Page 17 of Slapshot Baby

"Weeks isn't four years."

"No, it isn't."

"Then what the hell happened to the other three years and eleven months?"

"Your doctor will explain everything when she comes in," Mom says. "But baby, your brain has been through a lot of trauma. You're going to feel confused for a while. That's normal."

But the confusion doesn't fade. It deepens.

Days pass in fragments. Doctors come and explain using words like "retrograde amnesia" and "traumatic brain injury".

I hear them but they don't stick, sliding off something in my mind that isn't working right.

The hospital has a rhythm to it that I learn against my will: the early vitals check, the shift change, the specific sound the monitor makes when one of the leads shifts loose, the regular changing of the bandage wrapped around my head.

Mira brings food my mother sends from home.

My father asks pointed questions of the doctors and writes the answers down.

I sleep more than I've slept in years and wake up each time hoping the four years will be there. Each time they aren't.

My mother sits with me constantly. She talks about things I don't have any memory of. People I've apparently known for years. Events that didn't happen yesterday.

A week into this nightmare, Mom is alone with me for the first time. I ask about the team.

“They brought flowers when you were unconscious,” she says. “And they’ve been told they can visit now you’re awake and stable.”

My forehead scrunches.

“You don't need to worry about that," she says quickly.

I don't say what I'm actually thinking, which is that I'm not worried about the team. Four years of my life is sitting somewhere I can't reach, like a room with the door taken off its hinges.

I'm thirty-two years old according to my doctors and look older. But I feel twenty-eight.

I close my eyes again because the lights are still too bright and the room is still too loud.

"Is there a girlfriend somewhere we should call?" Mom asks. "Someone who'd want to know?"

My eyes open.

I search my mind. There’s no memory of anyone important.

I think about it the way I'd think about a game I'm trying to recollect: methodically, from the beginning. I go through the last year I can reach and find nothing that fits that description.

"No."

She nods, her shoulders slumping.

But a slight sensation of warmth goes through me. I recall a hand pressing my arm closer in sleep.

“There might be someone. Maybe I…”

She perks up, leaning forward slightly. “Maybe what?”

What if it’s the memory of a movie or my imagination playing tricks with me?

“Maybe nothing. It’s just my imagination coming up with false images,” I say.