The New Me Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  The New Me

  Want more?

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  The New Me

  Zoe Cannon

  © 2021 Zoe Cannon

  http://www.zoecannon.com

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and events are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  The New Me

  The floor was sideways, and pressed up against my face, and I didn’t understand how it had gotten that way. My leaf-green mug—the one Hugh had told me was my favorite—lay in pieces in front of me, surrounded by puddles of coffee. By some miracle, none of the coffee had landed on me. No, I realized a second later, that wasn’t right. My cheek felt too warm, and so did my right arm. But it was only warmth, not burning heat. The sensation was muted, like someone had turned down a dial in my mind to lessen the intensity.

  I searched my memory for how I had gotten here, and found only fuzzy static. A feeling I was all too familiar with since the accident. Hugh had said my doctor had warned me there could be brain damage, although I couldn’t remember that either, or any of my weeks-long stay in the hospital. According to Hugh, he had cautioned me about the possibility of lost memories, even personality changes. He hadn’t been wrong. Hugh talked about patching up the holes in my memory, as if my brain were a moth-eaten sweater, but more often than not I felt like my memory was one big hole, without even a few ragged strings of yarn to hold it together.

  But normally the memories I couldn’t find were from the time before the accident. Not just a few seconds in the past.

  Hugh’s heavy shoes clomped across the kitchen and around the broken mug. When I looked up at him, his frown of disapproval sent a shiver through me. A flash of memory burst into my mind like lightning. Hugh shoving me hard against the counter. Coffee sloshing out of the mug to sear my arm. The pain—not muted, the dial turned all the way up—making me lose my balance, and then—

  And then the images stopped. The world rearranged, like everything had flipped sideways a second time, and I realized the look on Hugh’s face wasn’t disapproval. It was concern.

  “Annika? Are you okay?” He bent down and reached out a hand to me.

  I took it. As his fingers closed over mine, a shiver swept over me, like a presentiment of danger. Then the cold shiver turned into one that was warmer and more pleasant as he drew me into his arms.

  “Cleaner,” Hugh barked over my shoulder. “Clean up this mess.”

  The silver humanoid cleaner bot obediently glided up on her wheeled feet. She carefully avoided the liquid as she bent and picked up the mug shards one by one with her pincer hands. Not that she was really a she. Some people named their cleaner bots, but Hugh had never been that sentimental. And if I had been once, I couldn’t remember it now. But I still thought of the bot as female, probably because Hugh thought it was funny to keep her in that French maid’s outfit he had bought.

  Hugh drew me out of the bot’s way as a sponge extruded from between the two sides of one of the pincers to mop up the coffee. “You need to be more careful,” he said in my ear.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “You tripped.”

  I looked down at the white tile floor, which had been empty before the mug had fallen. I didn’t like clutter, or at least that was what Hugh told me. “That’s it? I tripped?”

  “I think you had another lapse.” That was what he had taken to calling it whenever he mentioned a piece of our past and I couldn’t call up the memory, or when I couldn’t remember something simple like my email password. I knew it was just shorthand for memory lapse, but the word still felt like a moral judgment.

  “It’s never happened like that before. It’s never made me fall. Or forget something right after it happened.”

  Another flash. Hugh walking into the kitchen, his eyes landing on the mug in my hand. “What is that? You don’t drink coffee, you stupid bitch. How many times do I have to tell you before you get it through your useless scrambled brain?”

  But as I stared up into his warm brown eyes, I knew beyond a doubt that the man I loved had never said any such thing. I didn’t even know how my imagination could have come up with it. Even before the accident, he had never so much as raised his voice to me. I might have lost almost everything about my former life, but that part, I did remember. And ever since the accident, he had treated me like a precious crystal vase, fragile and breakable. As if the slightest harsh word, or the briefest second without his eyes on me, would send me shattering into a million pieces.

  So where had those flashes come from? Was the damage getting worse? Had my mind moved beyond simple lapses to start creating false memories?

  Not only that, but what Hugh had said in the flash was true. I didn’t drink coffee. Hugh had reminded me more than once that I had always liked a glass of lemon water in the morning, cool and crisp with a hint of tart, and that I used to gently tease him for his reliance on caffeine. I didn’t know what had made me prepare a cup for myself. Curiosity, maybe. With my old self gone, and the chances of getting her back looking slimmer by the day, why shouldn’t I try something new?

  Unless that impulse was, in itself, a sign that I was getting worse. That the last fragments of who I used to be were fading away, beyond hope of recovery.

  “Maybe I should call my doctor,” I said against Hugh’s chest.

  I felt Hugh shake his head. His stubble scraped against my scalp. “Not yet. We’ll keep a close eye on it.”

  “But if something is wrong…”

  “You were so miserable, all those weeks in the hospital. Every time I saw you, you begged me to take you home. And the way your doctor treated you…” He drew in a deep breath. “You told me you didn’t want to go back there, not ever, not unless you were dying. Don’t you remember?”

  Of course I didn’t remember. But the words sounded like a test. “I remember,” I lied.

