‘I’ll have whatever she’s having,’ she told him and he disappeared with a deferential nod. That was the thing about my half-sister. She was like her mother—no matter where she went, she immediately and effortlessly commanded fawning respect. She was so different when I first met her after my amnesia it surprised me we even shared the same gene pool.
I took a sip of my drink. When she turned toward me, I said, ‘I saw Maurice the other day.’ Maurice was a friend of hers.
‘Really? Where?’
‘At the butcher.’
‘How is he?’
‘Still reeling from his divorce, I dare say. He asked after you.’
‘Did he? I wonder why. He’s a blithering idiot,’ she dismissed callously.
The waiter came with her glass of sherry and we placed our orders.
She turned to me resolutely. ‘So how are the sessions with the hypnotist coming on?’
I shrugged. ‘All right, I suppose.’
‘What on earth does that mean? Have you or haven’t you remembered anything yet?’
I shifted uncomfortably. ‘A bit.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘What, exactly?’
‘Well, I remembered a few occasions. The birthday party when I was five, my mother telling Daddy she had cancer. Oh and I remembered finding Jacobi in bed at fifteen with his hardcore German transsexual magazines.’
We grinned at each other.
‘Well,’ she said with a mischievous look. ‘He’s a screaming transvestite now.’
‘What?’ I exclaimed.
‘Yes,’ she confirmed briefly and suddenly changed the subject. ‘What else have you remembered?’
‘The other memories are unimportant little pieces of the big puzzle.’
‘That’s it? Unimportant little pieces of the big puzzle. At his prices?’
I colored. ‘We are making progress, but Dr. Kane is cautious so there is no question of false memories occurring.’
She stared at me. ‘I can’t imagine there are any buried memories, can you?’
‘I don’t know. I do have the odd unsettling dream.’
‘What kind of unsettling dream?’
I bit my lip. ‘Just strange things that don’t make sense.’
She laughed. ‘Dreams are not supposed to make sense. You should see what mine are like. That’s no excuse for dragging out your…treatment.’
That tiny pause was meant to tell me she did not think much of my treatment. ‘He’s not dragging out my treatment. He’s just being cautious. He thinks I could be damaged if the process is not done properly.’
She looked at me in a non-committal way. ‘Like what happened to his wife?’
He was married! I gazed at her in shock. ‘His wife?’ I croaked, feeling such a fool.
She leaned forward, her eyes shining with some emotion that I could not figure out. ‘Yes, didn’t you know? She committed suicide in the most horrendous way. Locked herself inside her car in a Starbucks car park with their two children and a few gas tanks and pulled the pin off a grenade. From what I understand the children were just babies.’