by Sheila Lowe
Who the hell am I and what have I done?
On the other side of the bed, a computer desk caught her eye. So obsessed with her search for non-existent blood had she been that she had failed to pay attention to it. Or purposely shut her eyes to it.
All she had to do was walk over and switch it on, but the renewed dread she felt at the thought was not in her imagination.
You are so chickenshit.
Leave me alone.
Maybe it was an excuse to delay starting up the computer, but there was something else she needed to do first. She needed to face herself.
Closing her eyes, she drew a long, calming breath through her nose and held it for the count of four, releasing it gradually through her mouth. Where had she learned to do that?
She touched the landmarks of her features the way a blind person might. The skin was firm, young, the cheekbones prominent. She sighed and opened her eyes, as prepared as she was ever going to be.
Stepping into the bathroom, she turned to face a mirror that ran the length of the wall. Looking back at her was a waifish young woman with short honey blonde hair. Petite, perhaps five-three or four, she estimated her age at early to mid-twenties. Pretty enough, if wide, pain-filled eyes appealed to you. What was behind the anguish reflected in those cool blue windows to her soul? Her mind skittered away from the question as fast as a cockroach exposed to sudden light.
She took stock of the person Zach had identified as Jenna, gazing at her image for a time, skin so pale it could not have seen much sunlight in recent days.
Maybe she had not been lying when she told Zach she’d been sick. Maybe an illness had stolen her memory.
Maybe...For the space of half a breath, her mirror image seemed to shimmer and dissolve. Pain exploded in her head and a high-pitched sound like the whistle of a teakettle filled her ears. The edges of her vision darkened. The world tilted.
Grasping hold of the edge of the vanity, Jenna lowered herself onto the lip of the bathtub. The huge faceless figure she believed she had seen behind her could not have been real. There was no one in the bathtub, ready to attack her. She knew it logically, but still...
She kept her head between her knees until she was sure that the room had stopped revolving and her. Then, just to make sure, she slid the shower curtain open and checked.
Are you batshit crazy?
Maybe.
Well, it’s time to get acquainted with the crazy lady.
She started with the medicine cabinet. No matter how insignificant the contents—bottle of peroxide, box of Band Aids, vanilla flavored lip balm—they were all pieces of the puzzle that made up Jenna Marcott.
Like the kitchen, the bathroom was spotless, the pump on the bottle of liquid soap as fresh and uncaked as you’d find in a hotel room. Fern-colored towels on the wall rack folded into perfect rectangles.
I may be crazy, but at least I’m a clean kind of crazy.
In the top drawer of the vanity she found a toothbrush in a travel holder, a man’s electric razor, and an unopened packet of birth control pills.
Alarmed by the new questions the items raised, she slammed the drawer shut, not quite as certain that she wanted to continue her search.
Maybe if she just lay on the bed for a while she would go to sleep and wake up remembering who she was. Or, maybe she would wake up and find herself on the train again, stuck in a loop like Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day, waking up in precisely the same circumstances, day after day, month after month.
How can I remember an old movie but not my own name?
In the bedroom closet, a rack of stylish business suits, blouses, pants and tops, dressy dresses sorted according to color seemed to confirm her impression that she was a neat freak.
At the back of the closet was a man’s suit, size 42 Long. Dark charcoal, single-breasted Cerutti, maroon silk tie tucked in the pocket. An Egyptian cotton shirt in the lightest of blues shared a hanger with the jacket. Zach’s Mystery Man had good taste.
Where is he?
Someone accustomed to leaving his clothes at her apartment must be close enough to her that he would want to know something had happened to her.
Unless he already knows.
Did he have something to do with it?
Shoving aside that thought along with the other pile of things she didn’t want to think about, she turned to the lowboy chest of drawers: Tee-shirts, Levi’s, sweaters. Unfolding a pale lemon pullover, she pressed her nose into the soft cashmere, inhaling it.
Something about the faint flowery scent that clung to the wool made her want to weep. She pulled it over her head and hugged herself, comforted by its warmth.
The purse, a stylish zebra print clutch, was hidden in a faux leather storage cube next to the armchair. Blush, lipstick, a small palette of eye shadow—all high end products, no Maybelline—new-looking in their containers, although they had been used. A small wallet, ten crisp twenty dollar bills folded in precise halves seemed a lot of walking around money. Had she withdrawn it from the bank for her train trip?
But if the money is here, how did I pay for the train?
No shortage of plastic in the purse. Mastercard, Visa, bank debit card, Triple A road service, Barnes & Noble membership card, an upscale dress shop card, all embossed with the name Jenna Marcott.
Seeing the neat signatures written across the magnetic strip on the backs of the cards felt weird and creepy. Her signature was just one more piece that had broken off with her memory and was now as alien and disembodied as everything else in this waking nightmare.
The driver’s license yielded significant information: her birthday was January 1, renewal due next year.
I was born on New Year’s Day.
I look younger, but I’m twenty-seven.
The face in the license photo, which according to the date on the license was taken four years earlier, was marginally fuller and her hair was shoulder-length, but she had no trouble recognizing the girl from the bathroom mirror.
