by T. L. Hart
“Cotton Annie.”
“Your mother is named Cotton Annie?”
“No.” I laughed. “I’m Cotton. Daddy calls me it ’cause my hair is white like cotton. Get it?”
“But your real name is Jennifer Ann?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Ann Jennifer?”
“There’s no Jennifer at all. My whole real name is Bailey Ann Claymore, but you can call me Cotton ’cause you’re nice.”
“Cotton?” She clearly hadn’t been expecting that name. “All right. Cotton, I want you to listen to me. One.”
“I can count to a thousand, if I wanted to. Daddy says—”
“I’m sure you can. Two. You’re coming up now. You are safe, Jennifer.”
“My name’s not Jennifer.”
“You’re almost awake now.”
“My name’s Cotton.”
“Three. Wide-awake now. Back in my office. Open your eyes, Jennifer.”
“My name’s Cotton.”
I heard the words from my own lips, and they felt like the truth.
“Holy shit, Dr. Carey. I know you’re going to think I’ve gone crazy, but my name is Cotton Claymore.” I swallowed hard, trying to clear the choking lump at the back of my throat. “I don’t know this Jennifer Strickland.”
“Just take a few deep breaths and try to give yourself a little while to relax.” Dr. Carey sat staring at me as if I were a total stranger, and God knows this is getting pretty strange. “You are Jennifer Strickland. I’m not sure what just happened, but you can’t be Cotton Claymore.”
“Maybe I am. Maybe there was a mix-up at the hospital when I was hurt…Maybe I have amnesia or something weird like that.”
“There is something strange going on, but it isn’t amnesia. And you are not Cotton.”
“How can you be so sure? You’ve only been treating me for a few months. You only think I’m Jennifer Strickland because that’s who I told you I am. Maybe—”
“Because I knew Cotton Claymore very well. She’s been dead for more than six months. She was murdered.”
Chapter Five
“Not dead,” I whispered. Shifting walls, sliding certainties. “Not dead. I’m here.”
“Yes, Jennifer. You’re here. You’re safe Jennifer.” Dr. Carey kept repeating the name like a talisman.
“I’m not Jennifer.” Things in my head weren’t as sure as my words. Bottom’s falling away like an elevator dropping out of control. “Who is Jennifer?” I asked, begging for reassurance, not knowing quite what I wanted the answer to be.
“Jennifer Strickland,” comes the quiet, certain reply. “That’s you.”
“I don’t think so.” Elevator falls and I want to hold on to something and scream for help. “I think…I…” I don’t scream, though; just wait to hit the bottom floor, bracing myself for the inevitable. “Then who is Cotton? How is she here?”
I waited, clenching my fists as the ground rushes upward. A lurch, a grab low in my gut—ground floor, solid landing. Still breathing.
I looked around the room, silent except for the echo of my question. Dr. Carey is sitting in her chair, pen in hand, a very strange look on her face. Checking me out. Okay this is familiar. I remember this.
“Tell me please,” I begged. “Who is Cotton Claymore?”
“She was a friend, a colleague of mine,” she said. “A psychologist.”
“Was?”
“She was killed.”
“Murdered? You said murdered.”
She nodded. I closed my eyes, hoping the darkness would blot out the confusion scrambling my brain. For a few seconds the loss and disorientation that has made up my life had lifted and there was a person I thought was me. “Dead? I can’t be dead. I’d know.”
“You aren’t dead Jennifer.” Smooth, silky shrink tones, reassuring as hell usually, I’d bet. “Jennifer, I want you to breathe and relax for a couple of minutes. Reorient yourself. See where you are right now. Feel where you are.”
“Okay. While I’m orienting, you be thinking up an explanation for what happened here.” I shut my eyes and counted slowly to ten before speaking again. “Ready, set, go. Why am I remembering a dead woman’s childhood? A dead woman you know and I’ve never heard of?”
“I’m not sure what happened. I don’t intend to lie to you about that.” Dr. Carey tapped her pen on the edge of the legal pad and fidgeted slightly in her chair, the first sign of uncertainty I’d ever seen her display. “Perhaps you knew Cotton Claymore too. Isn’t it possible that she’s someone you’ve forgotten since your accident?”
