jennifer svendsen

Rebekah Lark awakens in an unfamiliar brownstone in New York City. When a man enters the room, calls her “Caroline,” and serenades her, she is afraid. He acts as though he knows her well, but the last thing Rebekah remembers is lying on an outdoor swing in her backyard in Colorado in early autumn. Now, as evidenced by the heavy falling snow, it is winter. It isn’t until she goes to the bathroom and sees herself in a mirror that she realizes she is living inside another woman.

She presumes this current transmigration is temporary and related to altered states she had experienced as a result of pain related to a brain injury. So, Rebekah plays along, humoring Caroline’s six-year-old son, Joel, as well as Leo, the man who thinks she is his wife. Her new family assumes that she, Caroline, is suffering either from transient global amnesia or anterograde amnesia, temporary states of memory loss caused by encephalitis and the brief resulting coma. Rebekah visits Dr. Pinkerton, and the following day undergoes an MRI, which naturally shows no brain damage that might account for Caroline’s supposed memory loss. Rebekah’s effort to explain her situation to Leo falls on deaf ears. The medical community’s sway is powerful, and they convince Leo that his wife is delusional. But, she is the puzzle doctors will never piece. Later the same day, Rebekah calls home and converses with her daughter, Alex, and husband, Connor, under the pretense that she is Rebekah’s childhood friend.

Rebekah’s eventual surreptitious trip to visit her original family in Colorado ensues in a tug-of-war between the two families. While she is falling in love with her new husband, Leo, in New York, she feels her heart strings pulled by her daughter, Alex, in Colorado who is the only one who believes Rebekah’s story and knows her true identity.

Despite the initial awkward adjustment to Caroline’s more voluptuous body, Rebekah is growing more comfortable as time goes by, as if the body were her own. She can no longer hold Caroline’s memories at bay; they come readily to the fore, mingling with her own, possibly supplanting some memories: she forgets what it was like to hold Alex as a baby. The heart has the power to charge memories with meaning. Rebekah loves the people and places that Caroline loves, and while she still longs to be a part of Alex’s life, she has little power to change her kismet.

After a frightening return to drinking to self-medicate, Leo eventually comes to terms with the loss of his wife and mourns her. He joins AA and makes an overture towards Rebekah. She thinks about leaving to get to know who she really is, since she spent so much time convincing everyone around her who she was. But her love for this new family, as well as the baby growing inside of her inspire her to stay – for now.