A Day Like This, page 23
“Well, then, it was worth it.” Marcie was always the practical one. “Have you talked to Graham while you’ve been there?”
“Just once, for a few minutes. I didn’t want him to worry. I’ll call him again from the airport. I let him know he’s welcome to stop by to get the rest of his things,” I said.
“So you’ve accepted that too?” Marcie asked. “I think that’s smart.”
The way I had oddly sensed the forgiveness and love I’d developed in this life for Marcie, I had innately sensed the decision to let go of Graham. “I have.”
“Sooo, is it too soon to ask?” Her tone changed to something more playful. “Might your time with this Jonathan person have had anything to do with this?”
I rolled my eyes. “Absolutely not.”
“Uh-huh. If you say so. I looked him up. Or, at least, I asked Piper to send his info to me. Smart, good looking, doesn’t seem to think you’re a total wacko. I’d say those are three very good points.”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“All right, all right. Too soon,” she said.
“When’s your flight get in? Do you want me to pick you up? Want some company?”
“Piper arranged for a car. I’m all set. I think it’ll do me well to get home and settle in on my own. But Marcie?”
“Yeah?”
“I love you. Thank you.” If there was anything to be grateful for in this lifetime—on this timeline—it was the gift of my sister, once again back in my world. I wouldn’t let her go again.
After hanging up the phone and packing up my things, I went downstairs to check out of the hotel. I stood outside beneath the hotel’s arched, stone entrance as the morning rain drizzled lightly. After a few minutes, the cab arrived to take me to Heathrow, and just as I was getting in, I heard my name called. I turned to see Jonathan, walking quickly up from the road below.
“I was afraid I wouldn’t catch you before you left.”
I was surprised to see him. “Jonathan? Hi. What are you—”
“Annie, I was just wondering . . .” He suddenly seemed uncharacteristically lost for words, looking upward at the rain lightly pelting his face.
“Wondering what?”
He laughed then. “I guess . . . well, I guess I was just wondering if you’ll be back in London again.”
Smiling hadn’t come naturally to me since the accident. In fact, it nearly hurt to do so, as if it were a betrayal of everything and everyone I’d loved. But again, thanks to Jonathan, I found the corners of my mouth turning upward. “You barely know me. I don’t even know me. My past—it’s all a blur up until now.”
“But isn’t it always like that when we meet new people? Our history is all our own perception, anyway. Until we meet and create a new part of the story together.”
“Jonathan, I—”
“I don’t know any more about your past than you do. But I can say with certainty that I would like to know more about your future.” He stood less than a foot from me, and I looked up into his eyes, wondering if maybe he could be right. He took a step closer, and I held my breath, the two versions of me at odds.
“Go back to New York. Take your time,” he said, seemingly sensing then exactly what I needed. Time. “And then maybe . . .”
I reached up, brushing my cheek past his, and hugged him. “I’ll be back in London,” I whispered.
“Okay, then. I’ll look forward to it,” he said, gazing down at me with warm, soft eyes, nothing like the hardened person who had greeted me on his front step just days earlier. I thought, as I had so many times before, You never quite know what lies behind a person’s facade or what the future holds.
We said our goodbyes again, beneath the towering turrets of the grand hotel, and he watched me go, on my way back to New York.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
I polished off the remains of an omelet that I’d made myself for breakfast with the leftover vegetables and three remaining eggs I’d found in the refrigerator. I made notes on a grocery list, planning to go later in the day. A cup of tea beside me, I sat curled on the sofa in the living room, weary from yesterday’s flight and still on London time, but unable to sleep. A stack of papers, bills, and mail sat before me, ready to be sorted. They’d been languishing on the entry table for the few weeks since the accident, and I figured I couldn’t very well put it off much longer. Charlie’s bed sat empty across the room, and I couldn’t wait to see him.
One by one I picked up the mail—junk and bills, mostly. I shook my head in disbelief when I saw the amounts of a couple of the bills, and I nearly laughed when I logged in to my checking account to see the amount of money I had. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about that anymore.
“We can beg for another extension,” Graham says, weary with worry over the bills on the kitchen table. “Maybe they’ll give it to us.” I place my hand on his and our fingers intertwine. It’s well after midnight. “We can at least try,” I say. “When’s the first payment for school due?” he asks. I tell him it’s due the following week, and we both knew there would never be money in the account for it, and we’ll have to abandon those plans, as well. He picks up my hand and kisses it, before resting his cheek in my palm. “Don’t worry. We’ll figure something out.”
My smile faded instantly as I remembered the difficulties we’d faced, at the same time knowing with absolute certainty that I would switch places in a heartbeat to have it all back again. I wondered if it would always be like this, or if the comparisons would someday begin to fade.
I forced myself to keep going. Opening get-well cards from people I mostly didn’t know, and junk mail. I eventually came to another bill—this one from Dr. Higgins’s office. I tossed it into one of the stacks beside me to be paid with the others but did a second glance as the dates caught my eye. I looked at them carefully, lined up one by one, but something didn’t add up. The dates on the bill were from visits going back two months before the accident. How could that be possible, when I didn’t meet him until after the accident?
