Life as I Know It

by Melanie Rose

  “Yes,” I mumbled unenthusiastically, poking at the dry toast in front of me. I wanted to shout, to tell her that in my other life I’d never been this ill to start with. The real me, Jessica, was at home and recovering. That this was a step in a direction I didn’t want to take at all.

  Grant arrived while I was still brushing my teeth into a white plastic bowl on the bed table that Sally had brought in for me.

  “You were so groggy yesterday, I didn’t think you’d need this,” she’d explained as she was wheeling the table in.

  “And you didn’t want anything cluttering the room in case I flatlined again,” I’d murmured, thinking of the beeping monitor to which I’d been attached.

  She had stared at me, hand on hip. “Well, that too, I suppose.”

  “Can you fetch me a mirror?” I’d asked, moments before Grant and the children arrived. “I haven’t looked at myself since the accident, and I want to make sure I look all right… for the family.”

  In the end, the family arrived before the mirror did, but it appeared Grant had been doing some homework on memory-loss patients. He walked in with a large photo album tucked under his arm. I allowed him to kiss me chastely on the cheek, and I smiled at each of the children in turn. After all, I reasoned, whatever was happening was no fault of theirs. Three of them at least thought I was their mother, and I hadn’t the heart to tell them any different—even if I could work out what was going on.

  Sophie, the eldest girl, was wearing embroidered hipster trousers and a cropped top that showed her flat eight-year-old stomach. When I caught her eye she stared back almost defiantly and stuck her iPod earphones into her ears, effectively shutting out any kind of conversation. I wondered what sort of relationship she had with her mother.

  Nicole, on the other hand, hovered around me anxiously and sat as close to me as she could without actually getting into the bed next to me. If I glanced at her, she smiled hopefully as if silently begging me to remember her, and when I ran my tongue lightly over cracked lips she reached out immediately for the plastic beaker and straw.

  Toby seemed like any other four-year-old boy: bored with being stuck in the bland hospital room and ready to make a game out of anything. I watched him lying on the floor opening a paper bag of sterile antiseptic wipes, which he used to scrub his sneakers before trying to cut the laces with a pair of blunt-ended suture scissors.

  Teddy, I noticed, was hanging back again, still clutching the squashy ball he’d had with him yesterday. I realized he was watching his brother’s experiments with the hospital equipment, but seemed to have no desire to join in.

  The girls spread themselves over the bed and snacked on the seedless white grapes they’d brought me, while Grant opened the album.

  “I’ve read that memory loss can be rectified by showing images of the patient’s life, listening to your favorite music, or watching your favorite programs,” Grant explained. “Here, look, this is a picture of us on our wedding day. I didn’t bring in the whole wedding album, since there are some of the best pictures in here, plus vacations with the children…”

  I had stopped listening to him, my eyes riveted on the photo of the bride and groom smiling outside an old church. Grant didn’t look hugely different, maybe a little less lined around the eyes. The bride smiling innocently beside him was about my height and build, with golden blond hair falling in soft curls round her shoulders above the white dress. The eyes staring into the camera were a mesmerizing blue with tiny gray flecks.

  “You always liked that close-up one best,” he continued when he saw me staring at it. “Of course, your hair isn’t quite that blond now, but you’re as pretty as ever, isn’t she, children?”

  “Arms not blue now,” Teddy commented from the corner of the room, where until that point he’d been watching us in silence.

  “Were my arms blue?” I asked Grant. I snatched at the comment as if, by thinking about that, I wouldn’t have to acknowledge the mind-blowing fact that I appeared to be sitting here in someone else’s body.

  “The doctor said it happens sometimes after a high-voltage injury,” Grant said. “There’s a huge medical word for it. Apparently your upper and lower extremities were cold and mottled blue when it happened, but it cleared in a few hours.” He squeezed my hand. “You look wonderful now.”

  Nurse Sally chose that moment to appear in the doorway and I glanced up and saw the mirror in her hand. My face must have blanched, because concern suddenly creased her features. I held her gaze imploringly and shook my head. She tactfully backed out of the room again and left me to my supposed family.

