POINT OF VIEW
J. D. CRAYNE

There are some patients you can't help.  Every doctor finds one eventually and when you do, the feeling of defeat and helplessness never quite goes away.
It is that way with Jennifer.
She came to me in the spring, referred by a male colleague at Trinity Psychiatric Center who suggested that she might make better progress with a female analyst.  Some patients just feel more comfortable with a male or female doctor and since analysis is difficult at the best of times we do what we can to accommodate them.
Jennifer was an angular blonde woman of 28, with the stark beauty of a fashion model and restless hands that always seemed to be knotting themselves together or plucking at something; the chair, sofa, or their owner's clothing.  Her case history mentioned insomnia - a fairly common complaint these days - and nightmares when she did manage to sleep.  Her family history indicated a fairly normal background: Parents and two siblings still living, no children, a brief marriage followed by divorce, employment as a middle-manager at a large public relations firm.
We didn't make much progress during the first months but she was forthcoming enough about the dreams, lying on my couch with her eyes closed, frowning at the memory.
"They're awful; real nightmares.  I dream there are people chasing me.  Sometimes I'm back home, as a kid, with Mom or Dad screaming at me and chasing me with a knife or a club.  Sometimes it's my brother John.  I'm running through a dark house and he's after me.  I know he's going to catch me and something dreadful will happen when he does.  I try to scream.  I try and try and try, but no sound comes out."
"What do you think those dreams mean?"
She grimaced.  "That's what Dr. Michaels kept asking.  I thought it was your job to tell me what they mean."
"An analyst can only tell you so much about your own dreams," I said, smiling at her.  "Dreams are made up of a private language created by you and your subconscious, and everybody's language is different.  It's not like Aunt Lydia's Dream Book, where you look up "carrot" and the cross reference says 'Expect a new love interest.'"
"I used to have a copy of a dream book.  At least, I think I did."  She frowned.  "That's part of the problem, aside from the dreams.  Sometimes I'm not sure what's real and what isn't.  Well, not now, I mean, but things that happened a long time ago, when I was a child."
"How old a child?"
"Twelve or thirteen, I guess.  It's all confused.  I'm sure I remember something, and then someone else contradicts me and all the facts seem to be on their side."
"What sort of things?"
"Oh, just things that happened."
I didn't press it.  I had feeling she was on the verge of a breakthrough, and that's a touchy point with any patient.  A wrong word or pushing a little too hard can ruin the whole thing.  I tried another approach.
"You dream about your parents and your brother.  What about your sister?  Do you get along with her?"
"Yes, I guess so, now that we're grown up."  She shifted a little on the couch and her restless hands plucked at her skirt.  "She used to slap me around when I was a kid, mostly for getting into her things.  She was out a lot.  She used to sneak out of the house to see some boy, and I remember her stealing lipsticks from the corner store.  When she was fourteen Dad found out she'd been sleeping with some twenty-year-old gang member and was pregnant.  He beat her so bad the neighbors called the police, and she lost the baby.  Of course, I wasn't any prize myself.  I was always cutting school to go to the movies.  I failed most of my classes and had to be put back a grade."
"What is your sister doing now?"
"She's married to a nice man and has two children."  She moved her head back and forth on the pillow.  "That's another of those things.  I said something about that to her a few months ago - the lipsticks, I mean - and she looked at me like I was crazy.  She said it never happened."
"That's not unusual," I assured her.  "A lot of people have episodes in their background that they'd just as soon forget.  She may be afraid you'll mention it to her husband."
"I suppose so."  She was silent for a long time, and I waited for her to go on.  "I wouldn't tell him.  I've never told anyone about it.  It was too awful to remember.  And sometimes ... sometimes not being able to talk about it is even worse."
She sort of sobbed, and then the tears began to roll down her cheeks.  She started talking, whispering actually, in a harsh breathless tone, and everything rushed out like a torrent of dirty water racing down a dry ravine.
It was a sordid and painful story: A drunken father who molested her from the time she was about seven, rape by her elder brother when she was thirteen, and an abusive, uncaring, mother who apparently did little more than drink herself silly and slap her kids around.
She sobbed her way through the details; I think with sheer relief at finally being able to tell someone about it.  I waited until the sobbing changed to sniffles, helped her dry her eyes, and let her rest for a few moments.
After a while I asked, "When did your father stop molesting you?"
"When I was fourteen."
"Did you finally tell him to stop, or report him to the authorities, or what?"
