Then and Always

by Dani Atkins

  Sarah pursed her lips wryly. “No trouble imagining that.”

  I looked at her carefully. Sarah had never been one to mince her words where Cathy was concerned. I was relaying events as they happened, so I hadn’t yet told her about the call to Matt’s mobile. I imagined she was going to have something quite colorful to say about that.

  “So really, this other life you thought you were living was the total pits? Correct? Everyone was sick or horribly scarred or dead? And all the good stuff that has gone on in your life just didn’t happen at all? Have I got that right?”

  “In a nutshell, yes.”

  “And yet you still went around trying to prove to everyone that you needed to get back to that place?”

  “Well, yes.” I could see where she was heading.

  “Everyone’s right. You are crazy. Did no one ever tell you that when you conjure up a fantasy world it’s meant to be better than the real one—not a hundred times worse?”

  Only she could pronounce me insane as though it were merely a charming quirk of character.

  “I do know what you’re saying. But even so, I still wanted to ‘go back,’ if that’s the right way to put it, to what felt like my proper reality. But now I don’t. Well, not since the other night.”

  “Ooh, did something happen with Matt?” I paused for a long second before replying, knowing my answer would shock and astonish.

  “No, Jimmy.”

  I swear the suntan literally paled for a moment and her eyes widened in disbelief.

  “Excuse me.” She snagged the arm of a passing waiter. “Do you think you can bring us another bottle of this?” She indicated our almost empty bottle of wine. “I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”

  I DIDN’T KNOW what I expected her to say when I finally finished telling her about the hotel incident. Perhaps I was expecting her shock or even disappointment at learning how readily I had been willing to cheat on Matt. What I wasn’t expecting was her unequivocal approval. “About bloody time.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Yes, I did. But did you hear me? He turned me down. He just wasn’t interested. And the following day he could hardly bear to look at me. Now, call me crazy, but in any of my previous lives that’s a pretty clear message of ‘I don’t want to do this.’ ”

  “Phah,” Sarah retorted. “That means nothing. You’re the only person in the world who exists, as far as Jimmy is concerned. It’s the way it has always been.”

  “You weren’t there, Sarah. You didn’t see how disgusted he looked. He couldn’t get away from me fast enough.”

  “And did you ask him about it the next day, when you were coming home?”

  “No,” I replied miserably, remembering the awkward car journey. “Neither of us dared to bring it up. It was just too embarrassing. Too humiliating.”

  Sarah shook her head. “There’s more to this than you realize. There has to be. Jimmy wouldn’t act like that with anyone, let alone you. I know you haven’t seen much of him over the last few years, but trust me on this one. He’s still every bit as much in love with you as he was in high school.”

  “You’re wrong,” I insisted glumly.

  “We’ll see.”

  We’d reached an impasse. There was nothing more to say about that night. So we finally—and thankfully, on my part—moved on to the much less complicated topic of Sarah’s wedding and honeymoon. She had stopped off on the way to the restaurant to collect the proofs of her wedding photos, and once our plates had been cleared, she spread the large album on the table.

  Never had I seen a bride look more beautiful and glowing with happiness than Sarah had on that day. As I turned the heavy embossed pages of the album, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed with sadness that I hadn’t been there to share that incredible moment with her. She must have known what I was thinking, and seen the regret in my smile, as my fingers hovered beside a photograph of her and David laughing happily under a falling cloud of confetti.

  “I wanted to postpone the wedding, you know,” she said softly, “when we knew what had happened to you, but your dad and Matt wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “They were quite right. I’d have been furious if you’d done that.”

  I carried on turning pages. Here now were photographs of the reception, the tables beautifully decorated with deep red floral displays that perfectly matched the crimson bows cinched around the back of the chairs.

  “It all looks so beautiful,” I murmured.

  Another page, and here were photographs of the guests, taken after the meal. Matt’s handsome face looked up at me from several group photographs. Jimmy was there too, but always in the background, not smiling directly toward the camera like my fiancé. I also couldn’t help noticing that in many of the photographs, Cathy was also present, never far from Matt’s side. I paused to study her exquisite face and caught Sarah watching me.

  “She looked amazing, of course. That dress of hers was so tight she must have been sewn into it!”

  I laughed. The deep red gown Cathy wore did indeed look as though it was molded to her body like a second skin.

  “I think she was trying to upstage me.”

  “Never happen,” I assured her, but after turning yet another page and seeing Cathy once more cozied up to Matt, this time on the dance floor, I had to ask, “Did she stick by him like this all night?”

  Sarah shrugged as though to say she didn’t know, but I could read her better than that. “God, she doesn’t miss a trick, does she?”

  “You know Cathy.”

  I was quiet for a moment. Yes, I did know Cathy; perhaps it was Matt I didn’t know that well.

  “And anyway,” Sarah said, taking the album from me and firmly closing it. “It doesn’t matter how much eye-fluttering and cleavage-flashing she tries, you’re still the one he’s engaged to, still the one he’s been with forever.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure a little detail like that would stop Cathy, not if she really set her mind to it.

