Life as I Know It (36 page)

I held him against me until his sobs had subsided, then wiped his smeary face with a tissue. “I promise nothing will happen to me. Come and look out of the window. See? Just big raindrops, no thunder, no lightning. It’s quite safe.”

He stared at me, sticking out his bottom lip in a doubtful pout. We both looked up as Sophie stuck her head in from the garage and called that we were going to be late if we didn’t hurry up.

“We’re coming, Sophie,” I called back. I got to my feet and ruffled Teddy’s hair. “Will you be all right now?”

He nodded dubiously, and clung tightly to my hand as we walked to the car.

“See, Teddy? We don’t even have to go outside.”

After making sure all the children had their seat belts fastened, I drove out into the gray morning with a sigh. As Karen had predicted, our late start and the weather meant that the traffic was twice as heavy as usual. I wouldn’t be back by nine now, and Dan would be worried that I was sleeping for so long. I hoped to goodness that he had the good sense to leave me be.

Dan was sitting
on a chair watching me when I woke up at half past nine that evening in his bed, where I’d gone more than two hours earlier on the pretext of needing a nap. Predictably, Teddy had cried even more desperately when I’d left him at nursery school. It was only when I had promised him he could leave at the end of the term, and that Daddy and I had found a lovely school for him nearby, that he’d eventually relinquished his grip on my clothing.

The traffic had been slow on the way back; the only good thing was that the rain seemed to have kept Jason at home, since there was no sign of him or his bike. As soon as I got in, I had to race down the garden in the torrential rain to feed the animals, before hurrying upstairs to lie down.

For an awful moment, as I lay there panting, my heart pounding from the rushing about, my hair damp from the rain, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to sleep. But the ability to swap from one body to another was still with me, and it wasn’t long before I felt myself begin to drift.

“Jessica?” Dan said as I began to stir. “You’ve been asleep for a long time. I was beginning to think you were going to be here for the night.”

“I’m sorry, Dan,” I said, sitting up. “I must have been more tired than I thought.”

I got up and crossed to the hand mirror he kept on the windowsill and straightened my tousled hair. When I looked up he was still watching me.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s something wrong with you, isn’t there? The fainting at the office the other day, the collapse while I was with you at the flat. This ability of yours to sleep so soundly. What is it, Jessica?”

I felt myself grow hot under his scrutiny.

“It’s nothing, just a residual tiredness from the lightning strike.”

He came and stood behind me and pulled my arm around so I was facing him.

“That’s not the whole truth, is it?”

I tried to avoid his gaze, but he cupped my face in his hands and stared directly into my eyes.

“Tell me the truth, Jessica… please.”

“I’m so sorry, Dan,” I stammered. “I love you, and I don’t want to lose you.”

“Tell me!”

“I… I can’t.”

He dropped his hands to his sides and walked to the other side of the room. I could see the frustration in his every move, but I didn’t know what to tell him. He stared at me, then came back toward me and tried again.

“Tell me, Jessica. Nothing can be worse than what I’m imagining.”

“It was the lightning strike,” I said in a hoarse whisper. “It… did something to me.”

“What?” he cried. “You’ve said that once before. Is it those turns you were having? Is it something that… can’t be fixed?”

I turned and stared out of the window at the dark night. I could feel him standing behind me, but he didn’t touch me.

“I asked you once if you believed in life after death,” I said quietly. “I asked if you thought you would know a soul even if it wasn’t in a body you recognized.”

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

He sounded desperate, and I wanted more than anything in the world to hold him and tell him that everything was all right. The trouble was, I admitted to myself at last, it wasn’t all right. It never could be all right. I had been living in the ridiculous hope that I could juggle being two people at once. I had lied to him, and to Lauren’s family. I was, although unwittingly, a fraud, and I wasn’t good enough for someone as wonderful as Dan.

“I’m not who you think I am,” I said at last. “Since the lightning strike I have been living the lives of two people. I’m Jessica some of the time, but when I sleep my life force transfers to a woman called Lauren. She’s the mother of four children, Dan. And the friend I had over for lunch today was her sister… my sister.”