It was the address that came as a surprise: Speedway Avenue in Marina del Rey, not Thompson Boulevard in Ventura.
Marina del Rey.
Mental vibration: three-story apartment building, pink and beige paint scheme. Marina del Rey was in Los Angeles County, about sixty miles south of Ventura. That explained the moving cartons. How long had they been stacked in the corner of the living room unpacked? Just one more question in a whole pile of them.
In the bottom of the purse she found a key ring with four keys attached. One fit the apartment entry door, one was a car key. A small silver key with a round head might open a suitcase or a file cabinet. Another was stamped with the words “Duplication Prohibited.”
According to a laminated employee photo ID badge in the purse, Jenna Marcott was an employee of BioNeutronics Laboratory in Oxnard. She slipped the lanyard over her head and let the badge slide down between her small breasts, then waited impatiently for another image like the one she’d had of the Marina del Rey apartment.
Nothing.
What happened to me?
What in the name of God had so completely ripped away her past? She snatched the ID badge and hurled it to the floor, as if rejecting it gave her some kind of power. Power? That was a joke. She had about as much power as a newborn kitten.
Can you grieve for something you don’t remember having?
Her eyes filled with tears and spilled over, a trickle at first, then a torrent. Jenna wept for her lost self, for the part of her mind that must have been filled with memories of twenty-seven years. Would she ever get them back? She wept until her eyes were swollen almost shut.
At last, when there were no tears left, she dragged herself back to the bathroom and splashed cold water on her splotchy face, taking a certain malicious satisfaction in throwing the towel across the shower curtain rail, not bothering to fold it nicely as it had been.
Two more items remained in the zebra purse: a folded piece of graph paper and an appointment reminder card that piqued her intere
st. Jenna Marcott was scheduled to meet with Zebediah Gold, Ph.D., Psychologist on August twenty-ninth at three p.m. in Venice.
You don’t have to be crazy to see a shrink.
But it helps.
Stop it!
She set the card aside and unfolded the graph paper. A short message had been scrawled in bold black ink:
I’m warning you, Jen, back off. Now!!! You’ve got to give me more time.
Back off from what? Time for what? There was no signature. The note writer had expected her to recognize the handwriting, which of course, she didn’t.
Maybe she had told this Dr. Gold who had written this threatening note. Was there time for her to make their appointment, or had she already missed it? Her eyes shifted to the bedroom doorway, where the computer would tell her the date and so much more.
You have no choice.
I know.
The fear still clung to her, but a powerful need for information drove her to seat herself at the small desk. She leaned down to power on the CPU, knocking the mouse pad askew.
In moving it to line up with the edge of the keyboard tray, something that had been covered up was exposed.
The breath whooshed out of her so fast, she might have been sucker punched.
Against the metal keyboard tray, a reddish brown patch seemed to pulse and glow like neon. The whistling shrieked in her ears. Her vision dimmed. Fade to black.
f o u r
Her eyes opened onto darkness so complete that for a few hideous moments she was sure that she had lost not only her memory, but her ability to see. Then her pupils dilated and shadows morphed into furniture shapes. A slice of moonlight shone in from under the window shade above her. She was lying on something cold and hard, her head tender where it had hit the floor.
Was she still in the apartment? Or some other place? Reaching out her left hand, her fingers touched fabric. The bed skirt.
Still in the apartment.
While she had lain unconscious, dusk had become night. Disoriented, Jenna pulled herself to her feet and fumbled her way to the nightstand on the other side of the bed. She switched on the lamp and looked around. Everything seemed normal.
What happened?
The stain on the keyboard tray.
I didn’t hallucinate that stain.
True, the stain was not the river of blood she had expected to find. But it was evidence. Of—what? The question hung there, mocking her. Not rust, not paint. Where had that spot of blood come from? She stared across the bed at the computer as if it were a malevolent transformer robot that could unfurl wings and fly across the room to attack her.
Whose blood is it?
Pulling up the sleeves of the yellow sweater, Jenna examined her hands and arms, rotating them so she could see for herself that the smooth skin had no cuts or abrasions.
She checked her neck in the bathroom mirror. Shrugged out of the sweater and T-shirt and inspected her torso, pivoting and stretching.
She stepped up onto the lip of the bathtub and twisted to view in the mirror the unmarked flesh of her back. Kicked off the tennis shoes; unzipped her Levi’s and let them drop to the floor. No cuts or bruises on the pale legs.
Whose blood is it?
For just a flicker as she stood shivering in her underwear, she considered running upstairs to Zach Smith’s apartment and banging on his door. She would tell him the truth and he would—No. This was not the sort of truth you could share with just anyone.
Jenna padded barefoot to the kitchen and tore a damp paper towel from the roll. The small act of scrubbing the stain away lessened its initial impact and made her feel a tiny bit better. But she took care to fold the paper towel inward so that she would not see the transferred blood, when she flushed it down the toilet. Once that was done, there were no more excuses.
“Okay, let’s see what day it is,” she said aloud, testing her voice. She sat at the computer and moved the mouse to wake up the monitor, relieved to find that the date was August twenty-eight and her appointment with Zebediah Gold, PhD was scheduled for tomorrow afternoon.