"I never said anything to him or anyone.  I was too scared.  He used to hit me, you know, when he wasn't doing the other things.  I had to go to the hospital about then, because I'd been chilled in the snow.  After I came home, he never touched me again.  Oh, he'd try to give me a hug or something, but I always pulled away and he never pressed it.  He stopped drinking about then too, so maybe that had something to do with it."
She wiped her nose, sat up, and pulled a makeup bag out of her purse to repair her face.  "He'd lost his job, you see, and we were evicted from the apartment, which wasn't much to begin with.  It was in the slums, down the street from a couple of bars and a strip joint.  He found another job as some kind of maintenance man at a camp up in the hills and we had to move into a horrible little two-room cabin, miles from anywhere.  One afternoon I just couldn't stand it anymore; the screaming and the drunken rows, and the smell of rancid grease from the kitchen...  I just walked off into the snow."
She fished a comb out of her purse and straightened out her hair as she went on.  "Things were a lot different when I got out of the hospital.  Dad must have gotten another job in town, because we went back to a really nice apartment.  It had new furniture, and carpets and drapes.  I had a whole closet of clothes for the first time in my life."  She smiled wryly.  "They even had me take piano lessons.  I never asked where the money came from.  I sort of assumed it was something illegal and I didn't want to know."
"What sort of job does your father have now?"
"He owns his own construction business.  I guess he's done pretty well."
After Jennifer left the office I leafed back through Dr. Michaels' records on her.  I was working on a paper, "Primary Interactions Within the Dysfunctional Family Unit," for one of the professional journals and it occurred to me that her case would make a good family history.  Dr. Michaels had collected the names and addresses of her family members, so I had my receptionist make appointments for me to visit them.
* * *
Jennifer's parents - Brian and Cecilia Eidercot - had a large, well-landscaped home in one of the more expensive city suburbs.  Brian Eidercot answered the door and when I introduced myself he led me into a pleasant room with a fireplace and two big bay windows that looked out on a wooded backyard with a large ornamental pond.
"Have a seat, Dr. Franklyn," he said, waving at a comfortable armchair and sitting down on the couch beside his wife.
They looked like an average middle-aged couple.  He was a little portly and going bald, dressed in a turtle-neck sweater and gray slacks.  She was a frankly-plump gray-haired woman with a pleasantly bland face that had probably been pretty once upon a time.
"Now then, Dr. Franklyn," he said, bending forward and resting his elbows on his thighs, "suppose you explain what this is all about.  You said on the phone that Jenny has been seeing you?"
"Yes, she's been my patient for about eight months now."  I hesitated, because the next part of the discussion was going to be over pretty rough ground.  "I want you both to understand that my goal in treating your daughter is to help her understand and deal with her problems.  In order to do that I need to build up as complete a picture as I can of her personality and her environment; friends, family, that sort of thing."
They both nodded.
"It's not my job to be judgmental, or to make moral evaluations.  It's simply to build up a picture that will help me to show Jennifer how to deal with her present situation.  I need to explain this because of some of the things Jennifer has told me.  Specifically, she has been telling me about long term abuse when she was a child; both physical and sexual abuse."
There was silence for a long, long moment.  If I ever saw a man who was stunned, it was Brian Eidercot.
Finally his wife said, "But that's impossible."  She sounded more bewildered than anything else.
She and her husband looked at each other.  He took her hand and then gave me a long hard look.  "If you were a man, Dr. Franklyn, I'd been tempted to punch you in the face and throw you out.  But as it is, I'll swear on a stack of anything you want to name that there was never anything like that in our family, ever!  Why would Jenny say that?"  He sounded both hurt and betrayed.
"I don't know," I told him, honestly.  "That's why I'm here: To try and separate fact from fiction.  I don't know if what Jennifer said is true..."
"It isn't'!"
"...but I need to find out what IS true if I stand any chance of helping her.  I'd like you to tell me about her childhood.  What sort of girl was she?"
"She was a wonderful child," Cecelia said, "Sweet, loving, and affectionate.  If we had ordered her especially we couldn't have done better.  Oh, I know.  Everyone's children are the best, but Jenny really was special.  She never got into the little scrapes that Myra and John did, and I never had to scold her about cleaning up her room."  She laughed softly.  "I used to say she was too good to be real!"
"She was a hard-worker too," her father said, "and almost a perfect student.  She loved school and always got good grades.  She took swimming lessons, and was on the drill team for a while, and later on she played soccer.  We started her on piano too, but she didn't care much for it so we let her stop."
"What about illness?  Was she sick much?"
