Jacob

Einstein explained relativity with the metaphor, "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity."

Waiting for her to wake up, time took on an elasticity that I had seldom thought it possible for a non-plastic substance to obtain. It slowed. It stopped. At times, it even seemed to go backwards. It seemed caught between exhale and drawing in of breath.

But she finally opened her eyes.

She's been awake for a little over a day now. It has been exactly 26 hours and 19 minutes since she woke up and spoke a coherent sentence. Her first lucid communication was to ask for a bowl of Cocoa Puffs.

She spent the next hours adjusting the bed, rearranging the multiple tubes and leads, taking inventory of the room, flipping through channels and falling asleep. The doctor was in several times to check up on her but every time, it seemed, she was asleep.

When her old supervisor came by for a visit and she greeted him by name, I let out a breath I did not realize I'd been holding since the moment she hit the floor in the Merlette's lab.

She was back.

Rachel was back.

I closed my eyes for the first time in relief.

I woke up when her visitor nudged me. He waved me out into the hallway. A nurse was tending to Rachel and she was occupied answering questions. I found her visitor about 20 feet down the hallway.

"You must be Dr. Hood." He held out a tanned hand and I shook it.

"Yes, I am. And you are?"

"Michael Arthur Gavrillis – Mack for short. I used to be Rachel's supervisor a couple years ago. She's one of the best." He hesitated for a moment. "Dr. Hood, let me cut to the chase here. Did she get her brains scrambled in whatever accident put her in here?"

"She might have hit her head the floor when she passed out but there is no evidence of a concussion. Why do you ask?"

"Well, she asked me about Agent Baldwin. She wanted to know if he was okay."

He looked at me expectantly for a few seconds.

"I'm sorry, I don't know Agent Baldwin. Is he someone that she works with?"

"He was her partner for an assignment my team worked in Kabul."

"Task Force Eagle?"

"She told you about it?"

I nodded. "I'm sorry, is it strange that she'd ask about a fellow agent?"

"It's strange because she was concerned that Agent Baldwin was wounded in the action in which she was injured."

"There was definitely no Agent Baldwin there. It was just Rachel and Felix – Agent Lee – and me. We were searching a laboratory facility when Rachel was exposed to a chemical that made her lose consciousness. I am not sure even an agent of the bureau would call that 'action'."

"No matter what the tactical description, Dr. Hood, Agent Baldwin couldn't have been there. Agent Calvin Baldwin was killed in the line of duty in September 2007. Rachel attended his funeral."

I could feel my focus narrowing down to a single point. Concentrate, Jacob, work the problem. The data began to assemble itself in my mind. Orientation is times three – person, place and time.

"She thinks he's still alive?"

"She asked if he was hurt and if that was why she hadn't had a visit from him yet."

"What did you tell her?"

"I changed the subject, told her I had to go."

"Did she say anything else that seemed strange or out of place to you?"

"She asked about news on her application to the Terrorism Task Force. And she told me that she would be back to work in no time, that I shouldn't give away her spot on the team."

"When did she leave your team?"

"July 2007."

"And when did she have an application to the Terrorism Task Force?"

"She submitted the application in November 2006. It was still in the queue when she left my team."

"She still thinks she's on your team." I wasn't speaking to him but he seemed to take this as a prompt.

"So it would seem. I know you're not a medical doctor but I assume you'd agree something isn't right with her."

"Thank you, Agent Gavrillis. I will let her doctors know right away."

We shook hands again and he walked away. I turned to the nurse's station and asked the nurse to call the doctor. She looked a bit dubious until I explained Rachel's orientation problem. She picked up the phone and dialed.

I am no good at waiting.

I hovered just outside Rachel's door, trying hard to hear Dr. Bellmer as she ran through the mental orientation status checklist with Rachel. I kept one ear to the conversation she was having with Rachel at the same time I texted Felix to run a search on Dr. Bellmer's credentials. Within 3 minutes, Felix rounded the corner and came towards me with his usual enthusiastic pace.