  “I know you two have been going through a sticky patch in the last few months, but you keep assuring me that’s only about work stuff—not anything serious, not like what happened when you were at uni.”

  I sat up sharply in my seat. “What? What happened when we were at uni? What are you talking about?”

  She jumped guiltily, and I watched the transparent thought process in her eyes as she tried to find a means of bluffing her way out of the gaffe she had made. I repeated the question, trying to keep my voice even and calm.

  “What happened when we were at uni, Sarah? Tell me. It’s not fair that I don’t know.”

  The laughter was gone from her voice but I could see that my plea had convinced her to tell me.

  “You and Matt had a major row and broke up for about four months or so in our second year.”

  This was indeed news to me. Certainly Matt hadn’t thought to mention it, despite the fact there’d been every opportunity for him to do so when we had been talking about our relationship earlier.

  “We broke up? But why? What happened?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Don’t be daft, of course you can tell me,” I cajoled. “I’m not going to get upset or anything, I just want to know.”

  “No. It’s not that. I mean I can’t tell you because I don’t know.”

  This was very strange indeed. How was it possible that Sarah didn’t know the details of something that must have been a major event in my life? We’d always shared everything. Surely I would have told her all about it? Apparently not, she reported. Oh, she’d tried to get the story out of me on many occasions, but I had refused to tell her anything.

  “Was I really upset about it?” I queried.

  “Yes. Very. But you still wouldn’t give me any of the details. And believe me, I tried to get them out of you!”

  I laughed then, imagining the third-degree tactics she might have employed.

  She wagged her fin
ger at me in warning. “And this is precisely why you should never keep secrets from your best friend. Because you never know when one day you’re going to get amnesia and need her to fill in the blanks!”

  The restaurant was beginning to empty around us by then. And when I looked out the window, I could see the day had darkened under a slate-colored sky. There was still so much I wanted to talk to Sarah about but we’d simply run out of time. We settled the bill, and in order to eke out our last few minutes together, I said I’d walk with her to the taxi rank.

  We were standing by the crossing, waiting for the lights to change, when it happened. The pedestrian lights turned green and Sarah had taken one step into the road when I first heard the siren. Strangely, it didn’t sound distant, but was instantly loud and strident, as though a vehicle’s arrival were imminent. My head darted to the left and right as I looked for the approaching emergency vehicle. But the long gray road was clear in both directions. Yet the sound was everywhere, the discordant two-tone klaxon reverberating off the buildings and pavements. I looked around in confusion as other pedestrians began to cross the road, surely walking blindly into the path of a speeding vehicle. Later it would occur to me how similar the situation was to my recent dream, the one where only I could see there was impending danger and everyone else was oblivious. But for now I had only one thought in mind, to snatch Sarah back from the looming threat. The siren was now so loud I could scarcely hear my own cry of warning as I reached out and grabbed her coat sleeve, snatching her backward onto the curb. I fully expected the vehicle to thunder past with inches to spare from where we stood, but nothing came whistling past us in a blaze of flashing lights. The road remained empty.

  The other pedestrians, those who had been crossing the road with Sarah, had by then all made it safely to the other side.

  “Where did it go?” I asked Sarah, unaware that my strange behavior was now the object of attention from the gaggle of “survivors” on the other side of the street.

  Sarah, to her credit, looked only a little shaky, as though being plucked from the path of invisible danger was something she regularly experienced.

  “Where did what go?”

  “The siren.” And when she continued to look at me blankly, “You must have heard it! It was heading right toward us! The ambulance or police car, or whatever …” My voice trailed off as it slowly dawned on me that the sound of the siren was gone. A horrible feeling of déjà vu came over me.

  “You didn’t hear it, did you?”

  She shook her head.

  “But it was so deafening, as though it was almost on top of us.”

  Another slow shake of the head.

  I didn’t need her to tell me that no one had heard the sound but me; I could already see it in her eyes.

  “Has this happened before?” she asked gently.

  I thought of the alarm clock that wasn’t there, beeping in the night, and the numerous times the scent of my father’s aftershave had surrounded me like a cloud.

  “There’ve been a couple of times,” I admitted slowly, “where I’ve heard things, smelled things even …” My words died in my throat.

  “You have to tell the doctor about this when you see him this week,” she urged, and I knew she was right, even though I was loath to add another inexplicable symptom to my ever-increasing list.

  “It might be something that’s really common with amnesia cases,” she suggested, then, seeing my gloomy response, tried a different tack. “Or maybe, since you bumped your head, you now have these incredibly acute senses, and can hear and smell things the rest of us can’t.”

  “What, like a dog, you mean?”

  She laughed then and gave me a hug. “Yeah, but a really pretty pedigreed one.”

  A FEW DAYS later I walked down the flight of marble steps leading from the clinic, with the doctor’s words echoing my footsteps. It had been too much to anticipate a simple solution to my problems from the one consultation. But I had hoped for some answers at the very least.

