Life as I Know It (2 page)

The nurse must have seen my shocked expression, for she lifted the small boy back down off the bed and chivied the children toward the door.

“Mummy is still tired,” she said firmly when one of the girls tried to protest. “I think you should wait in the playroom until Daddy has finished talking to the doctor. You can come and see her again later.”

The nurse closed the door firmly behind them and turned to face me.

“You don’t remember, do you?”

I shook my head in confusion. “There’s been a mistake. They’re not mine, honestly!”

“It is quite common for people to lose their short-term memories temporarily after a lightning strike,” she explained as she smoothly checked my pulse and blood pressure. I watched her jot her findings onto the chart, her face coming closer, minty breath warm on my skin as she peered into my eyes again.

“I’ll fetch Dr. Shakir. He can examine you better now that you’re awake, and he’ll explain what has happened to you. I think he’s talking to your husband right now.” She smiled encouragingly at me. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Richardson. Everything will turn out all right.”

“I’m not Mrs. Richardson,” I said again to her retreating
back, but this time my voice held less conviction. As the door closed behind her I went to rub my hands over my eyes, forgetting the IV drip, and the movement caused a fresh burst of pain in my left shoulder. Carefully, I lowered my left arm down beside me, then gingerly held my right hand out in front of me and stared at it. The hand was slim, with beautifully manicured nails. Panic spurted somewhere deep inside me. This somehow didn’t look like my hand, with its broken nails where my fingertips tapped away daily at my computer keyboard. And where was the small scar that I’d picked up the time I’d cut myself on a tin of Frankie’s dog food?

Tears prickled behind my eyes and I blinked them back, determined not to cry, but I had never felt so helpless and confused.

How could they have made such a mistake? It wasn’t possible that I had a husband and four children I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t have forgotten something like that! This had to be a bad dream after all—a very real-seeming dream that would evaporate when I awoke.

I could feel the hands that didn’t seem to belong to me shaking, and I tucked the right one alongside the left—firmly under the fold of the sheets. Soon, I told myself sternly, I would wake up and laugh about this nightmare. I’d wonder why I had been so afraid and I’d tell myself how silly I’d been to worry.

Screwing my eyes up tightly, I willed myself to wake up, but when I opened them I was still in the same place and my shoulder still smarted painfully. A little voice deep inside me whispered that something terrible had happened to me, and I shook my head, refusing to believe it.

When I heard the door open again, I sank back down between the hospital sheets and closed my eyes. I didn’t think I had the strength to go on with this nightmare. My body hurt and I
wanted to go home. Home to my little one-bedroom flat in Epsom, where I could curl up on the sofa with Frankie’s head on my lap and watch TV in my pajamas, or call my parents and friends and tell them about what had happened to me while I indulged myself by eating spoonfuls of my favorite pistachio ice cream straight from the carton.

Cool fingers stroked my forehead. The sensation was somehow familiar, yet I couldn’t recall anyone ever doing that to me before.

“Lauren? Lauren, sweetheart, are you awake?”

Clenching my eyelids tightly together, I remained obstinately silent. If this was a husband, father to those children, I wanted none of it.

Another voice filled the room, an Indian accent, firm and in control.

“Mr. Richardson, if you would excuse me for just one moment. I need a few words with your wife.”

The fingers found my hand and squeezed it. “I’ll be right outside the door, sweetheart.”

I waited until the door clicked shut before opening my eyes. A tall Asian doctor was gazing down at me, a reassuring smile on his friendly face. “Good morning, Mrs. Richardson.” His eyes flicked down to the notes in his hand. “Er—Lauren. The nurse tells me you are experiencing some memory loss?”

“My memory is fine,” I answered somewhat belligerently. “It’s just that you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

The doctor shook his head, still smiling. “I know this must be upsetting for you, Lauren, but I’m afraid that is not the case. There is a good man out there who assures me that you are his wife, and four young children who have been waiting since yesterday for you to wake up. In some cases a high-voltage injury
can cause clouded mental status. It’s known medically as the Pat Effect, but don’t worry, it’s usually temporary.”

