Headache

They tell me I’m married. A gold band encircles my left ring finger, but the short stocky man with a faltering smile and probing eyes is a stranger to me, a mystery. I remember my husband’s name—Ed—only because I’ve written it in a brand new spiralbound notebook, the kind kids cram into backpacks the first week of September. 

The nurses are more my family than he is. Now that I’m back home, I’ll probably forget them too—Lila and Kristin and Ranesh. Dr. Heely.  

Ed comes into the living room and sets a mug onto a coaster. “I made you a cup of tea. Or would you rather have coffee?” 

“Do I . . . like coffee?”

“You . . . used to.” We speak in hesitancies, in broken searching sentences. “You like . . . you liked tea, too. Careful, it’s hot.” 

The tea is steamy and fragrant, a little bitter. “This is good. Please. I mean thank you.”

His eyes search my face. I offer a small smile, I’m okay. He leaves the room with a backward glance. “Be careful not to spill, you’ll burn yourself.”

I stare at the alabaster walls. My house. The house in which I can never quite remember where the bathroom is located, sometimes pretending I intended to enter another room—a spare bedroom packed with Christmas decorations and exercise equipment, a coat closet neatly lined with shoes on the bottom and hats and umbrellas on top, a kitchen with glass-fronted cabinets and gleaming stainless steel appliances. Far more vivid than these scrubbed and polished surfaces are the crowded sticky countertops, the dusty carpets and mothy drawers, the weed-choked backyard of the house I grew up in. 

A heavy book lies on the coffee table, a photograph of a cardinal on the cover. Birdwatcher’s Complete Guide. I flip through the pages, wondering which of us is the birdwatcher. 

Are the disjointed images which pass unanchored through my mind—like letters cut randomly from magazines and newspapers and pasted together in a ransom note, never quite fitting together—scenes from my life, or are they excerpts from movies and books I’ve pieced together? I line up pictures and sounds in my mind—shifting the idea of a cramped apartment with a running toilet and scuffed linoleum to after and then before impressions of a vaulted church, a casket with a closed lid, trying to find the right sequence. Voices popping like kernels in an air popper: Happy Thirtieth Birthday! and a cake with sugary icing, pressed into place beside an image of a tomato-faced baby, screaming. I shuffle these events again and again, struggling to create a coherent narrative. 

Somehow the recollections of chalked fractions on blackboards and crisp textbooks, of itchy tights beneath ruffled dresses and brown-bag lunches are more real than what I ate for breakfast this morning or whether or not I believe in an afterlife or what my favorite TV show is. 

Sunny is the only one I remember, the only one I recognize. Sunny is the only thing that’s real; she dances across the shadowy chaos of my mind in glimpses and blurs, in spurts and flashes —a gap-toothed child in a Christmas dress, a teenager with sunburnt nose and coltish legs. She loves Halloween and horses and frozen Snickers bars and a young woman named . . . Melody? Melanie?

The man—Ed, my husband—comes back into the room. “Jody, look who stopped by for a visit.” 

Expectation is the falcon flying high and free, before the tug of the tether. It’s not Sunny standing in the doorway.

The woman’s face is awkward. She hovers on the threshold. She looks to be about my age. A tweed skirt, a silk top the color of blueberries. 

Ed says, “It’s Tamara. You remember Tamara.” 

I nod, although I don’t remember. The cat follows them into the room, tail wagging. I say, “Here kitty.” 

The man glances at Tamara and then away. “Dog, Jody. I’ll go make more tea.”

“I can’t stay long.” She fastens her eyes to my collarbone.

  “Are you my sister?” 

“We’re not related, Jody—I’m your friend,” in an unfriendly tone. “How are you?”

I glance at the notebook. “Good. I’m good.” The dog curls up on the rug by my chair.

Tamara fiddles with the clasp on her purse, echoes me. “Good.”

Ed comes back. He places a mug in Tamara’s hands. She looks grateful for something to stare at besides the floor. 

Ed says, “We’ve had a good day, haven’t we, Jody?” He turns to Tamara. “Jody stayed by herself for a few hours while I went in to the office. She even managed to use the computer.”

Tamara gives a little start, takes a shaky sip of tea.

 He straightens a lampshade. “Well, I’ll just be in the other room if you ladies need anything.” 

Tamara’s eyes skim over the drapes, the potted plant in one corner, the china cabinet.

I say, “Can you . . . tell me what happened? He doesn’t like to upset me. I know there was . . . an accident.” I suspect that once I’m finally able to reconstruct that night I’ll also be able to remember myself. Remember more than my husband telling me I like strawberry but not raspberry or that I always vote Independent or that I used to be . . . I sift through words in my mind—an accountant. The words are loose colorful petals that drift between my fingers, insubstantial, all their meaning lost once they’ve come detached from the flower.

