“Now, the emotions and sensations of an event are stored almost exactly as they were experienced. Strangely, the same chemicals that imprint them on the amygdala can actually impede the formation of memory in the hippocampus. You might have no conscious recollection of what happened, but that won’t stop it from messing with your brain. When those stored connections are triggered, you revert to the childlike mentality in which you first experienced them. That’s essentially what a panic attack is—the full experience of fear without the tools to reason through it.

“EMDR allows you to access those connections while you’re awake. The eye movement triggers the amygdala, while the questions trigger the memory. It allows your adult self to have a conversation, of sorts, with your child self. You explain things to your child self so that the unhealthy thought pattern, or cause-effect association, can be corrected.”

“But why that memory? I mean, nothing happened. I took a walk.”

“The separation of an infant from a parent can be traumatizing, in and of itself, even if you continue receiving the appropriate love and care from a new relationship. During infancy, all we know are our biological mothers. They’re our entire world, our whole sense of stability.”

Alice’s gaze makes me feel like I’m being X-rayed. I sometimes think the whole world knows my history, and I’m the only one who can’t see it.

I sometimes think they all know, and all I’ll ever get is what Mom told me, a logistical play-by-play of how the adoption went: She and Dad tried to get pregnant for a long time. Once, they thought they had. She miscarried; they were heartbroken.

Down in Alabama, on a reservation, an eighteen-year-old girl found out she was pregnant. Before anyone noticed her growing baby bump, she ran away, up to Kentucky, where her boyfriend’s family lived.

Meanwhile, Mom and Dad got a call from a friend of a friend, who’d gotten a call from a friend of a friend, whose nephew’s girlfriend was having a baby.

That baby was me.

Did they want her, the friend of a friend wanted to know.

They needed time to think about it, Mom said.

They had ten days and not one more, the friend of a friend said. The mother-to-be, my ishki, didn’t want her baby to grow up on the reservation. She’d never been happy there, had very little money, no real hope for a career, and an abusive father she didn’t want anywhere near her baby, near me. But she needed to find me a family soon, or she would have to take me back to the reservation with her.

Mom and Dad always say they were never terrified to take me; they were terrified to lose me—they thought that logic showed my ishki wasn’t sure, that she was ready to change her mind.

When Mom and Dad spoke to their lawyer, he brought up the Indian Child Welfare Act, a protective measure put into place in the 1970s, in response to the nearly one-third of all Native children who were being forcibly removed from their homes and put into non-Native boarding schools and foster homes. To protect babies like me and parents like my biological ones from being coerced into adopting to non-Native families, the act added a few extra hoops to the adoption process, one being that I couldn’t be adopted within the first ten days of my life.

Ten days during which my birth mother looked at me, rocked me, maybe even whispered or sang to me, and held fast to her decision to give me away. I wonder if in that time she ever stopped to think that people could be unhappy, lonely, weary anywhere; that in a town like Union, there would still be parents who hit their kids and kids who stared up at the night sky, whispering that they’d like a better life, a gentler place. Did she ever, in those ten days, want to be the one to soften the world for me?

Mom and Dad’s lawyer was unconcerned by the rest of the ICWA’s stipulations—Alabama was apparently notoriously unfriendly toward the act, and my biological mother’s extended trip to Kentucky was just one more way to ensure Alabama’s courts saw me as not Indian enough to fall into the category of all Indian children, to which ICWA was supposed to apply.

I knew she could never regret me, but Mom always told me that last part with guilt in her eyes, like she was pretty sure she’d done something wrong by adopting me, by playing into a system that made exceptions for people like her and Dad.

If at any point in the first two years my birth mother had changed her mind about the adoption and could prove she’d been under duress when she’d decided to give me up, legally the state was supposed to rescind the adoption. After Ishki’s neighborhood walk with me, Mom was terrified Ishki was going to try to regain custody, though of course by then the two years were up.

And it’s not like I wanted to leave my family—I never did. But sometimes, after that walk, I used to lie awake and cry, because it hurt so bad that Mom had thought my birth mother wanted me back, and it hurt so bad when it turned out she didn’t.

Even if I wouldn’t have wanted to go with her. She should have wanted me to.

Funny thing about belonging to two worlds: Sometimes you feel like you belong in zero.

“An EMDR therapist might say these manifestations are a coping mechanism,” Alice says, pulling me back to the office. “You needed a continuation of your original world—a time when there was stability with your biological mother—so your mind created one. When you’re under duress and returning to a precognitive state, Grandmother resurfaces. An EMDR therapist might think your dream states are triggering suppressed memories, which were in turn triggering a PTSD response. A hallucination.”

“Well, what would you say is happening?”

She grins. “I’d say it’s pretty hard to prove whether something’s real or a hallucination.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, all of my subjects have post-traumatic stress disorder, but not all PTSD patients have seen the orb. I mean, your PTSD may be real, but that doesn’t mean Grandmother isn’t. I mean, maybe the EMDR banished her because the trauma really is at the root of your ability to see her—perhaps it stimulates your dream life so thoroughly that it causes you to tap into something else entirely. And the fact that you’re having the visions again indicates there’s something else—a remnant of the anxiety attached to the memory or some forgotten bit of it, another negative self-belief you haven’t dealt with, or even another cataclysmic event you haven’t processed—allowing a tenuous connection to continue.”