He perched on the edge of the bed and looked at me with dark eyes full of sympathy, and something else I couldn’t quite detect.

“Lightning is a formidable force, Lauren, and you are on strong painkillers, which could be causing some of your confusion.”

I watched apprehensively as he opened a notebook and scanned its pages. His obvious belief that I was this Lauren Richardson person had me wondering what else he was going to tell me.

“When you were brought in yesterday with burns to your back, shoulder, and the top of your scalp, I did a little research on the effects of lightning strikes. Yours is the first case I’ve seen personally.”

He glanced at me for approval to continue and I nodded, realizing that the underlying gleam in his eyes was professional curiosity.

“Apparently, lightning travels at astonishing speeds of between one hundred and sixty and sixteen hundred kilometers per second on its downward track to the ground. Or, in your case, on its way to you, Lauren,” he told me with undisguised awe. “On its return stroke it can reach an amazing hundred and forty thousand kilometers per second, and the enormous spark heats the surrounding air explosively, creating the sonic boom we hear as thunder.”

I found myself thinking that he must have made an exceptional—if rather geeky—medical student with his enthusiasm for knowledge, but the facts were sobering when I remembered that the lightning had actually hit
me
at those speeds.

“In some cases this spark can generate a temperature of thirty thousand degrees centigrade, Lauren—about six times hotter than the surface of the sun!” He finished with a flourish.

The look he then bestowed on me was one of thinly disguised fascination, as if, after discovering and recounting how powerful lightning was, he was surprised to find I was still breathing.

“So, you’re telling me I’m lucky to be alive,” I commented quietly, watching his eyes for confirmation.

Dr. Shakir inclined his head with a small dip that I took to be affirmative.

“Although the scorching to your head appears superficial and the burns to your back and shoulder will heal without skin grafts, we must be careful about infection, which is why you have an antibiotic dressing on your shoulder,” he explained. Pulling his notes together he raised his eyes briefly to mine.

I looked at him suspiciously. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“The shock of the lightning bolt stopped your heart for a while. You went into cardiac arrest. We had to shock you again to bring you back. Once we’d got you back with us we concentrated on rehydrating you. That’s just normal saline in the intravenous drip you have there. Then we dressed the burns. After that it was just a case of waiting for you to wake up.”

“To see if I was brain damaged,” I said, shaken that I had actually needed to be resuscitated, and again watching for his reaction.

“I would like to schedule you for a head MRI scan,” Dr. Shakir continued smoothly, ignoring my comment and studiously avoiding my gaze. “But in the meantime you will have to trust me that you are the mother of those children and the wife of Mr. Richardson.”

I looked at him skeptically. He was hiding something, I was sure, but there didn’t seem much else to say. I glanced toward the door and remembered with a sick feeling deep in my stomach that the family out there was waiting to visit me.

“Please, I’m very tired,” I pleaded, fighting down the panic that was rising in my chest. “Could I rest before I see… anyone?”

The doctor paused as if considering my request, then nodded briefly and left. I lay back against the pillows as the door closed behind him, sifting through my memory for any clue to this unknown family of mine, while the heart and blood-pressure monitors bleeped on beside me. The frustrating thing was that, despite everything the doctor had told me, my memories seemed perfectly intact—they just weren’t the ones I was supposed to be remembering. After half an hour of alternately dozing and agonizing over my predicament, I heard my purported husband at the door asking to be let back in. Part of me was curious to see if he still thought I was his wife. I hoped he’d take one look at me and declare that he’d made a terrible mistake, but something deep inside told me that was a vain hope.

To stall for time, I brushed my hair carefully with a brush I was told belonged to me (even though I’d never seen it before in my life), then I sat up rigidly in the narrow bed and waited apprehensively for the stranger to come in.

The man who came toward me was slim and tall, maybe a bit over six foot. He had reddish-brown, slightly wavy hair and freckled skin. He was wearing a black polo-neck shirt under a tweedy jacket, but he didn’t look professor-like in it. I wondered vaguely what he did for a living and it occurred to me that it was strange I was supposed to have picked this man for a husband, when redheaded men had never appealed to me in the least.