  “Shouldn’t you be at work?” I asked this man, my husband, somehow recovering my voice. “And why aren’t the children in school?”

  “It’s their half-term break, Lauren,” Grant told me. “We were going to take a few days off and do some day trips with them.”

  I looked at the children, who were beginning to fidget in earnest now. The girls had finished the grapes and Toby had gotten up to inspect the silent EKG machine. Teddy was still glowering at me from the doorway.

  “You poor things!” I said with forced cheerfulness, wishing they would all go off and leave me alone. “Fancy having to be here visiting me instead. Grant, why don’t you go ahead and take them out to lunch or something? It’ll give me a chance to have a bath and sort myself out.”

  “Lunch?” Sophie repeated, pulling out her earphones and making a “yuk” face. “I want to go to Chessington World of Adventures!”

  “Yeah, me too, me too!” cried Toby, rushing over and jumping on the bed again.

  “I don’t,” Teddy muttered from the corner. “I’m goin’ to wait here for Mummy to come back again.”

  “I want to stay here with Mummy too,” Nicole said quietly from my side.

  Grant looked uncertainly from the children to me, then seemed to come to a reluctant decision.

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” he said, getting to his feet. “We’ll go to Chessington and leave Mummy to have some time on her own.” He glanced at Teddy. “You too, Teddy. You’ll like it when we get there.”

  “I won’t,” Teddy grumbled from the corner. He flashed me a malevolent stare as he was bodily picked up and presented for a kiss good-bye.

  I smiled at them all and waved thankfully as they trooped from the room, then, as the door closed behind them, I breathed a sigh of relief and turned my attention to the photo album, which Grant had left open on the bedside table. I stared at the lovely bride for a second or two, then pulled a tuft of my almost-shoulder-length hair in front of my face, peering at it out of the corner of my eye. Blond. Oh no.

  Sally reappeared a moment later with the mirror. “I saw the family leaving,” she said. “They seemed very excited about something.”

  “Grant’s taking them to Chessington World of Adventures,” I told her.

  “Lucky them,” she said. “Do you want me for anything, or shall I leave you alone for a little while?”

  “You can answer me one question, and then leave me alone,” I replied, holding the mirror facedown so I couldn’t see into it. “Where exactly am I?”

  The nurse had the decency to look shocked. It was strange how people took for granted the obvious things, the things that made up their own little universes. They knew I’d lost my memory, but it hadn’t occurred to anyone that I might not even know where I was.

  “You’re in St. Matthew’s Hospital, near Little Cranford,” she told me. “I’m sorry, Lauren, we haven’t been very understanding, have we? I’ll leave you to look at the photos and make yourself nice. The bathroom is right next door. You can just pull off the sticky pads from the monitor. Buzz if you need anything. I’m on until two.”

  I was none the wiser as to my whereabouts. I had never heard of Cranford, Little or otherwise. I stared at the back of the mirror for several minutes once she had gone, willing myself to turn it over. Eventually I plucked up the courage and peeked into the glass. What I saw literally took
my breath away. Whether this was a dream or not, it was certainly a nightmare, because despite all my denials, it appeared I really was sitting here in someone else’s body. A pretty someone else, with clear English-rose skin and expensively highlighted hair, though I could see if I held the mirror up that the blond locks were singed at the top of my head.

  Lauren had a cute snub nose, pouty lips, and cheekbones to die for. But the eyes, which I had expected to be the same clear blue as in the wedding photo, were a grayish green. My eyes, I realized with relief. Hazel eyes belonging to Jessica Taylor.

  I remembered the old saying that a person’s eyes are the windows to their soul. Well, these windows, despite the fancy dressing, were reflecting my soul. Teddy had been right, I thought with a pang of conscience. His mother had gone, and here was I, stuck in her body, without the first idea what sort of person she was, or how the hell I had gotten here.

