A Year Without Autumn

by Liz Kessler

  Autumn takes a step closer and puts her arms around me. “Hey, come on now, it’s all right,” she says. “It’s all OK; we’ll work it out.”

  “How can we work it out?” I wail, tears running freely down my face now. “You don’t understand. I’ve lost my mind. How can anything be all right?”

  I can’t speak anymore. Autumn holds me tight, and I sob on her shoulder.

  Eventually, the sobbing calms down. Autumn’s shoulder is wet from my tears. I move away. “Sorry.”

  “Hey, I’m used to it around here,” she says with a wry smile.

  “Look, can I use the bathroom?” I ask. “I need to wash my face.”

  “Of course.” Autumn points down the hallway. “Last door on the left.”

  In the bathroom, I grab some toilet paper and blow my nose. Then I sit down on the side of the bath to gather my thoughts. But I can’t. They’re too tangled and mangled, and they don’t match up with one another, like a drawer full of odd socks.

  I get up and turn on the faucet. Nice and cold. Cupping my hands under the water, I glance up at my face.

  Horror fills me.

  I grab the sink, splashing water all down my front.

  It can’t be.

  In the mirror, I watch my fingers reach up to touch my face. It’s me. But it’s not me. Not the me I thought I was. I’m wearing the same clothes. My new blue T-shirt with GORGEOUS written across it. My khaki shorts. My clothes that I suddenly realize feel tighter than usual. With everything else that’s been going on, I hadn’t even noticed that. And my hair — what’s happened to it? It’s all gone! Too short to be tied back. I hadn’t realized. Why would I? Why didn’t Autumn mention it?

  I grab at my hair. My fingers run easily through the short curls. I feel the back. The hair’s smooth and thin, tickling the back of my neck in wisps.

  “You OK in there, Jen?” Autumn calls through the door.

  I try to reply. Nothing comes out. I can’t tear my eyes away from my face.

  “Jen? Are you all right?”

  I make a kind of choking noise. It’s all I can manage.

  “Jenni, I’m coming in, OK?”

  As she opens the door, I tear my eyes away from the mirror to look at her. But I’m pointing at it. At the mirror — the lying, tricking mirror. At the face streaked with tears.

  The face that is undeniably a year older than it was this morning.

  “What’s wrong, Jenni? What happened?”

  “What happened?” I gasp. “Look!” I stab my finger at the mirror.

  Autumn looks at the mirror. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Not the mirror!” I scream. “Me! Look at me!”

  Autumn takes my hand and talks in that calm manner that she suddenly seems to have developed today and that I’ve never in my life heard her use before. “Come back into the living room, Jenni. I’ll make you a cup of camomile tea.”

  “I don’t want camomile tea!” I yell as the panic surges through my body. “I want to know what’s happened to me!”

  “Let’s just sit down, and we can work out what’s going on. It can’t be easy for you. It’s my fault. I’ve relied on you too much. It’s all gotten to you. Come on. I’ll —”

  “Is there another mirror?”

  “Another — well, yeah. There’s one in my bedroom, second door on the right.”

  “Let me see,” I say. I get halfway down the hallway.

  But what’s the point? I don’t need another mirror. My hands can’t be lying to me, running through the short crop of hair on my head. My eyes aren’t imagining all of this. It’s not just me; it’s Autumn and her mom and the condo. It’s everything.

  Autumn’s following me to her room. “Go on. Look in my room if you want.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say flatly.

  We go back into the living room, and I flop back onto the sofa.

  “Are you all right?” Autumn asks, reaching out a hand to me.

  I don’t reply. I can’t.

  “You’ll be OK,” she goes on. “I’m not going to rely on you so much anymore. The stress has gotten to you.”

  “What stress?” I mumble.

  “All the stress of the last year. You’ve done so much by helping me look after Mom and Dad and coming to see Mikey with me — none of it’s been easy.”

  I wince at the mention of Mikey’s name. Little Mikey in a coma? It’s not possible. I saw him yesterday! And now he’s gone. Invisible, like his dad.

  Wait.

  Invisible. Autumn’s joke this morning.

  “Autumn.” I grab the arm of the chair. “Do you remember making that joke about becoming invisible?”

  “What joke?”

  “Just before. Just — I don’t know. When we couldn’t find each other. You said maybe you’d become invisible. And we were talking about parallel lives and stuff. Don’t you remember?”

  Autumn frowns. “Vaguely. I think. But that was ages ago! That was last year, Jenni!”

  “It wasn’t! It was this morning!”

  Autumn takes another of those long breaths. “Jenni, let me look at your head,” she says. “I think you might have concussion.”

  I let her examine me. “Does it hurt?” she asks gently.

  “I didn’t bang my head,” I say calmly. “I don’t have a concussion. Why won’t you believe me?”

  “How can I?” Autumn says. “You’re not making any sense!”

  I shake my head. She’s right. “No, I’m not. Sorry. Maybe I knocked myself out or something. Maybe I’m dreaming.”

  “Look,” she says, getting up. “Why don’t we go for a walk?”

  “But what about your mom?”

  “She’ll be OK for a bit. Come on. We need some fresh air.”

