Falling in Love in New York (32 page)

“Abby wait!” Suddenly, she heard a voice call out behind her. Kieran.

At this, and despite the fact that she didn’t want to speak to him, didn’t want to even look at him, her legs began to slow almost as if by their own accord.

Seconds later, he appeared in front of her. “Are you OK?” he asked, and the fake sincerity in his voice was the final straw.

“How can you ask me that?” Abby gasped wretchedly. “How dare you ask me if I’m OK!”

Kieran looked perplexed and uncomfortable. “I’m sorry … look I know it must have been awkward back there, but I thought we were over that by now and …” he shrugged. “I know it’s been a while, but it’s good to see you Abby.”

Now she felt as though she’d passed into some kind of parallel universe. What on earth was wrong with him? Why did he expect her to be happy to see him out of the blue like that, especially with what she’d discovered? Or had he been so caught up in his own life that he didn’t even realise the significance of what had just occurred? Was he really that stupid, that heartless even?

“Kieran, you have a one-year old child,” she began, willing him to do the maths and make the connection. “I know it mightn’t matter much to you now, but it certainly matters to me!”

“What does?” Again he seemed genuinely confused. “So I have a child–big deal, what’s that got to do with anything? You know I’m happily married now and what happened between us was a long time ago.” He wrinkled his brow. “As far as I’m concerned back then, I tried to do the best by everyone. Now I don’t think for a second that it was easy for you but– ”

“Don’t you have any idea why I’m so upset?” He seemed so clueless that briefly, Abby wondered if
he
was the one with the memory problems! “Any idea at all? Kieran, you’re son is
a year
year old! Which means he must have been conceived while you and I were still together, in other words, behind my back! Yet back then, you swore that you and Jessica weren’t getting together until it was over between you and me.”

Kieran frowned, and was it her imagination or was he now starting to back away a little?

“Abby I really don’t know what is wrong with you, but somewhere along the line you must have lost the ability to add and subtract. Yes, Alan is one but believe me I know exactly when and where he was conceived and it certainly wasn’t behind your back’.”

Abby really couldn’t believe she was hearing this. What did he think she was – stupid?

“Why are you doing this?” she demanded. “Why are you still trying to pull the wool over my eyes? I’m not an imbecile, despite what you seem to think. The child is almost one so add in another nine months and you have almost two, whereas it’s barely a year since you two got married so …”

She stopped in her tracks when she realised Kieran was looking at her very strangely, as if she’d lost her mind or something.

“Abby,” he said then, his voice slow and firm, almost as if he were speaking to a particularly slow child. “I married Jessica in 2006. Alan was conceived on our honeymoon.”

“What …?”

But then suddenly, just like that, it hit her. Suddenly Abby realised that while she hadn’t exactly lost her mind, she’d almost certainly lost something else.

Her world began to spin on its axis as she finally understood why dates –particularly the current
year
–had kept confusing her lately. That time with the cheque; she hadn’t been absentminded in writing it at all; instead something else had been at play.

“You two got married in 2006?” she repeated in a whisper.

“Yes. So you must realise that our son couldn’t possibly have been –”

Her mind reeling, Abby reached out and held onto the wall for support.

Although she’d questioned this privately a few times, it was indeed 2008, although Abby had initially believed it was 2007. But unwilling to admit to herself or anyone else that this had confused her, she’d eventually put it down to a possible side-effect of her injury, one didn’t really matter much in the scheme of things. No big deal.

But one thing she could be
absolutely
sure about was the year of her accident, which had occurred shortly after Kieran’s wedding, and which he’d just confirmed had taken place in 2006.

So if the injury had happened in 2006 and it was now 2008…

It could only mean one thing, Abby deduced, flabbergasted. A full year had passed, a year about which she had no recollection, no clue as to what occurred.

A lost year.

But in order for this to have happened, she realised grimly, it wasn’t just her memory that had been playing tricks on her.

Everyone else had too.

“How long has this been going on?” White-faced with shock, and her cheeks wet with tears, Abby appeared at her mother’s door. “How long have you been lying to me?”

Teresa visibly paled.

“Love, what are you talking about–?”

“Don’t lie to me!” Abby cried, brushing hastily past her. “You’ve been doing that long enough, you Caroline and Erin, and whoever else is involved!”

After discovering through Kieran that she’d lost a year of her life and the significance surrounding it, Abby had raced back to the flat and immediately called Finn, who she suspected
must
have been involved in this too. But she couldn’t get him on the line and had no choice but leave a tearful, rambling message on his voicemail.

“I really need to talk to you,” she sobbed. “I’ve just bumped into Kieran and he ... I found out that …I found out something and I don’t know what to do or what to think… I really need to speak to you, please call me as soon as you get this.”

She didn’t know what she’d do if she discovered that Finn was in on this, if he too had deceived her in such an awful way.

