The first thing that hits me when I wake is the smell of sour air and chemicals.
I try to open my eyes, but only one will cooperate. The other sticks shut stubbornly. My mouth is dry, my throat sharp as a row of pins.
‘She’s waking up,’ I hear Daniel say quietly, and I feel his hand on mine, see his face blurring into focus.
I hear the crunch of metal on metal, and feel the rain of glass on my head, my body jolting in fear. But then the glass and the sounds are gone, and I can only hear Daniel.
‘Erica? Erica? It’s okay, Erica.’
I try to focus on him, through my one eye. He stares at me and strokes my forehead. His hand hurts my skin, but I can’t seem to be able to speak, so I say nothing.
I remember feeling as though I was kissing Mike. Was I kissing Mike? Or was I kissing Daniel? The sting of foreign Thai heat and the scents of cooking spices and alcohol still warm my skin and I try to push away whatever it is that is covering me, suddenly far too hot.
‘Keep that on, sweetheart.’ This time the voice belongs to my mum, and it sounds strangled. I turn to the side, every fibre of my neck screaming out with the effort.
‘Hi,’ she says, her lips in the strange shape of a forced smile. ‘How are you feeling?’
I try to form words, but my mind is too slow, my mouth too dry. I nod, then close my eye again, drenched in exhaustion.
***
As the days roll by, indistinguishable from one another, I learn what happened.
I left Daniel to go out in the car. I drove alone, presumably planning to go to the supermarket. And then I lost control of the car. It rammed into a metal post, which then fell onto my windscreen. I have broken my left arm and my head is covered in cuts. Nobody else was involved or hurt. The car is a write-off.
‘I’ll need a new one,’ I say, but as soon as the words leave my sore, chapped lips, and I see Daniel’s eyes flit from me to the dull green floor, I know I won’t be needing a new car. The poisonous thought that I could have hurt someone fills my mind, drowning my thoughts. I always thought I was safe driving, because I thought if there was anyone to hurt, then they would see me, and I wouldn’t vanish in the first place. Now, nothing seems so straightforward. I obviously ended up back in the car after disappearing, because that’s where they found me.
‘We’re going to do some more scans,’ the doctor says. I have already had scans, tests and results, but they still can’t work out why I lost control of the car. I didn’t have my phone with me to distract me. The radio wasn’t on. I had zero trace of drugs or alcohol in my blood. My blood pressure and blood sugar levels are both consistently normal. ‘Try to think again, Erica. How did you feel just before it happened?’
‘I can’t remember,’ I answer. Mum stares at me and I wonder for a minute if she might tell him.
Oh, she does it all the time, Doctor. She will have probably lost all control of her senses and crashed the split second before she entered the alternate world where she watches another version of herself.
My lips curl into something like a smirk and the doctor frowns.
‘Erica, it’s important we know as much as we possibly can about how this happened.’
Mum drops her gaze from me.
‘I really don’t know.’
‘And nothing like this has ever happened to you before?’
I shrug, which hurts, and reminds me of Mike.
The doctor sighs and scribbles something in my notes. I imagine his impatient scrawl: difficult and secretive.
***
I’ve been on the ward for a few days when a sour-faced nurse tells me I have a visitor, even though it isn’t visiting hours.
‘Would’ve turned him away if he’d listened. Said he’s had a long trip.’
I’m puzzled, and my brain is slow. When I see Nicholas I grin, my whole face hurts. He leans over and gives me an awkward hug.
‘How are you?’
I shuffle around in the bed. ‘I’m doing okay. Thanks for coming. Mum didn’t say you were going to.’
‘I told her not to. It’s only a flying visit, I’m afraid. You scared me a bit. I wanted to see you. Plus, I have something for you,’ Nicholas tells me. He glances at the nurse, and waits for her to move from my room and further down the ward. Once she has gone, he hands me a yellowed newspaper.
‘Page twelve,’ he says, gesturing to the paper that is crinkled and stiff with age.
I find page twelve and a child stares out at me: square 1980s prescription glasses, pixelated hair in bunches, a small smile.
My heart reverberates in my chest then picks up speed. ‘I didn’t think we’d kept this! Where has it been all this time?’
‘We didn’t keep it. This is a copy of the paper that we read at the time. I’ve only just managed to get hold of it. I kept my notes from when it first started happening to you so I still had her name and the date that she was in the paper. Do you remember when I started making notes on your case? It was in my phase of wanting to be a doctor,’ he says.
I remember. I remember, in a flash, everything about that short space of time when it first started to happen: the strange new terror of being on my own in case it happened again, the September sun burning through my clothes as I rode my bike along the promenade with Nicholas, trying to talk our way through what had happened to me; the neat sharpened pencil flickering about in his small blue notebook as he tried to research his way to answers.
‘I did try to find out more about her a while ago; I asked Mum if she knew where that newspaper went but she couldn’t find it. And there was no internet then, so I came to a bit of a brick wall. But the other day when Mum told me about your …’ he looks around, checks for staff before he continues, ‘your accident, I decided to look again. I dug out the notebook and managed to get this old copy of The Gazette. I thought it might help.’
I scan the faded article, which outlines eleven-year-old Helen’s strange vanishing act. It only ever happened to her when she was alone. She saw moments in her personal history that held no apparent meaning, and sometimes herself, living a different life.
‘I am lucky enough to have a pony in my other life, so I’ve had to learn to ride,’ she was quoted as saying with, the journalist noted, a charming smile. I frown at the paper.
‘She changed her name,’ Nicholas says, breaking into my thoughts. ‘As an adult, she didn’t want the attention. She wanted a normal job. A normal life. I don’t think it went any further because I don’t think many people believed her. She could never prove it other than to her family.’
‘That makes sense. Daniel has tried to do some research on it a few times, and I have too. But we’ve never found anything. I told him about Helen, but I couldn’t remember her surname.’
He motions for me to pass him the newspaper and I hand it to him. ‘Look,’ he says. ‘This part’s interesting. She talks a bit about controlling it.’
‘She could control it?’ My voice is louder than I mean it to be, and now I glance out of my tiny room onto the ward.
‘Yeah. That’s why I brought it. I wanted you to see it. Read this.’
‘This is brilliant!’ I whisper. ‘She just used an anchor to keep her where she wanted to be. I should have thought of that before.’
‘I know. Something so simple,’ Nicholas said. He handed the newspaper back to me. ‘Here you go. Keep it. Use it. Buy a cat.’
I laugh and pick up my phone to send a message to Daniel. ‘I already have a cat.’