They both shook their heads and Brian Eidercot said, "All the kids were healthy as horses.  Sure, they had the usual childhood stuff - chicken pox, mumps, and an occasional cold - but nothing unusual."
"Accidents?"
Negatives again.
"John broke a leg doing gymnastics when he was in college, but the girls didn't have anything like that," Cecilia said.  "Jenny did get lost in the snow for a few hours once, but she was fine when we got her back."  She laughed softly.  "I was scared to death!  It seems rather trivial now, but at the time ... oh, my!"
"How did it happen?"
"We'd gone up to the mountains one winter weekend, and she wandered off and got lost while Myra and John were playing in the snow.  It really frightened us.  She's our youngest, you know."
"How old was Jennifer then?"
"She'd just turned fourteen," her father said.
"Did she say anything about it, anything that would indicate it really affected her?"
"No, she never said much of anything.  I think she was just relieved to be back.  Probably afraid I'd bawl her out too."  Brian smiled at the memory.
I thanked them both and went back to the office for my afternoon appointments.  The Eidercots seemed perfectly honest and straightforward.  Of course, that could be just a false front with nothing but ruins behind the wall.  And of course Jennifer could be lying her pretty little head off.  Or maybe she'd somehow mentally swapped families in her teens.  The thought made me grin, remembering all the fuss over women cross-nursing each other's kids and causing some kind of identity crisis.  In any event, folklore always said babies were swapped in the cradle, not around puberty.
* * *
A couple of days later I drove across town for a talk with Jennifer's elder sister.  Myra, a trim woman with light brown hair and big blue eyes, lived with her husband and two children in a spacious apartment just a few blocks from a local park.
"Come in and sit down, Dr. Franklyn.  My mother told me about your visit.  I honestly don't understand this at all.  Why would Jen say things like that about Dad?  He would never have done anything like that!  I don't think you realize how much this has hurt him."
"I know it must have been a shock," I said.  "I didn't mention it to your parents, but she also told me that her brother raped her when she was thirteen."
"John?!"  Myra burst out laughing.  "Now I know this is all some sort of crazy joke.  John would never, ever do that.  He simply couldn't!  Jen knows it too, so why would she make up an awful story like that?"
That seemed to be one of life's unanswerable questions for the moment, so I ignored it.
She pointed to two large photo albums that were lying on the coffee table.  "Just look through those.  I got them out after Mom called me.  That's what our childhood was like."
I leafed through the albums slowly.  Page after page of snapshots.  Grinning kids, smiling parents ... Halloween makeup and holiday pageant costumes ... baseball hats, soccer balls, wagons and scooters ... days at the beach and picnics at the park ... a succession of family pets, and the grinning kids getting taller and older.  There was Jennifer with a gap-toothed smile at six, pigtails at eight, and squinting out from under a baseball cap at twelve.  I sighed.  If there was an answer, it wasn't here.
I closed the books on my lap and folded my arms across them.  "What was your own childhood like, as far as you can remember?"
"Picture perfect!"  She grinned.  "You see, Dad is one of those self-made men.  He's a high-school drop out, got into construction, and built up his own business.  He always wanted his kids to have all the 'advantages' he didn't have.  We had music lessons, Little League sports, home computers, pets, the works.  He went to our ball games too, and all the recitals and those awful school plays.  He always made time for us.  We weren't spoiled beyond reason though, and he was never blind to our faults.  If any of us got out of line, he sat us down for a long hard talk."
She grimaced.  "There were times I felt so bad I wished he'd just paddle me like my friends father's did.
"And your mother?"
"Mom was a high school Biology teacher when they got married.  I don't think my grandparents liked the match very much, but they sure couldn't complain about the way Dad treated her, or us."
"Do either of your parents drink?"
"Not what you'd call drinking, no.  Once in a while Dad will drink a can of beer when they have the neighbors over for backyard barbecue, and they usually have wine with dinner.  They don't drink hard liquor though, and I've never seen either of them drunk; not even tipsy."
"Getting back to yourself," I began slowly, "there was something your sister said about shoplifting lipsticks."
"I know.  She was going on about it, and it just never happened!  I admit I did lift a candy bar from the drugstore when I was nine, but Mom marched me right back and made me return it.  I got one of those lectures from Dad too, and I never did anything like that again!"
"She also said you'd had a premarital pregnancy."