Perched on the edge of the sofa, looking around the room as if unsure how she got here, Tamara says, “You were . . . um, we were going to meet up for dinner. At, uh, House of Kai.”

I rock forward in the chair, my hair falling into my eyes. A raised eyebrow as he holds a bite of food between two skinny wooden sticks (chap-stocks? Chip-stacks?) Spice touching my tongue. A sexy smirk as he swipes a thumb over my lips, raises his fingers to his mouth to lick the sauce from them, his eyes pinning mine. 

The cat gets up, nudges my hand with her cold nose. Tamara stares into her mug. “Jody, we . . . talked about this when I visited you in the hospital. Are you sure it’s a . . . good idea to think about this right now?” Apparently stilted sentences are contagious. 

“I forget things, I’m so sorry. I just want to understand. Where did it happen?”

Her shoulders sag. “A kid with a brand new driver’s license and his daddy’s sports car ran the stop sign at the intersection of Thirty-second and Larch.”

“I was on my way to meet you?”

Tamara looks over my shoulder. “Right.”

“What’s his name?” Her aquamarine eyes dart to mine and I say, “The kid who hit me.”

She exhales. “Reid. Reid Avery. He’s seventeen. He’s going to be a senior at Westmore High this fall.” I glance at my notebook. Sunny turns twenty-one next month. 

My husband comes back, fusses with our empty mugs. “Jody tires easily, don’t you honey?”

“Yes.” Tamara stands, drags her purse over her shoulder. “I should get going. It was nice seeing you both. Take care.” She offers us a wobbly smile. I don’t think she’ll be back. 

“I want the talking,” I tell the man. 

“The TV? You want this?” He points.

“No, not that. The talking, the voices without the picture . . . Music!”

He does something and a woman’s sad voice fills the air. “Let’s find something a little more upbeat—”

“No, I like this one.”

My wrist, my ribs, my nose have all healed. The bandages and the plaster casts have come off, the skin beneath smooth and new. It’s just my brain that still glitches. I could do yoga or play tennis—odd how some words, some images, come so easily (never the ones I strive for though, the ones I crave)—I could play cards or a board game, if I could retain the rules for more than ninety seconds, after someone patiently explains them to me again. I could go to work, if I could remember where to go and what to do and what to say. If I could extract from my memory the correct name to match each pitying curious face. I could go to the grocery store or sit in restaurants with my husband, if excruciating headaches didn’t lay claim to entire days at a time and if strings of expletives didn’t explode out of me as I’m choosing a pasta salad from the deli or perusing a dessert menu. 

I sit in the armchair by the big window at the front of the house in a strip of warm sunlight, trying to fit Tamara’s information into the blank space directly leading up to The Accident and The Accident itself, writing words in my notebook: sports car, Reid Avery, stop sign. 

After opening the back door and also the door to what appears to be a study—a laptop left open on a desk, books piled high on shelves—I locate the bathroom. I flush and wash my hands. Cosmetics and creams and powders are crowded onto a glass tray on the sink top. I spray a squirt of perfume onto my wrist, the mist of droplets cool against the indigo tributaries of veins. I twist up a lipstick, matte red, earthy and warm. I run it over my lips, rub them together. 

Sensations and images flood my mind, crowding on top of one another—a silk scarf to match the lipstick, tamped-down anticipation, dark wavy hair, broad shoulders, cool mint words whispered against the ticklish hollow at the base of my throat. 

Who had I been meeting? Would I recognize the neighbor or the coworker or the old flame if I flung open this door and he stood on the other side? Would some instinctual draw pull me toward him? Or would I offer a polite hand, a bland smile, saying, Hello, it’s nice to meet you? 

A rap against the door. I drop the lipstick and it rolls behind the toilet. 

Ed says, “Honey, are you okay? Do you want salmon or pork chops tonight? I found an interesting recipe for—”

“Leave me the fuck alone!” I pound my palm against the door. 

Silence.

I open the door. The hallway is empty. “I’m sorry,” I call, rubbing my forehead. My fingers probe the shallow indentation above my left temple. The perfume is cloying on my wrist, too strong. 

His voice drifts down the hallway. “That’s okay, honey.”

Back in the living room I curl up on the chair, but the sun’s angle has shifted and the pale light fails to fall over me. 

#

The image in my mind whenever Sunny’s voice comes through the phone is of a kindergartner with floppy pigtails, but the photograph on the mantel shows a bright-eyed young woman with wind-tossed hair and a confident smile. 

