He Called My Brain Injury a Hunger Strike, So I Forgot Him novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Box 214

A key sewn into Leah's coat lining opens a safe-deposit box with $22,000, her passport and a lease she signed to leave Roland. The deposit receipt is stamped five hours before she was shot.

The next morning, Erik put a slice of dry toast on a plate and set it in front of me.

"Small bites," he said. "Stop when it argues."

I ate half a slice.

The room tilted once and then settled.

"It stayed down," I said.

"Good." He picked up his coffee and looked at me over the rim. "Then you can tell me what you've got."

"Thirty-one dollars and a coat."

"Coat's a start."

I had been wearing it for two days, and it had a tear at the hem where the lining hung loose.

Erik noticed it when I stood up.

"May I?"

I nodded, and he knelt, turned the hem back with two fingers, and went still.

"Leah, there's something sewn in here."

It was a small brass key, stitched into the lining with black thread.

The stitches were uneven and tight, and they had been done by someone in a hurry.

They were mine.

I knew my own hand, and I had no memory of ever doing it.

There was a paper tag tied to the key.

Cascade Credit Union, box 214.

"Do you bank there?" Erik asked.

"Roland does everything at Meridian."

"Then why is your key at Cascade?"

I turned it over in my palm.

My hand was steady for the first time in a week.

"I think I hid it from him," I said.

We went in his truck.

The credit union was a low brick building with a clerk who checked my license and my face for a long while.

"I don't see your name on the signature card," she said. "Wait. Here it is. Callison, L. Opened in February, in person."

"February," I said. "Before I was shot."

"I'm sorry, I didn't know that," the clerk said. "I'll take you back."

She walked me to a small room with a steel table and left me alone with the box.

Erik waited in the lobby.

He had asked if he should come in, and I had said no, and he had nodded and stayed put.

I opened the lid.

There was an envelope of cash, rubber-banded, with a slip inside: $22,000.

There was my passport, still in its sleeve, with a boarding pass folded in it that I didn't remember buying.

At the bottom lay a clear plastic folder with a lease inside it.

I read the first page twice.

A one-bedroom apartment on Alder Street.

Tenant: Leah Callison, only.

Move-in date: the day after the shooting.

I sat down on the steel stool.

It meant that on the day I was shot, I had already rented a home for myself.

It meant I had been leaving him.

I put my hand flat on the table and breathed until the room stopped shaking.

For six months, Roland had told me I was a nag who had pushed him away.

I had believed him, because I couldn't remember anything that said otherwise.

Now I had a lease signed in my own hand, and a passport, and money I'd saved in secret, and I had no idea why.

"You don't remember any of this," I said out loud.

The room didn't answer.

I divided the cash and put ten thousand in my coat.

I left the rest in the box and locked it.

Erik was on the lobby bench, with his elbows on his knees.

"Okay?" he said.

"I've got money."

"Whose?"

"Mine," I said, and my voice broke on it. "It's mine. I saved it. I think I was getting ready to go."

He stood up slowly.

"Then that's good news."

"Is it? I don't know why I was going. I don't know what I was running from. I don't know what happened that day."

"You don't have to know today."

"Erik, my own husband is afraid of what I'll remember."

I hadn't meant to say it aloud.

He was quiet for a second.

"Then he'd better be," he said.

In the truck, I opened the lease folder again to find the landlord's number, and a small slip fell out of the back.

A receipt.

Security deposit received, $2,400, paid in cash, signed by the landlord.

I looked at the date.

It was the day I was shot.

The time stamp said 3:40 in the afternoon, and I was shot at nine o'clock that night.

I read the line twice, and I still didn't know what I had been doing for the five hours between them.

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