13.

I followed him of course. I had confidence now. A good deal of confidence about the way this would play out, and why it would play out that way. Confidence in my whole approach to having discovered I was still in a coma. A degree of self-congratulation that I hadn’t panicked, too much. Self-congratulation that I had been calm and thoughtful, and had thought and planned my way out of what was, in truth and in all senses, a mess.

It had all worked out like this:

I’m attacked.

I fall unconscious.

I think I wake.

The world is fractured and weird.

I think I’m traumatized.

I think I’m brain damaged.

I realize I am neither, I’m in a coma.

I realize I have to wake.

So I plan.

I look for a catalyst, and I find a fragment of a memory, in the form of “Miss Molly.”

By searching, and by coaxing, I find more fragments.

Gardens, swings, bricks, and windows.

They lead me to the house where I grew up.

Where the “Miss Molly” memory is placed in context.

Where I become light and weightless.

And the memory becomes as complete.

As complete as it needs to be.

 

And—perhaps this is where I congratulate myself the most—I do all this alone. I do all this alone; everything I achieve, I achieve alone, because it’s my head I’m locked into, and I share this space with nobody but myself.

 

In the living room, I saw my dad. Standing beside him was my mother. Still silhouettes, now against the French windows to the back garden. But I didn’t need to see their faces to know them.

I was unable to speak. The fabric of my body was now as weightless as a single spider web.

They both turned to look at me.

Then my father said, “This one bothers me a lot.”

And my mother said, “More than the others?”