As he approached, I realized with a sinking heart that the charade was still on. He bent to kiss me, but I turned my head away and he straightened quickly, his face flushing slightly.

“I’m sorry,” I said firmly as he pulled out a chair and sat down next to the bed. “But I have no memory of you.”

He stared at me, and I could see he appeared to be fighting some internal battle. After a moment he seemed to come to a decision.

“Dr. Shakir told me you’ve lost your memory, sweetheart. I was hoping he’d got it wrong.” He sighed deeply, then forced an uncertain smile and held out his hand formally to shake mine. “I’m Grant,” he told me. “Grant Richardson. I’m thirty-seven years old, and we’ve been married for ten years.”

His grip on my fingers was cool and steady, but somehow the smile seemed unsure. I suppose it was a lot to come to terms with, finding his wife had lost all memory of him and their life together. I knew I was certainly finding the whole situation bizarre, and my heart went out to this stranger. If I was struggling to get my head around what was happening, what must it be like for him?

I didn’t know what to do. I could hardly say, “I’m Jessica, nice to meet you,” so I looked away from him to a point halfway along the wall to where a cart stood stacked with medical supplies, and said nothing while he continued to hold on to my hand.

“Have you got any questions for me?” he asked gently. “Isn’t there lots you want to know?”

I had questions all right, but they were more along the lines of “What the hell is happening to me?” than the sort he would be expecting me to ask.

“Lauren?”

Sighing, I realized that I was going to have to play along, if for no other reason than in the hope of getting some answers to this nightmare. I withdrew my hand firmly, then asked, “How old am I then?”

My voice sounded petulant even to my own ears, and his smile wavered momentarily as the depth of the problem came home to him. I shook my head and he sighed and ran his tongue over his lips, somewhat fearfully.

“You’re thirty-five, Lauren. We married when you were twenty-five and I was twenty-seven. We were—still are, very much in love.”

“When’s my birthday?”

“The nineteenth of June.”

“No, it’s not,” I told him firmly. “I was born on the twenty-ninth of April. I wouldn’t have forgotten a date as ingrained in me as that!”

Grant avoided my eyes and shrugged. “It’s only a small detail, sweetheart.”

“Okay, then,” I said, taking a deep breath and trying to pull myself together. “How old are these children of ours?”

“Sophie’s eight, Nicole is six, and the twins are just four.”

We sat in silence while I contemplated the hideous possibility that I was the mother of four children. I’d had very little to do with children in the past. My job as a legal secretary was with a small law firm, where I did far more than just typing reports, legal papers, and documents onto the computer. I also assisted one of the solicitors by researching areas of law for cases he was working on, took dictation, and transcribed records, proofread letters and legal documents, and, more interestingly, went to court, police stations, and client meetings to take notes.

Aspiring to become a solicitor myself in the near future, I had been about to embark on a law degree and didn’t have much time to myself, let alone to consider marriage or children.

The memory brought me up short. Perhaps it was time to tell the truth. “It’s not that I’ve lost my memory,” I tried to explain to the man beside me. “I have memories—it’s just that they’re different from the ones you say I should have.”

“We should ask Dr. Shakir about it.” Grant eyed me suspiciously. “There may be some medical condition that has sparked unreal memories in you.”

I remembered the notes I had transcribed the last time I had been in the office, and realized that I could recall them almost word for word. I pictured my boss’s diary, where I had entered the times and dates of his appointments with clients and his court appearances for the following week. I could even remember what I’d had for supper on Friday evening after getting in late from work.

“My memories are real to me,” I told him.

Grant shook his head tiredly. “I don’t know, Lauren. This is hard for me to take in, too. I’ve been awake all night, waiting for you to come around. And the children are missing you, they’re really confused…”

He broke off, giving me a sideways glance, and I noticed him anxiously twisting the wedding ring on his finger. I looked down at my own left hand, which because of the pain in my shoulder had been tucked under the covers. While he watched, I peeled away a corner of the white hospital tape that was holding the drip in place, exposing my ring finger. I gasped. A thin gold band gleamed back at me.