“Maybe instead of telling me, you should start showing me. You seem to forget I’m starting over from nothing. So do you want to start with me or not? We have three days. Three days to block out the world, three days away from the daughter we have to pretend for. Maybe what we should be pretending for next three days is that we just met. We can start over.”
“Three days,” he whispers, turning away from me. “Give me a minute.” Clearly I’ve set off another precious memory for him to grieve.
“Can you put the past down for a day? Or two or three? You can pick it up again when we leave.” I hold out my hand for him to take before we walk back up the hill. “Can you put down all the heavy stuff, the fact that I was injured, that I need to be watched every minute, that I used to be Audrey? Just for now?”
Jason turns and takes my hand. “I think so.”
I smile mockingly. “No more hovering? No thinking I’m going to be mortally wounded if I get a splinter?”
He smiles back. “No more suspicions? No more accusations? No more Luminol?”
I laugh to myself. There’s no way anyone is ever going to let me forget that.
A large plaque hangs in the foyer of the inn, inscribed with a quote by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Happiness in this world, when it comes, comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit, and it leads us a wild-goose chase, and is never attained. Follow some other object, and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.
Something about it stirs me, and I read it over and over again while Jason gives our name at the front desk. I have the oddest feeling that Audrey is trying to tell me something.
“Here we are, Mr. Gilbert.” The woman behind the desk adjusts her glasses and looks at the computer screen. “Two ocean front—”
“I’m sorry,” I say, stepping forward and linking my hand with Jason’s. “But we’ll only need one of those rooms.”
I realize now, after many firsts in my short life as Jane, that the one I love the most is feeling Jason’s bare skin against my own. With no clothes between us and his arms wrapped tightly around my back, I can feel the beating of his heart against my own and his warm breath on my neck. We’ve been tangled together kissing for at least an hour, and he’s been so patient. Every time he attempts to move or change position, I pull him back to me because I can’t stand for there to be space between us for a single second. I want this moment, this feeling of desperate wanting, to last forever. How naïve I’d been to consider a shower a thing of ecstasy when there was this to experience.
Jason kisses me while slowly dragging his hands through my hair, and I melt into him. I ask if this is how it was with her, but all he’ll say is that it’s been a very long time since he felt this way. There’s an incredible storm rolling through, and every so often a burst of lightning brightens the room and I can see the conflicted look on his face. I imagine he’s torn between his dedication to Audrey and his feelings for me. I feel his mouth spread into a giant smile beneath my lips, and I roll myself on top of him, prepared to do anything I can to take his mind off Audrey.
I kiss his chin, his neck, his chest, gathering my hair so it spills over him and drags down his stomach after me. Jason grips the sheets in anticipation, and my insecurities about Audrey dissipate the farther down his body I travel. He whispers my name, entwining his fingers in my hair, and I realize that yet another first for me is this thrilling sensation of complete empowerment.
~22~
“You’re sure you don’t have a history of asthma?” Dr. Patel listens to my chest and scrawls some notes in his pad. “Tell me again how this started.”
“Well…” I try to take a deep breath but end up coughing instead. “We went away for a long weekend a few weeks ago, and ever since we’ve been back, I can’t catch my breath. It started little by little, but it’s gotten worse. I feel like I can’t fill my lungs all the way.”
“Were you exposed to any strong chemicals or mold perhaps?”
“No. Could I be allergic to wine? I’ve developed a taste for it lately, white mostly, and I know I didn’t drink much before.” I struggle to take a deep breath and hear wheezing in the back of my throat.
“Not likely.” He listens to my chest again and then flips through his notebook quietly. “I see that when you were recovering from your accident, you often complained that you couldn’t catch your breath. You had periods of wheezing and asthma-like symptoms. We attributed it to your deflated lung.”
“And what do you think now?” I ask.
“Now I think it is most certainly anxiety driven.”
“But I don’t have anxiety.” Things couldn’t be better between Jason and me. Our weekend at the inn brought us together, and we returned very much in love with one another. Daisy is happy; she just started kindergarten. There’s nothing going on that could explain anxiety-related attacks.
Dr. Patel chews on the end of his glasses and then points them at me. “Audrey, have you retrieved any memories at all? Seen anything that was familiar? Experienced déjà vu?”
“Not really,” I say. “Once in the bathtub I got a picture of Jason and me bathing Daisy.”
“And did you feel connected to that memory?”
“Yes, very much. I wanted more.”
“And what have you been doing to recover other memories? I assume that Jason has been showing you old picture albums and newspaper clippings and telling you stories about the life you used to have to help you jog something.”
I stare back at him and shift uncomfortably in my seat. The wheezing in my chest continues.
Dr. Patel hands me an inhaler. “Two puffs. Exhale between.” He folds his arms as I inhale. “Are you still having him call you Jane? And before you lie to me, consider the fact that I may already know.”
“Yes.”
“And the nightmares?”
“Still having them.”
“Are they getting worse?”
I nod and try to take a deeper breath. “I still see the floor fill with blood and hear a woman screaming, but now he’s chasing me.”
“Who?”
I look away. “Jason. But I’m not afraid of him if that’s what you think.”
