“What color do you want your room to be?” Belinda had asked. “Maybe a restful blue?”
“I’ve done enough resting for a lifetime,” Emily said with a laugh. “Leave it the way it is.”
“I can’t do that. The room is a god-awful shade of purple.”
“Purple? Why would you have a purple room? Oh,” Emily said, finally understanding. “Are you giving me Chelsea’s old room?”
Belinda nodded.
“Are you sure? I could get my own apartment, you know. Thanks to Mortimer, I have the funds.”
“Absolutely not. You’re staying with me. At least for a while. And I want to do whatever I can to make you feel comfortable in the room.”
“Good. Then leave it purple. I never mentioned this before, but I think purple is a fantastic color.”
She also assured Belinda that she found Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins to be cute, not creepy, and didn’t mind his visage leering down from the wall.
It wasn’t as if she were going to be staying at her friend’s house forever, only until she found work and became accustomed to living outside the hospital walls. Besides, Emily had a strong suspicion her friend’s life would be changing in a significant way soon.
It had been a little over a month since Mortimer Stiles had made his appearance in Emily’s hospital room, and he and Belinda had become what Belinda called an “instant couple.” (Just add some heavy groping and stir. No heating necessary, Belinda joked.) They engaged in the kind of intense phone conversations only new lovers have, private talks that stretched into the wee hours of night. When her son, Andy, stayed with his father, Mortimer would usually sleep over at Belinda’s house.
“Don’t worry. I’ll cut out the adult slumber parties as soon as you move in,” Belinda said with a wink.
“I don’t want you to change your habits just because I’m moving in,” Emily protested.
“It’s fine. Helping you get your life in order is my main priority,” Belinda insisted, but Emily still worried she was going to be in the way.
The air outside was more biting than crisp, and Emily ducked her head against the wind. Winter, with its watery gray skies and straw-colored lawns, seemed to have trundled into Alabama overnight.
As she haltingly made her way across the leaf-strewn grounds, the smell of wood smoke spiraled into her nostrils, awakening memories of velvety hot chocolate, scratchy wool sweaters, popping fires, and something else: a voice. It was dusk, and a mother called her daughter into the house.
Emily stopped walking and stood motionless, aching to hear the voice again. “Susan!” This time the voice was more insistent, and she envisioned a young child running up a winding path toward a small white clapboard house. The window panes blazed with the promise of hot soup, a lit hearth, and the comforting clatter of dishes. She wanted nothing more than to burst into the toasty house, shuck off her shoes, and walk stocking-foot into the kitchen, where she’d peer into pots and snitch a curl of carrot from the cutting board.
“Coming, Mother,” she whispered.
Even though it was seven a.m., it was still dark out when Emily took a final tour of her hospital room, looking for any personal effects she might have forgotten to pack. Yesterday, after her walk, she’d retrieved her money from the hospital safe, and now it lined the bottom of her oversized purse. A sealed envelope addressed to Belinda was on the chair beside the bed. She closed her mind to her friend’s reaction when she found the letter.
“You’re doing the right thing,” she whispered to herself, satisfied she hadn’t forgotten anything. When she closed the door and stepped into the hall, she almost ran into a new nurse named Laura, who was pushing a breakfast cart.
“Careful,” Laura said with a smile, her auburn ponytail bobbing behind her. “Or you really will have egg on your face.” Her glance registered the tied-up pillowcase Emily was carrying, bulging with her meager belongings.
“Running away from home?” she asked.
“I’m meeting Belinda downstairs,” Emily said in explanation, even though it was a lie. Belinda wasn’t due to pick her up for at least two more hours.
“Don’t be a stranger,” the nurse said cheerily as Emily headed toward the bank of elevators down the hall.
Emily nervously exited the building, half expecting someone to stop her. The taxi she’d ordered was idling outside under the pale yellow glare of a streetlight, the smoke from its exhaust mingling with the diminishing darkness. She hobbled to the cab, cane in hand, and asked to be driven to the bus station. With no identification, it was the only form of transportation she could use.
The cab felt like a safe cozy cave, lit by the numbers on the meter and the green phosphorescence of the dash. A barely audible strain of music droned from an easy-listening station on the radio, and the interior smelled like sausage biscuits, likely from the cabbie’s breakfast. Condensation had formed on the window, and she traced her real name in the scrim of fog:
Susan.
She no longer wanted to be connected with the drug user and prostitute named Emily. She still didn’t remember that period in her life—a time when she’d been so disconnected from her true nature she’d used a false name—nor did she ever want to remember.
“I’m so sorry, Belinda,” she whispered as the cab bumped through the downtown streets of Birmingham.
Her friend would certainly search for her at the bus station, but with Emily’s two-hour head start, it would be impossible for Belinda to know which of the five morning buses she’d boarded since she was now traveling under her real name.
She hated to cause Belinda worry, but now that most of her memories had returned, she wanted to put her horrific past behind her. She would have preferred a proper goodbye, but she knew Belinda would try to talk her out of leaving.