Sunny chatters about her friends and complains about someone called Professor Henderson. She says, “Meredith and I are both tutoring dumbass freshmen this semester to pick up some extra cash.” I can hear the smile in her voice when she says Meredith. 

I say, “How is church . . . how is work . . . I mean how is school going?”

Dr. Heely says the aphasia and the memory loss are likely temporary, but it’s been nearly two months since The Accident. I trace the letters written in my notebook. Aphasia. Such a pretty-sounding word.

Sunny says, “Well I haven’t flunked out yet,” and she’s the only one who treats me like a normal person.

#

This is what I remember. I wasn’t meeting Tamara that night, but I told my husband I was. I don’t know my lover’s name; I can’t conjure his features or the sound of his voice. Sometimes I can smell his cologne, dark and leathery, and beneath it, his skin. Sometimes I can feel the whirls in the pads of his fingers as he traces a lazy hand down my forearm, my cheek, the nape of my neck. Sometimes I can remember that he loved me.

#

Ed made fish. Citrus and pepper compete in my mouth. There’s roasted green things, bitter, and little red potatoes, a cheesecake for dessert. I take a bite of bread. “What’s that flavor?”

“Rosemary.”

“It’s good.”

He looks pleased. The little cat . . . no, the little dog sits beneath the table, staring up at me. “What’s her name again?”

“Cricket.”

After the cake, Ed says he’s going to load the dishwasher and clean the kitchen.

“I’ll help.” I hold out my hand and Cricket gently lifts the morsel from my cupped palm.  

Ed says what he says every night. Or every night that I can remember. “No honey, you should rest. Go watch TV or read a book.”

“I watched a show this afternoon. A woman named Tamara talked to another woman. Tamara had pretty eyes.”

He looks up, the bright pink rubber gloves incongruous beneath his hairy forearms. “Jody, that wasn’t a TV show. Tamara was . . . is your friend. She comes to see you sometimes. She came to visit you today.”

“Oh.” The familiar headache is creeping along the base of my skull, fuzzy and sly. It always starts as a nagging itch—teasing, testing—before morphing into a crushing consuming agony, blocking out the little I still know: This is my husband, his name is Ed. My name is Jody. I am forty-three years old. Sunny has long ashy-brown hair and a crooked eyetooth and someone else’s face, but my eyes. Her laugh is a round giggle, like a child’s, with a breathy catch on the front end. I was in an accident, but I’m getting better every day. This is how I tie my shoes. This is how I answer the phone when it rangs. No, when it rings. My address is fifty-three-eleven Maple Leaf Lane. I used to have a job. I was a . . . 

I give up trying to remember what I used to be and go into the house—the room—with the TV in it. I sit in the armchair and press the tabs on the little black square to make the pictures change. The cat jumps onto my lap. Her fur is soft, like flannel. 

On the screen, a woman recommends a brand of mouthwash. A couple exchanges one-liners, an audience laughs. 

My husband calls, “Want to go for a walk, honey?”

“Okay.”

“No, not those shoes. Wear these tennis shoes, okay?”

He attaches a rope thingy to the cat’s neck. “Feeling okay, honey?” 

“Sure.”

The moon—the sun—is falling from its high point, like something that used to matter but doesn’t anymore. The man takes my hand in his. The cat prances ahead of us on its rope, occasionally looking back over one shoulder. Kids on bikes fly past us. The wind against my teeth, streaming through my hair. The sting of gravel-laced scraped knees, the thrill of throwing my hands off the handlebars as my legs frantically pump the pedals. Was that me, or was it Sunny? 

The houses look cozy as we pass them. I wonder if the people inside are happy or just pretending to be. I grip the man’s leg. No, his arm. “I remember!”

Something flickers across his face before the kind smile stamps it out. “What do you remember?” For once, his eyes aren’t scanning my face. He’s watching two boys toss a ball back and forth in a yard.

This is what I remember. Long tapered fingers clasped with mine. I look down at the thick stubby fingers intertwined with my own. A deep barrel laugh I can feel vibrating through me when I lay my cheek on his smooth bare chest. This man beside me has golden hairs sprouting out of the vee of his shirt. The sensation of being a puzzle piece finally fitted up snug against the proper slot. It feels like I’ve discovered this secret before, only to lose it, over and over again. 

The headache is crawling up the back of my neck, twining its fingers into my hair, into my brain, into my memories and my thoughts, twisting the top of my skull like the lid on a jar. 