  In the bathroom, I inspected my new body with a kind of bewildered detachment. I’d always felt my own face wasn’t unattractive, with skin that tanned easily and wavy shoulder-length brown hair. But Lauren had full breasts, a solid waist, and long legs. I ran my fingers over the silver stretch marks on her stomach and thighs—my stomach and thighs—remembering that she’d been through three pregnancies, one of which had been with twins. There was bruising to the ribs, which I assumed must be the result of having been given CPR after the cardiac arrest. I winced when I touched the livid purple marks, but at least I was alive.

  Groaning, I lowered myself carefully into the bath, taking care not to get the hot water anywhere near my bandaged shoulder, then I soaped the new body wonderingly, surprised that it felt as if it belonged to me. Picking up the shampoo, I began to wash my blond hair until a stinging sensation reminded me about Lauren’s head burns. Would I feel such discomfort if this was just a dream, I asked myself with a grimace? I felt so real. Surely this wasn’t simply some medicine-induced hallucination?

  I rinsed my hair with great difficulty using a plastic container that Nurse Sally had given me. I had to tilt my head awkwardly to one side so the water wouldn’t run down onto the bandage. When I returned to the room, wearing one of Lauren’s clean nighties with a towel wrapped turbanlike around my wet hair, I climbed back into bed and closed my eyes, exhausted.

  Despite my tiredness, I knew I had to methodically process all the information I had if I wasn’t going to go stark raving mad. I knew I had been given painkilling drugs, but couldn’t believe they were strong enough to have caused me to conjure up a whole new identity for myself. There was no floaty haziness to what I was experiencing. It was just too real, too solid, and so I felt I must try to put these strange events in order.

  Fact: I had been struck by the lightning at around two on Saturday afternoon. I didn’t yet know much about the details of Lauren’s strike except that it appeared to have been more violent than mine, and she seemed to be more badly injured than I was. We had both been unconscious for the remainder of Saturday and into Sunday morning. Lauren had suffered a cardiac arrest, but apparently I had not.

  Lauren had woken up first, or rather I had woken up in her body. But she had slept again since then, and I was still here. I glanced at the newspaper Grant had brought in along with the photo album. It was Monday’s paper, with a piece about the royal family on the front page. I pushed it away bad-temperedly. If I was really here, then the obvious question had to be, where was Lauren now? I knew she wasn’t in my body, because I’d woken up there, too, although if my suspicions were right, what appeared to be night here was day there, and vice versa.

  My first inclination was that I should ask Dr. Shakir about what might have happened. Perhaps this sort of thing had been documented before about victims of lightning strikes. I recalled reading an article once about how a lightning-strike victim had tried to kill herself after being struck. She’d been reported as saying she couldn’t live with herself after the incident, that she’d felt differently about everything. She’d even been afraid to leave her own house.

  I lay and chewed my lip pensively. Could she have experienced something similar to what I was going through now? Could she have come back into a stranger’s body?

  On second thought, telling anyone about what was happening was probably not such a good idea. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my days locked in a lunatic asylum, that was for sure. I imagined myself trying to explain that I was trapped in the wrong body, and how the medical profession would react to such a confession.

  Sitting up, I towel-dried my hair, shaking out the damp locks and turning to rummage in my locker for Lauren’s hairbrush. No, I thought as I stroked the brush carefully through my hair, I would have to be much subtler in my quest for an answer to my present predicament.

  An hour later an orderly came with a wheelchair and took me for a head MRI scan, and I’d not been back on the ward more than ten minutes when Dr. Shakir himself came to see me. He perched on the side of the bed and asked how I was feeling.

  “I still feel rather… unsettled,” I told him carefully.

  He nodded, patting my hand in a fatherly fashion. “You have been through a great deal, Lauren,” he said. “When part of your memories are lost, your identity seems lost with it. It’s quite understandable you should be feeling disoriented.”

  “Is it usual for patients to lose all their memories?”