Dan was standing with his mouth open. I knew I was hurting him terribly. After what had happened to his mother he would have no choice but to think I was crazy, and the knowledge was as painful to me as having a stake driven through my heart.

“You need help,” he said shakily. “There are doctors who can help you, Jessica.”

“No. No one can help. I didn’t want to hurt you, Dan. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything before, but I knew you wouldn’t understand. No one can do anything to help me.”

Dan laid a hand tentatively on my shoulder and I rubbed the side of my face on the back of his hand, closing my eyes at the feel of his skin, warm on mine for what I feared might be the last time.

I felt the tears starting, but I choked them silently away, turning to look up at him in what I dreaded would be our final moments together.

His face was gray and hollow. I could see the sorrow etched deeply into his being, and knew that I was responsible for hurting the person I had come to love most in all the world.

“If it’s some sort of dual personality disorder,” he whispered fearfully, “there are places you can go…”

“I told you, it’s not a disorder, it’s real. I really am living as two different people.”

“No, Jessica! That isn’t possible. You must talk to someone about this…”

“Good-bye, Dan,” I murmured as I slipped out from under the deadweight of his hand and made my way to the door. “Tell your father I think he’s great… and Dan?”

“Yes?”

“Look after Frankie for me.”

I wasn’t sure what prompted me to ask him to look after Frankie for me. It was a gut feeling… something I couldn’t quite put my finger on—a sixth sense that she would be better off with him, for tonight at least. During the long walk home the rain started. It began as a whisper of moisture against my skin, increasing gradually until I had to wipe droplets from my eyelashes. I hardly felt the cold; I was too numb already. By the time
I reached my flat, my clothes were soaked through and my feet were squelching inside my shoes. Without even bothering to dry off or turn on the lights, I closed the front door behind me, kicked off my sodden shoes, and flopped down onto the couch, burying my head in my arms.

It was still raining heavily when I awoke at midday in Lauren’s bed; I could hear it lashing against the bedroom window. Consciousness as Lauren was hardly more appealing than how I’d felt as Jessica, and before I’d even opened my eyes I began to sob uncontrollably, hugging the frilled pillow to me and curling my racked body into a fetal position around it.

After a while, I heard a knock on the bedroom door and Karen’s voice asking if I was all right.

I sat up and wiped my nose on the back of my hand, sniffing loudly.

“You can come in,” I called in a nasal croak, sitting up with the pillow still clutched in my arms.

“What on earth’s happened?” she said, taking one look at me and hurrying across the room to perch on the edge of the bed.

“I told Dan the truth about what’s happening to me, and he thinks I’m insane,” I sniffled, the tears flowing freely again. “I mean he would, wouldn’t he? No one in their right mind would believe such a story. I wouldn’t have believed it myself if it hadn’t happened to me.”

“I believe it,” Karen said, putting her arm around my shaking shoulders. “Did you give him a chance to absorb what you told him, or did you just drop it on him from a great height and run away?”

I squinted at her through swollen eyelids. “Okay, I ran away, but he didn’t come after me, did he?”

“How do you know he isn’t banging on the door of your flat right now?”

“It won’t make any difference,” I wailed, breaking into a fresh torrent of sobs. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t be two people. It’s not fair to anyone, least of all me!”

“I know, I know,” Karen said soothingly. “I wondered how long you’d be able to keep it up, but Lauren, think of the children. They need you! What would happen to this family without you? Grant can hardly cope with the children on his own. Without you their lives would be in the hands of a long succession of nannies. The children love you, Lauren. I’ve seen how happy everyone has been since you arrived.”

“But I’m an imposter! I’m not their real mother. I’m lying to them and to Grant and to everyone I meet while I’m in her body.”

“Would you rather they had no mother at all?”

“You could look after them. They love you.”

“They love me as an auntie. I’m not cut out to be a mum. I like being here, helping, but my life is in London. I love my job, Lauren, and I love Jen. Can you see Grant allowing me and my partner to move in here?”

She paused as I smiled through my tears, sniffing loudly. “Probably not.”