The longer she stayed in Birmingham, the more likely her bad memories would leap out of the bushes like the bogeyman. She had no desire to recall the events that led up to her coma. Ever.
Thirty-Five
All of the major newspapers carried the details of Susan’s accident on their front pages, and CNN featured updates of the story every half hour. Not that there was a lot to report. Susan was unconscious and not expected to ever wake, and Ryan refused to speak to the press. The only people Ryan had seen since Susan’s collision with the gravel truck were his sister and Wanda Myers.
The three of them had congregated in the small gloomy chapel attached to the hospital. Darcy’s face was slack, and she kept clutching the side of the carved wooden pew to steady herself. She was still reeling from hearing the truth about Susan, and was clearly doped up on all kind of meds.
“I swear on my mother’s grave that your family’s secret will die with me,” Wanda said in a shaky voice, holding up her hand as if making a pledge.
“Thank you, Wanda,” Ryan said. His eyes were swollen from crying—not for the woman who was barely alive in the hospital, but for his Susan. She was completely lost to him, and the only person who knew exactly what happened to her couldn’t speak.
Ryan returned home from the hospital with a single mission in mind: to eradicate any trace of Susan’s imposter. He tackled the closets, stuffing newly bought dresses and shoes into twenty-five-gallon garbage bags. The colors were garish, the detailing flashy—every outfit the woman had ever purchased screamed, “Look at me!” How could he ever have believed that monster was Susan?
In the very back of the closet, puddled on the floor, was a sleeveless blue sheath, the dress Susan had worn the night they’d first made love. Most of her old clothes had been relegated to the attic by the imposter; she must have overlooked this piece. He dropped to his knees and brought the fabric to his face. “Oh, Susan,” he whispered, rocking back and forth on his heels. “What did she do to you, sweetheart?”
The phone interrupted his reverie. He crawled to the bed
side table and consulted the caller ID. It was Susan’s physician on the other end.
“I’m calling about your wife,” the doctor said. “She’s regained consciousness and wants to see you.”
Thirty-Six
Emily, a.k.a. Susan Sims, alighted from the Trailways bus, her butt aching from too much sitting, and arrived at the last place she’d remembered living, Devon’s Island, South Carolina.
“Susan Sims, this is your life,” she whispered to herself as she entered a bus station, which smelled of dirty feet and was the size of the average person’s living room.
It was misting outside, and the windows of the station clouded up as she slipped some quarters into the slot of a pay phone to call a cab.
A yellow-and-black checkered car arrived and took her to the Winchester Hotel on Bay Street. As she paid the driver, she spied the green-and-white striped awning of the coffee shop two blocks from the hotel. On nice days she’d sat outside under one of the umbrellas with an iced coffee sniffing the sea air. Three doors down from the coffee shop was the dusty and narrow antiquarian bookstore where she’d stocked up on battered editions of Jane Austen novels.
She entered the lobby of the turn-of-the-century hotel and waited at an imposing carved-oak check-in desk, which had real keys on brass tags hanging on the back wall. If it weren’t for the blue glow of the clerk’s computer, Susan could have sworn she’d time-traveled back to the late 1800s.
The clerk asked for a credit card, and Susan fibbed and told him her wallet had been stolen. She paid for the room charges in cash and was asked to leave a hundred-dollar deposit for incidentals. Then she went into the gift shop to purchase something to read. The magazines in the rack out front all looked several weeks out of date, so she chose a Sue Grafton mystery instead.
If the lobby was circa 1898, her room was pure seventies, with squat lamps, green shag carpet, and a crudely rendered seagull print hanging above the bed.
She dropped her bundle of belongings on the burnished orange bedspread and glanced out the window. The drizzle had stopped, so she descended the twisting staircase back to the lobby and walked seven blocks until she came to a brick office building with a sign out front that read “For rent or sale.”
She peered through the smudged windows. There wasn’t a trace left of her veterinary practice—just a few empty cardboard boxes. Everything had been sold or discarded, but what did she expect after so much time?
She perched on the stoop outside the front of the building, trying to decide on her next plan of action. She didn’t know why she’d come to Devon’s Island other than that it was the last place she remembered as being home. She’d only moved to South Carolina to be near her grandmother, and Lois had been dead for almost two years.
She finally had the answers to many of the questions about her life before the coma. She’d been adopted when she was less than a week old. Her father abandoned the family when Susan was eight. They’d been living in Asheville, North Carolina at the time, and her mother, Barbara, who used to baked cookies once a week and make shadow puppets on the wall, took to her bedroom every night with a bottle of gin. Susan was expected to take on a lot of responsibility at a young age. By the time she turned nine, she was in charge of most of the household chores, from standing on a step stool, stirring the orange powder from boxed macaroni and cheese into cooked noodles, to stuffing heavy heaps of wet bed sheets into the dryer.
