A woman searches for the truth of who she is.
In Case She Forgets Again is a novel about the life of Carmen Almonte, a woman stuck between two worlds: where the living linger and where the dead wait. When Carmen returns to the Dominican Republic to be near her dying grandmother, time folds. What begins as a trip about mourning turns into something deeper, a story about family, silence, and the shadow of a past not entirely her own.
Told with poetic precision and intimate urgency, this novel blurs the lines between reality and dream. At the center is the question of: Who do we become when the people who shaped us are gone?
This story is about survival and the words that are unspoken. This story is for anyone who has ever lived in the shadow of their family, anyone who has carried a love so deep it became its own form of memory
A woman searches for the truth of who she is.
In Case She Forgets Again is a novel about the life of Carmen Almonte, a woman stuck between two worlds: where the living linger and where the dead wait. When Carmen returns to the Dominican Republic to be near her dying grandmother, time folds. What begins as a trip about mourning turns into something deeper, a story about family, silence, and the shadow of a past not entirely her own.
Told with poetic precision and intimate urgency, this novel blurs the lines between reality and dream. At the center is the question of: Who do we become when the people who shaped us are gone?
This story is about survival and the words that are unspoken. This story is for anyone who has ever lived in the shadow of their family, anyone who has carried a love so deep it became its own form of memory
That year was strange, Carmen. You remember that? It was the year you said you felt a hand ripping through that thin film holding your life together. A few months before all of this, you were planning what you would do with your family for winter recess. You wanted to go somewhere far. You and your husband argued over where to go. You insisted on Canada, thinking of the cold, you were drawn to it—imagining it like a refrigerator, preserving things, slowing down time, making your time away stretch, the way it does when you travel home. You imagined the silence there, the emptiness. Your husband, on the other hand, was more practical about those things. He imagined the icy roads, the danger of driving through unfamiliar roads, and the car without snow tires. His suggestion was simpler—Central Park, museums, a quiet week in the city. You compromised and stayed. It turned out to be the best decision you could have made.
That day was a Thursday, you were planning to go to Queens—to the museum, then the mall. You woke to the sound of your husband on the phone. He wasn’t saying much, just ahem, mm, okay, okay. You stayed still for a while, eyes closed, hoping he’d say something that would tell you what was happening—hoping it was something trivial so you could go back to sleep. But no. He just kept talking in that purposely cryptic way. Finally, you decided you had to open your eyes. When you did, he looked over at you and handed you the phone. Your stomach dropped past the mattress, past all the junk you kept under the bed, and landed hard on the cold wooden floor. It was your mother’s voice on the other end. She was calling from the hospital. She didn’t say much—just that she was there—and then handed the phone to a nurse. The nurse’s voice was calm, almost detached as she told you your mother was in critical care, that she’d had a heart attack.
Do you remember that morning, Carmen? I don't think I've seen you get ready so quickly. The 6 a.m. cab ride, the way you watched the highway—the same one you’d taken so many times to visit her at her new apartment, the one she’d finally gotten just three months earlier, after years of renting rooms and sleeping on couches. You had applied to those apartments like you had no other purpose in life—to every single affordable housing apartment she qualified for. She had lived with you years before, and you knew you couldn’t do that again. It had been a disaster, her living with you. But she was getting older and had nowhere else to go, so you applied as if it were your only mission in life. You told yourself you were being a good daughter, that this was what selfless caring looked like. But deep down, you knew the truth. It wasn’t kindness, it wasn't selfless, it was self-preservation. You couldn’t live with her again, and this was the only way to protect your future, your kids, and your sanity.
Your mother had no idea. She thought you were just being hopeful, maybe even naïve. To her, getting a lottery apartment was as impossible as winning the lottery itself. When she was finally called to see the apartment, she walked in as incredulous as the first day she’d applied. She moved about carefully, not allowing herself to get attached, watching it all play out as if she wasn't walking through her future home. In the days that followed, you followed every instruction in the emails, making copies of every statement, notarizing every form, while your mother sat in the background, watching you, from the corner of your couch. From time to time, lifting eyes from her phone to watch you, amused, maybe even pitying you for thinking how naïve you were to believe you could actually get the apartment.
