To Have and to Hold Read Online Free PDF Page B

almost hadn’t known it was lost. Was it possible that if it hadn’t been for Trina, he might not have figured it out for even longer?
    “It’s more common than you’d think,” Dr. Stephens said. “Again, it’s a subjectivity problem. We don’t have foolproof ways to determine what someone does and doesn’t remember. There are certain kinds of questions that help—asking people about recent current events, that kind of thing—but it turns out that a very large percentage of people are oblivious to recent current events, particularly if they’ve been in a remote location.”
    Hunter sighed.
    “As I gather you were.”
    He nodded.
    He’d gone to the base first thing this morning. Before referring him to Dr. Stephens, the base doctor had told Hunter he could make a case for medical discharge. “Any cognitive impairment. Which memory loss is.”
    But Hunter didn’t know whether he wanted medical discharge. How did you decide what you wanted to do with the rest of your life when you didn’t
know
what your life was like?
    It was strange that all through his time in Germany and D.C., he’d never felt as disoriented as he did now, as if finding out about the gap in his memory had brought it into being.
    He’d pocketed the paperwork and the referral and gone to see the rear detachment commander, Captain Carmichael. Carmichael, brand new to his position and harried, had pulled the incident report, but it had been—typically—short on details. There had been a firefight. No other U.S. casualties. No mention of insurgent casualties, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been any.
    “Can you find out more?”
    “I can try,” the captain said. “But you know how it is. Communication is intermittent. Even if they’re getting email right now, no guarantee someone’s got time to fill in the blanks for you.”
    “Tell them I lost a fucking year,” Hunter said.
    The captain gave him a look caught halfway between sympathetic and
tell me a story I haven’t heard before
. “I’ll do my best.”
    That left him, for as long as it took to get answers back from the front, with this giant
hole
in his psyche. And only Dr. Stephens to help him guess at what lived inside it.
    “So—what?” he demanded of the neurorehab specialist. “So we have no idea what happened to me and—”
    “Well, we know certain things. We know that if there was a percussion injury, like a blast, it wasn’t intense enough to cause eardrum rupture. So that helps us a little. And if there was a blow to the head, it didn’t cause external bleeding or someone would have flagged it. So we’re probably looking at some kind of blunt trauma, which means damage—if it exists at all—is probably localized to point of trauma and point of rebound—” At Hunter’s blank look, he clarified. “The point where the brain bounced off your skull on the other side.”
    “Oh,” Hunter said unhappily. “And what do you mean, ‘damage if it exists at all’? I can’t remember a year of my life. That means there’s damage, right?”
    “Probably,” Dr. Stephens said. “But it’s also possible to have some retrograde amnesia in response to severe bodily injury or psychological trauma. I’m sure you’ve heard of childhood abuse victims or even adult rape victims with no memory of the incident?”
    Hunter nodded.
    “At this point, in the absence of any concrete evidence of specific brain damage, the way we proceed is the same regardless of etiology.”
    Hunter gave him a dirty look.
    “We do the same thing no matter what caused the amnesia.”
    “And that is?”
    Dr. Stephens, for the first time, had the good grace to look ashamed. “Essentially, we wait.”
    “Let me guess. I could remember in a day, a week, a month, a year, or possibly never.”
    “I think that about sums it up. And even if you get some memories back, you’re not guaranteed to get them all back. We do occasionally use ECT—electroconvulsive shock therapy—but that can