Now, Teresa stared at her daughter, her expression panicked. “Involved in what? Abby, I …” But just as quickly her face crumpled, and now she looked resigned and fearful. “Love, why don’t we both sit down and talk this over, OK?”

“How could you do this to me?” Abby insisted, fraught with terror, distrust – a million and one things were going through her mind. They’d deceived her and she wanted to find out how, where, and most importantly
why
?

“Love, we were only doing what we thought was right– ”

“You thought lying and pretending and making a fool of me was right? How did you work that one out, Mum?”

“Abby please, sit down there and I’ll make you a cup of tea, OK?”

“I don’t want a cup of tea, and I don’t want you to patronise me!” Suddenly weary, she sank onto the sofa, her eyes filling with tears. “What’s happening to me Mum? I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

“Honey …” Moved by her distress, Teresa gathered her daughter in her arms and for a brief moment, Abby relaxed in her embrace. However, just as quickly, she remembered the reason she was here and she stepped back.

“Mum, please tell me what’s going on.”

Teresa exhaled deeply and shook her head. “What happened? How did you– ?”

“How did I find out that everyone’s been messing with my head? I bumped into Kieran today–Kieran and his one-year-old son!”

“Oh.”

“Is that all you can say? Somehow I lose a year of my life and all you can say is ‘oh.’”

“We never expected … we were going to tell you eventually,” Teresa struggled, not sure what to say.

“You were going to tell me when? When another two or maybe three years had passed?”

“Doctor O’Neill said – ”

“What?” Abby’s head snapped up. “What’s Hannah got to do with this?” Then it hit her. “Of course, she has to be in on it too… God, I don’t believe this.”

She slumped heavily onto the sofa – this, a blow too many. Hannah, to whom she’d confided so much of her thoughts and feelings, and whom she’d trusted no end…Now Abby realised that this too was all another charade, another betrayal. Wasn’t there
anyone
she could trust anymore?

“Love, maybe it would be better if you spoke to her about it; she’d be able to explain it all much better than I could.”

“For goodness’s sake Mum, you’re my mother! Why can’t you explain why everyone’s been lying to me all this time!” Now the tears had started to flow, despite Abby’s best intentions and again, Teresa floundered. 

“They advised us to wait until after the wedding, because of the stress of it all you see…”

Abby shook her head vigorously. “Mum, you’re not making sense! What’s the wedding got to do with it? And what do you mean, ‘they advised you to wait’, who’s ‘they’? Please,” she implored, when she saw her mother hesitate, “I really need to know.”

Teresa slumped onto the sofa. “Love, this won’t be easy for you to hear and I really wish you’d let me phone Doctor O’Neill; she really would be much better able to explain–”

“Forget Doctor O’Neill,” Abby interjected shortly. “Whatever it is, I want to hear it from you.”

Teresa waited a couple of seconds before speaking, as if trying to decide the best place to start. Then she sighed.

“Love, when you woke after your head injury eleven months ago …It wasn’t the first time you’d woken up,” she continued, her gaze falling to the floor. “It was the fourth.”

“What?” Abby gasped. “What do you mean?”

“Abby, as you know, your accident didn’t happen last year like you think it did–it happened the year before.”

Abby couldn’t speak. Even though she’d figured out that much, it still stunned her to hear her suspicions confirmed. All those ‘mistakes’ she’d made about this year’s date hadn’t been symptoms of her injury at all, they really had been spot on… Which meant that a whole year of her life really had been lost.

“But how…
why
? Was I in a coma or something–what?”

“No, no nothing like that. As I said, that last time was the fourth time you came to.”

“Came to from what?”

Teresa took a deep breath. “From another blackout.”

“Blackout…”

“Love, I can only imagine how confused you must be. So maybe I should just start from the very beginning, and then you might be able to understand.”

Abby sat down across from her, feeling dizzy. Blackouts?

Her mother sighed again. “Abby, as you know well, that blow to the head you got caused terrible damage, especially to your brain.”

She nodded, unable to speak.

“But when you woke up in the hospital the first time, the extent of that damage was plain for all to see. There was a major gash on the side of your head, and the doctors had to shave off most of your hair.”

Abby’s hand instinctively went to her head. “Shave it off?”

“Yes. It was completely gone. But it’s grown back fairly well now, although I know it seemed so much shorter when you woke up the last time. ”

“But Hannah said – ”

“I know they told you they had to cut it shorter to examine the wound, but that was so you’d think it was the … first time. And of course the wound has also healed well.”

Hearing all this, and the extent of their lies, Abby was gobsmacked.

“Go on.”

“Well as I said, you woke up that first time with a fairly severe head wound. But everything pretty much happened the same as it did last time, the doctors sent you for an MRI to try and determine the extent of the damage, and they came up with the same diagnosis, the damage to your hippocampus and how it would affect your memory.”

Teresa paused and she looked pained. “But love, you took it very badly that first time,” she told her. “You were distraught about the prospect of losing your memory, none of us could comfort you, and you wouldn’t go outside for weeks on end because of your hair and the way you looked – not to mention that you were still broken-hearted about Kieran. The doctors suggested that you see a psychologist to help you deal with your emotions, but you wouldn’t have any of it.”