Anyway, the day you called to congratulate her, she still didn’t get it. All she said was, “Bueno.” It wasn’t until you told her she had to buy the money order for the first month’s rent and deposit that she started to believe you. But it wasn’t real to her—not fully—until the two of you were sitting in that office the morning after Election Day, a small bag of cleaning supplies at her feet, waiting for the keys to be handed over. Only then did she believe. But not entirely, cause when she finally walked in, all she could think was that maybe the second month’s rent would come in too high, too much for her to pay, and she’d have to move out again and go back to the old couch. She feared the illusion would break, that the lottery ticket had been a scam all along. You thought about how tragic, yet predictable, it would be, her dying after only a few months of enjoying her apartment, of living her dream. You already knew the cruelty of life, its irony and couldn’t imagine it ending any other way.
Anyway, you finally got to the hospital—and it was probably the coldest day ever. The kind that bites into your skin the moment you take your hands out of your pockets. You arrived to the sight of a big, brown, ugly building that towered over everything around it. It seemed to dare you to go in, as if warning that only the truly desperate would walk in. You had to be really sick—or nearly dying—to believe you’d come out in better shape than you went in. It was the darkest, most depressing place you’d ever seen; it reminded you more of a prison than hospital. You walked to the front entrance, not knowing any better. There was a police officer and metal detectors. You asked where the ER was, and they mumbled something barely audible—but enough for you to understand you had to go back out and around. You managed to find a ramp—an entrance clearly meant for vehicles, not people—but you climbed it anyway. At the top, a man was lying on the floor, his pants pulled down, feces smeared across the tile. You nearly jumped over it, barely missing the mess, and made it to the entrance. You told them your mother had a heart attack and was in critical care. They waved you in, but only after checking every piece of ID you had and handing you a flimsy sticker pass.
You wove your way through the hallways, crowded mostly with people who seemed emotionally disturbed, drunk, or on drugs. Your mother was separated from the rest, inside a small room surrounded by machines. The nurse told you she’d had a heart attack and they were afraid she might have another. Your mother, though, looked strangely normal—talking, alert, unsure of what had really happened. It was really a shitty time. I don’t think you’d ever known so much about the human body before that, but that day you learned everything about stents and arteries. You realized heart attacks sound far scarier when you hear about them than when you’re actually living through one. I remember how you stared at your mother’s chart, how it read heart failure, and how impossible it seemed that someone could appear so functional with such an important part of them failing. And somehow, it made sense to you—that out of all the parts of her that could give out, it would be her heart.
You sat there for hours, asking when she’d be transferred to a hospital with the proper labs and staff to monitor her. When it became clear they weren’t prioritizing her and would only move her if she showed signs of another heart attack, you told her to start complaining about chest pain. From there, the proverbial ball began to roll. They called Bellevue, who quickly arranged for her emergency transfer. Within hours, an ambulance arrived to take her there. It was only then that your mother broke down. I think that’s when she finally understood how serious her condition was. She began to sob. Something else interesting happened that day. It was then, Carmen, that you discovered your mother had a sense of humor. It was there that you saw her not as your mother, but as a woman. You noticed her sarcasm with the doctors, her curiosity. The questions she asked were sharp and relevant—unlike the ones she usually asked you. She even made a few jokes about what had happened. But underneath it all, Carmen, she was terrified. She thought she was going to die.
That’s the part she never told you—the part nobody tells you. It’s in those moments, when we come face to face with death, that we finally understand how fragile it all is—how easily everything can end. It’s when we stand in the shadow of death, when we realize there’s nothing left to lose, that we become who we truly are—or maybe, that’s when others finally see us as we are. Yes, your mom survived, but what came next, no one expected. You tried again to take a break, to step away for a bit. When the call came about your grandmother, at least you weren’t too far. Sure, surrounded by water slides and overpriced slushie's, but just a short drive away. It was familiar, a repetition of another season. You weren’t in Canada, but the winter had lingered, and the roads were icy. And you—being so good at what you do—carried all your shit out of that hotel, loaded up the car, and drove back home, beginning a journey that would take you farther than you’d ever been.