  She’s right. I need to get out of this condo.

  Autumn pokes her head into her mom’s room, then closes the door behind her and softly pads back up the hallway. “She’s gone back to bed,” she says. “We’ll be fine for half an hour or so.”

  “Right. Let’s get out of here.”

  We walk along the path, down to our place by the river. For a second, it almost feels like normal. Just Autumn and me walking along together, hanging out. And it would be fine if I could somehow walk without seeing anything around me. But everywhere, I see signs of change. Nothing major — nothing that makes much sense when you say it out loud — but just enough to completely disorient me and remind me that my world has spun off to somewhere that I don’t recognize. Little things, like the parking lot. There’s a fence around it, and each space is labeled with a number. It wasn’t like that an hour ago.

  And I’m sure the trees at the end of Autumn’s row are taller. They were little sprigs this morning. And there’s a brand-new building behind Autumn’s. I’m sure it never used to be there. And the ivy on the reception building — it looks bushier.

  Am I imagining it? Has everything changed? It couldn’t have. But if not, then how can I walk around here every year and not even properly see what’s around me?

  “When did they do that?” I ask, pointing at the fence in the parking lot.

  Autumn shrugs. “Sometime this year, I guess. It was like that when we got here.”

  “Where’s your car? Don’t tell me your dad’s gone out in it — not if he’s drinking.”

  Autumn scans the parking lot and points to an old Fiesta in the corner. “It’s there!” she says.

  I swallow hard. It’s the final straw. Autumn’s dad drove here in a battered old Fiesta?

  “That’s not your car,” I say, but without any conviction. If everything else has changed, why should this be any different?

  “Yes, it is,” Autumn says.

  “But the Porsche —” I say, the words almost catching in my throat. “Your dad loves that car.” I try to latch on to one last thread of hope, desperate to find normality somewhere — anywhere! “Did something happen this morning? Is it being serviced or something?”

  Autumn lets out
a deep breath. “Are you trying to upset me, Jenni?” she asks quietly, walking ahead and not turning to look at me. “Because you’re doing a really good job.”

  I run to catch up with her. We’ve reached the bridge over the river and stand leaning on the railing. “I’m not trying to upset you! I promise. I just —”

  Autumn turns and stares at me. “Jenni, he sold it,” she says. “You were with me the day they took it. Do you honestly not remember?”

  I shake my head, my mouth clamped shut. I don’t dare to speak. I hardly dare breathe.

  “Jen, I think something serious has happened to you,” she says. At last.

  “I know. Something really bad has happened. I just don’t know what it is.”

  “I think you’ve got amnesia. You know, we’ve talked to lots of doctors this year, and they’ve told us about all the different coping mechanisms. Maybe this is yours.”

  I bite away the tears that I can feel welling up and burning the back of my eyes. “Autumn, what happened with the car?” I ask. “Maybe if you tell me, it’ll bring a memory back.”

  Autumn leans back down on the railing, staring at the river as it trickles and bubbles obliviously along below us. She turns back to me. “You promise you don’t remember?” she asks again.

  “I promise. Tell me what happened.”

  “It was one of the worst weeks,” she begins, then laughs. A dry, cracked laugh with no humor in it. “Although there’ve been plenty to choose from. On the Monday, Mom got the letter from the gallery saying she’d been fired.”

  “Why?”

  “She’d been taking too many days off to go to the hospital. She spent virtually the whole of the first six months in there. They were pretty understanding at first, but then they said they couldn’t afford to keep paying her wages and pay another person to come in and cover her job, too. So they thanked her for all her years of work, gave her another six months’ pay, and told her they were letting her go.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Just like that. She built that place from nothing.”

  “I know.” Autumn’s parents were very proud of their story. Mrs. Leonard was brought in to run a tiny, struggling art gallery, and she built it into a major exhibition center, selling famous works from around the world — including Autumn’s dad’s. “What about your dad’s work?”

  “That was Tuesday’s news. His next exhibition got canceled. At least that one wasn’t a surprise. He hadn’t painted a thing all year, so how could he hand over twenty new works? We all knew it wasn’t going to happen.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” I murmur, feeling helpless, useless.

  “And then on Wednesday, we sold the car and the fancy condo here. Three days; one big demolition job on our lives.”

  I lean forward on my elbows and cover my face with my hands. Where was I when all this happened? Why can’t I remember?

  “It was only last month that we decided to get this condo. I didn’t want to come back. Dad probably doesn’t care one way or another where we are as long as there’s a bar nearby. But Mom — she thought it would be good for us.”

  “Do you think she was right?” I ask.

  Autumn does that dry laugh again. “Look at us, Jen. My best friend has developed amnesia, Mom’s shut away in her bedroom, and Dad’s done his invisibility act as usual. How good does that sound to you?”

  Invisible. That word again. It’s how I feel. As though that’s what I’ve been for a year. The world has passed me by, and somehow I wasn’t there. I don’t like it.

  “Autumn, let’s move on,” I say. I need to keep moving. I need to stop myself from staying still and focusing on what’s going on. Keep moving, and don’t think too much.