Myra stared at me.  "Where on earth did she get that idea?  I can prove that's not true.  When I was going to get married, Mom said it would be a lot more pleasant if I ... well, if I had a doctor take care of the painful part."  She blushed slightly.  "She took me to a GYN, and I'm sure he must have some sort of medical record that will show I was a virgin before he did his little bit of surgery."
Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said.  "Did your sister ever have any really bad shock, either mental or physical?"
"No, not that I remember.  She was upset when John broke his leg." Myra laughed suddenly.  "Poor kid!  She'd gotten some funny idea that the doctor was going to cut it off.  She was only eleven, and Mom had to explain about casts and crutches."
She thought for a moment, lips pursed.  "There was the divorce, of course, but that was pretty amicable.  She and Ted got married right out of college, but they didn't really have much in common and it was over within three years.  I think they still see each other once in a while but marriage just didn't work out."
"How about the time she got lost in the mountains?"
"I'd almost forgotten that.  She was gone most of the afternoon and Mom was pretty frantic, but Dad called Search and Rescue and they found her before dark.  The local hospital kept her overnight for observation, and I think they had to treat her for hypothermia, but she went home with us the next morning.  I guess it did sort of scare her though, because she was kind of withdrawn after that.  She didn't laugh at our silly family jokes, and sometimes I'd see her just sitting and staring at things, like she'd never seen them before.  She starting having some trouble at school too, but she straightened that out after a while.  You know, she was barely fourteen and coping with periods and having breasts and all.  When we grow up we forget how unsettling all that is.  I was sixteen, and I thought she was just being moody."
"Was there anything else unsettling around that time?  Did your family move, for instance, to a different house or apartment?"
"No, we'd moved into the house my parents have now when I was twelve.  I remember that because I had an awful crush on a boy down the street and I was just devastated when we moved away.  Jen would have been ten, I guess.  Dad got her a puppy when we moved.  It was for all of us, but she was the one he followed around all the time."
"What happened to the dog?"  I asked, thinking that a traumatic childhood loss might have something to do with Jennifer's problems.
She looked surprised.  "Why, nothing!  He lived to be almost fifteen years old and finally died of old age.  He was a cute little cocker-poodle mix and we named him Spanky.  He was sort of excitable though, like a lot of small dogs.  I remember when we got back from that trip to the mountains, and picked him up from the neighbor who had been looking after him, the poor little guy was so frantic to see us he bit Jen.  As if she hadn't had a rotten enough time that weekend!"
"Well, thank you Mrs. Reed."  I put the albums back on the coffee table, stood up, and handed her one of my business cards.  "If you think of anything else, I hope you'll call me."
"I will.  I really love Jen, and I hate to see her life turning into such a mess."
* * *
When I got back to the office I phoned the emergency hospital where Jennifer had been taken after her adventure and arranged for the clerk to send me a transcript of her medical records.  That done, I went out to see the last member of Jennifer's family, her brother John.
John Eidercot lived in a lakeside condominium that he shared with a friend.  We sat at a small breakfast table in a nook off of the kitchen, while his friend perched on a stool at the serving bar and sipped at a can of diet soda.
"You don't mind if Nial stays, do you?  He's my Significant Other."
Nial, a husky, snub-nosed fellow with dark brown hair, flashed a broad grin.
"I don't mind at all," I said.  "Have you been together long?"
"Six years," John said.  "The best six years of my life."  He was a wiry blond man, and carried some of Jennifer's beauty in his high cheekbones and the delicate modeling of his narrow temples.  According to Dr. Michaels' records he was a reasonably successful architect.
"Did your parents or sister tell you why I wanted to talk to you?"
He frowned.  "Yeah, some bizarre story about Jen saying Dad molested her.  I don't understand that at all.  It's just not anything I can even imagine.  Dad is, well, just about a perfect father."
"Do you know she also accused you of raping her when she was thirteen?"
John was just as stunned as his father had been.  He stared at me, his jaw slack and his mouth half-open.
"No," he said finally.  "I don't believe it.  Has she gone completely nuts?"
"That's what I'm trying to find out."  I smiled at him reassuringly.  "I'm not here to make any judgments or evaluations.  I'm just trying to piece together what's going on in your sister's mind."
"Well, I'd like to know what's going on in her mind too!  I never did anything like that.  Hell, when she was thirteen I was seventeen and had my eye on our high school quarterback instead of the girl cheerleaders."  He glanced up at Nial with a half smile.
I was trying to fit this new piece of information into the picture I was building of Jennifer and her life.  "Can you think of anything that might have happened to your sister?  A shock, fright, anything like that?"
"Something that might have sent her over the edge, you mean?"