“Perhaps you’re being chased by memories and they appear in your dreams as Jason.”
“I doubt it,” I say. Goosebumps cover my arms.
“This is a dangerous game you’re playing, Audrey. The subconscious mind is not to be trifled with. There is residual anxiety under there that keeps you from being able to breathe. You must try to discover what is blocking you from remembering.”
“But I’m finally happy.”
He puts the stethoscope to my chest and places the listening ends in my ears instead of his own. “Does it sound to you like you’re happy?”
I shake my head.
“There is a hospital psychiatrist I want you to see. He can help you start to uncover the roadblocks you are setting up for yourself and why you may be doing it. I know Jason said you are absolutely against it, but I think it’s time,” he says.
Jason said I was absolutely against it? He hadn’t even told me about it.
Dr. Patel picks up the phone on his desk and makes a call. “Yes, I can send her right down.”
I open my mouth to ask him a question, but he holds up his hand, expecting an argument.
“Those memories are trying to push themselves back in, and the way you are breathing tells me that you will not be ready for them. What will you do if you are in the car driving your daughter somewhere when it happens? The first part in taking care of a family, Audrey, is keeping yourself well. Otherwise how well can you care for them?”
His suggestion that I might be putting Daisy in danger sets my teeth on edge. I snatch the psychiatrist’s card from his desk and walk out to the hallway, my inhaler in hand.
Dr. Jefferies sits in front of me pressing his fingertips together. “So in your opinion, Audrey was unable to cope with either the aftermath of he
r accident or the stresses of her life, so she summoned you to take her place?”
I frown at him. “When you say it like that, you make it sound like I’m just an alternate personality.”
“I’m intrigued by your use of the phrase ‘just an alternate personality’, as if you would resent the idea of Audrey being the primary one.”
“I’m not an alternate personality.”
“That’s how you describe yourself.”
I force a smile. “Then I’m not explaining it very well.”
“And you feel that you’re in competition with Audrey for Jason’s affection?”
I look at him and throw my hands up in frustration. “I don’t know what to say. It isn’t easy waking up in a life you don’t know. Being married to someone you just met. Jason and I have been able to connect to each other as we are now and make a new life. I don’t know what’s wrong with that.”
“What’s wrong is that you’re experiencing psychosomatic ailments brought on by repressed anxiety. That you have renamed yourself because you seem to not want to be Audrey Gilbert at all. That you are experiencing jealousy towards the person you used to be, as if she’s another individual entirely. It’s incredibly uncommon for an amnesia sufferer to resist remembering and to create an alternate persona in defiance of the person they were. Unless there’s something they are bound and determined to forget.”
I feel my chest tightening. “I’m not doing it on purpose.”
“But you’d rather be Jane than Audrey.”
“Audrey sounds like a bit of a wimp to me.”
Dr. Jefferies smiles smugly and taps his pen on the table. “I understand. But if you take pride in thinking you’re stronger than she is, then wouldn’t you be able to handle knowing the information that you seem to think Audrey couldn’t?”
I tear out of the hospital so fast I’m surprised I don’t get pulled over. As soon as I get home, I call Jason to tell him what they said. When he doesn’t answer, I stomp into the house and slam the door.
Nobody has even considered what happens to me if Audrey flitters back into my brain. Where do I go? Do I float off with the wind?
My chest is caving in on itself. I dump my purse out on the floor to find the inhaler, and I put it to my mouth with shaking hands. Dr. Patel told me not to use it more than twice a day or else I could have heart problems. How am I supposed to breathe?
As soon as I can exhale again, I make my way downstairs to the storage room and start rifling through giant plastic storage bins. Daisy’s baby clothes and toys take up almost every box. There are wedding presents still in their packages, old silk flower arrangements, shelves of tools, bins full of batteries, and a stack of fishing poles propped in the corner. Jason and Audrey’s winter jackets, skiing equipment, and cardboard boxes full of magazines. Even a neon blue surf board with Thomas’s initials etched into the side. But nothing that can tell me anything about Audrey. I search the cabinet against the wall and find a metal box containing their birth certificates, passports, and marriage license. No yearbooks, no childhood pictures, no wedding album. It occurs to me that I’ve never seen a picture of the grandmother who raised her. Wouldn’t Audrey have kept it?
I head upstairs to the master bedroom, barely making it the two flights before I need to stop and sit down. I retrieve Audrey’s hatbox of journals from beneath the bed and open it, hoping to find clues in the remaining pages.
The journals are gone.
The box is now full of gardening magazines. My throat begins to close. I race into Jason’s study and call Dottie on her cell phone.
“Hi, honey. I’m just leavin’ work, can I—”
I wheeze into the phone. “Dottie, I need you. Help me.”
“I’m on my way.”
I take another short puff from the inhaler and stumble into Jason’s study. He saves everything; there has to be something in here that can help me. I look through the shelves of junk, the baseball cards, the boxes of old movie stubs and dozens of matchbooks that he’s collected from God knows where. Piles and piles of photos, signed vintage record albums, and old picture books from his childhood. I sit at his desk and carefully go through every drawer, one piece of paper at a time.