Almost today, according to the computer clock—it was a few minutes before midnight. Unconscious for more than five hours.
Had she gotten up and gone somewhere else during that time? Engaged in some activity that she’d now forgotten? No. Waking up in the same spot where she’d blacked out convinced her that she had not moved in all that time.
She started with the Documents folder, but found it empty. The Email Inbox, Outbox, Sent folders, all empty.
Where are my emails? My data files?
The coincidence of her computer being as bereft of information as her own memory just didn’t add up. Clicking from one folder to another, she raced through possibilities, rooting around for any sign that the computer had ever been used. Maybe it was brand new and she hadn’t yet saved any personal files. Maybe it had suffered a virus attack that wiped out everything on the hard drive.
Maybe everything on it was deliberately erased.
In the Windows All Programs list, she found basic office programs installed on the system—a word processor, a spreadsheet, an email client—nothing more.
On top of the monitor a web cam stared back at her like an evil eye. There was no light glowing on the camera, which indicated that the software that would visually connect her to another computer was turned off. But it felt like it was looking right at her, spying on her movements. She reached up and unhooked the device, laid it face down on the computer desk. Then, in a burst of overkill, she bent down and unplugged the USB cable, too.
A few minutes later, standing in the shower, Jenna still felt like an intruder in somebody else’s life. It would not have surprised her if someone had unlocked the door and come marching in, demanding to know what she was doing there pretending to be Jenna Marcott.
After drying off, riffling through drawers of methodically folded cotton knit shorts and tops gave her the sensation of shopping at a store where everything was free.
It also felt like digging into someone else’s underwear, but with no other choice, she picked out a sleep shirt and threw it on.
The bottom drawer of the nightstand contained what she classified in her head as “special lingerie.” Did the man Zach called “Mr. Mystery” appreciate the black silk thigh-high stockings, the sexy push-up bras, the barely-there thongs? She wondered when they would meet, and what she would say when they did. Hi, honey. Did you have anything to do with my amnesia?
On the bottom of the drawer was a flattish package loosely folded in gift wrap and sealed with adhesive tape. It seemed an odd place to leave a gift, unless she had hidden it there, intending to surprise the mystery man.
Reaching in, she took hold of the package, but something sharp stabbed her forefinger and she dropped it back in the drawer. A tiny red balloon bloomed on her fingertip.
Acid surged into her throat and she ran for the john, retching until the dry heaves left her sweaty and quivering all over.
Once her stomach had calmed down and she was able to force the bile back down her throat, she searched in the medicine cabinet for some tweezers and eased out the glass splinter. Her finger burned like fire.
She held it under the cold faucet until the red water ran clear and asked herself why, when she had expected to see a whole lot of blood in the apartment, the actual sight of blood affected her so profoundly.
In case there more glass hid in folds of the package, Jenna held it over the sink and gingerly parted the wrappings.
What if it’s a can of worms?
You want to know, don’t you?
I don’t know. I don’t know.
You have to open it.
Yes.
Inside she found a splintered cherry wood picture frame, its cardboard backing, and a photograph ripped into a dozen pieces.
Taking the pieces to the dining table she laid them out as if they were a jigsaw puzzle, shifting them around until she located the matching ones. Two of the edges bisected a m
an’s face.
The size 42 Long suit.
The big date Zach had mentioned
Mr. Mystery.
Even with the jagged tear through his face, the man had movie star-quality looks. Soulful brown eyes you could drown in. Dark hair threaded with silver, trimmed close to his head. The slight growth of facial hair was more macho than professorial, like someone on vacation who hadn’t needed to shave for a few days.
Dwarfed by his height, Jenna stood beside him with his arm draped possessively around her shoulders. Though she could tell he was older than she by more than a few years, they made a striking couple by any standard.
In the strapless black cocktail dress, with diamond studs sparkling in her earlobes, a matching pendant against her throat, Jenna had to admit, she looked pretty breathtaking herself. Was sweeping her hair into the sophisticated up do an attempt to close the age gap? When had she cut it short? Judging by Zach’s surprise, pretty recently. How had this man reacted? Did he know?
When did I look that happy? How long ago?
For all she knew, it could have been last week, or it could have been a year ago.
She gazed at the restored photograph for a long time, trying with all her might to recognize the man. In the end, though, she had to concede that she would not have been able to pick him out of a crowd as someone she knew.
The dark, soft-focus background looked like a bar or restaurant. Her photo self smiled up at her companion with an intensity that bordered on obsession. Was that what had gone wrong between them? Had she been too adoring, too clingy, and he had dumped her?
Or, had he cheated on her? The man’s attention seemed to be fastened on something or someone beyond the camera—another woman? Even if that were so, Jenna had a hard time imagining the kind of emotion that would drive one to destroy what by all appearances had been a happy memory. Why not just throw the picture away instead of saving all the broken pieces in the lingerie drawer?
A reminder? A symbol?
What had caused her to destroy the frame along with the photograph? From where she sat now, it seemed overkill.