  Nothing about the session had gone as I had imagined, I mused, as I allowed myself to be carried along on a wave of shoppers and tourists, all trying to seize whatever bargains there were to be had in the days before Christmas. The clinic itself had been far more elegant and exclusive than I had expected, while the doctor’s offices had been far less intimidating; no scary leather consultation couch, no men in white jackets waiting in the wings to escort me to some secure facility.

  Even the doctor surprised me: Dr. Andrews was a woman, when I had been expecting a man, and far more maternal and warm than the Freud-like physician I’d anticipated. She had been professional enough to get me to open up completely about my misconception of the past five years, and kind enough to make me feel that nothing I said was weird enough for her to press the panic alarm, which must surely be hidden somewhere in her office.

  I hadn’t been expecting that this would be only the first of many sessions we would have to share in order to piece together my lost past. I had undergone all the medical tests and procedures that were necessary to diagnose any physiological problem, but I was still crushingly disappointed that there would be no quick-fix solution—no magic pill. I suppose I had secretly been harboring hopes that some form of medication or treatment could be offered to dispel my illusions and make my new reality feel … well, feel real. Dr. Andrews had been kind but firm when clearing up that particular delusion.

  And when I asked the final question, the one whose answer followed me now like a shadow on the busy London pavements, she had at least been honest.

  “Rachel, I cannot tell you when your memory will return. It could be tomorrow, or next week; indeed it may take a good deal longer. And, although it is rare, I do have to tell you that in some very exceptional cases, the lost period of time remains just that, forever lost.”

  Forever lost. The words haunted me as I walked, echoing hollowly as my feet trod the glistening thoroughfares of the capital.

  Not that the entire consultation session had been all doom and gloom. Dr. Andrews had reassured me about my weird imagined sensations. Apparently, auditory and olfactory hallucinations were by no means uncommon for those who had undergone head trauma, and when I questioned why the things I could smell and hear were so specific, she had a reasonable theory for that too. The fragrance of my father’s aftershave would have very specific connotations of safety and security for me, and because the sense of smell is particularly evocative of memories, the doctor guessed that the hallucination probably mirrored feelings of physical safety I had felt as a child, when held by my parent. Her reasoning about the imagined sirens was even more prosaic—she surmised that when I was taken to hospital after the mugging, I had not been entirely unconscious and the ambulance’s siren had somehow implanted itself into my memory and was now being arbitrarily replayed as my confused mind struggled for a foothold in reality.

  She was a little less sure of why I was also hearing alarms that were not there, but assured me that in time we would uncover all of the mysteries. In time.

  I would have to be patient and let the truth uncover itself a little at a time, and she assured me that with each emerging element I would be able to let go of a comparable piece of my imagined history, until at last only my real past would remain.

  It sounded like a very slow business to me, and I still couldn’t help but think it would have been so much better if I could have been given some short sharp treatment—however horrible—to make it all happen much more speedily.

  What I liked very much about Dr. Andrews was the way she hadn’t laughed when I’d explained why I thought I had two entirely different past lives. Her reaction was nothing like Jimmy’s had been when I offered up my theory of parallel worlds. At least she didn’t laugh out loud and blame it all on my fantastical literary choices. I hastily slammed the door shut on that line of thought. I had not allowed myself to think of Jimmy all week, and the offices of a psychiatrist who was skilled at probing out a person’s innermo
st secrets was not the place to let my resolve weaken.

  Though I hadn’t spoken to Jimmy for a few days, I knew he had been in regular contact with my dad, for I’d overheard several whispered conversations behind doors. So, despite the fact that he clearly wasn’t anxious to speak to me, Jimmy still wanted to know how I was on a daily basis. And while part of me was pleased to know he cared enough to call, the other part was angry that it was my father he chose to speak to and not me. It confirmed my worst suspicions: that he was still so uncomfortable with what had happened between us at the hotel that he could neither face nor forgive me. I wondered if he would ever be able to do either again.

  Tired of being buffeted by the determined holiday shoppers, I slipped inside a small coffee shop and found an empty table. At the last moment my doctor’s appointment had been rescheduled from late in the afternoon to early morning. I hadn’t minded getting the early fast train into London, but it did leave me with many hours to kill before I was to meet Matt for dinner and a lift back home to Great Bishopsford. It had been too late to reach Matt the previous day to let him know of the change of plans, and while I had thought the extra time in London could be spent Christmas shopping, the doctor’s appointment had taken more out of me than I’d expected. I had no appetite for pushing and shoving through hordes of people in the department stores.

  I glanced at my watch. It was only late morning but there was a possibility that Matt might be free for an early lunch. It would be good to explain to him some of the things Dr. Andrews had said while they were still fresh in my mind. Perhaps it would help him to understand why I was finding it so hard to fall straight back into my role as his fiancée. Acting on impulse, I pulled out my mobile phone and scrolled down the address book until I reached Matt Office.

  His secretary answered the call on the second ring, her cool professional tone warming considerably as she recognized my voice. Which was more than I did for hers.

  “Oh, Rachel, I’m sorry, you’ve just missed him. He left about ten minutes ago for his flat, but you’re meeting him there for lunch anyway, aren’t you?”