“Please take a seat.”
“Thank you,” Matt nodded and sat across from the doctor. “I um, got all your voicemails.”
“I assumed you would.”
“I’m ready to discuss treatment plans.”
“I’m happy to hear that. But I don’t have a plan.”
Matt was puzzled but he just glared at the doctor.
“I can’t treat someone I haven’t seen in nearly a month. I don’t know her progress, or regression, or what state she’s in,” he paused. “I don’t know who I’m treating,” the doctor emphasized, as if to get his point across.
“She’s innocent.”
“What do you mean by innocent?”
“You know what I mean; she’s a new person in this world, she doesn’t know anything.”
“No, she’s not an infant; she is your wife and has lived all the things Elizabeth had lived. She just doesn’t remember living it. She is no more innocent than you or I just because she doesn’t remember doing something. She is, at the end of the day, the Lizzy you keep referring to.”
Matt stared at him for a long moment. “She doesn’t want her memory back,” he finally said.
“That’s fear,” the doctor said without giving it so much of a thought.
“I get that. But why?”
“You tell me.”
Matt jumped out of his chair, sliding it across the short end of the room. “I’m not here for a therapy session.”
“Neither am I,” the doctor patiently argued. “I’m here to help Elizabeth. Is she getting worse?”
“She remembers something.”
“Something?”
“Yes, it wasn’t exactly a memory. It was something that someone had said to her, my brother actually, and she remembered him telling her those same words.”
“What were the words?”
“What does it matter?”
The doctor’s expression was perplexed. “It matters tremendously!”
Matt rubbed his temples. “I don’t even remember.”
“Yes, you do,” the doctor assured. “What’s the big deal, they’re just words.”
And this was why Matt had been avoiding the doctor, regardless of how brilliant the magazines claimed he was. The guy was a real jerk.
“‘Nothing good comes of keeping secrets’,” Matt muttered. He folded his arms over his chest. “That was it.”
Dr. Tai sat back in his chair and stared at Matt as though he were, in fact, in a therapy session. “Fine,” the doctor briskly peeled his back off the chair and leaned forward. “Tell me what happened right before her accident.”
“She was out shopping,” Matt replied.
Another hard stare. “Mr. Owen, I do need you to realize that if it were an easy task bringing back an individual from lost memories, as severe as Elizabeth’s case, don’t you think you would have received a step-by-step in one of my voicemails? That being said, it’s easy to pick out the most uneventful thing that happened that day and move on.” He watched Matt for a moment before continuing. “You don’t have to tell me what it is,” he untwined his fingers and sat back in his chair, “but it would help.”
