Archive of Our Own

“Gross, unilateral amnesia,” that’s what the doctors tell you, staring at charts, at brain scans, their expressions caught somewhere between interested and weary and impressed. They hadn’t expected her to wake up at all, thought you were on a pipe dream, in denial when you insisted. They don’t say it again.

Not when one day she’s cracked her eyes open and the next she’s off the ventilator and the third she’s sitting up in bed when you come in, slurping jello out of a pint sized cup, more empties littered on the tray table than she should be allowed.

Your relief is so brief, when you think of her conning more out of the nurses.

“Um,” she says, her voice a little deeper than usual, rough with disuse, and that’s your first clue, you don’t think you’ve ever heard her use a space filler of a word with so much uncertainty. “Hi?”

You stand at the foot of the bed, suddenly at odds in this place you’ve made your home for the last three weeks. The chair that’s destroying your back, the sweater you can’t pull on that the nurses keep moving around, the little plastic cup you use to sneak down stolen painkillers. It’s like someone’s moved all the furniture a foot to the left, taken the walls out too, moved the doors, there’s so much space all of a sudden.

Her fingers twitch, twist with what? with nerves? She’s still on a heartrate monitor but you can’t take your eyes off her face to check if it’s increased.

“Question for you,” she says, faux casual, you recognize that, when she’s playing something serious up to be light. Usually, you would roll your eyes at her for it, tell her to stop screwing around in not so many words, but the whole room is off kilter, she is, you certainly are.

You nod, dumbly. What the hell else is there to do?

She sucks in a breath between her teeth, half of a – fake – smile pulling up her cheek. “Who am I?”

This prompts the brain scans, the words like amnesia and hypoxia and damage. They tell you these things alone, in a windowless office somewhere in the hospital bowels while she sits in her bed, sucking on an ice lolly stolen from the children’s ward.

You should have lied differently, it occurs to you, when you said she was your wife.

It doesn’t change anything. Or that’s what you convince yourself. There’s no difference between her, the one you remember from years past, from weeks ago, to the corpse you monitored in the hospital bed, the rhythmic hum and wheeze and clunk of the ventilator that somehow never matched up to your own breathing, to the curious, but blank faced girl who sits in the same bed.

Staff move through the hospital like ghosts, constantly in the way of you; you think they’d hate you more if you were nice to them. The doctors talk and you try to listen. They wear white coats, surprisingly unblemished by blood and body fluids. You can’t bring yourself to fit a jumper over your head, something about it too suffocating, the ache in your shoulder when you lift your arm too sharp, so you shiver in a t-shirt.

You’re the same. She’s the same.

She’s still annoyingly good at too many things. She’s still ambidextrous. She can still speak all three dozen languages she’s always spoken. She’s still charming and obnoxious and loud. She still flirts with you outrageously.

You tell her your name is Eve, and that’s it. She tries it on for size, rolling it around her accent like she did two years ago, before it was second nature. You try not to think about how she said it in her sleep, how when you told the doctors they looked at you, sadly, but also like you were crazy. She doesn’t ask for her own again. She doesn’t ask for anything.

Through the open door you watch her make the physical therapist laugh as the older woman shows her how to stretch and strengthen her quads, mobilize her hips and knees, the moves the same as the ones you put her through while she was asleep. Three weeks of deterioration, three weeks of loss in her body after what? minutes? caused the loss in her mind.

She fumbles her foot, purposefully? or is she really that weak? You can’t tell. The PT holds her behind the knee and she gives the woman her most charming smile. It boils something in you, heat like the one that spreads pain and infection out of the wound in your own shoulder, into your throat, into your stomach. Jealousy is nothing unfamiliar to you but this reeks of a different stink, of rotting flesh and dead fish, the taste that’s been stuck under your tongue since you surfaced alone.

Her doctor is handing you papers you’re sure will end up crushed at the bottom of your bag with loose change and crisp crumbs. He’s saying words like plan and recovery and outpatient.

You wonder where the hell you’re going to take her. There was never a plan to get this far.