“No.”
“Don’t you think you should consider the possibility, Jennifer? She was a very well-known figure in this city. There were articles about her in the papers; she was on the news from time to time. It makes more sense that you’ve forgotten her than…” She stalled, shaking her head. “I don’t know what to call this episode. I’ve never come up against this kind of experience before.”
“I think it’s fair for me to second that, but for all I know, maybe Jennifer Strickland made a habit of thinking she was dead people before the accident. Maybe we should do it over and see who else is hiding out in my crowded little skull.”
“I can safely assure you that no one is hiding in your brain. There is a reasonable explanation for this aberration.”
“And that would be found on what page of The Bedside Hypnotist?”
“It’s a good sign that you’re able to joke about this,” Dr. Carey said, having regained her composure enough to scribble on the notepad. “I know it was confusing and upsetting, but—”
“Confusing, yes, but it gives me hope that I’m going to be all right.”
“I don’t quite understand your thought process. Can you explain how this makes you feel more hopeful?”
“It probably won’t make sense to anyone but me.”
“Don’t try to defend or analyze it. Just go on.”
“For months now, I’ve only had memories other people gave me. An identity someone said was me. Jennifer Strickland’s memory was from Gregory, from friends, from clues around my house. There was nothing I had in my own right, nothing except a fragment of crazy dreams.”
Dr. Carey was listening, but how could she really understand? I didn’t really understand it myself.
“I know it’s weird.” I struggled to find the words that could make us both understand. “It’s strange, but when I was Cotton I felt real. I remembered a mother and a father. I had a past that was in my head without any help. Things are fuzzy again right now, but for the first time I can recall, I know who I am. I don’t know how to explain it, but I think Cotton Claymore has a lot more to do with me than Jennifer.”
“I’m going to be honest with you, Jennifer.” Dr. Carey wasn’t going to let go of Jennifer that easily. “I’m not going to pretend to have a scientific answer, but there has to be a rational way to explain what happened today.”
The good doctor believed in her science. I, myself, was having a few problems making the theories fit the potsherds we’d unearthed in my brain sediment. Maybe I’m sort of a psychiatric Missing Link.
“I think we need to stop for today. Are you comfortable with that?” I nodded and she continued. “I have a couple of people I’d like to consult with about our session. Can you meet with me again tomorrow?”
“Double sessions now? I guess since you’ve had two of me today, you ought to charge both of us.” Reality was in serious flux and I was crazy for sure, because I was finding this funny. “I think now is the time you start earning your fee, Doc. I’ll see you—we’ll see you—tomorrow.”
On the way home from Dr. Carey’s office, I was so excited by the plan forming in my head that I forgot to be nervous driving myself around town. My neurologist had given me clearance to drive the car and on the way over, I had felt like the Beamer was a tank that I was maneuvering through a sea of land mines. Now I was on automatic pilot, slipping in and out of traffic with the unthinking skill of a
race car driver, my mind on only one thing—this living ghost, this familiar stranger, Cotton Claymore.
The house was empty when I got home, pristine and chilled to a perfect seventy-two degrees against the humid June day of early Dallas summer. Gregory was still at his office, I presumed.
I dumped my bag on the kitchen table and grabbed a soda from the refrigerator, then headed directly for the home office/library tucked behind the den. I had a mission and a few precious private hours in which to accomplish it. There was no way I was going to try to explain this to Gregory.
The desktop computer sat like a high-tech oracle, enshrined in a wooden-shelved grotto, waiting for the touch of a high priestess to perform the mystical rites. I approached it with uncertainty, a novice daring to summon the knowledge of the gods. I, who barely know how to work the gadgets in the kitchen, was more than a little intimidated.
“Think of it as a space-age toaster,” I mumbled, punching the power setting to “on.” It hummed instantly to life, presenting me with a display of options, neatly laid out in invitingly simple little pictures. I touched the mouse and watched as a blinking arrow skittered around the brightly lit screen, then stopped and clicked with false confidence.