  Hugh drew back enough for me to see his approving smile. He clasped my hands in his and squeezed them hard. “You can beat this on your own. I have faith in you.” His smile grew mischievous, crinkling the corners of his eyes. “And if you don’t, well, I guess we’ll just have to replace you.” He jerked his chin toward the cleaner bot. “I hear they’re making good companion models these days.”

  Just a joke, and one we had shared before. He looked at me expectantly, inviting me to join in. But another cold shiver ran up my spine.

  “We can’t have anything less than perfect in this house, after all,” said Hugh. “Isn’t that your rule? Never make a mess, never forget a birthday, keep every square inch of space pristine and perfect?”

  I looked down at the mess I had made—nothing pristine or perfect about that. But the cleaner bot had already made the mess disappear. And beyond that spot, the kitchen was all gleaming white and silver, without a single cereal box on the counter or dish in the sink to mar the sleek, sterile landscape. In the cabinets, I knew I would find the dishes arranged by size, and the spices alphabetized. I didn’t remember being the person who had done those things, but the evidence of it was right there for me to look at any time I wanted.

  I felt the sudden urge to apologize, even though I didn’t know what for. For whatever mess or missed birthday I had criticized him for before the accident, maybe. For whatever had put that edge into his voice.

  Instead, I met his smile with one of my own, and told him what he wanted to hear. “You’re right. I can do this.”

  His face softened. He folded me into his arms again. I couldn’t h
ave broken free if I had wanted to. Although I didn’t even understand why that thought had come to me—why would I ever want to?

  “You’d better,” he murmured into my hair.

  * * *

  “Tell me about the accident,” I said, when we were lying in bed that night.

  I had been the one to decorate the bedroom, he had told me. It had been my sanctuary, my happy place. I found that hard to believe. The silvery-gray sheets made me feel like I was living inside a cold, barren spaceship. The crisp white walls were blank except for a single abstract painting that took up most of the wall that faced the bed. The painting looked like the contents of a toilet bowl after a night of drinking too much. Its sharp red and blue lines gave the room its only color. Every time I saw the painting, I wondered about the person who had chosen it, and whether I really wanted to be that person again.

  I glanced over to see Hugh’s brows draw together. His face closed down, the warm spark vanishing from his eyes. The same thing that always happened when I brought up the accident.

  “We have so many good memories between us. There’s no need to bring up a bad one.” His smile took visible effort. “Do you remember when we first met?”

  He kept going over this one with me. He liked it when I recited it back to him, even though I was pretty sure he knew I still didn’t actually remember. “I was working at a bakery,” I said, beginning the familiar ritual.

  “The Merry Morning Bakery,” he reminded me. He always insisted I get the smallest details right. As if he thought maybe one of them would jog my memory.

  “The Merry Morning Bakery. Only it wasn’t morning, it was nighttime. I was just hanging the closed sign on the door when you burst in, panting like you had run the whole way.”

  He smiled at that, as if we were sharing the memory together. Maybe he thought we were.

  “As soon as you got your breath back, you asked me whether we had any angel food cake,” I continued. “Because your mother was pregnant, and—”

  Just like that, his smile disappeared. “My sister,” he said flatly. “My sister was pregnant.”

  “Your sister was pregnant,” I corrected myself. “And she absolutely had to have angel food cake, and not from a mix. You had tried three other bakeries, but they all had bots doing the baking. And your mother—I mean your sister—had this superstition about bots and pregnancy—”

  “How could my mother have been pregnant? She was fifty when we met.” The way he was looking at me made me remember that brief sense of danger I had felt in the kitchen, and that incongruous false memory.

  “I’m sorry. I’m still having trouble remembering this one.” Shame swept over me, even though I wasn’t entirely sure why. It was hardly my fault I didn’t have my memory back. Except, of course, that it was my fault I had lost it in the first place. If I hadn’t taken such a stupid, silly risk… “I remember you telling me the story, though,” I said, too brightly. “And that’s almost like remembering it for myself. You asked how much money it would take for me to keep the bakery open long enough to bake your sister an angel food cake with human hands. And then you pulled out this big wad of actual cash…”

  My voice trailed off as Hugh turned on his side, away from me.

  “Let’s just go to sleep,” he said without looking at me.

  I stared up at the blank white ceiling. I wasn’t tired. These days, I stayed wired right up until I closed my eyes. And I wasn’t ready to close my eyes yet.

  “It’s not working,” I said quietly. “I’m not getting any better.”

  Hugh let out a sigh. “You’re doing great, honey. I’m sorry. It’s just so hard, hearing you get it wrong over and over again.”

  As reassurances went, his words left a lot to be desired. He was doing his best, I reminded myself. In a real sense, he had lost his wife that day. I couldn’t expect him to cope perfectly all the time.

  “I love hearing all these happy memories,” I said. “But they’re not helping me remember anything for myself. I’m getting worse. You can see it, can’t you?”