The thing is, she’s fine. She can get out of bed without stumbling and wash her hair and moan about the quality of the food you bring home. She’s back to sleeping curled up on her side, like how you remember from that one night in the bothy, her knees knocking into the backs of yours, and those few snatched hours in the camper.


Her skin is warm where you expect it to be cold but it doesn’t make touching her any easier. The river doesn’t cling to her, not like it does to you, in the infection that aches through your shoulder, where the bullet tore through her and into you, pus seeping out into bandages you don’t remember to change until they stink. Her wounds are neat, tidy, stitches. Light pink, but only where the edges meet. She has ointments and creams cascading over the bathroom sink that she works into each one daily.

It’s been three days since they let her go, there’s nothing wrong with her other than the bullet holes and the gaps in her mind. She’s untouched. Halfway healed. Except you can’t see an ounce of remembrance in her gaze.

She sits at the island countertop in your acquired flat slathering cream onto her cuticles while you messily dice an onion with a too dull knife. Tears clog up your sinuses, thick sludge in your nose, behind your eyes, but she seems unaffected.

You grit your teeth and swallow your own snot. Acidic, familiar. “I don’t suppose you’d want to help.”

“I am injured.” She shrugs her good shoulder. The bad one only has a pair of nickel sized scabs now, soon, even those will be gone, replaced by fresh, white skin.

These are the words you speak to each other. Do you want a drink? and I’m gonna shower and where’s the dish soap? Unimportant things. Inconsequential. She doesn’t look like she wants to know more. Her face impassive. Blank. There, but not. The complete opposite of how you’re used to her. You can’t tell if it’s deliberate or not, if she’s still there, brewing beneath this mask of serenity, or if this is all that’s left of her, if the river took everything else away, if you drank it down yourself.

She doesn’t ask things. You don’t either.

You don’t ask because for the first time you don’t want the answers. You don’t want her to tell you again that she doesn’t remember your knife in her gut, the way she once smirked in the woods, gun to her own chin. That she doesn’t remember Rome or Margate or Berlin, putting that damn banana in your salt well. You don’t want to hear it. You don’t want to see it.

So you don’t.

You throw oil and the onions in the too hot pan and listen to them sizzle, snap, pop, burn. She raises an eyebrow, but it’s still to her own cuticles, not you. A pot boils over on the other burner but you don’t follow its lead. Instead, you slop dry, cheap pasta into it, let the water boil into steam with a violent sound on the element, a wave sent over the side.

Displacement. Fuck.

She’s got a funny shaped file now, metal, shining in the fluorescent overheads that cast weird shadows, make you squint even though there’s more than enough light. She hasn’t said a word about the accommodations, even though you know they’re terrible, not up to her standards by far. She hasn’t said a word about much of anything. You want her to tell you about the time she killed a guy with a nail file stuck in his eye. You want something, anything, to animate her, bring her back to life.

Instead, she slips off the stood, entirely silent, and returns to the bathroom with her tools. You dump a can of tomato sauce in the pan. It spatters red spots onto your shirt, not at all like blood.

“Eve,” her finger traces the knots at the top of your spine, lighter than her voice which is so thin and thready you almost don’t believe it’s outside of your mind.

You nod, hardly, your cheek against the pillowcase. Sharing the bed with her is a necessity, you tell yourself, there’s only one after all. But the flat is drafty, the blankets too thin, and in her sleep she tucks her nose into your hair, her fingers wander over your hip, your stomach, and she mumbles in your ear, completely unknowingly, completely incoherent.

You tell yourself it’s practical, shared warmth and all that, and ignore the pressing ache that these moments are the only ones that feel like you haven’t lost her entirely, where she seems familiar, where you’re not looking for signs and symptoms. With your eyes closed, it could be a whole different world you’re in.

Of course, she doesn’t let you keep it. “Why don’t you ever use my name?”

You swallow, and swallow again, and again. A thin shaft of light sneaks through the blinds onto the wall in front of you, orange from the streetlights.

“I’m- I-“ your mouth tastes like chalk. Gritty like sand. Dry like absinthe. Cloying. A good word, you think, for her. Always in the back of your throat. Whether you like it or not.

“I use your name.”

