Who Am I?

The American woman would never forget how she felt when she woke up that morning in an unfamiliar room and looked out the window to see the Eiffel Tower outside. She was sure there was no good reason for her to have suddenly traveled to Paris. What had happened to prompt this trip? Why couldn’t she remember? She got up and opened the door. Looking out into the hall at the numbers on the doors and the elevator, it was obvious that she was in a hotel, as she had suspected, but she didn’t know which one. The name must be written on something inside. She went back in and searched for something with the name on it. les jardins du Adela was printed on a placard beside the phone. 

    She had hoped that her memory of whatever had brought her here would come back when her grogginess wore off, but she was fully awake and alert now and it was still a mystery.Then she noticed a long scratch across her arm and dried blood under her fingernails. Was this a clue? Her heart sank, wondering how it happened and if it was the result of a violent altercation of some kind. Could she have been involved in a crime? Maybe that was why she had run off to another country. She could be trying to hide from the law.

    The woman thought about trying to get some information from the front desk that might jog her memory but didn’t know what name to give them because she wouldn’t be checked in under her real name if she really was on the run. Then she realized she didn’t know her real name.

    Amnesia! It has to be amnesia, she thought to herself, struggling to contain the urge to scream.

    She knew whatever had happened, whoever she was, that panicking would make things much worse. She had to repress the hysteria that was building inside of her and was able to do this when she faced the fact that she might be the only person in the world who she could count on.

    After frantically searching the room and closets for her passport or some type of ID, she found neither, nor any phone or other electronic device belonging to her, another sign that she was trying to remain under the radar, another reason to believe she had broken the law. She probably dumped proof of who she was in an attempt to be incognito.

    “There must be something in the room that will tell me who I am,” she said aloud, pulling at her hair and beginning to feel dizzy.

    It was at that moment that she noticed a slip of hotel stationary on a desk with handwriting scribbled across it. The woman almost tripped over a stray soda bottle on the floor in her rush to get to the paper, desperately hoping she could learn something from it. 

    What she found was yet another puzzle, but one that stoked her fear. 

    Taylor made me so angry. I can’t believe what I did but I’m not going to feel guilty. I have to remember I don’t have anything to feel guilty about. Someday I’ll make everyone understand.  

    How could it say so much and so little at the same time? She still didn’t know what she had done but it must have been pretty bad if she had gone all the way to Europe. Though she knew she was from America, she couldn’t remember what city or state or even what region of the country. Another big question was “Who is Taylor?”

    It seemed strange for someone to write down those few lines. It didn’t appear to be a confession or a letter or a suicide note. There should be more. She looked inside a wastepaper basket next to the desk and saw some wet crumpled paper. She smelled what could only be stale coffee as she dug out the pages stained with brown liquid. She must have spilled coffee on them and probably intended to rewrite whatever it was but hadn’t done it before falling asleep.

    She straightened the pages and could make out words here and there but it was mostly illegible. She made out the name Taylor again. Who is this person? She thought that if she could remember, it would bring back what had happened.

    She searched through the purse that she had already looked through once, which contained no identification, for some connection to Taylor. In a small zippered inside pocket she came across a photograph of a little girl. Behind the small child was a banner that read Happy Birthday Taylor. Underneath the photo was scrawled 2010. That would mean Taylor was in her early twenties now. It was more than logic that told her Taylor was her daughter. She knew it in her heart. She felt the connection. That overpowering maternal love and the memory of pure joy came rushing back to her.

    Though the woman still didn’t know her own name, she knew that Taylor was her daughter and that if she’d done something to harm Taylor, she wouldn’t be running away. She wouldn’t care about protecting herself. She examined the crumpled pages again but could hardly glean anything new. The words yelled…upset… and on a plane, but nothing that didn’t fit in with what she had already figured out. She was obviously involved in some sort of confrontation and ended up getting on a plane to Paris.

    Just as she was about to give up, a blurred string of words became clear to her eyes: Is nobody going to say it?. It seemed like a dead end, that one vague sentence. The lines before and after had been washed away by the coffee but it proved to be the key to unlocking her memory. The woman knew these instantly familiar words she had written down were not hers, It was a question she had heard someone else ask; Taylor, she thought. Yes she was repeating something Taylor had said. the night before. And then it started to come back in bits and pieces, everything that had happened the night before. 

