Perchance (31 page)

             
"Rhett?" I asked. "Like in Gone With The Wind?"
             
He smiled. "That was your favorite movie when you were little."

             
I closed my mouth and felt the weight bear into my chest. I wasn't me. I had no idea who I was. These people claimed to know me and be my parents, but how could I just forget them? How could I forget a whole life?

             
I tried really hard to remember my
real
name, my
real
life, but nothing came. So, I threw my Hail Mary, my last attempt to prove I wasn't crazy and didn't belong to these strangers, however nice they may be. "Do you have some pictures? Of me?"

             
In no time two accordion albums were in my lap. One from the man's wallet and one from the woman's. I picked up the first, trying to sit up a bit. The man pressed the button to make the bed lean up and I waited awkwardly until it reached the upright position. Then I glanced at the first photo.

             
It was the man, the woman, two girls and a boy. They were all standing in the sunlight in front of the Disneyland sign. The man was wearing
a cheesy Mickey Mouse ears hats
. I glanced at him and he smiled with hope. I hated to burst the little bubble that had formed for him, but I didn't recognize any of these people. The pictures proved nothing. "I don't know any of those people."

             
The woman seemed even more stunned, if possible. She stood finally and turned to go to the bathroom. She returned with a handheld mirror. She held the picture up in one hand and the mirror in the other and I indulged her by looking. I have no idea why I was so dense to not understand what they had been implying, and what I had so blatantly missed.

             
I was
in
the photo.

             
I looked at the mirror and recognized the middle girl as the girl in the mirror. I took it from her hands and looked at myself. I turned my head side to side and squinted and grimaced. The girl was moving like I was, but I had no idea who she was. She looked as confused as I felt. I looked back at the picture and examined…myself. She was wearing a pink tank top with jean shorts. Her hair was in a messy blonde ponytail and she had one hand on her hip and the other around the girl's shoulder. One of her legs was lifted a bit to lean on the toe. Cheerleader immediately rambled through my head. I almost vomited right there. "I'm a cheerleader?"

             
"Why, yes," she answered gently. "You love it."

             
My grimaced spread. "I can't imagine myself loving that. Or pink."
             
It hit me then. Like really sunk in. I had no idea who I was. I had forgotten a whole life that no longer belonged to me. I felt the tear slide down my cheek before the sob erupted from my throat. I pushed the pictures away, but kept the mirror. I turned to my side and buried my face in my pillow, clutching the mirror to my chest. My body did this little hiccup thing and I cried even harder because I couldn’t even remember doing that before.

             
The man and woman continued to stand at the foot of my bed when the doctor came in. I looked at him through my wet lashes. When he spoke, his voice sounded familiar. "Emma, I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but it appears that you've developed amnesia from your accident. We’ll have to run lots of tests, but the good news is that in more cases than not, the amnesia is temporary."
             

             
I jolted and wiped my chin clear of tears. "You mean I could remember one day?"

             
"That's right."

             
"Don’t get her hopes up," I heard from the doorway and turned to find the man-boy. My heart leapt a little. He was the only person that I remembered. Well from when I woke up at least. He felt like some awkward lifeline I needed to latch onto. He shook his head. "Every case is different. She may never remember anything."

             
"Mason," the man yelled, making me jump at the volume of it, and shot daggers at him across my bed, "this doesn't concern you."

             
"She's been in my care for six months," he growled vehemently and then glanced at me. He did a double take when he saw me awake and looking at him. I had no idea what the expression on my face may have been, but he softened immediately and came to stand beside…my parents.

             
"Isabella. Rhett," he said and nodded to them as they did in turn. He was on a first name basis with my parents. He wasn't wearing scrubs like the nurse. He was in khakis and a button up shirt, the sleeves rolled almost to his elbows. His name tag said "Mason Wright - Occupational Therapy". He looked at me with affection that showed the truth behind his words. "I'm Mason, Emma. I've been doing all of your physical therapy while you've been…asleep."

             
"You look a little young," my mouth blurted. I covered my lips with my fingers, but he laughed like he was embarrassed.

             
He swiped his hand through his hair and glanced around the room. "Yeah… So anyway, I'll be continuing your care, now that you're awake. You'll have some muscle atrophy and some motor skills that will need to be honed again." I nodded. "But, from what I've seen from working with you these past months, I'll think you'll be fine in that department."
             
"Working with me? Like moving my legs while I was asleep?"

             
"
Mmhmm
. And your arms, too. It keeps your muscles from completely forgetting what they're supposed to do." He smiled.

             
I wanted to smile back at him, but feared that I didn't know how with this face. Plus, my body was exhausted just from this little interaction. He must have seen that, too, because he turned to the tall man who had yelled at him before. "She needs her rest."

