It's daytime, and the footsteps and chatter in the hallway keeps me awake. The haze of the overdose is gone, my mind clear. My iPhone charges on the chair by the wall. Stepping out of the washroom, I see a woman wearing a white coat waiting by the foot of my bed. I reach around my back to tie my gown tighter.

"I'm from the Mental Health Unit," she says, flashing a toothy smile. She holds a clipboard over her chest. I slink into bed, making sure none of my gown opens up in the wrong places.

"Here it comes," I say in a condescending tone.

"I have some questions if you don't mind," her voice dripping with empathy.

"I already have a therapist," I press a button and my bed inclines to an upright position.

"Is your doctor helping your mood?"

"He's great, can't you tell?" I smirk. "I don't need another one of you guys, no offence."

She sighs and thinks. "You're welcome to stay here a few more days. It might be best."

"I'll pass on that," I say.

She writes something on her clip board.

"What are you writing?"

"I want to give you my card," she reaches into her pocket.

"No thank you."

"If you need to talk to anyone, you can call me," she extends her arm to me, offering her card.

"I won't need to," I refuse to take it. "There's nothing to talk about. I know what I need to do." 

Marie holds open the plastic grocery bag open as I dump my dirty clothes inside. I inhale the clean laundry smell of the fresh clothes I'm wearing, that Marie brought me from home, and I'm glad to be checking out of the hospital. I say goodbye to the nurses and walk out of St. Michael's into the busy streets of downtown, Toronto.

I don't feel like going home. It's morning and autumn is alive. The air is cool, the hoodies and sweaters are out, and the university kids are walking around with their backpacks. Marie and I walk south down Yonge Street, the smell of Lake Ontario creeping closer. Reaching the harbor, the lake smell is overpowered by the fragrance of burning charcoal and smoking meats from the vendors at the Spicy Food Festival. We tread down the boardwalk, reaching the end, and then continue down Lakeshore Boulevard to a small grassy park along the arm of a peninsula. Strolling down the paved path, our faces are dampened by the mist from waves smashing against white boulders lining the shore.

"He was so real to me," I say.

"The mind is a powerful thing," says Marie.

"And the emails? How..."

"You... you wrote them sedated on meds."

"But Will's page? The page started way before the meds? I don't remember any of it."

"My psychiatrist thinks the anxiety I suffered from was caused by a repressed memory," says Marie. "He says it's a common thing to forget what your mind doesn't want to remember. He... he thinks I was molested in my childhood. I told him I wasn't, and he just said I was repressing the memory and prescribed more... more pills. The mind is a powerful thing...."

Childhood, Marie tells me. I repeat the words in my head -- childhood -- repressed memories.

Suddenly, I think of my parents. I think of the cottage and the forest, and I recall the dreams that have haunted me since starting the meds. The visions of the dead birch and the portrait of Jesus hit me like the waves on the boulders beside us. There was a quickening in my blood – much like, I would imagine, a rise in temperature when a life-long sailor feels that he is getting closer to the sea.

"What's wrong?" Marie squeezes my hand.

"I've been dreaming about the cottage again."

"The cottage?"

"My father's cottage," I say. Marie studies me intently. I was finally going to tell her about the past. She looked at me with thirsty eyes. "I've never told anyone about that place. Not to my doctor, not to anyone. I've never even written about it."

"What happened there?" she says.

"I was so young," I say, walking slower. "I remember living with my uncle when I was in elementary school, and never talking for years. My uncle and the doctors thought I turned into a mute. One night when I was eating dinner with my uncle, I said something out loud, like 'thank you' or 'uncle', I forgot which. Then he asked me what happened at the cottage. I remember telling him that I didn't remember anything. And it was true. I remembered some of the details, like the way a journalist takes account of what happened. But what I experienced -- what I felt -- only comes back to me in snapshots, like a bunch of photographs messed up in my brain -- in no particular order." I look into the lake and my mind trails away.

"Where's the cottage?" Marie interrupts.

"Near Sudbury. My uncle owns it, now. They tried to sell it after what happened, but no one would buy it. Not after what happened there."

"Hey," Marie pulls my arm. "Look at me."

I look at her.

"We have to go there," she says.

"Where?" I say, knowing the answer but asking anyway.

"To the cottage," she says.

I look out into the lake, and I think about it. "I don't..."

"We're going," she stops walking and I'm facing her now, and I know that there is no way out of it. She will not let this one go.

"We're going there. And then whatever happened there, we're going... to leave it there. We're going to leave it there for good."

My apartment seems smaller now – suffocating me. I open all the windows and the cold air trudges in. Marie and I are both wearing sweaters. On Craigslist, I search for a used car and find a champagne colored '99 Civic for $1200.

"What's the seller's number?" Marie sits beside me, poised on her cell phone. I tell her the number and she dials it. Someone answers the phone on the other end. Marie is speaking to him politely, and I hear his voice like a distant murmur I can't decipher. .

"We can be... be there around six...uh huh...okay, cool, what's your address?" Marie points at me and makes a motion like she's writing in the air with an invisible pen. I grab a nearby pen and magazine. She tells me the address and I write it down on a single line across the top of a page in the magazine. "Okay, see... see you at six. Bye."

Opening Google maps, I enter the address of the seller and nod my head to Marie. "I know where this is. It's not too far from here."

Marie looks at the map on my screen. "Show me where your cottage is."

"I don't remember it anymore. Give me your phone. Do you mind if I call long distance?"

"Where?"

"Ottawa. My uncle."

Looking at the dial pad on Marie's iPhone screen, I'm surprised to see my fingers unconsciously tapping in my uncle's phone number from memory, like a pianist's fingers playing an old melody. My uncle answers the phone and is shocked to hear from me. For over half an hour he talks about his new wife, his new love of gardening, and how he is sorry for not visiting the cottage this year and how dirty it must be. My uncle had been maintaining the cottage as much as he could throughout the decades. He tells me there were some consecutive years when he was not able to make the trek at all. He even thought about trying to sell it again, but I tell him not to. I tell him I will handle everything from now on.

I ask my uncle how I was growing up, and he tells me how I never talked. And suddenly, I feel guilty for not trying to get to know him, or be closer to him. He was Dad's younger brother, and raised me until I was old enough to live on my own. I was eighteen years old working in his shipping company's warehouse, and then eventually as a writer, living alone, where I would be lost to my uncle, the world, and even myself.

Marie listens to me talk to my uncle, and I let her. She tries to understand as much as she can from hearing only one end of the conversation. Watching her watch me, even after an hour passes, fills me with a feeling of security.

I finally ask him for the address. Pulling the laptop closer to me, I type in the address in Google Maps and press enter. A red pin pops up on the screen. The map shows a yellow road cutting throw a green area and ending at a blue lake.

Wishing my uncle goodbye, I bring Marie closer to me. She climbs behind me on the sofa, cradles me with her legs, and rests her chin on my shoulder. We look at the screen together, and I zoom out of the map. I zoom out and out until it shows all of southern Ontario. 

I put my finger on the red pin at the top of the map. "There it is," I say.