There a long space of quiet. You think maybe she fell asleep. You hope she did.

“Eve.” She says it something like a Hail Mary, rote like amen but no shortage of devotion. It scares you that she didn’t lose that. It scares you how deep that must be ingrained.

“I don’t even know what it is.”

You scoff. “I’ve told you your name.”

“No, you haven’t.” Obstinate. She’s good at that. Always has been. It makes no sense. It makes no sense what she once was and now is.

It makes you want to dig your heels in more. You flip over, out of her hands, into the sharpness of her gaze. She doesn’t look tired at all. Fuck. Her eyes are bright, glowing, interested, headstrong, in a dog-bone kind of way, that makes you think of a little girl on a beach, sitting in the sand at the edge of the waterline, plastic shovel in hand, digging down and down and down, determined to reach the center of the Earth.

“I’ve told you your name.”

But maybe, maybe, you haven’t said her name, because in truth you’re not sure what to call her. Is she Villanelle? You’re not sure. You don’t think so. She’s certainly not Oksana. But maybe you wouldn’t know her if she was. How do you even recognize her at all, with the elasticity of her face and voice and personality?

“You haven’t told me anything at all.” She should say it like a challenge, or a plea, but instead it’s a plain fact.

You swallow hard on your own dry throat. You know it. You know the questions you would be asking if it were you in her place, who am I? and who are you? and who are we? but she hasn’t asked a one, hasn’t asked anything at all before today. If it were you you’d be digging, digging, digging, that same little girl on the beach but a pinch in your brow, the determination to complete the task rather than the joy at discovering it.

Her though, she waits. She’s bloody quiet. Watching, curious, yes, but you can’t reconcile it. You want her back loud and demanding. You want her back her. But you’ve no idea the words to say that will spark her back to herself.

“Just saying.” She shrugs, one shoulder, perfect, casual, blank again, everything turned off, you watch it happen on her face, a light switch, easy as that, like it doesn’t bother her at all, like she could go weeks, months, like she could never learn her name at all and be perfectly content, and rolls out of bed.

You could call after her, you could say Villanelle, wait, and it would solve both your problems, or at least put them firmly back in her hands, but you don’t. You don’t know why you don’t. You just watch her sashay, really she must be healing, she must be healing so much faster than you, into the bathroom, hear the shower turn on.

“Villanelle,” you tell her the next morning but it feels mistaken, sits awry in your mouth, flinty, the wrong kind of acid, salt and sulphur instead of your usual vinegar and vitriol.

She only nods.

It’s all wrong.

You want her smirk, that sly sideways grin, to go along with some kind of teasing, some cutting remark, some now that wasn’t so hard was it? Instead, she’s silent, piling sugar into her tea. How is that something she remembers? how she takes her tea. Does she even remember it or has she guessed? Does she do it to leave the sugar bowl half empty? Just to bother you? Does she even notice that it does?

You grab her arm; it startles you both. You don’t exactly touch her anymore, not in the daytime, not that you ever really did to begin with. There was no time to ever get comfortable with each other.

Still, she says fucking nothing.

“Is that always how you take your tea?” you nod to it, jerk your chin, relive a bit of whiplash and savour it.

She shrugs. “I don’t know.” Like it means nothing at all.

Smoke wafts up out of the toaster and you cram the cancel button to get it to pop, mutter an expletive, that makes her smile. You claw the bread out with the tips of your fingers, blackened in stripes, soft and raw in between, and smear enough butter on to make it soggy.

Her mug is just there, at your wrist, the surface of her tea, milky, still disturbed by the swirl of her spoon, roiling towards the lip of it. One move and you could knock it, shatter it against the floor, spill liquid all down the cupboards, make a royal mess of both your feet.

Instead, you rip into stale bread gone wet with your teeth. She takes the mug up off the counter and retreats to the sofa.

You learn things, but you’re not sure about who, not sure where to place them, how to categorize them.

She showers with the bathroom door open, the TV on, calling out commentary to who? to you? maybe? She never seems to desire a response.

She’s not fussy about food, not like you expect her to be. Sure, she rolls her eyes at your penchant for living off snack food, complains when you skip meals, but she never says a word no matter how shitty your pasta bake turns out.

