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‘You don’t remember the accident at all?’
Her therapist is talking softly, gently, the perfect picture of professional concern. Her husband is at her side, a steady, comforting presence. Tiffany sits on the therapist’s sofa and stares at his cat as it plays on the floor, chasing after a toy.
Leap. Miss. Reset. Leap. Miss. Reset. Leap. Miss. Reset. Again and again and again.
Clearly, not the brightest animal in the world.
‘Tiffany? Do you remember what happened?’ His voice washes over her like water, soothing, drowning out the confusion and panic and wrong wrong wrong creeping up her spine and filling her lungs with ice-cold dread.
‘No,’ she replies. Lies. Maybe. She’s not sure. ‘No, it’s all just… blank.’ (That bit is a lie, definitely.)
He nods, understanding, and he frowns just a little, disappointed on her behalf.
(but his eyes are smiling behind his glasses, like this is the best news in the world, and she can feel her heart slamming against her ribcage, terror surging. He knows, he must know. He must know she’s lying, why would he smile if she can’t remember, surely his job is to help her remember-)
She keeps her face blank and her hands steady with a practiced ease which is entirely her own yet belongs to someone else. She’s never had a reason to learn to lie, after all. There’s no way this poised calm could be her own. ‘Do you think I will remember? Sooner or later?’
‘That’s a hard question to answer, Tiffany. It’s possible that, given time, you will start to regain those memories. However, it’s equally possible that this time is going to remain a blank spot in your mind for the rest of your life. Given the severity of the concussion you suffered, I’d almost say it’s likely that those moments are gone forever.’
‘That’s probably a good thing, love,’ her husband says as he reaches over, taking her hand. ‘That accident… I really thought I was going to lose you, Tiff. I’m glad one of us can forget about it.’
She nods. Chad smiles at her, relieved. She smiles back, brittle, because she’s supposed to.
A concussion, the doctors say.
There was an accident, they say. A bad one. She came off her bike, they say. She was thrown through the air, they say, and slammed her head on the asphalt as she came back down.
She’s lucky it wasn’t worse, they say. (Sometimes, it sounds like a threat.)
Thank goodness you’re safe, her husband says.
I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you, her husband says.
God, I’m so relieved you’re back, her husband says.
The kids were so worried, her husband says.
Hold on. Kids?
The memories come, then. Her perfect, beautiful children. Three of them. And the dog, don’t forget the dog, but- children. She has a family. They need her. She understands it, then, a truth just as fundamental as gravity. Her name is Tiffany, she has a family, and they need her.
How bad was this accident? For a moment there she thought-
She could have forgotten her children.
On the floor in front of her, the stupid cat finally stops chasing the toy, and pads across the room. Her therapist scoops it up, one-handed, and it hangs in his grip, practically boneless, purring.
‘I’m okay’, she says.
It’s probably a lie. Most things are, right now. She might feel guilty about it if her instincts weren’t screaming that everyone else- her husband and her therapist and everyone, up to and including the nice barista at the coffee shop- were telling, and living, even bigger ones than her.
Chad believes her, though, and he smiles and stands and shakes hands with the doctor.
And then they leave with instructions for her to rest (she laughs a little, thinking of children, of the fact that she has people relying on her and rest can wait a while) and a container of painkillers, bright blue pills that she already knows she isn’t going to use, if the way the nausea surges through her at the sight of them is anything to go by.
Her husband loops a hand around her waist, possessive protective in the aftermath of what must have been a horrifying thing to witness, and leads her towards the car.
She lets him.
There is a motorbike in her garage which is twisted almost beyond recognition and it might even be her bike. She thinks this might be true. She had a motorbike, once, and it was the same model as this one. There’s no reason to doubt that this is hers. She likes riding her motorbike. That she knows is true. It can be a dangerous hobby, too. Accidents happen. She knows that. She- she’s seen that. (She’s… caused it? No, that can’t be right. She’s been in exactly one accident and she has the concussion and the empty space in her memory to show for it.)
Nothing about this situation feels implausible, really.
Why, then, does the whole thing ring false?
Chad talks in the car, the whole way home. Every word out of his fucking mouth sends pain arching up her skull until she wants to scream and smash his stupid face through the windshield.
She smiles through clenched teeth, and makes agreeable noises in all the right places, and does not snatch the steering wheel from him even when he nearly causes another accident.