Where is her life?
Dottie runs into the room breathless. “What’s happening? I’ve been lookin’ all over the house for you.”
“I need to find something.” I try to shove a drawer back in its place but it gets stuck. “Damn it,” I say, struggling to pull it free.
She crouches down next to me. “You OK, honey?”
“No. I can’t breathe anymore.”
“We gotta get you downstairs and see if the oxygen machine is still here,” she says.
I tell her about my visit with Dr. Patel and the psychiatrist while I yank on the drawer. It won’t budge, so I get down on the floor and slide a letter opener into the track and pull as hard as I can. The drawer pops out onto my lap. I run my hand along the empty well and find a small, leather bound booklet and a white envelope held together by a rubber band.
Dottie sighs. “Looks like you mangled his checkbook.”
I open it up. “This isn’t a checkbook; it’s a balance register.” A piece of paper slides out with a name written in Jason’s handwriting.
Viki Dupree- 212 Diamond Wood Road, Deacon Hill, West Virginia.
“I thought we were done with all this,” Dottie says.
“The journals are missing. They’ve been replaced with magazines.” I point to the register. “Look at this. He’s paying this woman every month.” I flip back a few pages and check the dates. “He’s been paying her for fifteen years.”
“What?”
“He was paying her fifteen years ago for about eight months. Then the payments stop. They begin again this past June and go through last week.”
“June?”
“My accident was in June,” I whisper and look up at her.
She shakes her head. “Oh, Lordy.”
I open the white envelope and scan the letter inside. My blood goes cold. Someone, presumably Jason, requested an information search on a Wyatt Montgomery.
Dottie reads over my shoulder. “Wyatt Montgomery, alias Spencer Rudnick. If I were gonna make up a name it wouldn’t be Rudnick. Looks like he’s been arrested quite a few times. Known addresses are several places in Alaska; Sante Fe, New Mexico; Boulder, Colorado; Deacon Hill, West Virginia…”
“I’ve heard the name Wyatt, but he couldn’t have been arrested. Jason said he’s a police officer.” I put the paper down and look back at the note from the checkbook register. “Huh. That’s the same place in West Virginia as this woman who Jason is paying.”
Remembering something I saw when I was snooping earlier, I point to the armoire and ask Dottie to hand me the bowl of matchbooks. I dump it on the floor.
“Look.” I pick up a matchbook and hand it to her. “The Hornet’s Nest. Deacon Hill, West Virginia.”
“I don’t like where this is goin’,” she says.
“Please, Dottie, I need to know. Dr. Patel’s right…I need to help myself or I’m no good to anyone.”
“Can’t you just ask Dr. Gilbert?”
“If this was something he wanted me to know, do you think it would be hidden under a drawer? And who do you think replaced the journals?”
She looks back at me in silence.
“It isn’t like before,” I say. “I love him now. But if he’s in trouble, I should know.”
I arrange for my in-laws to take Daisy for a few days. I tell Vivienne I’m treating Dottie to a girl’s retreat and text Jason the same story. With five days left in his seven-day rotation, I know he’ll be happy I’m not home alone. Dottie and I pack up her car, and before she can talk me out of it, we head off to find some answers in Deacon Hill, West Virginia.
We drive all day and into the night, taking turns at the wheel. With each state we pass, I hate myself more for lying to everyone. Most of all Vivienne.
My breathing prob
lem calms down significantly the farther we go. Once we enter West Virginia, Dottie calls and reserves a large suite at a Residence Inn a few towns over from Deacon Hill where we practically fall into our beds in exhaustion after the eleven-hour drive.
Be ready to hit the road first thing in the morning, I text her from my bedroom.
I don’t know how you talk me into this stuff, she replies. Maybe I have a head injury.
You’re the best friend I have, I type.
That you know of, she responds with a winky face.
I close my eyes and think of Jason, wondering what he’s doing at this very moment.
~23~
Dottie slows to a stop in front of a hot pink mailbox spray-painted with the number 212. Beyond that, a long, white trailer slumps in the dirt, surrounded by patches of dead grass and weeds. A small, wooden porch with crooked steps and a metal roof frame the dingy yellow front door.
“You sure you wanna do this? You don’t have any idea what’s waitin’ in there for you,” she says.
“Nothing’s waiting for me. Nobody even knows I’m coming,” I say.
She snorts. “There’s always something waitin’ for somebody. Waitin’ to surprise you, shock you, change your future. Call it fate or karma or what have you. But right now, you’re in a place to decide if you really wanna invite whatever it is into your life.” She peers over the top of her sunglasses. “There could be a whole nother family in there. Another wife, love children. Though I doubt it,” she says under her breath, “because you know Dr. Gilbert would put them up better than this.”
“How can anything change my life when I don’t remember what my life is?”
Dottie wags a finger in my face. “Don’t pull that with me. You have a life. That’s another thing that’s waitin’ for you. You have a husband and a daughter who love you. But is that enough for you? Nooooo. No, you need to go diggin’ in a trailer to see what else may be waitin’ for you. And for what? What you find in there could ruin what you got back home.”
When I Was Jane Page 19