She falls asleep with difficulty, but wakes with ease.

You can’t tell whether these things are new or ingrained. Whether the river gave them to her or took them from her. There’s no way to know, for you or for her.

Sometimes you wake so close it feels like you might be inside her, or she you, that maybe for half a second you’re the same person, all warmth tucked under the blankets, sleep hazy in the air. Usually, you wake slowly enough to extricate yourself without having to think about it.

But she’s breathing steadily, awake, either for a while or only just, her eyes are always bright either way. Your shoulder must be cutting off the circulation to her arm but she hasn’t moved, doesn’t move it. She stares at you the corner of your eye, not quite meeting your gaze.

She’s an inch away. Not even. Half that maybe. Who are you to tell? There isn’t a ruler. There isn’t an outline. There isn’t a rulebook for appropriate personal boundaries with your adversary turned lover turned amnesiac roommate.

(Is that what you are? Is that how she thinks of you? Is it how you think of her? You have no idea.)

You can feel her breath on your cheek though, feel the brush of the wild ends of her hair, she keeps it messier than you’ve ever seen it before but in that effortless way some women can manage but you never have. She’s so close.

Your gaze falls to her lips, you know it does, and she knows it does, neither of you have to say a word about it. Is she thinking about kissing you? You are. Kissing her, that is.

You’re also wondering if she’ll remember the first time you really kissed her. Maybe not the view of the country road, but something in the smell of open air, the blooming ditches, or a substance less precise, the curve of her own smile, your hair mixing with hers in the breeze. You wonder if the shape of your mouth will be familiar to her, distantly, an itch she can’t scratch, a word she can only feel the shape of on the back of her tongue.

You don’t kiss her, despite the desire clear as day on her face. You think of Paris, that day that she doesn’t remember like all the other days, and the want slips away completely.

You watch her watch it happen. See your own face reflected in hers. A funhouse mirror. You don’t know how she does that. Still.

The moment breaks; it’s fine, it’s fine.

You’d be lying to everyone if you said it was perfect, if you even said it was working. You’re delusional, but you’re not that delusional. You snip and she snaps back and you’d be lying to yourself if you said you didn’t like it, if it doesn’t make you feel something when she’s obstinate, contradictory, unflinching.

You scoff at her, shout at her, “Are you purposefully trying to make me crazy? Is that what you’re doing? Because it’s working.”

“I don’t know, Eve, am I?”

Fuck her for the way she says your name. For the way she tosses her shoulder and her hair goes along with it. For the way she looks at you and still somehow sees every crack and crevice you don’t want her to, that you’ve tried to fill in with spackle and putty. For making it believable for one, tiny second that she’s faking, that none of this is real, that she’s fucking with you. That she remembers everything, that this is one of her games. Fuck her even more for being real, for being broken, for not remembering who you are, why she should be afraid of your ire.

You jab at her shoulder, at the healed over wound that barely has a Band-Aid covering it anymore. Your whole torso aches with infection. “Do you know how you got that scar?”

She rolls her eyes. “I was shot, obviously.” Her body recoils from your touch but her feet stand firm.

Good, you think, it should hurt her. She should be hurt, just like you are.

“Where?”

Her tongue glosses over the backs of her teeth but her face stays blank, her body relaxed, but purposefully? Her lips twitch and twist before she speaks with what? nerves? You can’t tell anymore.

“On a bridge, maybe, or a boat, somewhere near the river. Does it matter? I don’t remember.”

“Try.”

“I am.”

“Harder.” You shove her again, two fingers aimed right at the bullet hole. She doesn’t move away from it; you can feel the solidity of her in your middle knuckles. The wound is healed, flesh knitted together from the inside out, unlike yours which is still a soft, cavernous hole. Her face twists, from pain? From annoyance? From memory or lack thereof? You try to stare her down but she looks over your shoulder, refuses to meet your gaze.

“It was night,” she says, finally. “The water was dark.” She breathes thickly, like the air is humidity soaked when the silence between you is completely dry. “But there were reflections of light.”