I knocked heavily on Dr. Higgins’s door for the second time, and finally he answered, surprised to see me. “Annie. Hello. We don’t have an appointment . . .”
I marched into his office, relieved that there was no one there. “I need to talk to you.”
“Okay, well. I was just on a call, but if you’d like to come—”
I pulled the bill from my purse and held it out to him. “What is this? Why do these dates say that I was here in April and May? I called your billing department. I figured it was an error. But they confirmed that my first appointment with you had been two months before my accident. I got your name from the hospital!” But just as I said it, I remembered. Marcie had been the one who had suggested Dr. Higgins, not the hospital. And Graham had been the one to make the first appointment with him. He teaches at Columbia. He’s the best. I assumed they’d gotten the name from the hospital. It had never occurred to me to question it.
Dr. Higgins glanced at his watch and gestured toward the leather sofa. “Why don’t you sit down.”
I needed answers. “I don’t want to sit. Can you please just explain this to me?”
He gave me a look, and, begrudgingly, I took a seat as he did the same. “Annie, the day you came in here wasn’t the first time we had met. I had been treating you for a couple of months prior to the accident. You were becoming depressed and anxious, having trouble. You’d started forgetting things, losing time, as we say.”
My hands started to shake. I remembered what Piper and Marcie had described to me—the way I’d been behaving in the weeks prior to the accident. “Tell me more.”
“You had vivid dreams that had become disturbing to you,” he continued slowly. “About a little girl. I encouraged you to explore them with your art. There was some improvement at first, but in the weeks prior to the accident, there would be episodes in which you had no memory of where you had been or what you had been doing. Given your family history, Graham was understandably concerned, and you were as well. And then the accident happened. As I mentioned, it was best for you to remember things on your own. To you, I was a stranger, and you were a new patient. And so that’s where we started.”
I tried to process this, but the words wouldn’t come out. But then something on the shelf behind him caught my eye. It was a white book that I recognized from the box of research at Jonathan’s apartment. I squinted to see the name—Hodgson—was written in large type. I realized then why the name had seemed familiar when I’d first heard Eunice mention it. He turned, following my gaze, as I stood. Wheels turning in my head, mechanisms clicking into place as I walked over to it slowly.
“You teach at Columbia,” I said, understanding dawning.
As I got closer, several more of Hodgson’s books came into view. And then a framed photograph of Dr. Higgins, several years younger, along with a few others, standing alongside Dr. Linda Hodgson. My eyes grew wide. I picked up the frame and turned it toward him.
“You know about her work,” I said.
I held out the picture, and he took the frame in his hand. After considering it for a few moments, he sat on the edge of the sofa. “Dr. Hodgson was one of my mentors,” he said, finally.
“You were on her research team?” I asked.
He nodded. “One of them. I was very close to the work and studied her theories. We worked together for several years at her institute in Sweden, and then eventually at Columbia.”
“So you know, then, what she was working on before she died.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What is it you think you know about her work, exactly?”
“I know about the private research she was doing.”
He grew somewhat cagey. “That’s all very classified. Even I don’t have access to some of it. How did you get it?”
“Trust me. I had some very resourceful help,” I said.
He raised a brow and seemed both amused and surprised. “I’d say so.”
“I want to know. Please. You knew her research firsthand. What do you think?”
He tapped his fingers on his knee, reticent. “All right, I’ll talk you through this, but only because I think you won’t give up until I do. But Annie, I want to be clear. I’m not advocating this line of thinking for you whatsoever. There’s nothing shadowy going on here. Dr. Hodgson was the greatest teacher I ever had. I looked up to her. As I said, she was my mentor. But she went from being considered one of the most brilliant minds in the field of neuropsychiatry to being shunned by the medical community. As much as I admired her, I can’t say I fully support all of her theories. But I’ll answer your questions. Okay?”
“But surely you couldn’t help seeing the parallels in my case.” I asked him again: “After hearing everything that I’ve told you. Everything you’ve seen me go through. Do you think that maybe there could be something more going on here? That maybe what I was telling you was all in fact . . . true?”
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “In my line of work, I have to act on the best interest of the patient, and given your circumstances, it is most likely just a memory issue. Nothing else. Which, on the record, is what I still believe to be true.”
“And off the record?”
He tapped his fingers together. “Off the record? As I said when we first met, the mind is a mystery, as is the universe. And there were some . . .” He hesitated, choosing his words in carefully measured doses. “There were some things about your case that struck me as unusual and perhaps, yes, reminded me of some of the patients Dr. Hodgson was working with, who claimed to have had experiences outside of what science can currently explain.”
“Such as?”
“For one thing, the detail you provided was incredibly accurate and charged with emotion, as if you had actually lived it.” I thought of Eunice and Dr. Hodgson—two versions of one life, somehow bleeding over into one another.