***
The arrival is always the same. Soaring through the sky, drifting above the clouds, catching a quick glimpse of the threshold where earth meets space—and then, the descend. The smell of musk greets you, the moisture in the air, the sounds of the waves pounding against the jagged rocks, finding tiny pockets of space, then forcing its way up, making the water splash up and out. The sounds of cars honking, vendors, people, everything. The moment you walked into the house, something felt off. It wasn't totally wrong, just off. There was a thick silence, nobody was there to greet you. Your grandmother wasn’t there. No footsteps, no voice calling from the back room. The air was cool, the tile floors were still damp from the night before, they felt cold beneath your feet. You stood in the doorway, looking past the living room, beyond the dining room, and to the backyard, clothes wires hanging from all ends. You froze to take it all in. You tried to picture your grandmother returning but couldn’t. You didn’t say it aloud. But I felt it, how the air changed, how the house felt empty, how the silence felt permanent.
That night, the heat was suffocating. Once the sun disappeared, it began to press in. You hadn't packed for that kind of heat, at least not at night. You took off your pants first, then lay back, hoping it would pass. The polyester bed sheets stuck to you, damp, clinging. You slipped your top over your head let it fall beside you, your skin now bare. You sprawled yourself across the bed, one arm flung above your head, one leg curled, the other stretched open. The fan turned slowly, dragging warm air across your body. And I watched. Silently. From the place I always return to. But something called to me. Maybe a tremor, hunger, or perhaps a memory. Your skin was damp and glowing, iridescent almost, maybe from the heat, maybe from the light of the full moon slipping through the window. Whatever the reason, the room felt suffocating. Maybe more than the heat, it was the weight. The weight that builds over time, pound, by pound, layer by layer. Your job was a mess, too many demands, too many changes. Every day felt like another wave slamming against you, too fast to give you a chance to catch your breath. They needed more from you, but you had nothing left to give. And at home, your daughter was slipping away from you in small, sharp ways. Your marriage, well, what marriage? It felt like it had shattered so bad you didn't even know where the broken pieces were.
You didn't want to think about any of it. You didn't want to feel anything at all. You just wanted quiet release. You weren’t trying to think, you were trying to forget. Your legs parted wider as you shifted. Your hips tilted looking like an invitation. Not for me, of course, I knew that. Still… I felt the pull. You shifted again, restless. One hand drifting down but then your fingers lingering. You pressed down, your lips parted, soundless. Your hands moved faster, your back arching, once, twice. You held your breath and then fell apart. And I stayed in the shadows, the place I always return to, watching and feeling every ripple..
Carmen had a gift, just like her grandmother Elida, just like her great-grandmother before her. She could see beneath the veil, and she could see into the spaces between and make connections. She could give space and life to the entities who lived around her. And her grandmother, well, her grandmother didn’t want them to define her, to shape her, to lose her sense of being whole, alive, filled with light and joy.
Carmen’s story is one of belonging and of exclusion, of loneliness and of having to hold the image, the idea of what her mother believed her to be. And yet she was so much more. A girl who belonged to a culture, a family who was alive, and a girl who was between, who lived in cold spaces, harsh spaces, and one where image matters more than reality, where fear fills rooms, and where a mother is interested in everything but the reality of the daughter who stands before her. Carmen experienced a lack of tenderness, a life without a mirror to show her who she was. Or did she?
This is a beautifully written story filled with memory, with the idea that we all need someone to bear witness to our loneliness, our fear, or grief, and that there in the shadow world, there is someone who sees, who holds our stories, who knows who we are. And yet, we are more than our pain, our brokenness; the wounds are there, but they don’t define us.
Set in the borderlands, in the spaces between, this is a story of culture, of coldness, and of women, generations of women, who long for love, freedom, and to be seen. It’s a story of longing, of vulnerability, and of struggle, of migration and of home. Of tradition, of medicine and of a world beyond our own.
If you’re looking for a book to end the year with flair, this is the one for you. It’s definitely been my book of the year so far, and it’s one to cry with, to feel alongside and to hold your breath with. One to dream with and to cry with. To understand and to share with. Carmen’s longings – to be seen, to belong, to feel held – aren’t just her story; they are a human story. Part magical realism, part deeply human, this one is an absolute gem.