you’re crazy, Marnie. I will admit I thought you were pretending to have amnesia.”
“Why would I do that?”
“To get out of trouble. To avoid your involvement in a theft of property. To pretend you didn’t know what had happened. To get me to forgive you, once again. Who knows?”
“Do you still think I’m pretending?”
“Let’s say I still have doubts about your truthfulness, but if you’re acting, you’re doing a darn good job of it.”
“I’m not pretending. I really don’t remember anything before waking up in that park.”
“I want to believe you. The question now is what happened to cause you to lose your memory? It must have been pretty traumatic.”
“I wish I knew. If I knew what happened, maybe the rest of it would come back.”
She thought about all she had discovered so far that day. It was more than she had learned the whole prior week. From David, she found out Jonathan was her son and she had ignored him for much of his life. From Ruth, she had learned she had gotten pregnant in order to get David to marry her, that she had stolen something from the family company, and that she was promiscuous before and after marriage. David confirmed that fact when he described her behavior at the Roadhouse.
Besides all these revelations, she had explored the house where she lived and found several rooms where she felt at home, and found books she liked and had probably read.
She had experienced an emotional breakdown when told she was Jonathan’s neglectful mother, but when she recovered from that crying spell, she felt better and more clear-headed than at any other time since she found herself in the park. She finally felt like she was stronger and ready to solve the mystery of what had happened to her.
“The worst thing—the very worst—isn’t the fact I can’t remember anything, nor even the possibility I may never get those memories back. The worst thing is knowing I’m a bad person.”
“I don’t know that I would say you’re a bad person. I would say you behave badly . . . very badly.”
“Only a bad person would neglect her son and cheat on her husband. And evidently, from what you’ve said, I was what? Promiscuous?”
“All that and more,” came his terse reply.
“I don’t want to be that person. If recalling my past means going back to that life, I’ll do without it.”
“I keep thinking about a guy I knew in college,” David said. “Between our sophomore and junior years he was in a horrific car wreck. He was in a coma for a month. When he woke up, he said he had died and gone to heaven. He said he had looked down on his body in the emergency room and then went toward a beautiful light. He saw his grandparents who had died earlier and a friend from his childhood who had drowned. They told him it wasn’t his time to die, but he had to straighten out his life and be a better person. Sometime after that, he woke up in the hospital bed.”
“Really? I think I’ve read about cases like that, but I never knew if they were true or not.”
“Up until then, he had been a real goof-off. He got drunk a lot. He cut classes, paid people to write his papers for him, slept around.”
“Did he change?”
“Yeah, he sure did. He turned into a fine man. He stopped drinking and pulled his grades up all on his own. He graduated, not with honors, but with decent grades.”
“So, there’s hope for me. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m saying he was different when he came back to school. You’re different, too. That is, you’re you, but you’re not. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Not really.”
“Well, you’re still Marnie, but you haven’t groused one time about being stuck in the house, and you hate that house. You seem to really like Jonathan—”
“I do. I do like Jonathan,” she interrupted, “but I still don’t like the house.”
“You spend time with him, which you never did before.”
Marnie turned her head and looked out the car window, vowing not to cry.
“I’m concerned that when your memory returns you’ll go back to ignoring him, and he will be hurt even more by your indifference, after having had your attention.”
She wanted to promise she wouldn’t return to her old self but hesitated to make that pledge. She had no assurance of what she would be like if and when the amnesia was gone.
“You haven’t said anything