Forgotten Father by Carol Rose

I’ve been here, but I’m guessing it’s somewhere
around April the first?”
    He stared at her, his eyes somber.
    “What?”
    “I need to ask you a few more questions.”
    The doctor proceeded then to ask her seemingly
random questions. But even though she knew who was the president
and how many days were in a year, Delanie began to feel the cold
clutch of fear in her chest again.
    “What’s the matter?” she asked finally, her voice
quavering. “Why are you asking me these questions? Why am I
here?”
    Dr. Gallagher looked at her a long moment, as if
weighing how much information she could handle. Finally, he said,
“You’re here because you were found wandering along the road, dazed
and incoherent.”
    All Delanie could do was stare at him in
disbelief.
    “You weren’t able to respond to questions at the
time. You were suffering from cold and exposure. If you’re Delanie
Carlyle, the police found your car abandoned along Highway 22. It
was in a ditch and wasn’t visible from the road, but it hadn’t
sustained more than minor damage. Highway 22 is nearly thirty miles
from here.”
    “No,” she whispered. Not again. She’d been a child
the other time. So long ago…and not once since then.
    He nodded. “We don’t have any idea how you got from
there to here, but from the looks of your shoes, I’d say you walked
quite a bit of that distance.”
    Struggling to assimilate the situation, she just
looked at him.
    “Do you remember any of this?”
    “No,” she admitted reluctantly.
    The doctor made a note on the chart he held in his
hand.
    Still grappling with what he was telling her,
Delanie felt numb. Blank. As if parts of her mind had been washed
empty.
    “Even for a woman as young and healthy as yourself,
that kind of distance would take a while to walk with our terrain.”
He looked down to where his fingers were fiddling with the piping
on the edge of the vinyl armchair. “You’ve been here two weeks,
Delanie. Today is May seventeenth.”
    “Two weeks,” she whispered. “My God.”
    “From my brief exam just now,” Dr. Gallagher said,
“you seem to be oriented and aware—“
    “Except that I’ve lost…weeks of my life,” Delanie
mumbled. “I can’t remember the last month! You said it’s May
seventeenth? That’s more than a month!”
    “When you were brought in we, naturally, examined
you and ran some tests,” he paused as if looking for the right
words. “Although you’ve been asleep most of the time, we could find
no indication of a concussion or brain injury. We thought at first
that you might have been the victim of a crime…but there wasn’t any
clear evidence. No specific injuries.”
    “So I’ve just forgotten six weeks of my life for no
reason?” she asked sharply.
    He raised his gaze from the arm of the chair where
his fingers still worried at the vinyl piping. “From my research,
talking to colleagues and checking the literature…some people
exhibit symptoms similar to yours when they’ve had a
significant…emotional trauma of some sort.”
    Delanie looked back at him helplessly, groping in
her head for some wisp of a memory, some clue to explain why she
sat in the hospital bed.
    Nothing. Not a picture or a name. No memory of
anything but normal work stuff at The Cedars. Yesterday, she and
Connie, her assistant, had hung pictures all day.
    Only “yesterday” had actually been six weeks
before.
    Connie. She had to call Connie. The people she
worked with must have thought she dropped of the face of the
earth.
    Why couldn’t she remember?
    “An emotional trauma would cause this?” she asked,
the words sounding hollow.
    “Yes. The psychiatrist I called in to consult on
your case described it as a tremendous shock or a painful episode
so severe as to trigger a disassociative episode.”
    “But I’d have to remember something like that,
wouldn’t I?” she asked desperately. “Surely if something that
emotionally disturbing happened to me, I’d remember