Page 7 of A Future To Remember

I blinked. There was this momentary confusion where I didn’t understand how I knew that Thai food was my favorite fare and why in this town there were no Thai restaurants.

“What’re the restaurants?” I asked, switching to something that didn’t invite a flurry of questions I wouldn’t be able to answer.

Cash seemed to check himself, then he began to tick off the names of the town’s eateries on his fingers. “We got Poor Hank’s Bar and Grill, Wanda’s Diner, and KFC. The KFC is new,” he added, with a bounce of his brow.

“First, I’ll pass on the KFC, second, why is Hank poor? Is he broke?”

Cash laughed. “Naw. He married Wanda, but she works mornings and afternoons, and he works afternoons to midnight, so they never see each other. His place used to just be called Hank’s, but when he got married, he changed it.”

I was kinda crushin’ on Hank and his sentimental gesture. “What’s the best thing on Poor Hank’s menu?”

“The address to Wanda’s.”

That made me laugh. “Come on, Cash, what’s he make that’s edible?”

Cash stopped twirling his Stetson long enough to scratch his head. “Well, he makes a decent burger. And fries.”

“Oh, man, I could go for a burger.”

“You got it, Maddy.”

My eyes widened in surprise. I liked the sound of that name coming out of someone else’s mouth even more than I liked it coming out of my own. “Medium-rare. Extra ketchup.”

“Can do,” he said. “How ’bout I come back in half an hour, and we can sit together and talk.”

Cash was really the nicest man, but I also understood there was an ulterior motive here. I’d been the victim of a crime—maybe just assault, but it could’ve just as easily been attempted murder given my injuries and where I was found. Cash was thinking that the more I engaged in conversation, the more I might reveal about myself without necessarily trying to remember.

It was a clever technique, and one I was all too ready to engage in. “That’d be great.”

He turned to leave, and when he got to the doorway, he turned to point a finger gun at me, click his tongue, and wink. “Back in a jiff.”

After he left, I curled up in a fetal position and turned away from the door to doze off for a bit, but I came to when I overheard the hospital’s resident talking in low tones just outside my room.

He must’ve been talking to his new intern because he said, “Jane Doe. Late thirties to early forties, female, five-four, fifty-two kilos.

“When she was brought in, she was hypothermic, bradycardic, hypotensive, and hypoventilating. Pulse was fifty-eight; BP—eighty-seven over forty; pulse-ox—ninety-four; and temp at ninety-one.”

“Jesus, how was she even alive?” the intern asked.

“Trust me, she almost wasn’t. On arrival, she was unconscious, pupils reactive but slow, and her skin was cold to the touch. We put her on a warm IV drip, warm irrigation to her superior and inferior thoracic aperture, heated her trachea and bronchial tubes with warm O2, and used every warming blanket we had on hand.

“Once her vitals could support the transfer to imaging, we ran X-rays and CT scans. Scans showed no intracranial hemorrhaging, but given the deep laceration to her temple, she’s likely got a TBI. X-rays showed other trauma, mostly healed, including a fractured radius, both fresh and semi-healed extremity lacerations around both carpus and both talocrural joints, multiple ecchymosis on the interior abductors, vaginal tears and bleeding, and scarring indicating significant traumas that, at some point, included a GSW to the superior right thorax, and a sharp-force wound to the left ulna.”

“Fuck,” the intern said. “I’ll repeat: How is she even alive?”

“Honestly? I have no idea. Imaging makes it look like she spent her life getting the shit kicked out of her.”

“Human trafficking?”

“It’s what Sheriff Penton thinks, and I agree. That, or she’s been living with a sadistically sick son of a bitch.”

“You said she had a GSW to the thorax—any hospital record on her? She couldn’t have survived that without surgery, right?”

“Right. But we’ve been checking every hospital in the state and haven’t found a hit matching a woman of her description. We figure the GSW is from at least a decade ago, and she could’ve been anywhere other than the state of Idaho when she got that.”

“Is she saying what happened to her?”

“She claims she doesn’t remember, and I think it’s legit. My working theory is that the trauma of all that abuse and the TBI combined is causing retrograde or dissociative amnesia.