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her feel a lot better, just as Mrs. Baker had said it would.
    While they ate lunch, they talked about the blank spots in Susan’s memory, trying to fill in the holes, which had been numerous and huge only yesterday, but which were fewer and far smaller today. Upon waking this morning, she had found that she could remember most things without effort.
    She had been born and raised in suburban Philadelphia, in a pleasant, white, two-story house on a maple-lined street of similar houses. Green lawns. Porch swings. A block party every Fourth of July. Carolers at Christmas. An Ozzie and Harriet neighborhood.
    “Sounds like an ideal childhood,” McGee said.
    Susan swallowed a bit of lime Jell-O, then said, “It was an ideal setting for an ideal childhood, but unfortunately it didn’t turn out that way. I was a very lonely kid.”
    “When you were first admitted here,” McGee said, “we tried to contact your family, but we couldn’t find anyone to contact.”
    She told him about her parents, partly because she wanted to be absolutely sure that there were no holes in those memories, and partly because McGee was easy to talk to, and partly because she felt a strong need to talk after twenty-two days of silence and darkness. Her mother, Regina, had been killed in a traffic accident when Susan was only seven years old. The driver of a beer delivery truck had suffered a heart attack at the wheel, and the truck had run a red light, and Regina’s Chevy had been in the middle of the intersection. Susan couldn’t remember a great deal about her mother, but that lapse had nothing whatsoever to do with her own recent accident and amnesia. After all, she had known her mother for only seven years, and twenty-five years had passed since the beer truck had flattened the Chevy; sadly but inevitably, Regina had faded from Susan’s memory in much the same way that an image fades from an old photograph that has been left too long in bright sunlight. However, she could remember her father clearly. Frank Thorton had been a tall, somewhat portly man who had owned a moderately successful men’s clothing store, and Susan had loved him. She always knew that he loved her, too, even though he never told her that he did. He was quiet, soft-spoken, rather shy, a completely self-contained man who was happiest when he was alone in his den with just a good book and his pipe. Perhaps he would have been more forthcoming with a son than he had been with his daughter. He always was more at ease with men than with women, and raising a girl was undoubtedly an awkward proposition for him. He died of cancer ten years after Regina’s passing, the summer after Susan graduated from high school. And so she had entered adulthood even more alone than she had been before.
    Dr. McGee finished his chicken-salad sandwich, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, and said, “No aunts, no uncles?”
    “One aunt, one uncle. But both of them were strangers to me. No living grandparents. But you know something—having such a lonely childhood wasn’t entirely a bad thing. I learned to be very self-reliant, and that’s paid off over the years.”
    As McGee ate his apple pie, and as Susan nibbled at her canned peaches, they talked about her university years. She had done her undergraduate work at Briarstead College in Pennsylvania, then had gone to California and had earned both her master’s and doctorate at UCLA. She recalled those years with perfect clarity, although she actually would have preferred to forget some of what had happened during her sophomore year at Briarstead.
    “Is something wrong?” McGee asked, putting down a forkful of apple pie that had been halfway to his mouth.
    She blinked. “Huh?”
    “Your expression...” He frowned. “For a moment there, you looked as if you’d seen a ghost.”
    “Yeah. In a way I did.” Suddenly she was not hungry any more. She put down her spoon and pushed the bed table aside.
    “Want to talk about it?”
    “It was