As a kid, Susan had precious little free time and few friends. Her companions were her pets. Barbara, perhaps out of guilt for being such a lackadaisical mother, allowed her daughter as many animals as she wanted as long as she took full responsibility for them, including buying their food and paying for their shots. Susan’s love of pets eventually led to a post-grad degree in veterinary medicine. She’d intended to set up a practice in Asheville, but her plans changed when her mother died of cirrhosis of the liver two months after Susan had earned her diploma.
“I don’t know what it is with the women in this family, but we have lousy luck with men,” said her grandmother Lois, whose husband had also left her for another woman. Susan made a promise to herself that she’d never be like her mother.
After Barbara’s funeral, Lois begged Susan to move to South Carolina. As an incentive, she offered to financially back her practice. Her grandmother was her only living family member, so Susan agreed to make the move.
Susan settled into her grandmother’s house intending to stay only until she could find an apartment of her own, but she quickly grew to cherish the first taste of family life she’d experienced since her father had left. She and Lois had homemade banana nut muffins and strong black coffee each morning, chatting over the daily paper and watching the birds and squirrels squabble over the feeders on the back porch. Susan lived with Lois for three years, until her grandmother died in her sleep.
One of her last recollections was meeting in the lawyers’ office for the closing on Lois’s house. She’d already moved into a rental home with her dog, Mutsy, and had planned to continue to work until the end of the summer. That was where her memories stopped. Where was Mutsy? And how had she ended up roaming the streets of Birmingham, Alabama? She knew her grandmother had left her some money, but obviously she’d run through it, or she wouldn’t have been trading sex for drug money.
You might never recover the memories of the year before you were assaulted.
Those were Dr. Perry’s exact words. Susan had lost a little more than a year.
“Susan, is that you?” She nearly toppled off the stoop of the building at the sound of her name.
“It’s me, Rochelle.” A puffy-faced woman with choppy bangs lumbered up the sidewalk. Rochelle Jenkins. She worked as a receptionist in the doctor’s office next door to Susan’s practice. Sometimes she and Susan strolled to the coffee shop and grabbed a pimiento-cheese sandwich together. “Gosh, it’s been ages.”
“Rochelle,” Susan said softly, trying to find her voice. “Great to see you.”
Rochelle reached the stoop and stared down at Susan. She had to be nearing thirty but looked far younger, with a round face and sulky oversized lips.
“Good golly, you’re thin. Have you been doing Paleo?”
“Paleo?”
“The diet?”
Susan wasn’t familiar with the Paleo Diet, but she knew it couldn’t be nearly as effective as the IV diet she’d been on for so long.
“I’ve been sick,” Susan said, touching her cane. “But I’m better now.”
“Checking out your old stomping grounds, I see,” Rochelle said, looking the building up and down. “Thinking about setting up shop again? You’ll have some competition. There’s a new vet on Broad Street.”
“Really? I hadn’t actually decided—”
Rochelle grinned, revealing a bit of salad wedged between her front teeth. “Did you bring your fellow with you? I’d love to meet him.”
“Fellow?” Susan flinched.
“The guy you moved away for. You were so mysterious about him at the time.”
Susan stood silent for a moment, her lips slightly parted as if she were about to speak. So there had been a man in her life after all, and she’d moved to Birmingham to be near him. Obviously the relationship had gone horribly wrong.
“We broke up,” Susan said quickly. “It’s just me now.”
“That’s too bad,” Rochelle said. “You were over the moon for him. Didn’t seem like you at all, you picky thing. Are you moving back to Devon’s Island?”
“I don’t think so.”
Rochelle was right. It sounded out of character for her to pick up and run off with a man. She’d always been so cautious when it came to romance. Who was the guy? Had her love for him led to drug abuse? Had she ended up repeating the mistakes of her mother after all?
Rochelle glanced at her watch. “I gotta get back to work. How long
are you going to be around? We could have lunch. Just like old times.”
“Maybe we’ll do that,” Susan said.
After Rochelle left, Susan caught a cab out to her grandmother’s house just outside town. From the window of the car, she stared at the old Victorian structure with its steeply pitched roof and spindly gingerbread porch. The last happy moments she could remember had been spent within those walls. She dabbed at her eyes as she asked the cabbie to move on.
Susan returned to her room and dialed the number of vital records in North Carolina, arranging to have her birth certificate sent to the hotel so she could start the process of rebuilding her identity. She had no idea what kind of shape her driving record was in and whether or not she’d had run-ins with the police. Likely her credit rating was shot. There were so many things she dreaded finding out about herself.
Later that evening, she set out for the nearby coffee shop to get a bite. A cold wind blew in from the ocean two blocks over, and the light jacket purchased for her by Belinda in Birmingham didn’t ward off the chill. She hugged her arms and walked through the steam of her own breath as she passed a restaurant with a blue neon sign outside identifying it as Crabby Abby’s. A male patron in a long dark overcoat emerged, and the first few lines of the Beatles song “Let It Be” floated through the open door.
“Let it be…” Susan found herself whistling the tune as she leaned her cane against the building and knelt to tie the laces of her tennis shoe. A bank of clouds shifted in the heavens and one star gave a weak wink before the haze swallowed it up.
Divinely Yours Page 21
