I woke disoriented. I must have finally fallen asleep, but I didn’t remember when. I felt drugged, foggy. How long had I slept?

I blinked and tried to get my eyes to focus. The bed below me felt hard, institutional. Not my bed.

Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. I sat up straight, gasping. Surrounded by machines, in a room that smelled like antiseptic.

“Oh, you’re awake!” I heard a voice, not one I knew.

I couldn’t stop blinking. I had to be dreaming. The last thing I remembered was drifting off - well, I didn’t even remember that. I’d been trying to sleep, staring at the blank ceiling in my lonely upstairs bedroom. I’d been thinking about adopting a cat.

But now I felt... wrong. Heavy. Hot. My body felt wrong, as if my mind had been transferred into someone else’s skin. In the wrong bed, the wrong room.

A woman in dark blue scrubs leaned over my bed. “How are you feeling?” She rolled a blood pressure cart towards me. “Let me just take your vitals. The doctor will want to see you.”

She came toward me with the cuff, but I flinched away.

“Honey, you have to calm down,” the woman said, soothingly. “Do you need something for that? I can get something in your IV.”

I shook my head. Put my hand on my face. Yes, I was feverish. And as I realized that, I felt the ache deep in my chest and limbs. Heat spread everywhere, lighting me up from the inside. “Water,” I said - croaked, really. The inside of my throat was dry, fiery.

“You’ve got your jug right here.” The woman passed me a large plastic tumbler, filled with ice to the top, water filtering down around it. “You need to stay hydrated.”

I sucked down as much of it as I could, until I felt slightly more human.

The woman peered at me. Her stick-straight blonde hair framed her cherub face. She looked like she’d been out of school for five minutes. “Can we get your blood pressure now?”

I cleared my throat. “Can you tell me where I am?”

She stood back. “You don’t know?”

“I know this is a hospital.” A chill went through me - oh, great, fever and chills. I grabbed for a blanket and pulled it up around my neck. “But maybe you can tell me how I got here.”

My request didn’t seem to register with her. “I only just got on shift. But they said you’d been sleeping for a while and that I should let the doctor know when you were up.”

“Okay.” I ran a hand through my hair. It felt greasy. Gross. Either this was the most realistic dream I’d ever had, or I was in some alternate dimension. I knew I’d washed my hair the previous morning.

I stuck my arm out for the nurse while I ran through everything in my head. I’d gotten up, washed my hair, driven to MindTech. I’d met with Helen. We discussed Lisa, the patient who had come from the psychiatric ward. I’d stayed late with her. I couldn’t recall a fever, or getting sick.

The nurse scuttled out. I sat back, held the cold water cup to my forehead. I must have lost some time due to the illness. That happened sometimes with really bad flu. I’d seen the neurological effects in case studies - even in mouse experiments, researchers had found memory lapses to last months or more. Once I figured out how I got here, and what had happened, I could get back to the office and run scans. The memories would probably filter back over the next few days, and I could isolate the problem regions for targeted therapy, too.

Unless I’d contracted something like meningitis. I took another long pull from the plastic straw, downing the water. If I’d been that sick, none of it would come back.

I needed the doctor. I had to know what had happened. I couldn’t keep lying here, sweaty and raw. I looked around, taking in my surroundings more fully. A call button lit on the side of my bed - the outline of a woman’s hair, her head covered with a cap. The universal symbol for a nurse. Always seemed a little sexist. I pressed it. “Hello, Miss Underwood? Are you okay?” The nervous voice of my nurse came back through the speaker.

“It’s Dr. Underwood,” I said, reflexively. “And I need a doctor. Now.”

“Oh, right, right. Yes. I’ll send her in as soon as I can.” The line clicked off, and I was once again alone.

**

I don’t like waiting.

As I lay there, marinating in my own sweat, I went over the events of the previous day once more. Work. Lisa. Home. As if those recollections might help me. But I kept re-drawing the same conclusion. Something had happened, something I didn’t understand, and I would have to wait until someone came in to explain it to me. And I didn’t want to be explained to, either. I like being the one who knows what’s going on.

My body felt alien. Tight. Wound like a spring. And my breasts - so heavy, painful. The whole elephant-walking-on-the-chest thing. But it wasn’t just that heaviness - there were lances of pain, darting in and around the skin as if they might pop my breasts like two swollen balloons pierced with needles. I chugged more water, but it didn’t help. If anything, I would have to go to the bathroom, and I wasn’t even sure if I could get out of bed.

Then the nurse hustled back into the room, followed by a woman in a white coat. The attending doctor, no doubt. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re awake, Dr. Underwood.” She rushed to my side. “How do you feel?”

She’d called me doctor. She knew me, somehow. And I did recall her, in a way. She seemed familiar.

I mopped my brow. “Pretty terrible.”

“We’re going to get some more fluids into you. You’ve already had a course of antibiotics, so the fever should be easing. We can also give you ibuprofen for that.”

“What happened?” I blurted. But then I recognized her. Lisa. The doctor was Lisa. “The last thing I remember was you in my office. I didn’t know you were a doctor. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Lisa looked down. “That was a long time ago.”

“What?” No. It wasn’t. It was yesterday.

“I don’t want you to think you didn’t help me.” Lisa laid her hand on my arm. Our eyes met. Even as my breath sped up, and my mouth went dry, she told me in that moment. She didn’t want to talk about it in front of the nurse, didn’t want to compromise her identity as a professional by talking about her faults. I knew that feeling. “You did, more than you know. But I prefer to keep that in my past.”

“How can you, when it was... I don’t understand.” I needed my phone. My calendar. I had to know what day it was, what I was supposed to be doing today. Even if I was in the hospital, I could e-mail Helen and tell her when I’d be back in the office. Or she could send me my cases for review.

“My son is a happy and healthy two-year-old.” Lisa smiled, ducked her head. “Do you want to see a picture?” She squeezed my hand. “You took care of me, Dr. Underwood. It’s my turn to help you.”

I stared at her.

She scooped her phone out of her pocket and swiped at it a few times, then displayed the photo of a cherub-cheeked blond boy.

My gut twisted. “Dr. Arnold... what day is it?”

“February 12,” she said.

It had been Christmas. Lights sparkling around the office, hung on the landscaped bushes near the front door. But, if the boy was two... “What year?”

“2019,” she told me.

It had been 2017. 

Next Chapter: Chapter Four - Ben: Two Years Before