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Caroline sat opposite a very severe looking woman. Caroline was in her prettiest sun dress, a pale-yellow color with a mix of pink and white flowers on it and a lace ruffle sewn into the ruffle at the bottom hem. She didn’t know why this woman always looked grumpy and annoyed with her. It wasn’t Caroline’s fault she had an amnesia condition that left holes in her memory, including why she had to come see Mrs. Doyle every month so Mrs. Doyle could scowl at her and make her feel bad about herself.
“Your boss told me you missed work a couple of days ago,” Mrs. Doyle said after an unbearable ten minutes of silence.
“Did I?” Caroline asked and frowned. “I must have had a bad day, I don’t remember missing it, but then I rarely do.”
“You don’t remember what you did that day?” Mrs. Doyle asked.
“No, I don’t.” Caroline answered. Mrs. Doyle got up and walked over to Caroline and bent down close to the young girl. Her breath smelled bad and she was breathing a little hard, but Caroline didn’t believe Mrs. Doyle was so out of shape that getting up from the desk was a great strain on her body. She wasn’t fat. She was a trim woman with pretty hair. “Are you feeling okay Mrs. Doyle? You’re breathing really hard and fast. You aren’t going to pass out are you? I don’t have much training in first aid and I don’t want something to happen that I can’t handle.”
“I’m just unhappy Miss Caroline, I thought we had a deal. I thought that since our meeting a couple of months ago, you were going to have your aunt write down when you had bad days and any details you could remember about them.”
“I think I went for a ride, but I don’t know that for sure.” Caroline said quickly. “Maybe my aunt took me to the beach.”
“Do you remember going for a ride or to the beach? Do you remember being with your aunt that day?”
“Not really,” Caroline admitted. “It really must have been one of my bad days.”
“What do you remember?” Mrs. Doyle asked.
“My aunt coming in to wake me up and telling me that I had an appointment with you in a few hours. Then I got dressed, had breakfast, called work to make sure they knew I needed today off. They said I had scheduled it, so my aunt gave me a French lesson in the kitchen while we waited to come see you.”
“What do you remember before today?” Mrs. Doyle asked.
“I took a book to the park,” I said. “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But I don’t remember coming home and that seems like it was a few days ago. I thought that was Tuesday, but it’s now Friday. I don’t know what I did on Wednesday or Thursday. I feel like I must have slept through it. Maybe I feel asleep at the park and my aunt came and got me and then because of the amnesia problems, I don’t remember anything between Tuesday and today.”
“Did perhaps Amber take over while you were at the park?” Mrs. Doyle asked.
Caroline frowned. She had been told about Amber but wasn’t sure she believed in her. Amber supposedly shared her body. She didn’t know how that was possible or why it happened. It wasn’t like she was pregnant, she didn’t even have a boyfriend. How could she have another person inside her that made her forget things she did?
It didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t deny that she didn’t always remember what she had done that day or the day before or for two hours out of the day here and there. She had one day suddenly come awake while watching American Idol. She hated American Idol. She didn’t know why she had been watching it.
Nor did she know how she had gone from being at work to being home with her aunt watching American Idol. She also couldn’t deny that Amber liked weird books. Caroline was currently working her way through the greatest novels ever written, novels like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and War and Peace, but Amber seemed to want to read The Boxcar Children and Cam Jansen, books that were too young and stupid to keep Caroline’s attention, but they kept showing up at the house, and when she asked her aunt about them, her aunt would tell her Amber wanted them.
That didn’t explain the other books, though. Every couple of weeks a new Danielle Steele novel appeared in her room. She didn’t believe Amber was reading Cam Jansen and Danielle Steele and she, Caroline, had no desire to read Danielle Steele. She had tried one of the novels and it was all about love and sex and didn’t interest her. She preferred her romances to be based in history, books like Jane Eyre and War and Peace.
When she asked her aunt about the Danielle Steele books, her aunt had told Caroline she had picked them up for her, she liked romance novels from other eras, she thought she might like some from modern day. Caroline had thanked her and the subject had been dropped, but it seemed like the Danielle Steele books were being read. She’d find her bookmarks in them occasionally or find them opened and face down on her nightstand. She didn’t believe this was being done by her aunt. Maybe Amber was trying to read them. She’d once found her bookmark removed from Wuthering Heights. She had been forced to rediscover her place, reading several chapters she was sure she had already read. They were familiar and she knew what they were about even though she couldn’t quote from them.
She had other dreamlike memories as well, nightmares really. Nightmares that involved blood and screaming and people she had never met, which was weird, because she had read in a book that you couldn’t dream about people you didn’t know. The brain was unable to create faces in dreams. Every person in a dream had to be someone you had at least run across in real life, but Caroline was sure she had never met any of these people that screamed and bleed in her dreams.
Parts of them disintegrated like in a horror movie. She hadn’t told her aunt about the nightmares, she was afraid she’d have to go back to the hospital and she didn’t like it there. It was boring and made her amnesia worse. The best part of the hospital had been Dr. Abernathy. Dr. Abernathy had been very nice to her, Caroline, and had been the first person to tell her about Amber. She didn’t like Dr. Durant at all. He was a mean man who didn’t care about Caroline’s feelings, he just wanted to tell her about all the bad things that had supposedly happened to her that really hadn’t. Maybe they had happened to Amber, maybe that’s why Amber was hiding in Caroline’s body. She had tried to discuss that theory with Dr. Durant and he’d just continued to shout at her.
Her life was confusing enough without Dr. Durant telling her she was bad or evil or that horrible things had happened to her that hadn’t. He also told her a lot of stories of some woman named Martha that didn’t make sense to Caroline. Martha made Dr. Durant angry, but that wasn’t Caroline’s fault, she had never met Martha, had never even heard of the woman until Dr. Durant had started ranting about her one day. Why should he hold Caroline responsible for her actions? Didn’t Caroline have enough to deal with? She had Amber who somehow caused her amnesia. It was hard to keep a job when Amber made her forget to go to work.
Then there were the uniforms. When Caroline wore her work uniforms they always had Amber’s name on them. She had tried to get them changed, but her bosses always told her they couldn’t change it. She had created a new name tag with a label maker that read Caroline and she often wore it instead of the name tag issued by her boss. Her boss had never told her she couldn’t, so she guessed it was okay.
She didn’t have any friends at work and she was being homeschooled by her aunt. It made for a lonely life. Sometimes she wished Amber would talk to her, maybe since they were sharing a body they could be friends, but Amber never contacted her. Repeated pleadings in the mirror for Amber to contact her usually resulted in a bout of amnesia.