‘Mom! You’re back! We were so worried-’
‘Donnie, leave your sister alone. Brandon, it’s your turn to load the dishwasher, if you run off to play that computer game again then so help me god-’
The world pulses wrong, wrong, wrong, pain lancing up the back of her skull like a spike driven straight through her occipital, and she smiles and mediates and keeps her family together because that’s what she’s supposed to do.
‘Oh, shit, Tiff, I completely forgot to walk the dog today-’
‘It’s fine, I’ll do it.’
‘Thanks, love. It’s just, there’s a football match on tonight-’
‘I said I’ll do it.’
The accident happened.
It was in the local news, she has the hospital stay (and the hospital bills) to show for it, her bike is a hunk of twisted metal taking up space in her garage.
She can almost remember it, too.
Light like she’d never seen before, beautiful. Falling and falling and falling, further than she thought possible. An impact that rocked her to her very core, even before she registered the rest. Pain like people aren’t supposed to remember and lips against her own, familiar, and desperate, an emotion she doesn’t have the words for. A face she knows she needs to remember, blurring as she fights back tears. The world fading out around her, a soul-deep certainty that her time is over. One final breath and she’s slipping away. Not alone, though. Not alone. Hand in hand.
The surgery.
She tries not to think about it. Tries to forget the whirring machinery, the pain and the fear and the sheer existential dread brought on by those mechanical blades. She tries not to think about it because those memories feel like defeat in a way she can’t quantify, can’t explain how the knowledge that she wasn’t alone is both a relief and a torture in and of itself.
Except-
Except there was no surgery. She’s lucky it wasn’t worse, after all. Aside from the concussion she came out of the crash in astonishingly good condition, the few scrapes and bruises she’d collected were already fading by the time she woke up. For her to think otherwise is- bizarre. The dreams of her arm pinned and her abdomen skewered by twisted, broken metal… they’re just that- dreams.
She was riding alone. She crashed. She was knocked unconscious. She was taken to hospital. She’s fine, now. That’s what happened. That’s what happened and if she really wanted to, she could go read the news articles and medical reports that prove it.
There was no surgery. There was never any surgery.
There was no one else there.
Chad doesn’t want her repairing the bike. He wants her to give the whole thing up, thinks her recent scare should have turned her off the hobby entirely.
He wants it out of the garage, wants to use the space for himself. He’s never been much of a home handyman- somehow, those tasks always fell to her- but Brandon’s started a woodwork class and wouldn’t it be nice to have a bit of a boy’s space, think about it, Tiff, you always want us doing stuff as a family, this’ll make for some great bonding time won’t it son? Come on, Tiff. Surely you don’t want us hammering away where you’ll hear it.
‘Get rid of the bike,’ Chad says. Her son doesn’t say the words but it’s clear he’s thinking it.
‘It’s likely not a reminder you want to keep around the house,’ her therapist comments, when she makes the mistake of bringing it up. ‘The crash was a very traumatic event for you, Tiffany.’
Tiffany agrees, and he smiles, and the light glints off his glasses in a way that makes her hide a shudder.
The following day, she takes it into her shop and sticks it in the corner.
She’s busy, of course. It’s not like she can afford to drop everything and fix it. Her hospital bills are expensive, and she’s got a mortgage to pay, and groceries to buy, and it’s her daughter’s birthday soon and that means shopping for presents and they were already low on spending money before she went and totalled her bike-
It’s at the end of the repair line. Something to do once she’s got through the backlog of actual work, of repair jobs that will put money in her wallet, and, therefore, food on her family’s table.
Worry about the kids first. If she’s somehow got the energy for it once they’re all okay… then, maybe, she can see about fixing her bike.
She wakes to the memory of machines burrowing into her lungs and skittering around the inside of her chest, someone else’s screams mingling with the alarm on her bedside table.
Tiffany staggers out of bed and straight into the shower. The body in the mirror is disturbingly reassuringly whole, no sign of redlit robotics peeking out the gaps where organs should be. Regardless, she still wastes minutes she doesn’t have running her fingers across her abdomen, searching for the gaping wounds she knows should be there, her mind rebelling each time her fingertips brush against whole, unmarred skin-
‘Mom? We’re gonna be late for school!’
Tiff curses, scrambles for her clothes, and tries not to think too many uncharitable thoughts about her husband, happy to ignore the fact that she’s overslept yet not even willing to drive the kids himself.
Rush hour traffic is as bad as always. Her instincts tell her to mount the kerb, screech down the sidewalk and up the lane on the right, road rules be damned as long as she gets out of this infernal gridlock.