Abby stared at her–unable to believe that all this had happened, actually happened without her remembering it. It was as though she’d stepped into some weird, parallel universe…

“Hang on a second,” she interjected then. “You’re saying that the doctors explained the damage to me, and I couldn’t cope with it?”

“Pretty much, yes. It’s hard to explain love, but as soon as you realised that you were indeed forgetting little things here and there, emotionally, you just couldn’t cope. And you wouldn’t let any of us help you. I wanted you to move in here with me but you refused and … well we were all very worried – the doctors included – about how you were going to cope in the long term. As it happened, we soon found out.”

“What? What happened?”

“It was a couple months after the original accident. You were found unconscious on the street near your flat. The doctors told us you’d had some kind of epileptic attack, which they said is often a side-effect of traumatic brain injury.”

Abby was stunned. “Epilepsy?”

“Yes.” Teresa shook her head, and she could only imagine how terrifying it must have been for her mother to learn of this, to say nothing of how she herself felt hearing about it now.
Epilepsy
.

“The attack was very severe and apparently caused a blackout of some sort … I don’t really know.” Teresa’s hands were clasped tightly in her lap, and Abby could see it on her mother’s face that the burden of explaining all this to her was taking a lot out of her.

But hearing it was taking a lot out of her too.

“How long … how long was I out for?” she asked then.

“Maybe a couple of hours or so between the time you blacked out and when you woke up, the doctors said. But love, the crucial thing is that when you woke up that second time, all you could remember was leaving your flat that morning. It took us all a while to figure out that you weren’t talking about leaving it
that
morning–the morning of your blackout–but the morning of the original accident–the day you first got hit. It was as if the previous few months had never happened.”

“I don’t believe you,” Abby cried. “My entire memory wiped clean, just like that?”

“The doctors said it must have been all the pressure you were under in trying to come to terms with it. You were under such an incredible amount of stress trying to cope with all this on your own, which must have been so overwhelming for you …” Her mother’s guilt about it all was plain to see. “But you wouldn’t let any of us help you, you just insisted on locking yourself away from us all like you did after Kieran and eventually I suppose it just became too much … But then when we found out that the seizure had caused your memory to …reset itself almost, we knew that the doctor’s fears were realised and the damage was real.”

Abby was still struggling to comprehend all this. “So what about the other times?” she urged. “You said that the last time I woke up was the fourth time, so what happened in between?”

“Again the doctors went through the process of explaining the memory loss to you except this time they could tell you for sure that there were no maybes about it, your blackout had proved that. At first you didn’t believe that so much time had passed, until you discovered the date and admitted to yourself that you couldn’t account for the months that had gone before. So this time, after lots of convincing, you agreed to take their suggestions on board, and agreed to meet with Doctor O’Neill to talk things through and try and ensure that the same thing didn’t happen again.”

Which explained why Hannah was in on it too, Abby realised now.

“Unfortunately, barely a month later you had another attack, this time in front of my own eyes here at the house. We were having a family dinner and you and Caroline had a bit of a run in about something … I don’t know …” she added looking pained. “Anyway, you got so upset you had another seizure– except this time you were out for four or five hours.” She bit her lip and tears came to her eyes. “It was an awful time …Caroline was inconsolable, she was convinced it was all her fault.”

Abby realised now that the sisters’ recent closeness may have had much to do with this.

“And again this time when you woke up, all you could remember was leaving your flat that morning, same as last time, despite the fact that by then almost four months had passed since you first got hit. And again, the doctors went through the same procedure, explaining your injuries and taking scans, except now they needed to find out what might be triggering these seizures, and if they were causing any more damage to your brain.”

She paused then, as if to give Abby time to let it all sink in.

“And I remembered nothing at all again, not a single thing?”

Teresa shook her head. “No, we were right back where we started, and had to explain everything to you all over again, same as last time. Again, you reacted very badly but once more agreed to see Doctor O’Neill.”

“So what happened to cause the latest seizure? The one I woke up from …a year ago?”

“We’re not sure love, as this time it happened again when you were out and about. The doctors seem to think that stress brings the seizures on, but because you can’t remember what happens beforehand, we’ve no way of knowing what brought this last attack on. This time you were at the DART station, but we don’t know what you were doing there or where you were going…”

Abby thought hard, but try as she might she couldn’t recall a single thing about being at a DART station, or indeed any of the other events her mother was describing.

It seemed that each attack did indeed ‘reset’ her memory back to the day before the accident. The neurologists had been right all along, she admitted terrified. Her long-term memory was in fact useless, which meant that all the time and effort she’d spent trying to cope with this had been a complete waste of time.

To think she’d spent all this time thinking she
was
coping, believing she could get through it…. The thought of this more than anything else, terrified her beyond belief.