Chapter 28: Coming Clean

“I see you are still hurting over this,” Janna said. My psychotherapist. We’d been meeting for six months. Lily was due in three weeks. I had to get to the point. “You are making progress with your relationship counselor. Sometimes I think you are simply repeating yourself with me. Why?”

This was it. I was shaking. I knew I had to go through with it or I could never look my mates in the eye again. Or my daughter. Or our son. I would never again know that intense feeling of love when the three of us were together.

“What are the conditions under which a person can be institutionalized?” I whispered. That was what I was truly afraid of. I would tell her and they would lock me away. I would never see my daughter or my lovers again. I would forever be locked inside my own mind trying to figure out which life I’d lived. Janna chuckled.

“Do you think we are locked in the nineteenth century? I don’t know how these myths persist. There are two circumstances under which a person can be institutionalized, as you put it. The first is voluntary. Oh, there might be interventions and confrontations that lead to it, but most people who self-commit are suffering from drug addiction, alcoholism, or some other form of mental health issue that they realize has gotten beyond their control. They need help, recognize it, and ask for it. Those are usually for a finite term, as well, which could be renewed, say after a specific treatment program has been completed but more help is needed. Second, is court-ordered. In other words, I could not listen to you and simply say ‘this person is crazy’ and commit you to a mental health hospital. I would have to go to court and convince a judge that you were a clear danger to yourself or others, that you could not function in normal daily life, and that you needed long term professional care. I would have to call witnesses and then another health professional, not a therapist, but a psychiatrist with a medical doctorate would have to confirm my diagnosis and recommendation. The same is true if a close friend or family member decided you needed to be institutionalized. I can tell you right now that no matter what your head is telling you, I’ve been meeting with you for six months and have seen no sign that you are a danger to either yourself or others or that you can’t take care of yourself.”

“Thank you.” She just sat there waiting. And waiting. “I woke up the morning after my senior prom knowing that I’d been drugged and raped the night before and that I was pregnant. There was no question about it. I knew. I knew because I had already lived my life for the next twenty-five years and remembered all of it.”

“Dreams can be a powerful thing,” Janna said. “It is certainly possible that you retained memories of what happened and projected your life ahead of you.”

“It wasn’t a dream. I’d lived through twenty-five years, raised my daughter, and divorced my husband. I got in my little Prius and drove from Fargo, North Dakota to the Southern California Coast and, later that night, in another drug induced stupor, I had a heart attack and died. I didn’t see bits and pieces of my life when I woke up. I remembered all of it. I remembered my daughter’s birth, my forced marriage to her father, the day he confessed he’d been cheating on me, taking my real estate license exam ... everything. I can close my eyes and feel my daughter’s arms around me when she hugged me goodbye the day I left. It’s driving me crazy.”

Janna just sat there, a puzzled look on her face.

“What’s a Prius?”

“Oh. You know. It’s a hybrid car from Toyota. They started making them back about ... uh ... next year,” I stumbled.

“So you are saying that you know everything that is happening in your life? You’ve lived this all before?”

“No. When I woke up seventeen again, I swore I wouldn’t make the same mistakes. Not this time. I didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant. I got past my eighteenth birthday, graduated from high school, and ran away.”

“That’s good then, right? You saw a life that you could have had and chose to make better decisions.”

“It sounds so simple. But it’s all different,” I said. She nodded.

“Let’s assume that everything you have said is real,” she started. Assume? It was real! “For my sake. I can see that you already know it’s all real, so something else is troubling you. Whether it was another life or an extremely vivid dream doesn’t make a difference. Your brain recorded an entire lifetime and you are making decisions based on what you experienced. Do you know things in advance? Can you predict the future? More things like the Toyota Prius?”

“Some things. A lot of things happen or are just about to happen and I think, ‘I knew that!’ Like I know that the stock market is going to start a slide around the first of 2000 and banks will be overextended on bad mortgages. Some of them will be bailed out and some will be consolidated into other bigger banks. Most of that will happen after 2001 and in the wake of the Enron collapse. It’s not like I’m a walking encyclopedia, though. I don’t remember the exact date that the executives of that company were discovered to have stripped its entire value and stolen its employees’ retirement funds.”

“That’s a pretty heavy accusation.”

“You don’t believe it. Nobody would. Nobody would believe that we are going to have a president elected in 2000 based on contested ballots in Florida. And that a year later he’d commit us to a massive war in the Middle East that would still have troops tied up and in danger for more than fifteen years.” I simply couldn’t bring myself to say that the Twin Towers in New York would be attacked with airplanes. It was even hard for me to believe now.

“Okay. I’ll make notes of a few things that you’ve said you remember. I think that you should also write down as much as you remember—your predictions of the future. Enron. Who is going to become the next president. The names of some of the banks that will be involved in collapse and acquisition. Anything you can tie specific names to and, if possible, dates. By being proactive in this, you will erase some of your sense of déjà vu and will establish a firm standard by which to judge how accurately you remember. But I want you to keep this in mind: By making a different set of choices the day you woke up after the prom, you changed things. I have no idea how completely. Did you just change your own circumstances? Or did the change ripple through the world like the legendary butterfly effect? If the latter, things are easy. You just have to keep living and making good decisions in a world that is better for your experience, but is no longer dependent on it. If the former, you have to keep living and making good decisions in your life, knowing that you are no longer dependent on what happened before.”