Cold Cold Heart by Tami Hoag Read Free Book Online

book last night? She wondered as she sat up and propped herself against the headboard. Had she slept a few hours or a few weeks? Was it a bad dream that chased her from her sleep, or a memory forever shrouded in a black shadow?
    The questions and all the possible answers brought a flood of emotions. Fear, panic, grief, and anger came all at once, like a rushing wave inside her head.
    That was in fact what the doctors called it: flooding. A tsunami of emotions that crashed through the injured brain, short-circuiting logic and the careful strategies the brain-injured person worked on every day in the attempt to put her life back on some kind of simple track.
    Dana knew she had to stem the tide. She grabbed her four-by-six note cards off the nightstand and fumbled through them for the right one. As she found it, she called to mind Dr. Dewar’s soothing voice:
Breathe slowly, in through the nose and out through the mouth.
Concentrate on the mechanics of filling your lungs. Hold the breath for two beats, then exhale slowly. Four beats in, four beats out.
Work to find the connection between the mind and the body. Feel the energy in your toes, slowly moving up your legs. Move your fingers. Feel the energy slowly move up through your arms . . .
    If she could stay focused on the exercise, she could keep at bay the flood and all the debris that came with it. Sometimes she succeeded in this. Sometimes she didn’t. Sometimes the flood crashed over her, and she panicked and froze, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t move. This time the flood receded slowly, leaving her feeling weak from the effort of fighting it.
    She had been told time and again during her stay here that the key to success in dealing with her issues was all a matter of routine. If she could consistently repeat the routines of each day, the thoughts and actions would become automatic and she wouldn’t feel so fatigued from having to remember every detail of every task.
    She looked at the digital clock on the nightstand: 3:17 A.M. Shuffling through her note cards, she found the one she wanted, and she read through the same list of questions she asked herself every morning to establish her routine.
    Where am I?
    In my room.
    Where is my room?
    The Weidman Recovery Center.
    Where is the Weidman Center?
    Indianapolis.
    Why am I here?
    Because I have a traumatic brain injury.
    Who am I?
    Dana Nolan.
    Who is Dana Nolan?
    The last question wasn’t on the card, but she asked it anyway. She wished she could answer with something other than the adjectives other people had given to her—sweet, bubbly, friendly, kind, helpful, sunny, always smiling, always laughing, perky, pretty.
    Those words might have applied to her former self—“Before” Dana—but she felt none of them applied to her present self—“After” Dana. Her memories of the Dana Nolan other people described seemed like clips from a movie passing through her mind. In them, Dana Nolan was a character played by an actress, and Dana herself was just an observer watching the show, wondering if that actress was anything like what the tabloids wrote about her.
    There was a strange disconnection between the person in the memories and the person she was now that was impossible to explain to anyone who hadn’t experienced it. She couldn’t describe it to the friends and family of that former self, the people who had come to visit during her months here at the center—some of whom she didn’t remember from her past life at all. She could remember them now because she had their photographs in her iPhone along with a description of who they were and how she had known them, the last time she had seen them, key subjects they had spoken about.
    They seemed hurt by her lack of ability to recognize them, as if she had a choice in the matter, as if she was deliberately snubbing them just to be a bitch.
    Several of the people she had known and