  “It’s going to be a long, hard road. The doctor said—”

  “You don’t want me going back to the doctor. You said I should beat this on my own. And I think I know how to do it. I need to start trying to remember the harder things. Like the accident.”

  “Leave it,” Hugh said. “I want you remembering the good days, not the bad ones. Those memories won’t bring you anything but pain.”

  But I had to try. “We were out hiking. You used to go hiking all the time. You knew all the trails no one else knew.” As with all the other stories of my past, I only knew even that much from what he had told me. I had no recollection of the accident that had taken my life—my self—from me.

  Hugh looked over his shoulder at me with a scowl. “I said leave it.”

  “I don’t blame you for what happened. You know that, right? It was my fault. I saw the tree that had fallen across the river, and I wanted to walk across.” That kind of recklessness didn’t fit my image of the woman who had decorated this room and alphabetized those spices. But I felt more like the person who had taken that risk than the one who had done all those things.

  Hugh didn’t say anything. He lay too still, his body a single tense line.

  “You saved my life,” I said. “I was underwater for five minutes. If you hadn’t pulled me out when you did—”

  “I said leave it!” he roared.

  I froze mid-word, my mouth still open. Half-memories flickered through my mind—the coffee cup, a half-dozen others. Almost close enough to grasp.

  He rolled onto his other side and met my eyes. The anger in his gaze turned to affection. Under that warmth, the wisps of memory all melted away.

  “Please, Annika.” His voice was rough. “I can’t do this right now. And you shouldn’t either. It’s not good for you. Let’s just go to sleep.”

  He rolled over again. This time I didn’t say anything.

  But I didn’t close my eyes. I didn’t want to sleep. I didn’t like what sleep did to me these days, pulling me under greedily the second I closed my eyes, then granting me only a split second of blank oblivion before I woke and found that an entire night had passed. I hadn’t had any dreams since the accident. Maybe if I could dream, I would be able to access the memories trapped inside my brain.

  It wasn’t as if anything else was working. No matter what Hugh thought.

  I needed to free the bad memories in order to get at everything else I had lost. I was becoming more and more sure of it. Maybe my mind was working so hard to block out the pain and trauma of the accident, and my time in the hospital afterward, that it was blocking everything else out along with it.

  I had to find something to jog my memory, if Hugh wouldn’t do it for me. I had tried looking online for information on the accident once, in a rare moment when he wasn’t watching. But it hadn’t even made the small local paper.

  And I knew he wouldn’t have saved anything to remind him of that time. He had even burned the clothes he had worn that day—cut them to pieces with kitchen shears and started a fire in a deep metal cooking pan. He had stuck it in the oven and closed the door before the smoke alarm could go off. Then he had sat on the floor and watched through the oven door, going through an entire six-pack of beer by himself, not answering when I tried to ask if he was all right. When he had taken the pan out, the flames had warped it; it wouldn’t sit flat anymore. That was the last time he had ever talked about that day in the woods with me.

  What he had said about the hospital earlier, though, made me wonder. If it had been as bad as all that, maybe waking up those memories could trigger something too. And the hospital must have given him something when they had sent me home with him. Like discharge instructions, with my doctor’s name on them. Just seeing the name might spark a memory.

  I had never seen him check any instructions, although he must have done it a lot, in the early days of my homecoming that were as lost to me as my time in th
e hospital. But I knew where he would have kept anything he didn’t want me to see.

  I wasn’t allowed in Hugh’s office. Especially not now that he had started working from home so he could take better care of me. He helped his clients recover from bankruptcy, which meant he worked with a lot of people’s sensitive financial information. He couldn’t let anyone else lay eyes on their files, even though he knew I wouldn’t do anything with the information. He smiled apologetically whenever he reminded me of the rule, like he knew full well how silly it was. But he still kept the door locked whenever he wasn’t in there.

  But I knew where he kept the key.

  I had seen him put it away once. I hadn’t meant to hold on to the memory. I didn’t care about getting into his office; I had no interest in other people’s financial problems. But that was the way my Swiss-cheese brain worked, these days. Either I couldn’t remember anything, or I saw it once and never forgot it.

  So I knew Hugh kept the key to his office in his sock drawer, tucked inside one half of a pair of novelty reindeer socks he said his sister had given him for Christmas one year.

  I stilled my own breathing to listen to Hugh’s. It had gone slow and rhythmic. A soft snore rumbled past his lips.

  I crept out of bed slowly, careful not to brush him with a foot or tug the blanket away from his body by accident. I eased his sock drawer open, and cringed at the squeak it made. I looked over my shoulder. He hadn’t moved.

  I reached into the reindeer sock. My fingers closed around the cold metal key. I tiptoed out of the room with it hidden in my fist, and closed the bedroom door softly behind me.

  I crept down the hall, past the cleaning bot on her charging station. She was still wearing that silly outfit. I cast another glance over my shoulder. The hallway was silent and, except for the bot, empty. But I couldn’t shake the sense of Hugh watching over my shoulder. He was always there, these days, with a warm smile and a hand on my arm to steady me. Making sure I was all right.