Silence Read Online Free PDF Page A

trying to grasp anything that could help me bridge this moment to sitting in Coach’s biology class. But there was nothing to build on. Any memory of summer was completely and utterly gone.
    “It’s okay, baby,” Mom murmured. “We’re going to get your memory back. Dr. Howlett said most patients see marked improvement over time.”
    I tried to sit up, but my arms were a tangle of tubes and medical monitoring equipment. “Just tell me what month it is!” I repeated hysterically.
    “September.” Her crumpled face was unbearable. “September sixth.”
    I sank back down, blinking. “I thought it was April. I can’t remember anything past April.” I threw up walls to block the outbreak of fear banging inside me. I couldn’t deal with it in one great flood. “Is summer really—is it
over
? Just like that?”
    “Just like that?” she echoed in a detached voice. “It dragged
on
. Every day without you … Eleven weeks of knowing nothing … The panic, the worry, the fear, the hopelessness never ending …”
    I mulled this over, doing the math. “If it’s September, and I was gone for eleven weeks, then I went missing—”
    “June twenty-first,” she said blandly. “The night of summer solstice.”
    The wall I’d built was cracking faster than I could mentally repair it. “But I don’t remember June. I don’t even remember May.”
    We watched each other, and I knew we were sharing the same terrible thought. Was it possible my amnesia stretched further than the missing eleven weeks, all the way back to
April?
How could something like this even happen?
    “What did the doctor say?” I asked, moistening my lips, which felt papery and dry. “Did I have a head injury? Was I drugged? Why can’t I remember anything?”
    “Dr. Howlett said it’s retrograde amnesia.” Mom paused. “It means some of your preexisting memories are lost. We just weren’t sure how far back the memory loss went. April,” she whispered to herself, and I could see all hope fading from her eyes.
    “Lost? How lost?”
    “He thinks it’s psychological.”
    I plowed my hands through my hair, leaving an oily residue on my fingers. It suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t considered where I’d been all those weeks. I could have been chained in a dank basement. Or tied in the woods. Clearly I hadn’t showered in days. A glance at my arms revealed smudges of dirt, small cuts, and bruises all over. What had I gone through?
    “Psychological?” I forced myself to shut out the speculations, which only made the hysteria clamp down harder. I had to stay strong. I needed answers. I couldn’t fall apart. If I could force my mind to focus despite the spots popping across my vision …
    “He thinks you’re blocking it to avoid remembering something traumatic.”
    “I’m
not
blocking it.” I closed my eyes, unable to control the tears leaking from the corners. I sucked in a shaky breath and clamped my hands into tight balls to stop the awful trembling in my fingers. “I would know if I was trying to forget five months of my life,” I said, speaking slowly to force a measure of calm into my voice. “I want to know what happened to me.”
    If I glared at her, she ignored it. “Try to remember,” she urgedgently. “Was it a man? Were you with a male this whole time?”
    Was I? Up until this point, I hadn’t put a face with my kidnapper. The only picture in my head was of a monster lurking beyond the reach of light. A terrible cloud of uncertainty loomed over me.
    “You know you don’t have to protect anyone, right?” she continued in that same soft tone. “If you know who you were with, you can tell me. No matter what they told you, you’re safe now. They can’t get you. They did this horrible thing to you, and it’s their fault.
Their
fault,” she repeated.
    A sob of frustration rose in my throat. The term “blank slate” was nauseatingly accurate. I was about to voice my hopelessness, when a shadow stirred near the