"Anything like that, yes."
"Nope.  She had a perfectly normal childhood, did okay in college, met the man of her dreams - who turned out not to be - and made a career for herself with a good company.  I'd say she's done just fine.  That's why these wild stories of hers just don't make any sense."
"What about the time she was lost in the woods?"
"That was a long time ago.  I haven't thought about it in years.  Nothing really happened."
"Do you remember exactly what did happen?"
"Sure."  He reached out for Nial's can of soda, took a sip, and handed it back.  "Dad thought we ought to go up into the mountains and have some fun in the snow, so he rented a cabin for the weekend.  I think it was the middle of February, but I could be wrong about that.  The cabin was part of a big resort and really nice.  It had two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, forced air heating, and the whole works.  Mom and Dad had one of the bedrooms, the girls had the other, and I had a roll away in the living room.
"We were outside just after lunch, building a snowman, sledding, and having snowball fights; all the things kids do in the snow.  Jen wandered off somehow, and she was missing for about four hours.  We were all scared, and Mom was almost hysterical.  Dad called the ski patrol and they found her just before dark.  We were dressed for playing in the snow, not long-term survival, so she was pretty chilled.  In fact, I think she was almost unconscious when they found her.  They rushed her to the hospital and treated her for hypothermia, but she was released the next morning."
He frowned, blond brows drawn close in thought.  "She was different after that.  I never really thought about it before.  She was quieter; sort of withdrawn.  Jan was always a real imp, laughing and joking around, but after that she was ... oh, I don't know.  Standoffish, irritable sometimes.  Unpredictable."  He shrugged slightly.  "She was about fourteen and I just thought it was because she was growing up, I guess.  Do you think something happened to her while she was lost up there?"
"I don't know.  It's a possibility.  One more thing, were there any problems at home about your lifestyle, arguments or anything that might have upset her?"
"When I came out, you mean?  No, nothing at all.  I think Dad was a little sad about not having grandsons to carry on the family name, but he and Mom are very supportive.  Nial and I go over there every Saturday night for dinner."
I thanked John for his time, and asked him to call me if he thought of anything else.
* * *
Back at the office that afternoon I went through the transcript from the emergency hospital, looking for anything, anything at all, that might account for a child's change of personality after hypothermia treatment.
After I read it through a couple of times I got up to stretch and stood by the window, looking out at the sunset.  It was as if there were two separate, entirely different families.  If Jennifer was telling the truth, then the others must be in an advanced state of denial.  That does happen, of course.  Sometimes people are so determined to preserve their own illusions that they completely bury reality.
But what if all the other members of her family were telling the truth?  What if their memories were the real ones?  Then what made Jennifer invent a past that was so horrible?
She could just be trying to please me, of course.  Some patients tell the stories they think their analysts want to hear.  I'd been careful in our sessions not to give Jennifer any leads like that, but patients can be very inventive if they start to worry about a doctor losing interest.  The only other possibility I could think of was that Jennifer was suffering from some guilt complex of monumental proportions and had built up the stories of abuse to somehow degrade herself.
And yet, her memories all seemed so consistent, so cohesive.  It was hard not to take them at face value.  Can people have completely different, yet perfectly valid memories of the same events?
At the moment, I didn't have an answer.  I kept thinking of the Japanese drama where three characters all have different explanations for the same occurrences.  I thought about points of view and changelings and medical miracles until well after the sun was gone and the stars were out.
The following Tuesday Jennifer came in for her regular session.  She looked tired, like all insomniacs, but her makeup was perfect and aside from those eternally restless hands she seemed well in control of herself.
She was seated across the desk from me, and I explained that I thought I might have some answers for her.
"Do you remember the time you were lost in the mountains, when you were fourteen."
She looked a little puzzled.  "Yes.  I told you about that.  I just couldn't stand that cabin another minute and I went out to be by myself."
She sighed softly and stared out the window at the cityscape.  "It was so pretty out there, so quiet and white.  I remember I saw a deer and I followed it for a while.  When I started to go back, I discovered I didn't know where I was."
"You were missing for about four hours, and when the rescue team found you, you were only semiconscious.  They had to treat you for a severe chill - hypothermia - at a local hospital.  I have the records here." I tapped the folder on the desk in front of me.
"All right.  But what does that have to do with anything?"
"I think it's tied in with your dreams and your memory problems.  How much do you really know about dreams?"
"I have bad ones," she said with a sour smile.
