THE PRESENT
I’m in bed. David brought me here a few minutes ago. I couldn’t walk, my feet too heavy to lift, and he carried me up the stairs like we were newly-weds. The killer, the man I thought was a killer, who calls me a killer instead. Holding me in his arms.
‘You drugged me.’ I mutter as he adjusts my position on our mattress, propping a pillow beneath my head. I remember watching him drop the clear substance into my water as I sat collapsed at the table. ‘You bastard.’ But the word has so little power behind it. I don’t have the venom inside me that I had before.
‘Medicated,’ he says, as if the alternative vocabulary explained everything. ‘You feel it now, right? Coming back into your system?’
My toes are tingling, but I don’t think this is what he’s referring to. The abyss I’d been falling into is closing up, and the light above me has become more inviting. A sense of hope I’d thought I’d lost – I can almost grasp it. I suspect it’s this his ‘medicine’ is bringing about. The gaps in my soul are starting to fill and solidity is slowly returning to my mind, though there’s a headache forming at my temples, squeezing at me without mercy.
‘It’s been the only way to keep your childhood away from your present,’ he adds, pulling a blanket over my legs. ‘To let you be free to be someone new in the here and now.’
Whatever.
I decide to give in to the drug. I can feel its effects circulating through my system, each beat of my heart driving it to the extremities of my members. It is taking me over again.
Taking me over.
‘What gives you the right?’ I ask, drowsiness pulling me away. For the moment, though, the will to protest is still stronger. ‘What gives you the right to steal my past from me?’
‘Oh, Amber,’ David answers. ‘I’m so sorry you were brought to this. Your past, your childhood … it’s not something you need to remember. I promise you. It was truly terrible. Just let it go.’
There’s a look about David, like he’s unwilling to tell me more. This new, sudden spirit of openness, and he still wants to hide things from me.
‘That can’t be right,’ my voice trails off. ‘It was mine, however bad it may have been. Who did you think I would be, if you took it all away from me?’
Then my voice is just an echo, bouncing against the bone of my skull, fading into nothing.