As I Wake by Elizabeth Scott Page B

this,” Jane says, and she sounds very nice. Very polite.
    She also sounds like she means what she said, that she doesn’t want Clementine to have come here.
    I look at her and see that she doesn’t like Clementine. I watch how her eyes move, how she blinks.
    I see she is afraid.
    Why?
    “Oh, it was nothing,” Clementine says. “I just—well, you know how talk gets around the hospital and one of the nurses at Dr. Jabar’s called over to get some records sent and said that there was some sort of problem with Ava today.”
    “Not with Ava,” Jane says. “Ava’s fine.”
    “But I heard that—”
    “My head hurts,” I say to Jane, cutting Clementine off. “Can we go in?”
    “Oh, honey, of course,” Jane says, relief in her voice, and holds the door open for me as we walk inside. I look back before it closes and see Clementine still standing there watching us. Watching me.
    She came here because of what happened at Dr. Jabar’s today.
    Because of Morgan. I know it. I know it.
    She wanted to see if I’d seen him.
    I think she wants to know if I remember him.
    Why?

22.
     
    THAT NIGHT I sit on the floor of Ava’s room, going over the furniture with my fingertips in the dark, waiting to remember it. It’s starting to feel familiar, but that isn’t memory.
    My mind has nothing but blankness behind a few bits and pieces of things that don’t add up. I remember Jane, but a different Jane, a Jane that left me, was taken away.
    And Morgan. I remember him, this afternoon. The dreams I’ve had, the attic and the cold and him.
    They aren’t dreams. I want to think they are, I want to think they have to be—this doesn’t happen to people, they don’t wake up and find themselves somewhere else but they aren’t dreams.
    They’re memories.
    They’re memories and if Morgan is real, and here, then how can I remember him—and me—somewhere else? Not to mention how I saw us in all those other times so fast, like there has always been him and me.
    Like we have always found each other.
    I don’t know how.
    I just know what I saw. What I felt.
    I walk out into the hallway. I know its darkness now too, and head for one of the closed doors, let myself into Ava’s bathroom.
    I like Ava’s bathroom best out of every room in the house. I like her large white shower, her broad sink. I like the bottles and jars of lotion she has, like opening them up and sniffing them even though I can’t bring myself to use them, find myself clutching the large bar of soap she has in her shower each time I use it as if I have never seen it before.
    I haven’t, not that I remember, but shouldn’t I be used to soap? Shouldn’t I not be so amazed by how it is so large and all mine?
    I fall asleep in there, holding one of Ava’s soft, thick towels and a jar of mango-ginger body lotion, and wake up to see Jane looking at me, her face lit by the hall light and the sun that cuts through it from the open door of Jane’s bedroom.
    “Did you sleep in here?” she says.
    “I—” I say, and sit up, my body stiff from being curled up on the floor. Somehow, it feels more familiar than waking up in the softness of Ava’s bed. “I guess I did.”
    Jane sits down next to me, touching the bottle of lotion.
    “I keep telling Ava not to waste her money on things like that, but she . . .” She trails off.
    “But she what?”
    “But you keep buying it,” she says, smiling at me, but too late, too late, we both know what she said.
    Ava. Her. She.
    Not you.
    Not one You.
    I look at Jane. “I—I’m not her, am I? I’m not Ava.”
    Jane stares at me.
    “Don’t,” she finally says, looking at the floor, and then says it again, louder, before looking at me.
    There are tears in her eyes.
    My heart pounds.
    “Don’t ever—please don’t ever think that,” she says.
    “I can’t—just hearing you say it . . . You don’t really think that, do you? I know it’s hard for you and that things aren’t the same. The doctors said . . . they