“Okay Magic Genie. Let’s get cooking.”
Either I have forgotten my abilities as a computer whiz—which is always a possibility—or Gregory had installed some pretty foolproof shortcuts on the road to the Internet. Whichever, in an amazingly short half hour, I managed to access the back files of the Dallas Morning News.
I triumphantly typed in Claymore, Bailey Ann. Then my courage failed completely, and I sat with my finger poised, unable to carry out the simple double click that would achieve my goal. Cotton Claymore, whoever and whatever she was to me, beckoned, and I sat frozen, scared to even breathe too hard, desperate to know, terrified to find out.
What if…?
I tapped the mouse one click.
What if…I didn’t even know what question followed what if. What if I read everything and none of it makes any more sense than it does now? What if I read it and something makes sense? What if I’m just plain crazy and either answer leaves me someplace lost and as confused as I have been for months? What if…?
“What the hell! I can’t be any worse off than I am right now.”
Click double click, and the headline screams in heavy black type: PROMINENT PSYCHOLOGIST MURDERED—DR. BAILEY “COTTON” CLAYMORE BLUDGEONED TO DEATH.
I jerked my finger from the mouse and scrambled out of my chair as if distance would protect me from the unexpected jolt of terror. I was gulping ragged splinters of air into my lungs, trying to stop the knot of panic in my chest from erupting in a scream. This is what I was searching for. It’s not as if it was a revelation.
“Don’t be such an idiot. Stop it.” I ordered myself to calm down. “You knew she was dead. Read the damn story.”
I glanced back at the screen, seeing the article in smaller type below the banner headline. Seeing it, but maintaining a distance that safely blurred the type until I could stop trembling enough to read it. A few deep breaths, I thought, and everything would be all right.
I forgot about nerves, forgot about breathing completely when I saw the photograph at the bottom of the page. Even in the grainy black and white newspaper reproduction on the screen, I recognized that face.
No matter how different it was from the one I saw in the bathroom mirror this morning, I knew that was my face under the name Cotton Claymore. My face.
Chapter Six
I floated up from a deep sleep, anticipating the day as if it were Christmas morning without quite knowing why. It was early enough that the room was dark as a cave and I was the proverbial bat, scoping out my surroundings with senses sharpened by limited sight. Sliding one bare leg out from under the cover, I used my body radar to check things out. I stretched; I sniffed the cool air; I waited for an answering vibration.
This is a stranger’s room, not my own. Sheets too silky, mattress too firm. No lingering scent of spicy sandalwood or earthy hint of sage. No soft and warm body tangled in the covers on my right. Whose room am I in? Whose room am I missing? Who am I in which room? I ask as I stumble toward being fully awake.
Under the sheets my hands touch skin, skimming breasts and flat stomach, moving lower to stroke curly silky hair. This body is mine, whoever I am. It feels touch and tenderness and responds without needing facts or memories. My thighs close around my hand and with a shudder of self-love, sleep reclaims the darkness. I dream of muskrat love and sandalwood.
The sun wakes me, lighting a room unlike the dream room, beige and modern as a spread in Architectural Digest. Sleepy satisfaction morphs into wide-awake anxiety.
Something has changed, is changing, in my mind. Today is different in some way than in the weeks before. I have a restlessness, a furtive gnawing as real as pain, but more diffuse. It curls in my stomach, just under my breastbone and low in my pelvis, tension so acute it is almost excitement. I feel it in my head, too, a cousin of the memory loss from the accident, but a superior relative, mocking me with hidden knowledge. There are secrets I know that I can’t tell myself. Or that I won’t.
Then I remember all the hours yesterday spent browsing the newspaper files. Haunting and oddly familiar stories about Cotton Claymore, her life and death. The unsolved murder left me shaken and confused. I ran hard copies of all the articles and sealed them in a large brown envelope, trying to stuff all the questions I had inside until I could dump my literal and figurative load on Dr. Carey’s solid and sensible shoulders.