Panic ticks up the back of your skull, clawing into the top of your spine like a termite into wet wood. Cloying. Destroying.

“Yeah,” you say. “It was.” You throw down the tea towel and walk all the way out of the flat without another word.

You’re halfway through a half-hearted, conciliatory clean-up of the flat when the thought strikes you so hard you have to sit down, knees bashing against table legs as you go, your heart pounding in your throat like there’s a gun to your head when really nothing at all has happened.

Maybe she’s really gone forever.

She’s right there, humming to herself something unfamiliar, piling an obscene amount of sugar into a single cup of tea, so much that the tide of it rises closer and closer to the lip of the mug, that it must be thick and grainy when she drinks it, balanced on one foot, the other half cocked out behind her like a goddamn relaxed horse. She’s right there. Her roots are growing in something mousy and brown close to that school picture you saw ages ago and you’ve seen her scowling at them in the bathroom mirror, fogged up with steam, but she hasn’t made any move to rectify it. Three times this week she’s picked the pocket of a man on the street in order to buy herself something ridiculous. You can’t count the number of comments she’s made about clothes, about style, yours, hers, strangers on the street. There’s no shortage of her things lying around the apartment, hair stuck on the shower wall to avoid going down the drain, half empty mugs sitting abandoned in the kitchen sink, socks forgotten between the cushions of the couch.

She’s right there.

Except she’s not.

Except she’s gone, maybe, and not just for now, for good. For forever.

It strikes you in the gut, like one too many drinks in when the nausea overtakes and you’re fine one second, then absolutely positive you’re going to hurl your guts up the next. A split second difference. Entirely unprompted.

You wonder if this was just as fast, if they’d pulled her up a half second earlier, gotten her to shore quicker, started chest compressions sooner, if she’d be completely and perfectly fine. Did you lose her all at once or by degrees? What was one second lost in that murky sludge of a river equivalent to? a year? a memory? a person? Does it even matter now, when the same amount of time hasn’t reversed it, when weeks haven’t brought even a shred back for her?

You lay in bed at night and you wonder how different it would be sleeping beside a corpse, or a ghost. She absolutely would haunt you. You wonder where you’d be if she hadn’t been found. You wonder if you even would have gotten this far by yourself. You don’t think you would have bothered.

As the days go on she picks at you more and more. You brought it on yourself, you know, with nothing short of demands of her. You’re the one who wants her to remember, you’re the one who wants the old her back. She’s the one, this new her, who would be flattened down out of existence with said return.

“You don’t tell me things.”

You hum, non-committedly, pretended carelessness. It’s the only way you know. You’ve never been good with delicacies; though she herself is hardly a fine wine, more and more she seems like thin blown glass, just at the precipice of shattering.

“You don’t say, hey Villanelle, your favourite colour is purple, you know?”

“I don’t think your favourite colour is purple.”

“You know what I mean.” She rolls her eyes. “Don’t you want me to remember?”

You bite your cheek, reopen the wound, gnaw at it so your mouth floods with metal, with seawater. “Of course I want you to remember.”

“Then why don’t you help me?” she says it like it’s the easiest thing in the world. And maybe it would be, to Villanelle. Maybe if your positions were reversed she would have you back in three days’ time, would never stop chattering even in her sleep, she talks in it, another thing you haven’t told her, would tell you your entire life story, get that eureka moment, that Hollywood ending where the music swells and you remember. She would do that, maybe.

You don’t, can’t. What happens if you tell her everything, spill it all out through gaping wounds, let the festering infection air, let your blood pool, spill, and nothing changes? What happens if you give it all away, if she takes it, and still has nothing in return? Do you lose it forever?

You swallow the thick ring of spit in your mouth, taste the pain on the forefront of your tongue. “You were more a reds and oranges and greens kind of guy.”

Were. Shit.

She nods, swallows it down. “I think I like green right now.”

“One time,” it spills from you without your permission, “When we were in Scotland you wore this horrible green, furry jacket. You looked like the Grinch.”

She rolls her eyes. “Still probably better than the crap you wear.”

“Hey, my crap is your crap now, you know.”