  As we get closer to our place, I notice that the families who were here earlier have left. We walk over the last bit of rough path to the bushes. Yesterday you had to pick your way across them, virtually climbing over branches to get to our spot, but now the water is so shallow, there’s enough shore to walk around.

  I rummage through the pebbles, looking for a flat one. I find one and hand it to Autumn.

  She smiles sadly. “I’d forgotten about skipping stones,” she says. She goes over to the water’s edge and throws it perfectly across the river. It bounces five times.

  I pick one up and throw it across the water. It trips over the surface once before flumping into the lake with a plop.

  “You’re still the stone-skipping champion of the world,” I say.

  Autumn smiles again. This time it almost seems to reach her eyes, and for a split second things feel normal. Then she turns to me. “Jenni, what are we going to do about this?” she asks.

  I bend down and rummage through the stones, looking for some more flat ones. “I don’t know. I’m scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Look, I don’t think it’s amnesia,” I say. “I don’t feel any different. It’s everything around me that’s changed. I feel exactly the same.”

  “But that’s exactly how it is with amnesia!”

  “I know,” I say, frustration biting at my throat. “But it doesn’t feel like amnesia. It doesn’t feel like I’ve lost my memory. It’s — I don’t know. It’s too weird.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Just — it’s not as if I’ve forgotten things. It’s as if it’s all changed, in a split second. Everything’s different from how it was this morning. Except it wasn’t this morning. It was a year ago.”

  Autumn just stares at me.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I say.

  “What am I thinking?”

  “That I’m describing amnesia.”

  Autumn doesn’t say anything, but her look says it all.

  I sit down on the pebbles. “A whole year,” I say quietly, “and I don’t remember it.”

  Autumn sits down beside me. “Look, what’s the last thing you do remember?” she asks.

  “You coming over to our condo,” I say woodenly. “We were going horseback riding.” My eyes fill with tears as I hang on to this simple, useless fact. “You said don’t be late.”

  “And that’s it? That’s really the last thing you remember?”

  I nod.

  “Jen, you swear you’re not messing with me?”

  “Of course I’m not!”

  Autumn breathes a low whistle out through her teeth. “Wow.”

  We stare at the river in silence. The water glides past, smooth swells running into tiny whirlpools around the bigger rocks.

  “It must have been when you fainted,” she says after a while. “You must have hit your head. We just didn’t realize how bad it was.”

  “But I’d forgotten stuff before that. I didn’t know you were in that condo.”

  “Maybe you fainted before that, too.”

  “I don’t make a habit of falling down all over the place, you know,” I say. “Anyway, I’d have remembered if I’d done that.”

  Autumn just looks at me.

  “OK, maybe I wouldn’t have remembered. But it all feels so weird. I can remember this morning so clearly.”

  “But it wasn’t this morning,” Autumn insists.

  “See, even you,” I say.

  “Even me what?”

  I pause. I don’t want to hurt her feelings. “You’ve changed,” I say carefully.

  “How?”

  “You don’t believe me. You’re looking for a rational explanation.”

  “Well, of course I am. What — you want me to say you’ve been abducted by aliens or something?”

  “The old Autumn would have said exactly that!”

  “Well, the old Autumn didn’t know anything about reality,” she says flatly. “The old Autumn was quite happy living in a childish make-believe world where bad things didn’t happen and where you could make up whatever silly story you liked and tell yourself it was true.”

  “And the new Autumn?”

  Autumn stands up and brushes stones and grave
l from her legs. “The new Autumn knows that the world isn’t like that,” she says. “Come on. We should be getting back. I don’t want Mom to wake up in an empty condo.”

  We head back in silence. My thoughts all seem to be buried under mush, and I don’t know how to articulate a single one.

  We get to Autumn’s door. I know I should offer to go in with her, but I can’t face going back in there.

  “Listen, I’d better go in on my own, OK? Spend some time with Mom,” Autumn says, as if she’s read my mind. Or maybe she just doesn’t want me around. I wouldn’t be surprised. The last thing she needs right now is a best friend who’s only adding to her problems.

  “See you later?” I ask.

  Autumn nods. Her face is empty and lifeless. It’s like a mask made from gray cardboard. It’s like someone else. Not Autumn. This isn’t Autumn.

  As she places her hand on the door, I’m desperate for her to turn around, flash me one of her terrific grins, and tell me it’s all a big mistake. Her biggest, cleverest, most horrible practical joke.

  A tiny part of my brain is still clinging to the hope that she’ll get to the door, then turn and scream, “Sucker!”

  She doesn’t. She goes into the condo and closes the door behind her without turning around to wave.

  Now what? I’m stuck in this strange world that I don’t recognize, and the one person in the world I’d normally want to share it all with — the one who would usually help me make sense of it, figure it all out with me as though it’s a big exciting adventure — isn’t there anymore, and I’m standing out on a path on my own.

  Which is when it occurs to me: if she’s right about it being amnesia because of the shock and everything to do with Mikey, perhaps it’s only all the things to do with her family that I’ve forgotten. Perhaps everything will be completely normal with my family. Maybe I’ll remember everything as soon as I get back to my parents and to Craig. And then once I’ve remembered everything with them, I’ll remember everything to do with Autumn, too.