“But manufacturing whole worlds, Annie, isn’t uncommon. Hell, it isn’t uncommon in perfectly healthy people, like I mentioned. People create entire worlds, histories, life stories all the time—writers, filmmakers, you understand. But I would be lying if I didn’t say that your circumstances lined up in ways that were compelling. Especially in combination with your mother’s history.”
“Why didn’t you tell me more about it? About the theories?”
He shook his head. “Look, Annie, it’s most likely that you suffered a major emotional trauma after a lifetime of struggle and loss. Losing your house, while certainly not the worst of what you went through, was probably the tipping point, and you . . .”
“Broke,” I interjected.
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that. You’re here, aren’t you? Some people do break—I don’t need to tell you that. But, Annie, I can tell you this—you’re not one of them. You will very likely recover just fine. In time.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” he said.
“What would Dr. Hodgson say?”
“About you?” He gave me a sidelong look, and the corners of his mouth turned upward. “I honestly don’t know. But I do believe she would have been very, very interested to meet you. And your mother.”
But frustratingly, neither of them was here. I stood, walking over again to the row of books by Dr. Hodgson, running my finger along them.
“Have you met anyone else like me?” I asked. “Anyone who’s been through something similar?”
“I have, yes. Though nothing quite as significant. Smaller instances. I treated a young girl once with some similar issues.”
“What happened to her?”
“She was quite young. I strongly urged her parents to be patient. But they sought more proactive treatment elsewhere, as I understand it.”
“And you thought maybe she wasn’t imagining things after all?”
He was reluctant, but the expression on his face told me I was correct. “They probably did the responsible thing.”
I gave him a look. “For the record.”
He tapped the side of his nose, then shrugged. “For the record.”
“I see. And I suffered an injury to the head that gave me a case of selective amnesia and cognitive distortion. For the record.”
“Most likely? Yes. That is my official diagnosis. But, Annie, if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that life is mysterious.”
There was that word again: mysterious.
A moment of understanding passed between us, and I realized how far we had come since the first day I had sat on his leather sofa. Or, at least, the first day I remembered. “And now? What do I do now?” I asked.
“That’s up to you. You can either let what you’ve experienced break you, Annie. Or you can accept that you may never know the answer to your mystery.”
“And then?” I asked.
“Choose to go on.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
July in New York is unpredictable—sometimes the heat rises from the sidewalk as the sun pours in shafts down long streets. Other days, everything seems to exist in varying shades of gray beneath a heavy sky. The sounds of the city had become the background noise of my thoughts. When I walked through the front door of the loft after leaving Dr. Higgins’s office, I reluctantly admitted to myself that for the first time the place almost felt like home. Or at least familiar, anyway. The space was a quiet refuge, save for the traffic on the narrow rainy streets of SoHo below.
I was upstairs unpacking when I heard the door open. Graham had texted a few minutes earlier to let me know he was on his way up. Charlie made his way toward the steps, tired, and I spared him the trip and met him at the bottom. When he dropped heavily into my waiting lap, his tail thumped wildly on the hardwood floor, his tongue flopping out of his happy mouth in a grin as I scratched his belly.
I looked up at Graham, who stood watching us. I’d had a number of dreams about him over the last few days, remembering him from our time at the Yellow House, and in my head he looked different. Softer. So it was alarming at first to see him—so similar, and yet so changed. His hands were in the pockets of charcoal trousers, fitted slimly beneath a pale-gray shirt. He was neatly shaved, and his body was toned and slender, the body of a man who paid his dues in the early morning hours of a gym. Half of me wanted to go to him and throw my arms around him, but the other half knew he was no longer the same person I loved. And so I stayed where I was.
“You look really good,” he said, watching as Charlie and I played.
“Do I? Thanks.” I laughed, knowing how untrue it was but happy he thought so anyway. An eight-hour flight and numerous sleepless nights had taken their toll.
“No. Really. You do. Marcie kept me posted a little on what you were up to in London. I hope you don’t mind. I was worried, though. How did it go? Did you get to meet that journalist?”
I let Charlie off my lap and nodded, standing. “Yeah, I did. Thanks.”
“And?”
How would I ever begin to sum it up? “It was helpful. I’m glad I went.”
“You seem . . .” He narrowed his eyes, regarding me closely. “Calmer, I guess. It’s good. You look more like yourself.”
“Yeah?” Which version of myself? “Marcie and Dr. Higgins filled me in too. On your life the past few months. You’ve been going through more than I realized,” I said.
He inhaled sharply, understanding my meaning. I wondered if his new girlfriend was waiting at his new apartment, ready to live their new life, and my chest constricted. “Annie . . . I . . .” His voice splintered.
I placed my hand on his arm, my eyes filling in response to seeing his do the same. “It’s okay, Graham.”
He stopped short and dropped his shoulders. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know how to tell you. I don’t want to hurt you. Or risk making anything worse.”
“I know.” This man was the love of my life, and yet I was comforting him as I forced myself to let him go.
It’s late at night and my hands find him. He meets me immediately with a warm, deep kiss.
