“FAE?”
“Fresh Air Experience. It’s a therapeutic way of saying exercise. Residents who are up for it go outside and walk around the grounds. Usually, a nurse is assigned to each resident, but we’re short nurses, too. So either the orderlies help out, or it’s skipped altogether.”
“You mean the residents don’t get to go outside?”
“Don’t get your panties in a twist. Most days they do. Other days, it’s just not in the cards.” He peered up at me. “You’ve probably seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest too many times. This is a good place. Everyone’s treated well. The funding’s not exactly pouring in, but it’s better than a hospital. Or a psych ward. Cool?”
“Cool.”
Joaquin narrowed his eyes. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Got family near here?”
“No.”
He leaned in. “Okay, so listen. This job has a way of latching on. I know I said there’s a lot of turnover, and there is. Mostly because decent employees who don’t fuck up aren’t all that easy to keep. But those that stick, like me and Alonzo, we tend to stick. I came here for a summer job. That was eight years ago. Point is, don’t get stuck on this mountain.”
He slugged my shoulder and left me to mop the cafeteria floor. Breakfast was over and the room was empty. Alone, moving the mop in figure eights over the linoleum, I turned his words over in my head.
Don’t get stuck on this mountain.
Getting stuck is what I did best. I’d probably have worked at my last job forever if it hadn’t shut down. I didn’t want much in the world. Just a place where I could work and be of help to people. And no one to bother me.
Being stuck on that mountain didn’t sound bad at all.
While the residents were all at lunch, I cleaned three rooms. Each had its own bathroom and was identically furnished with a bed, closet, small dresser, and a table and chair under a window.
All the doors locked from the outside.
I met Alonzo downstairs in the recreation room that consisted of a nurses’ station, a dozen small tables, a TV mounted on one wall, shelves full of games and puzzles, and a storage closet at the rear. Alonzo had a stack of file folders under his arm and greeted me with an approving look.
“Joaquin tells me you catch on quick,” he said. “Let’s sit.”
We took a table in the corner that had a vantage of the entire space. Only one resident was present—the older man with the dented head. He worked slowly and laboriously over a puzzle while his attendant stood at the station, chatting with the duty nurse.
“You need to get to know the residents,” Alonzo said. “That there is Richard Webb. Mr. Webb to you and me.”
I nodded.
“They each have a nurse assigned to them. Most nurses work more than one resident though, so we step in and help, time to time. But carefully. Be friendly, but don’t talk their ear off.” His eyebrow raised. “I have a feeling I won’t have that problem with you.”
The door to the rec room opened. I looked back and recognized the nurse I’d met yesterday, Rita Soto.
Thea Hughes was beside her.
She wore shapeless beige pants, a plain shirt, and loafers, but she was jaw-droppingly beautiful. A stunning work of art wrapped in a paper bag. Her blond hair fell around her shoulders in soft waves, and she regarded the rec room with bright if hesitant eyes.
Rita led Thea to a table and set her up with paper and colored pens. Within moments, Thea was bent over her work, drawing. Like a child making doodles after school.
“That’s Miss Hughes,” Alonzo said, tapping his pen on the file folders. “Of all our residents, she needs the most care. Which means she’s got the most rules.”
I tore my gaze from her and forced my voice into a neutral tone. “What’s wrong with her?”
“Only one of the worst recorded cases of amnesia in medical history.”
I stared. “Are you sure?”
Alonzo chuckled. “Am I sure? That’s one I haven’t heard before. But I get it. Miss Hughes is young and beautiful and looks healthy as a horse, but that just ain’t the case.”
He shuffled through his files until he found hers, opened it, and spoke in a low voice as he read.
“Althea Renée Hughes, age twenty-three. Two years ago, she was in a head-on collision while driving with her parents. Drunk-driver plowed his pickup truck right at ’em. Parents were pronounced dead at the scene. Miss Hughes was Life-Flighted to Richmond General where she spent two weeks in a coma. They treated her for a broken arm, broken clavicle, broken femur, and internal injuries. But it was her head that took the worst of it.”
I swallowed. “What happened?”
Alonzo read from her file. “Catastrophic brain injury sustained in a motor vehicle accident with intracranial hemorrhage and increased intracranial pressure resulting in trauma and damage to the hippocampus.” He looked up. “In English: her long- and short-term memory are shot to hell. She’s got no memory of her life before the accident and no memory of her life now.”
“What do you mean? No memory at all?”
“She has semantic memory, which means she remembers factual information such as words, concepts, numbers. She still knows how to wash her face, use a fork, put on her clothes. But she has no episodic memory. No personal experiences, events, or details about people or places. Meaning, she knows what a dog is but can’t tell you if she’s ever pet one in her life. Some Egyptian history has stuck with her and so has her artistic abilities, but she can’t tell you where she learned’em.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “But she knows what’s happening to her? She’s aware of…?” I gestured to indicate the room.
“Where she is? What happened to her? What she was doing five minutes ago? Nope. She has a few minutes of consciousness and then she has to start over. She resets.”
“Resets?”
“Yeah, when her minutes are up, the slate gets wiped clean again, so to speak. We call it her reset.”
He’s messing with me. How can anyone survive with only a few minutes of memory?
“That’s crazy.”
“Sounds that way, but it’s her truth. You can hear it happen. She says the same thing, asks the same questions, every few minutes. All day long. Day in and day out. Going on two years now.”
How long has it been?
That was Thea’s reset. I’d heard it yesterday.
“She don’t stray from her script much unless she’s drawing. Or you get her in a conversation,” Alonzo said. “Then she’s good for a few minutes more. And just when you think ‘Hey, this gal’s all right. Why is she here?’ Bam. Reset.”
“What happens?”
“She’ll pause and get all blank and confused. Then start her script over again. When she first came to us and a reset hit, she’d throw a fit. Like a little seizure. Now she only has fits when something upsets her. That’s why we keep her on a strict routine, and you have to know how to talk to her so you don’t set her off.”
Too late.
“What does she think is happening when the reset hits?”