"Well, let me start by explaining a little about memory.  You've probably heard about long term and short term memory.  Those are the two ways your memories are stored, because your mind makes a distinction between things you have to know, and things you just have to remember for a little while.  It's like the difference between remembering where you parked the car, and remembering where you live.  All memories have their own place.  Dreams, on the other hand, don't seem to have any real place in memory at all.  They're in a kind of temporary storage location that goes away soon after you wake up.  If you repeat a dream to yourself right after waking, telling it to yourself like a story, you can make a copy of it in your real memory, but the temporary storage goes away forever."
I went on carefully.  "I've reviewed your medical records, and it looks like some of the drugs they gave you during hypothermia treatment were still in the experimental stage.  I think what happened is that you had a nightmare while you were semiconscious, and one of those drugs caused it to move into your long-term memory, erasing the real memories that were already there.  That's why you remember things that none of the other members of your family can recall.  You remember a totally different childhood.
"You mean, I'm remembering something that wasn't true, it was all a dream?"
"Yes, and a very bad dream.  I believe the nightmares you are having now are because your mind is still trying to adjust to those false memories.  The insomnia you've had is simply because you're afraid to go to sleep and have the same bad dreams again.  Your mind is keeping you awake in self-defense."
"I can't believe that.  Those things that happened to me weren't dreams, I remember them!"
"That's the whole point.  What started out as a nightmare became a real memory.  You remember that dream as real because it moved into your mind and replaced all the memories in long-term storage.  It became reality for you."
She frowned, trying to take it all in.  "If I could really believe that ... you think it's what actually happened?"
"It's the only logical explanation," I said.  "I've been over your school records and they show excellent attendance and very good grades.  There's no mention of absences, or failing any classes.  I've also looked through your family photo albums.  There's nothing in any of the pictures that show slum housing, or neglect."
She knotted those restless hands together and raised them to her face, pressing hard against her mouth and staring at nothing for a while.
"All right, if I accept that, what can I do about it?"
I didn't realize how tense I had been until those words let me relax.
"You need to replace those old memories with new ones.  We all have to make memory adjustments as we get older.  For example, I always thought my Uncle Floyd was bald, and it came as a big shock when I saw him after ten years and he had a full head of hair.  Then my mother explained that when I first remembered him as a child he was a college freshman and his fraternity had made him shave his head."
Jennifer chuckled softly.  "Okay, I see what you mean."
"Talk to your family more.  Get them to tell you about the past the way they remember it.  Go through the family photos with your sister and ask her to tell you about them.  Let those memories, the good ones, replace the bad ones you've been suffering with all these years.  It will take a long time, and it's going to be like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but I think you can do it.
"I'm sure going to try!"  She leaned back in the chair, her hands gracefully limp in her lap.  "I can't tell you what a relief it is, to have an explanation, to know what's been wrong all these years.  Thank you, Dr. Franklyn.  You've given my life back to me."
"You've still got some hard work ahead of you," I told her, "but I don't think you'll need an analyst anymore.  This is something you can handle yourself.  If you do have any questions or problems, give me a call.  I'll always be here for you."
She got up to go, and I thought of one last question.  "Tell me, when you were lost that time, did you see or meet anyone else in the woods, besides the deer, I mean?"
She paused, and then said slowly  "That's odd.  I'd forgotten all about that, until you mentioned it.  There was a girl, about my age.  I saw her before I realized I was lost, and I remember hoping that she wouldn't scare the deer.  I noticed her particularly because she was blonde too and we were wearing almost identical clothes; bluejeans, gray sweat suit top, brown gloves and black boots.  She was walking toward me, but then some bushes separated us and I never did see where she went.  I hope she wasn't lost too!"  She smiled, picked up her purse, and left.
* * *
I never saw her again.  I'm sure she's all right.  I gave her an explanation she could understand and a way to deal with her problem.  She has a loving, supportive, family and she's going to be just fine.  Besides, she's a survivor.  Her early history proves that.
I lied to her, of course.  There was no overlay of memory, no experimental drugs.  I'm quite certain about what really happened that snowy February afternoon:  Two young girls from two different realities walked into the woods and came out in the wrong place.  The coincidences between them were so close that the fabric separating their universes unraveled for just a moment or two and they each passed through into the other's world.  The dog knew.  That's why he bit the girl who came back.
She'll be all right, she's a fighter.  I'm not worried about her.  It's the other girl who keeps me awake at night.  The other Jennifer: A gentle, protected young girl from a loving family who walked into the woods and came out into a living hell.  She's the one I can't help.