That still sounded workable today, so I took a shower, pulled my wet hair back in a ponytail, then rummaged through my drawers looking for running shorts and a plain T-shirt. All I could find was a khaki pair, starched to cardboard, but the white tee was passably soft. I have to admit to a small thrill of pleasure at leaving the neatly folded rows in purposeful chaos.
There were several pairs of sneakers, all so white they could have been new, lined up on the closet floor. I picked a pair at random, hoping to get out of the house before Gregory was up. No such luck.
He was standing just inside the front doorway, a cup of coffee in one hand and the newspaper still in its plastic bag in the other. He looked startled to see me.
“I haven’t seen you up this early since…” He made a show of looking at his watch. “Now that I think about it, I’ve never seen you up this early.” The top-to-toe appraisal he gave me was clinical, and the expression on his face made me feel I had failed whatever test he had administered. “Where are you going?”
“Out for a run.”
“Excuse me?” He smiled, I swear to God. “In case you’ve forgotten—”
I was wrong. It wasn’t a smile, but an oily smirk. “You don’t run.”
“What do I do for exercise?”
“You don’t play golf,” he continued in a professorial singsong. “You don’t play tennis. You don’t—”
“What do I do?” I interrupted his litany of my inadequacies. “For exercise. There are five pairs of sneakers in my closet. I must do something.”
“You do Pilates. The shoes go with your leotards for that. Oh—you do yoga.”
“Not anymore,” I snapped, embarrassed at the very idea of having to ask him. “Starting today I run.”
I left him standing there and tore off down the block at a full lope, head held high, ponytail whacking damply between my shoulder blades. Pilates my ass.
Two blocks later I was clinging to a street sign, gasping for breath, a tearing pain in my left side. Obviously I was going to have to build up to running. What made me think this was a good idea? After a couple of minutes sucking in air, the pain abated and I started walking—slowly, but away from the house. The damned shoes pinched every step.
I was limping by the time I got back to the house. Limping and proud of myself and thinking of nothing more than a second shower. I guess that’s why I didn’t pay much attention to the old car pulle
d up to the curb in front except to notice that the faded blue paint would look better with a wash and wax.
I was a few steps away, about to make the turn up the walkway when the driver’s door swung open, effectively blocking my path. Instead of stopping, I sidestepped onto the lawn, not comfortable with getting too close to the strange blond-haired man who unfolded his lanky frame from the open door and stood staring expectantly in my direction.
“Hey, Jennifer. Wait up.”
I hesitated, sizing up the situation as quickly as my brain could work, scanning through my memory banks for a glimpse of this face, a hint as to who this affable stranger was and how he might fit in my world. No clue. He was new to me.
“Sorry it took me so long to get to Dallas,” he said, tucking the tail of his T-shirt into the waistband of his jeans as he walked closer. “You’re looking good, honey. From what I heard you were next door to dead.”
Well, at least he had his facts straight, although who he was and how he knew were still a mystery. I didn’t want to come across as a dim bulb, but he opened his arms, obviously intent on hugging me, and I wasn’t quite ready to go blindly into his embrace. Being polite was one thing, but still.
“Do I know you?”
“Know me?” He laughed, showing gorgeous teeth and crinkles at the corners of his very blue eyes. “Don’t tell me a knock on the noggin has made you forget your favorite cousin.”
Before I could protest, he grabbed me and twirled me around a couple of times and gave me a kiss right on the lips. Nothing too fresh, but not something that made me want to repeat the experience either.
“Your kissing cousin.” He put me down and I backed far enough away to reestablish my comfort zone, then one more step backward to make it clear. “Your favorite cousin. Actually your only cousin.”
“Sorry.” I shook my head and tapped a finger against my temple. “I’m still having gaps in here since the accident. Could you tell me exactly who you are? Are we close?”
“You aren’t kidding, are you, Jenny?” There was a skeptical half-shrug, followed by a grin that could only be described as devilishly charming. “Not even a tiny memory?” When I shook my head, he reached out and gave me another big hug, not seeming to notice he was the only one participating. “Let’s go inside for a cup of coffee and I’ll remind you how wonderful I am. Remind you of our plans.”