             
"I know that," he said indignantly. "However, the news crew will be here later on." He turned a bright smile on the woman that was supposed to be my mother. "She'll do an interview with them and tell everyone all about her ordeal. I'm sure you could even get a deal on a big story to the-"

             
My father spoke up, putting a protective hand on my foot. "You set up an interview with the press the day she wakes up…and don't even get our permission first?"

             
They all kept talking around me. Mason started defending me along with my parents. The man apologized half heartedly and I assumed he was the head doctor or some hospital head from the way he was acting.

             
My mind buzzed and cleared in intervals. I lost all track of time and eventually just turned to let my cheek press against the grainy pillow. My throat hurt from the tubes that had been keeping me alive.

             
Only to wake up to a reality that was more fiction than non.

             
My eyes still knew how to cry though and I tried to keep myself quiet as I let the tears fall. I thought I'd definitely earned them. Eventually the room quieted and the lights were turned off, all but the small lamp beside my bed. The phone on my bedside stand had a small list of numbers, for emergencies I assumed, but the name on the top of the card was what caught my eye. 'Regal City Hospice'.

             
Mason had been right. I wasn't even in a real hospital. They hadn't intended for me to wake up.

             
I wondered if that fact had put a kink in someone's plans. 

End of Preview

You can find Shelly and more information about this and her other books at her website

www.shellycrane.blogspot.com

Also, check out this excerpt from Rachel Higginson’s new book out now!

Starbright
by Rachel Higginson

Chapter One

             
The night had never been darker, the blackness surrounding the car, never so suffocating. Even the piles of snow pushed to the sides of the narrow road, did nothing to break up the oppressive darkness. The Stars above, shone brightly, I was sure of it, but they did so from behind a curtain of clouds that blocked the light from reaching the road. I felt swallowed up by emptiness.

             
I gripped the steering wheel tighter, my knuckles stretching until they gleamed white in the glow of the dashboard and my frozen fingers worked numbly against the cold plastic. The headlights of my old Jeep reached only a few feet in front of me and then stopped abruptly against a wall of darkness. I shivered violently, nestling my chin further into the down of my heavy winter coat and cursed the Nebraska winter for being equally as cold as it was desolate.

             
The farmland rolled away from the winding road, buried beneath several feet of iced over snow in every direction. Trees, planted for the privacy of farmers, lined the way home with empty branches and snowcapped tops. My breath puffed out in front of me, fogging up the frozen windshield and reminding me that the heater to my fifteen year old Jeep Cherokee remained unfixed.

             
“Tristan!” I growled furiously into the frigid air. “Why I let you talk me into another movie I will never know!”

             
There was no one there to hear my complaints, or sympathize with me against my best friend, but it felt comforting to make noise in an empty antique without a radio. Still, receiving not even a groan of empathy from the Jeep, I sat forward and peered into the impossible night ahead of me.

             
I knew these roads; I had each curve and turn memorized. The distance between Tristan Shields’ house and my own was well traveled and practically sacred. Still, out in the country where street lights were for city-folk and the deer and the antelope tended to play, their familiar territory became a dangerous, never-ending expanse of nerves and tension.

             
Even in summer, unless the Stars and moon were bright and friendly, the country roads of the Nebraska farmland became shrouded in a heavy obscurity, the headlights of the best of cars mapping out the only visibility in the heavy cloak of night and beyond those flickering lights the world seemed to drop off the edge of a cliff into nothingness. But now, in the dead of winter, with temperatures well below zero, the night around my old Jeep seemed to have a life of its own, oppressive and angry.  

             
I cleared my throat and mentally determined to conquer the creeping feeling of being afraid. I bit down on my lower lip and clutched the steering wheel tighter. My breath came out in shaky puffs of air, reminding me it was more than the roads and the night that curdled the most terrified places of my
heart. It was more than the late hour and bitter cold that forced me to shiver and shift my eyes suspiciously in every direction.

             
It was the Darkness.

             
Not the country night, or the moonless sky. But the real Darkness. The Darkness that moved secretly through this world and threatened every living, breathing creature. The darkness that slithered in unseen places and survived on the death and rotten things. The darkness that I would fight until my dying breath.

             
But not tonight. Tonight I wasn’t ready. Tonight, I was still only sixteen, and my parents were still off saving the galaxy while I stayed home to finish high school with an elderly woman as my keeper.

             
Something moved out of the corner of my eye. I could swear it. Swirling my head around, and keeping a steady hold on the steering wheel, I peered into the darkness, searching out the moving creature.

             
Nothing.

             
Nothing beyond the snow banks piled in the ditches and the swaying lifeless trees that were becoming sparser as I passed expansive fields blanketed under the white of winter.

             
I turned my attention to the road again and with a numb hand, brushed my platinum blonde hair under the brim of my stocking cap. My fingers snapped with electricity and for a moment the cab of my Jeep was lit with the sparks of static. Only a few more miles till home. I could make it. There was nothing to be afraid of.