    She remembered getting up from a nap in her bedroom when she heard voices in the den. As she descended the stairs to the first floor of her home, she recognized the voices. The conversation was between her sister Lynn, her brother-in-law Ed and Taylor. The woman remembered standing in the hall and listening to them talk about her.

    “I don’t know what to do. Mom says she’s ok but she’s been acting so weird lately, really erratic.”

    “Oh, Taylor, I’m sure there's nothing to worry about,” said Ed, reassuringly. “She’s probably just having trouble getting over the divorce.”

    “But, Uncle Ed, that was a year and a half ago. Besides this isn’t the first time she’s behaved this way. I remember times when I was a kid, when she would act like a completely different person all the sudden.”

    “Sweetheart, your mother has always been kind of moody and uh – high strung…”

    “Is nobody going to say it?” interrupted Taylor, with a sigh. “She’s mentally ill. She must be, considering some of the things she’s been doing lately.”

    Taylor went on to tell her aunt and uncle a story about noticing a deep, long cut along her mother’s forearm, which she claimed to be something that happened when she was gardening, but later that day she found a big sharp kitchen knife in her mother’s nightstand and saw what appeared to be drops of blood on the bedroom rug. 

    “I hoped I was wrong and that she just kept it there for self defense, like if there was an intruder in the middle of the night but she didn’t say that when I asked her about it. She just got mad and said it wasn’t any of my business.” 

    Listening to Taylor talk about her behind her back and make her out to be crazy infuriated the woman and she stormed into the room. 

    “I said it wasn’t any of your business because it isn’t!” she shouted at the wide-eyed Taylor as Lynn gasped and Ed started to speak but was drowned out by the heated argument between mother and daughter. 

   “I don’t remember why I had that knife in my bedroom drawer, ok, but I’m sure I had a perfectly good reason!”

    “You know that would be a lot easier to believe if you hadn’t already hurt yourself, at least twice before, Mom. You said you were finished with this self-harm stuff. You told Dad it was just some weird phase you were going through.”

    “I thought it was, Taylor. I don’t remember cutting myself, maybe I was sleepwalking.”

    “Or maybe you don’t remember it or a lot of the other creepy things you do because you’ve got a thing I was reading about called dissociative personality disorder.”

    “What, now you're a psychologist?” mocked the woman.

    “No, but I did talk to one. I described your symptoms and she said it was possible, but she wouldn’t give a diagnosis without talking to you first.”

    “Maybe we should listen to Taylor,” said Lynn. “I didn’t want to believe it either but I think we’ve all been ignoring the elephant in the room for a long time, just making excuses for you,” she cried. 

    “Carol,” began Ed, “Maybe you should look into getting some treatment. It wouldn’t hurt.”

    “Oh really, well it just so happens I did get treatment a few years ago and the therapist said I just had a little anxiety and gave me a prescription for a mild tranquilizer.”

    Ed wanted to talk to the doctor who had given her the prescription but Taylor was so worried about her, she wanted to take her to a treatment facility she'd heard about, right away. 

   The woman, who now knew her name was Carol, remembered that she had grabbed her purse, which still contained her passport from a recent trip to Jamaica, and bolted for the door. That was the last thing she could recall until she woke up in Paris this morning. 

    Was there a reason she came here, or was she just trying to put thousands of miles between herself and her family? Carol decided to try a trick she had seen in an old spy movie. She took a pen and grazed the last page of the stationery she had written on, hoping the impression of the words from the page that had been on top would show up. Not all the words were decipherable but she did make out Dr. Stephens. That was the name of the psychiatrist who had treated her a few years earlier. She remembered now that he had moved to Paris. That must be why she had traveled here, to find him to back up what she’d told her family about her condition not being serious. 

    As she let it all sink in, Carol couldn’t deny that she did need help and was further convinced when she saw two similar cuts on her thighs. She wasn’t mad at Taylor anymore. All she could think about was talking to her again. There were still things Carol couldn’t remember, like her daughter's phone number. It took a while to track down her contact info on the computer in the hotel business center but she was able to reach Taylor about half an hour later. 

“Mom, is that you?”

“Yes, honey, for the moment, but I don’t know who I’ll be when I get home.”