  He hesitated and I guessed he didn’t really want to confound me with the hard medical facts, but then he continued, “Well, it’s more usual for victims of lightning strikes to suffer anterograde amnesia, losing memories of the incident and suffering problems with memory afterward. In your case you seem to be experiencing retrograde amnesia, a loss of memories before the incident.”

  “I think it would help if you could answer some questions I have been worrying about,” I said carefully.

  He nodded, smiling benignly at me.

  “When I suffered the cardiac arrest, how long was I ‘dead’ for?”

  He looked taken aback by the bluntness of my question, but answered anyway.

  “We were working on you for almost forty minutes from the time you came in to when we got a sinus rhythm going. I believe the ambulance crew had been doing CPR for at least twenty minutes before that.”

  “Is it unusual for someone to be ‘gone’ for that long and have no serious aftereffects?”

  He smiled rather patronizingly before answering. “I don’t think you need to worry about that, Lauren. Apart from the memory loss, you seem to be recovering well.”

  “But is it unusual?” I persisted, wanting desperately to know if this body should clinically be dead.

  He shook his head. “People respond differently. I suppose, to be frank, I was a little concerned there may have been some brain damage after so long without oxygen to the brain, but as soon as you woke up my doubts were allayed.”

  “When you were working on me,” I continued, “did you contemplate giving up on me?”

  Dr. Shakir fidgeted uncomfortably and refused to meet my gaze. Instead of answering immediately he got up, lifted my notes from the foot of my bed and began leafing through them.

  “At one point,” he said quietly. “I confess I thought we were struggling to resuscitate you in vain. I contemplated calling time of death. I thought you might be too badly injured to survive. But then I heard your children outside the emergency room crying for you, begging us to save their mother. One of the little boys was chanting, ‘Mummy, come back; Mummy, come back!’ We shocked you one last time, and here you are.”

  Indeed, I thought wryly. Here I was. But not Lauren. Not the children’s mother.

  He put down the notes and smiled at me, less disconcerted now that I wasn’t asking awkward questions and forcing him to justify his actions, which, let’s face it, could have gone badly if Lauren had woken up brain-damaged and needing permanent care. How would Grant and the children have coped then? I wondered. From what I had seen so far, Lauren was the strong one, the one who held that fragile f
amily together. The knowledge transfixed me. Could I possibly step into her shoes? Was I strong enough? Did I even want to try?

  I shook my head, realizing that I was straying into padded-cell territory again. Thinking too deeply at this point wouldn’t help anyone, least of all me.

  “Dr. Shakir?” I asked, in what I perceived to be a deceptively innocent voice—Lauren’s voice, not mine, I had realized, since I was using her vocal cords and facial bone structure. “When you came to see me yesterday you said you’d looked up some stuff about lightning strikes?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes narrowing with just a smidgen of suspicion.

  “Did you find anything about victims having new memories? Or people recollecting events they couldn’t account for?”

  The doctor came and sat down on the bed again, trying to look concerned, though I could see the interest gleaming in his eyes.

  “There’s often confusion, due to the Pat Effect I mentioned to you before, but new memories?” He shook his head. “I’ve not heard of it.” He fixed his gaze on my face. “You’re not experiencing anything like that, are you, Lauren?”

  “Good heavens no!” I replied hastily with a forced laugh. “I was just wondering what you’d found out, that’s all.”

  “There are many documented cases of lightning-strike victims becoming disoriented, changed in character, for example,” he replied, the gleam in his eyes evaporating as quickly as it had arrived.

  “Go on.”

  “The effect of lightning on the human brain is similar to that of patients who have undergone electroconvulsive therapy,” he continued. “As I said, the vast majority who survive a lightning strike are confused and suffer anterograde amnesia for several days after the strike. Loss of consciousness for varying periods is common, as are neurological complications and difficulty with memory.”

  He looked at me intensely as if to check that I was keeping up with him, then he pressed on more boldly. “You have to understand that the cognitive and neurological damage caused to the brain by a lightning strike to the skull is similar to a blunt injury trauma.”