Dark Memories Emerge

T 1 GE RA LDINE he day Geraldine had been anxiously awaiting had arrived. She was about to meet Darlene, the daughter she didn’t remember giving birth to forty-nine years ago. She also had no memories of Darlene’s father, of being a wife and a mother, or of raising Darlene for the first twelve years of her life.

After awakening from a coma thirty-seven years ago, Geraldine couldn’t remember a single thing about her life before the catastrophic injury, or how it had happened, or the injury itself. Her first memories were of the rehab center. In those, she’d been recovering mentally, but physically she had already been completely healed.

Geraldine had been told that she’d suffered a severe head trauma, which she had to believe was true because she’d had to relearn everything, including speech.

And yet, no physical evidence of the injury remained.

The staff at the rehabilitation center hadn’t known how the injury had happened either. Then again, Geraldine might have forgotten what she’d been told.

Her memory was still spotty, with some things forgotten almost immediately and some things remembered vividly, which probably depended on their importance.

Geraldine could forget where she’d been the day before, but she remembered every moment of her second daughter’s birth thirty-four years ago. She also remembered each important milestone in Cassandra’s life, from her first words as a baby to her incredible achievements as an adult.

Then again, other events that were almost as important were missing—like getting bitten by a male with fangs and injected with venom, and like transitioning into immortality—but those might have been intentionally erased from her memory, so she couldn’t blame the accident for that.

Nevertheless, Geraldine found it unfathomable that she’d forgotten her firstborn child, even given the fickle and random nature of her memory loss. That was why she clung so hopefully to her hypothesis about having an identical twin.