Young Summer James, recently happily married and with a daughter, awakes in a hospital room that is part of a tightly controlled psych ward. Her memory is fuzzy, and she pushes the nurses who come to attend her to tell her what has happened to her. On seeing the chief psychiatrist of the ward, Dr. E Mocker, Summer is full of questions that the doctor only partly answers. He turns the conversation around and starts asking her questions. What is the last thing she remembers? Praying at a cemetery at the New Orleans grave of Marie Laveau, “the most powerful voodoo queen who ever lived in these parts.” What was she doing at the cemetery? Does she practice voodoo? Summer can’t remember. Her brain is like a fog. Her legs are twitching badly.

Dr. Mocker eventually offers some information that leaves Summer aghast. She had tried to commit suicide while she was in jail and was brought into the ward. The fuzzy memory has to do with the electroshock treatments that she was forced to undergo. Stunned, Summer asks why she has been in jail; she wants to call her husband, see her daughter. She cannot call her husband, the doctor tells her, impossible. As the conversation continues, things become even more unimaginable. Her husband is dead, and Summer had been charged with his murder before she attempted to commit suicide. Her memory will slowly return, the doctor assures her, and the treatment in the psych ward will continue until she is no longer considered a danger to herself and others.

But her memory hardly returns, and Summer cannot imagine having committed such an unspeakable act. Drugged daily, her memory of the recent past remains as vague as ever, and she is forced to consider the possibility that she is capable of having done the unthinkable.