She knows she could do it, too. The certainty settles over her like a shroud and she sees it play out in her mind, checks the mirror, prepares for a defensive driving manoeuvre she certainly never learned in any sort of driving class but feels more natural than breathing-
She grinds her teeth, pulls into a convenient parking spot, and decides to stop for coffee at Simulatte instead.
When she closes her eyes she’s soaring, the bike completely out of control, sunlight in her eyes and just a moment of weightlessness before gravity reasserts itself. When she’s lucky, the dream ends before she hits the ground. She isn’t lucky very often.
(She’s pretty sure that isn’t a bike.)
If she isn’t dreaming of the crash, then what is she dreaming of?
Parent-teacher interviews and Chad is busy, of course.
That’s fine. She loves her kids. She’s always happy to be involved in their lives. Tiffany’s a bit worried, actually, what happens now that her oldest is firmly into his teenage years. Will he want anything to do with her? What’s she going to do with herself, if the people she’s dedicated her life to suddenly decide they don’t need her anymore? She knows when she was a kid-
-Huh. That’s odd. She can’t remember.
Instincts she can’t place- the same instincts that draw her towards motorbikes and fast cars and the urge to punch Chad in his stupid perfect teeth- tell her not to mention it to anyone, to keep the discrepancies to herself, to jam those stupid headache pills into the back of the cupboard and never ever touch them no matter how much it might hurt.
Why is she thinking about those pills?
… Never mind. Not important, after all. What’s important is her family, and they’re right here.
One of her customers brings a bike in for service. She rides it around the parking lot, once, twice, testing the steering and the brakes.
No one’s watching. No helmet- her husband would kill her.
The wind in her hair feels more natural than anything she’s felt in months.
One more loop. Just… one more loop.
(What does it say about her, that she feels more emotion from a bike ride than she does tucking her daughter into bed?)
‘The traffic’s real bad today, isn’t it?’
Tiffany nods distractedly, scanning the crowd of students for any sign of her kids. ‘I think there must be a crash somewhere,’ she offers. ‘I haven’t seen it this bad in ages.’
‘No, no… not since those roadworks down by the river a year ago, right? God, that was a mess. Added half an hour’s delay to my trip home for eight bloody months, I swear…’ A flurry of movement from the crowd draws her eye, and a moment later, a small figure slams into the man at waist height. He stumbles, then laughs.
‘Afternoon, sweetheart,’ he says to the girl- his daughter, presumably. ‘Good day?’
‘We learned about the atmosphere,’ she tells him. ‘Did you know that without the sun-’
The man flashes her a grin and starts shepherding his daughter into the car. ‘The atmosphere, huh? Wow, that’s a really big subject! Next you’re gonna say that you’re trying to fix all the problems for us grown-ups!’
Her eyes linger on their joined hands, the utter adoration evident in every movement. He clearly cares so much, and it’s nice to see. She respects that. She’d like to think she’s the same, even if none of her kids try and impersonate a cannonball in coming to greet her.
(She doesn’t remember roadworks a year ago. She’s not sure she even came down this road a year ago, except- except she must have, right? This is where the school is, and she must have been doing the school run. Goodness knows Chad wouldn’t have been the one doing it.)
She wakes from a nightmare, fighting for breath against the metal tearing through her stomach and tasting blood at the back of the throat. She staggers into the shower and determinedly does not even glance towards the mirror, unsure what it will show and uncertain what she even wants to see.
She wakes from a nightmare of falling, of a gun in each hand and bullets flying too slowly, return fire catching her in the chest and she knows that someone was supposed to catch her, but no one did. Beside her, Chad snores.
She wakes from a nightmare of betrayal, of her family dying. She runs and checks on her children, trying not to pay attention to the fact that the litany of names fading from her mind with every waking moment are definitively not those belonging to her kids. (Mouse, Dozer, Apoc, Switch- she has no memory of anyone by those names, if some of them are names at all, yet the desperation and grief surging through her chest defies all logic.)
She wakes from a nightmare, the ghost of a blade at her throat, and she’s trying to stumble for the door but the room isn’t the room she thinks it is, the carpet beneath her feet a lie, the silent, unmoving building around her a bizarre contrast to the humming electronics and swaying deck she was expecting.
She wakes from a nightmare of being remade.
She wakes from a nightmare of being remade, but not alone. There’s a name on her lips but it slips between her fingers before she makes it to sunrise.
She wakes from a nightmare of being remade, but not alone. Someone is shouting a name which is hers but she can’t hold onto it until the sun comes up.