Sensing a moment of weakness, she gave me a squeeze. “Please, Lauren, I know I’m asking an awful lot of you. And I don’t know what you’re going to do about Dan, but Lauren has to stay.” She set her lips in a firm line. “Come on, get up. I thought we might go out together and look for a swing set for the garden, as you suggested.”

“I can’t go out looking like this,” I exclaimed, throwing down the pillow and walking over to the bathroom, where I peered in the mirror. “My face is all puffed up.”

“It’s raining; no one will notice,” she said. “Come on, I’ve put all the clean laundry away while you’ve been over in Epsom, and I’ve put a chicken casserole in the oven for later, so you’ve got time to come out with me.”

It took twenty minutes to make Lauren’s face look respectable enough to go out, then Karen and I headed off to the farm where we’d taken the children the previous week. I’d noticed then that they were selling play equipment, and we headed back there to order a huge multi-swing gym. In the converted barn restaurant we ate a late lunch, which I toyed with listlessly, hardly tasting the food. Karen tried to jolly me along, and together we chose the equipment we wanted. Later, Karen watched anxiously under the shelter of the huge barn roof while I tapped Lauren’s pin numbers into the credit card machine.

“I’m glad they’re willing to deliver it,” she said as we ran through the rain back to the car. “We’d never have gotten it into your van.”

I smiled wanly, glad she’d made me come out of the house. “I hope Grant will be able to put it together when it arrives,” I said as I started the engine. “I’m hopeless at those self-assembly things.”

Looking in the mirror, ready to reverse, I let out a long slow whistle of breath.

“Don’t look now,” I told Karen. “But there’s my stalker.”

Jason was standing astride his powerful bike, watching us, his blond hair plastered to his head as rivulets of water ran down his face.

“He must be mad to be out in weather like this on a bike,” Karen exclaimed, swiveling her head to stare at him. “What does he think he’s going to achieve by hounding you?”

“I don’t know,” I said grimly as I nosed the car through the puddles and out of the parking lot onto the tarmac access road. “But he must have followed us from home. We probably didn’t notice him because of the rain.”

As I swept the car up the road, the bike came zooming past, throwing up flumes of spray.

“Bloody hell!” Karen shrieked as the bike stopped suddenly in front of us.

I floored the brakes, the wheels screaming for traction on the wet surface. The car spun sideways, narrowly missing the bike, but ended up with the passenger wheels half up a grassy bank. Karen lowered her window and yelled obscenities at Jason, who was sitting staring at us a little way off.

“Bugger off, you idiot!” Karen shouted. “Or I’ll report you to the police.”

Jason calmly gunned the bike toward us, and stopped only when its front wheel was rammed up against the driver’s door. He rapped on the window until I reluctantly wound it down.

“This is doing no good,” I said wearily as the rain splashed onto my face and arm through the open window. “Leave me alone, Jason.”

He stared at me with his wild blue eyes and I shuddered at the desperation I saw there.

“I’m never giving you up,” he hissed. “I know you love me. You’re only staying with them out of a misplaced sense of duty.”

“No, I’m staying because I want to.”

“You don’t know the half of it, though,” he said coldly. “What do you think I came to talk to you about that day in the park? You tried telling me it was too risky meeting me with the children there, but I knew there was no risk at all.”

I stared at him, dreading what he might be about to say.

He thrust his wet head through the open window. “I came to tell you Grant knew about us,” he said. “That bastard husband of yours had found out about me. And do you know what he did about it?”

I sat rigidly, waiting for him to tell me, while the rain hammered down on the windshield and trickled down Jason’s face.

“He tried to pay me off, Lauren. He thinks money can solve everything. He knew about us, but he thought I’d go away like a good little boy if he paid me enough of his precious money.”

Gasping, I clutched at my throat, which seemed to be constricting painfully. I could barely breathe. So Grant had known all along! No wonder he’d been skeptical about Lauren’s memory loss! He must have thought Jason had told me he’d found out about us and that I’d used the lightning strike to fake a lost memory to avoid the consequences of his wrath. And no wonder he’d taken my mobile phone and ignored Jason’s pleading messages, I thought numbly.