This is what I don’t remember. An email I haven’t opened yet, marked read. A peek at a message on a phone that doesn’t belong to me. There’s something you don’t know about Jody. I feel horrible telling you this but I think you should know . . . 

The headache is a mother cat dragging her kitten away from danger; it sinks its fangs into the scruff of my neck and shakes me back and forth. 

I don’t remember the scream of tires on pavement, the flare of headlights rendering me blind. I don’t remember the frantic voices of strangers, the shriek of sirens. 

I haven’t been able to find any newspaper articles describing a car accident in Wilton, Minnesota during April of this year. Or did I find them and then forget? If someone—a stranger of course—had assaulted me, had raised a hammer or a baseball bat overhead as I lay unconscious on the trail of a wooded path or on my own living room floor with the intent of robbery or rape, wouldn’t it be kinder for everyone—the nurses, my husband, Sunny—to tell me it had been an accident? If the perpetrator was never apprehended, if my brain had been scrambled like the cayenne and kale eggs this man likes to make on Sunday mornings, if I descended into nighttime thrashing panic attacks during which I struggled to catch my breath and daytime rages during which I ripped books from shelves and flung dishes against walls, torn paper and ceramic shards littering my feet? A kindness . . . 

We pass other people, alone and in pairs. Is that him, over there on the park bench? Or maybe there—passing by in a what do they call them? An SUV. Is that the man I had loved, when I was still me? Does he know what happened to me? I imagine him sending messages to my phone in the days following the accident, as if flinging wishes into a void. The headache punches itself toward the back of my eyes.

The cat . . . the dog is scratching at something in the dirt. She drops her back legs to dribble urine, laying claim to whatever she’s found. 

“Jody?” Ed says. “You were going to say something.”

I’ve written his name on the back of my wrist so I won’t forget. I look up into his face. I can’t recall standing in a church before witnesses, reciting vows. The photographs show her—no, they show me, young, draped in ivory lace, smiling. My fingers squeeze his. “I forgot.”

Back at the house, Ed says, “Let’s go out back and sit on the patio.”

A drift of sizzling steak. Brick sun-warmed beneath the soles of my feet when I tug off my shoes and socks.

Ed brings me a glass of water and my pill. 

I say, “Please—thank you.” The sound of kids playing on the next block rolls over us, little boys shouting, little girls shrieking. “I wish Sunny was here.” 

“Classes are done in less than a week.” 

Sudden clouds jostle and race, spoiling the peaceful sky. Ed tells me he found the salmon recipe online, explains that roasting the garlic beforehand is the secret. The cat—the dog—chases a squirrel. 

The pill is softening the edges of the headache, a heavy blanket tossed over flames that waver and sputter and threaten to rear up again from the smallest ember. I close my eyes and picture the glossy hair flipped over one shoulder, the familiar eyes, the crooked tooth. The shy smile while offering some indeterminable animal fashioned from Play-Doh, scrawny mosquito-pricked legs dangling from the crutch of a tree, tears over a lost toy. 

#

I pace the house while my husband sleeps. I’ve forgotten his name again, but that’s okay—it’s written in my notebook. I rub the faded ink splotch on my wrist; the letters have blurred together. 

The rooms are dark in the corners, the windows unseeing eyes. The cat lies curled up beneath the kitchen table, snoring softly. The harder I grasp at what seems real—Sunny on stage at a spelling bee in fourth grade (beautiful—b . . . e . . . a . . . u . . . t . . . i . . . f . . . u . . . l. Terrible . . . my heart stutters—two R’s, Sunny), Sunny’s graduation photo pinned to the fabric wall of a cubicle, spreadsheets laid out before me—the less sure I am. The heater—the air conditioner—switches on with a click and hums through the vents. 

The headache is back, cunning, crafty. My husband told me to wake him if I need anything during the night. I don’t know what it is I need—how could he possibly provide it for me? 

I open cupboard after cupboard, searching for my pills. The digital clock on the refrigerator—no, on the microwave—ticks toward midnight and then beyond. I prowl the empty rooms. After a while I find myself standing in the bathroom. I dig through the cosmetics and the toiletries lined up on the sink. I pull towels and bottles of shampoo from the shelves and fling them into the bathtub. I swing a hair dryer by its cord, smashing it against the mirror. My face stares back at me, broken and distorted. 

The man is standing in the doorway, his hair sticking up, legs pale and alien beneath his boxer shorts. I check his face for anger or dismay, but he just looks tired. 

“I forgot. I forgot,” I cry, over and over. 

“What? Jody, what did you forget? It’s okay, careful of the glass, let’s go out here.” He smooths the tangled hair off my forehead.

“I forgot that I loved you.”