Her dreams are violent and they always have been. Bullet trajectories arc across the back of her eyelids and have for as long as she can remember, if not longer. Chad dreams board meetings in his underwear and wakes up shuddering, and she watches friendly faces blur into enemies, hands- hers and theirs- already curling around the grip of a gun.
Her dreams are violent and they always have been.
Her dreams are violent, and they always have been, but she thinks they weren’t this bad before. Violent, sure, but not all nightmares. She remembers them, sometimes, when she tries hard not to think about them.
A black woman flying a ship of some sort through a rabbit-warren’s worth of tunnels and shafts, all perfect turns and spiralling drops, and it’s the most spectacular thing she’s ever seen. There’s a city, grim old city, burrowed inwards like a cancer into the bowels of the planet, but the people are smiling and free and she feels the urge to protect every single one of them with the same ferocity she’d defend her children. A ship, a crew, a captain, a home. An old woman baking cookies. And, hidden deep- deeper than anything else- someone’s hand in her own, his lips against hers, love in her heart so strong she feels unbeatable.
Her therapist wants her to think of the accident as a turning point. Divide her life into “before” and “after”. Before, she took risks with motorbikes. After, she remembered how important her family was, that she really couldn’t afford to take the chance. Before, she was in perfect health; after, she keeps the headache tablets he prescribes nice and handy in the bathroom cupboard, just in case.
Before, she had nightmares of violence. After, she has nightmares of violence.
Before… she can’t remember, really, but she thinks her dreams followed her into the daytime, the motorbike and the martial arts lessons she really should get back to but doesn’t have the time for.
After- after she has her family, and that should be enough.
(Surely- surely she had them before, too-)
Her nights get worse, and worse, and worse. She should talk to her therapist about the nightmares, but she’s just too goddamn tired. Her days are for her family, after all, and she can’t afford to take time away from that, not for something which isn’t going to bother anyone else. And yet her dreams feel more like memories than dreams; and her memories feel more like they belong to someone else entirely.
Why does she care so much about a man she can’t even remember the name of, yet feel almost nothing except frustration for her own goddamn husband?
It’s because of the nightmares that the coffee shop becomes a habit.
Stop off in the mornings, on the way to the kids’ school if she’s running on time, on the way back if she’s not. Sit down for five minutes with a drink containing far too much caffeine and try and kick her brain back into some form of functionality, at least long enough to get into the workshop. Come back for lunch, sometimes, since she never has time to pack something for herself as well as the kids.
The food is good. Familiar, somehow. The barista is nice, too, gets to know her name and order quickly enough.
It’s a bit of a guilty pleasure, but in the grand scheme of things, buying an overpriced coffee isn’t going to hurt anyone, so she keeps coming back. There’s no risk to it, really. It’s not like getting on her bike again, which could lead to another crash and take her away from her family and her responsibilities. Just… a coffee, that’s all. Just a coffee.
And then-
‘Hi. Um… I know this is all a bit extemporaneous. I’m Jude Gallagher. I work for a game company called Deus Machina.’
‘Hi, Jude, I’m Tiffany.’ For a moment, she doesn’t get it, doesn’t know why someone would be approaching her, and then she sees his friend lurking behind and- ah.
‘Tiffany. Wow. Didn’t see that coming.’
‘Mom loved Audrey Hepburn,’ she replies, automatically. (Lie. Maybe. She’s not sure. She doesn’t remember enough about her mother to know if this is true or not, but it sounds reasonable enough. Also, she should probably be more concerned about not remembering key facts about her mother… but her mom isn’t here, her mom doesn’t need her support right now, so it’s a problem to put on the back burner at least until the kids are off to practice.)
(Maybe this is a concussion thing, again? She should probably mention it to the therapist when she sees him again. Whenever that might be. She’s got so many other things she really needs to do first.)
‘Oh, and this is my very good friend, Thomas Anderson. He is a bona fide famous person and considered by most to be the greatest game designer of our generation.’ Jude smiles, like he’s just done a great public service. So does she, once she sees the look on Thomas Anderson’s face, hears his apology for his co-worker’s behaviour… looks into his eyes and feels her heart practically soar out of her chest in excitement and relief when she sees him staring back.
‘Hi, Thomas. Everyone calls me “Tiff.”’
‘Hi.’
They shake hands, and-
‘Have we met?’
No matter what he says, she already knows the answer. She’s not sure how, but she knows the feeling of his hand in hers, better than she knows her husband’s. He’s older, now. So is she. But the feeling of his palm in hers is the same as always, solid and real and comforting in a way nothing in her life has managed to be.
It feels like coming home.