Yet no matter how I tried to place that bike behind the mangy ficus tree my mom routinely propped up with bamboo sticks and that lived past when I left home, I could only ever see it at the foot of my bed. The giant yellow bow glittering with the morning light coming through my thin curtains, its white rubber tires pristine, the paint glossy and chip free, the handlebar streamers sparkling rainbows.
At some point my brain chose a different setting for my eighth birthday gift, and every time I had remembered that event since, it solidified the image to the point where I argued with my mom that night about the recollection. She must have remembered it wrong; her brain more aged than mine, her memory less elastic. But when Dad and my older sister, Alexis, reinforced Mom’s version—my sister and I shared a room, so surely she would have remembered a clunky bike at the end of my bed—I was forced to admit I had gotten it wrong. And just like that I began to doubt myself, and the memory. How did I get the bike, nearly as big as I was, down the stairs? That would have been a major feat, like my mom had said. Soon enough I had to admit maybe the bike had never been where I remembered it, even if the memory felt as real to me as any other.
“Honest lying” is what the therapist I have been seeing, Dr. Amanda Kay, called it. The perfect oxymoron if I had ever heard one—how can it be “honest” if I am lying?
Apparently this re-creating of the past happens all the time, to everyone, Dr. Kay explained during our first visit. In fact, each time we recall something, we aren’t actually remembering the original experience; we’re remembering a memory of it. Our memories are fickle things, changing imperceptibly the very next time we recall them. They are not intact the way we imagine them to be but simply a construct of the real thing. Then a construct of the construct. And on and on it goes.
“It’s like putting a new layer of wallpaper over an existing one,” Dr. Kay had explained. “Multiple layers later, all you can see is the pink pastel roses on the top and not the blue and white stripes from a few years back, but the stripes are still there. Even if now you’d swear on your life that blue is actually purple, the white stripes gray. Our memory is not as reliable as we like to believe.”
“So we’re creating a knockoff version of an event and then remembering the knockoff as the real thing?”
“Precisely,” Dr. Kay had replied. “There’s no way to guarantee accuracy in our memories. Our brains pick and choose moments from our past and stitch them together to create something that suits us best at the time.”
I’d stared at her, the reality of my situation settling into me like an unpleasant virus. “So how can we trust the things we remember, the way we remember them?” I had asked.
“Because generally they’re close enough.” She had smiled then, the way she would at moments like these in our future sessions when she knew I was close to shutting down. Moments when I felt like I might never again be sure which memories I could count on and which ones were lying to me. “For the most part we get the highlight reels right and the extraneous details aren’t as important.”
Except when you wake up in a hospital bed believing you’re living a different life than the one you actually have, it tends to be the details that matter most.
Like I said, I have a complicated relationship with my memory.
I woke to find my coworker Matt Newman beside my hospital bed. Crying, which confused me immensely. What are you doing here? I wanted to ask him, but my lips were numb, my tongue thick. The room was bright and unfamiliar, and my body tired in a way I’d felt only once before when I caught a bad flu that had sent me to bed for nearly two weeks.
My parents were on the other side of the bed and, unlike Matt, weren’t crying but had forced, too-big smiles on their faces. “Relax, take it easy, you’re in the hospital, sweetie,” Mom was saying, while Dad bobbed his head up and down, like he couldn’t agree more with what she was saying.
“Hey. Hey there, Lucy,” Matt said, holding my hand, his thumb rubbing my skin. “Welcome back. You’re okay. You’re okay.” It was as though he was trying to convince himself more than anyone.
“Where am I?” My voice was rough, like I’d swallowed a roll of sandpaper. I tried to clear my throat, then sucked greedily at the drinking straw Mom brought to my lips. The cool water felt amazing as it went down.
“You’re in the hospital, love. Mount Sinai,” Mom said, glancing at Dad with a nervous look as she put the cup of water back on the nightstand. “But you’re going to be fine.”
Matt, now leaning over me, whispered again how glad he was I was okay. Am I okay? I wanted to ask, because I certainly didn’t feel it. But before I could get the question out, Matt shifted even closer and kissed me on the lips. On the lips!
“What are you doing?” I croaked. I would have pulled back and away from him if I could have, but there was nowhere to go, and besides, I barely had the energy to keep my eyes open. I had meant, Why are you kissing me? But Matt seemed confused by my question, even though I felt it should have been obvious why I was asking. What was Matt Newman, my friend from work—my “work husband” as I had taken to calling him—doing kissing me on the lips?
“Did something happen at the office?” Maybe I got hurt at work and Matt brought me to the hospital? But that didn’t explain his tears. Or the kiss. Oh, God...maybe I’m dying. I had never seen Matt so emotional before, so it had to be something pretty terrible even if I couldn’t remember what had happened.
“No, sweetheart. Remember? You hit your head. But you’re okay now. Just fine,” Dad said, smiling and bobbing and smiling and bobbing.
I couldn’t remember hitting my head. I put a hand to my scalp and felt around sloppily, my fingers not finding any obvious sign of injury. I looked from Matt to Dad to Mom, then scanned the small room, full of balloons (so many balloons) and bouquets of flowers, a row of greeting cards lining the windowsill.
“How long have I been here?” I asked, still feeling confused, like my brain had been removed and replaced with pillow stuffing. And even though I had barely moved, had done nothing more than lift my arm to my head, my heart thumped like I’d climbed fifteen flights of stairs. Sweat formed under my armpits and I recognized the feeling—my body was in survival mode—but still I struggled to assign context.
“A little while” was all Mom said, which I knew based on the singsong quality of her tone meant “quite a while.” Something bad must have happened. And then, in a sudden flash, it occurred to me what—who—was missing.
Daniel. Where’s Daniel?
“Were we in an accident?” Daniel drove faster than I liked and had a tendency to change lanes without signaling. Maybe it had been quite serious—the accident—and things were direr than they were letting on. Daniel might be hurt (or worse!) and they weren’t telling me yet because of my own fragile condition. I let out a sob and tried to sit up, needing to get out of this bed to find him, but my body didn’t respond the way I expected and I crumpled to my side.
Matt, still close by after the kiss, quickly put a firm hand underneath my shoulder blades as I lurched, the other hand a vise grip around my upper arm to prevent me from slipping from the bed. Sharp pains stabbed through my head, piercing holes into my thoughts. With a groan I leaned heavily into him and let him lower me back to the bed as Dad said, “There, there, Lucy. Stay put, love.”
I was full-on sobbing now, my vision blurry with tears. “Please tell me. What happened?”
“There was no accident, Lucy,” Mom said, pulling a tissue out of the cuff of her sweater and dabbing