It is amazing what you can forget. But it also amazing what you can remember.

Home from the hospital, I drank a glass of warm milk, changed into my pajamas, got under the covers, and slept. I woke around midnight when Jin called. He'd been moved to a room with a phone.

"Where did you go?" he said. For a second, hearing his voice, having him get to the point, I felt my heart leap. How could Jin not be Jin? I must have mistaken. "You didn't say goodbye."

I squeezed the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger, hoping it would keep me from crying.

"Suzy? You there?"

"There were so many people," I said. "The room felt crowded. I couldn't believe what I'd just seen."

That was when Jin told me about the shift change, how the monitor in the nurses' station had accidentally gotten turned off. "The nurses said you were the one who called them in. If you hadn't been there, I would probably be brain-dead or something now."

"Really?"

"Yeah." Jin snorted. "You saved my life."

Later, I'd go back and take in the momentousness of that, but just then I was focused on a different train of thought.

"Have you remembered anything yet? From before you went to sleep?" He said nothing. "Lying on the bed with me?" I prompted.

"You mean at my house? Last fall?"

A cold bubble of disappointment rose into my throat.

"Do you remember your dream yet?" I asked instead.

"No," Jin said.

"Iraq?" I pushed him. "The alley? The flat-roofed buildings?"

"Why would I dream about Iraq? Why does this matter, what I dreamed?" I couldn't see him, but I could almost feel him shudder, and it was the shudder that I clung to - my last hope. Maybe there were still traces of the paths his other self had taken? Like Dr. Kat had said, the memories are always there, you just lose your ability to reach them. Maybe after a night's sleep . . .

"You must be tired," I said.

"I just want to get out of this hospital. I don't understand why they won't let me go home."

"They will," I reassured him.

And I guess backing off the questions gave him the space to talk, because after a minute of my telling him about everyone at school calling him Head Fake and other stuff he'd forgotten, he said out of nowhere. "It's terrifying, you know? Waking up to find out you've been sick but you can't remember? And everyone thinks you're crazy."

"You're not crazy."

He was quiet for a moment, and during the pause a nurse came in. I heard him answer her question about headaches and dizziness. When she was gone, he said quietly, almost like he was talking to himself, "Before I woke up, it was black all around. I felt trapped. Kind of like the time I feel through the ice when I was little."

"Omo," I said. And suddenly, I just wanted to leave Jin alone. I didn't want to take him back to the scariest memory of his life, of being trapped in freezing water, the surface he was trying to pull himself onto breaking under his weight like a cracker, the skates that were supposed to be the best thing that ever happened to him pulling him down, and no one he could call for help. I knew now how it had felt for him to die.

"Jin," I said. "Oh, Jin." I was crying now.

"It's okay, Suzy," he said. "I'm here."

But he wasn't. As much as I wanted to believe him, I knew he didn't understand.