“Yes,” she hums, about to say something you won’t like. That at least hasn’t changed. “One of the nurses did mention I had a very pretty wife, though I do suspect we never actually got married.”

“How else were they going to tell me anything about you?” You try to play it casual, like she is. It’s hard when you think you never want to go to another wedding again in your life, not just because they’re painstakingly dull anymore.

“Hmm.” She shrugs, narrows her eyes at you. Familiarity snatches air out of your lungs like a vice grip around your throat. It always does. In the moments where she puts aside that blank thing, that fake happy thing she wears these days. You know she does it on purpose and all it makes you want to do is pick and peck at the shell of her until you get at something real and bloody underneath.

“What? Like you’ve got a problem with it?” You shrug an arm outward. “The door’s there if you want to leave.” You don’t mention the panic that grows in your chest at the thought of losing her again, don’t acknowledge yourself how you’d rather take her apart with the blunt edge of a kitchen knife than watch her walk away.

“I wasn’t complaining, Eve.” She rests her chin in her hand and stares. Seeing god knows what. Your own personality may be just as foreign as hers at this point. A twisted knot so snarled that the only way to untangle it is with the snap of a pair of garden shears.

Your name is familiar to her again, after only a couple of weeks. It sits thick in the back of her mouth with the growly part of her accent. You want to look for it there, her or you or some sense of familiarity, want to unhinge her jaw like a snake and peer down her throat, test her gag reflex, excavate her tonsils, lay out cross sections on glass petri dishes and study her under a microscope. But you were never any good at science in school, too haphazard, not enough focus. You’re better as a butcher than a biologist.

Your mouth settles into the hard line of a frown and she squints at you like there’s something to see there.

Still, nothing changes.

Sometimes she leaves the apartment, sometimes you do. Rarely, you’ll go together when the walls feel like they’re shrinking inwards.

When you go alone you walk aimlessly, circling the same block over and over again, letting rain drip down the back of your jacket even though you could put your hood up to stop it.

You don’t know where she goes. She doesn’t tell you; you don’t ask. Sometimes she comes back with things, an ice cream even though it’s five degrees out, a shiny bracelet you know she must have pulled off of someone’s wrist.

When you’re in the flat together, it’s better and worse. It’s the same as it’s always been or entirely different. That’s what you’ve learned, over hours and days and weeks. She’s the same as she’s always been, or entirely different. You can’t know. You won’t know. So it’s you you’ve started to question.

Do you prefer the coffee that your mother drank or the tea your father did? Have you always had this much rage? directed at just about everyone except for yourself? When did you first learn to love like a wildfire? It should be no surprise at all that she’s been consumed in the wake of you.

“I know I said we’d go, but I think Alaska is a really shitty decision,” she says, like nothing, as easily as you’d just been discussing the weather. You make no attempt to track her train of thought.

You’ve only heard her say the word, the place-name, Alaska, once, right before the bullet in your back.

You put the glass down slowly because otherwise you might smash it, into the table, the wall behind her head. She’s quick enough to duck. Violence is such a quick fix, such an easy reaction, a new problem caused, the old one swept under the burning rug.

“What did you just say?” The water in the glass trembles from your voice, a sonic boom, or maybe the careless way you set it down.

She hasn’t clued in yet. She shrugs. A roll of her shoulders, loose. You can tell she hasn’t gotten there yet because the stiffness that comes along with her any and every emotion hasn’t iced her joints shut yet.

“I just meant that Alaska is probably a piss poor place to retire. All things considered. Somewhere with a beach, a hot beach I mean, somewhere sandy, is what retirement should be.”

There’s nothing. No sign or symptom. No red flag or warning label. No swelling music. No dramatic gasp. She remembers something, and there’s no notice at all.

“Villanelle,” you say, comes out scattered, broken. She looks at you funny. Annoyed maybe, by the lack of you, by the other page you’re demanding when she was quite pleased with the story she’d brought you in on.

You swallow a weird kind of bile in your throat, nothing like nausea, nothing like hope, something else, tarred and feathered. “When did you say we were going to Alaska?”

You watch it, on her face, you watch it bloom.