"Remind me if I ever get my brain messed up to have this lady on my team. Dr. Emilynn Bellmer is double board certified in neuro-psychology and neurology. She is considered one of the top 3 specialists on memory loss in the country. She's got over 150 articles published and is author of the textbook they use to train doctors. She's got the same status with the FBI as you do, Dr. Hood, but a higher security clearance level."

"Let's hope she can tell us what is going on."

Felix looked around for somewhere to sit. There was nowhere so he hovered alongside me outside Rachel's room for a few minutes to wait for Dr. Bellmer.

I tried not to pounce on the doctor as she left Rachel's room after a very long 46 minutes. She seemed unsurprised by my hovering.

"I'm Dr. Bellmer. Special Agent Young is on your team?"

"Nice to meet you, Dr. Bellmer. This is Agent Felix Lee. I am not an agent with the bureau. I am a science advisor. Dr. Jacob Hood. Special Agent Young is my handler. What did you find out?"

"I've heard of you, Dr. Hood. You've been on some very interesting cases. Please come with me while I look at some test results." She rifled through a series of films at the desk and then headed into a room with a lighted table for viewing films. She put down a series of x-rays and stared at them for a few minutes before she pulled up a series of images on the computer whose screen was the desktop. Felix's eyes lit up.

"Is that one of those surface interfaces?"

Dr. Bellmer regarded Felix with a warm smile and went right back to sorting through images of Rachel's head and neck.

"The good news is that Special Agent Young has absolutely no evidence of trauma to the head or neck. You can see here," she gestured over the collection of scans and images, "there are no shadows, no lesions, no swelling, nothing. The bad news is that despite all the good news, Agent Young is temporally disoriented."

I translated for Felix without thinking about it. "She's not oriented to time correctly."

"No, she is not. She believes it is April 2007 and she is assigned to a team lead by an agent named Gavrillis who is her supervisor. She does not remember anything after April 2007. She does not remember anything at all about the circumstances of her injury but thinks she was injured in Kabul and flown stateside for treatment. She does, however, have memory of events since she woke up yesterday and her ability to form new memories is completely intact. She can recall in detail incidents from before the blacked out time window. In short, her recall seems unimpaired except for the chunk of time that she cannot recall. She's lost memory of approximately 3 years and 7 months."

"Retrograde amnesia?"

"Almost classic retrograde declarative amnesia. The only thing not classic is the lack of an obvious cause. Dr. Hood, has the FBI done chemical analysis of the substance to which she was exposed?"

"The lab is still working on it. We should have results in about 12 hours."

"I will be very interested to see the results. In the meantime, I think it necessary to get her oriented to current time. It's going to be traumatic for her. Are you close?"

I looked at her and could not quite parse the question. Felix jumped right in.

"Heck yes, they're close. They've been working together for more than a year and saved each other's lives a bunch of times. They're buds, right Dr. Hood?"

"Buds. Exactly."

Dr. Bellmer smiled. "In my experience, it helps for the person with the affected memory to be reoriented to details of the missing time by someone they already have a reason to trust. Even if she doesn't remember you, she may have a sense that you are trustworthy and therefore telling her the truth."

"Of course. How exactly does one reorient an amnesia victim to time they've lost?"

"There is no standard method. If she's like every other FBI agent I've treated, she'll pull the information out of you. You'll be lucky to keep up."

Dr. Bellmer's pager sounded. She pulled it off her belt, scanned the small screen and looked back at me.

"Trust your instincts, Dr. Hood. She may not recognize you but she knows you. Call me as soon as the chemical analysis is complete. I am going to inform Special Agent Young right now. Give me about 15 minutes."

And with that, she was gone.

Felix dragged me to the cafeteria for a sandwich. He asked didn't poke and hover as usual and vaguely, I wondered why.

I made my way back to Rachel's room with a slideshow running through my head of events that might be memorable enough that she'd recall them – when she'd discovered me with shrapnel in my ass after my car was bombed, when she was shot with a crossbow, when she was quarantined for smallpox. She'd been through a lot since being assigned to me. And now this. She was missing a significant chunk of time.

I came through the door and found her regarding me with the same piercing gaze she turned on everyone new we encountered when she was protecting me. And my mind went blank.