Page 65 of Brain Damage

I shake my head. “The police don’t know who it was.”

“It was probably somebody you knew,” Dr. Vincent says, stroking his wrinkled chin thoughtfully. “Most women are murdered by somebody they knew.”

“She was not murdered, dummkopf!” Helga says.

“I assume,” Dr. Vincent says, “if somebody shot her in the head, they meant to kill her.”

“My mother thinks it was a burglar,” I say.

“Maybe it was your husband,” Dr. Vincent suggests.

“Ach mein gott!” Helga cries again. “How can you say such a thing?”

Dr. Vincent shrugs. “Who else would it be?”

“He never visits her,” Angela confides to the others. “I haven’t seen him even once. Not even once.”

“Where is your wedding ring, meine liebste?” Helga asks me.

I shake my head. I don’t know where my left hand is and even if I did, I don’t think I’m wearing my ring.

“My husband and I were jewelers for forty years!” Helga announces. “You show me your ring and I will tell you if your husband is a good man.”

Dr. Vincent snorts at Helga. “Do you remember anything at all?” he asks me, his overgrown eyebrows knitting together.

I shake my head no. “Nothing. Except…”

All three of my groupmates are looking at me with interest. I wish I had something interesting to tell them.

“It’s just this dream I keep having,” I say. “It’s a dream, but it feels more like a memory somehow. But… I don’t know, it was too fuzzy. Something was happening on my left side and I just couldn’t see what it was.”

Angela nudges Dr. Vincent. “What would Freud say about that kind of dream?”

“A dream that you are dying is a sign of inner changes or transformation,” Dr. Vincent says thoughtfully. “Of course, the Freudian interpretation goes out the window if you were recently shot in the head.”

Amy interrupts our conversation when she returns to the room carrying a stack of games and appearing slightly breathless. She drops them on the table in front of us. Some of the games look vaguely familiar, maybe from parties or TV shows. Maybe this group won’t be so bad.

“What have you been talking about?” Amy asks us.

“We’re trying to figure out who shot Charly in the head,” Dr. Vincent explains. “It was either her husband or a burglar.”

Amy’s eyes widen and she proceeds to lecture us about how we shouldn’t talk about these kinds of things. Although I don’t really see why not. It seems like the police are never going to figure out who shot me. My only hope is to try to remember.

And I have that dream again. About the night I got shot.

It’s night. Outdoors, it’s chilly. Raining. I’m so wet, my clothes are dripping. My shoes slosh against the marble floor in our lobby when I step inside. “Hey, Charly,” says Annie, my neighbor from two flights up. I nod and smile back at her.

My boots are quieter on the carpeted floor in the hallway outside my apartment. I fit my key in the lock of my apartment door.

Then the explosion. Followed by crimson.

I can’t get up. I can’t move. There’s somebody in the apartment with me, somebody who means to hurt me. I sense them, on my left side. I try to turn my head, try to see who’s there. But I can’t see them. I can only hear the voice echoing in my head:

You deserve this.

And then I wake up.

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