Haunted Honeymoon by Marta Acosta

Author:Marta Acosta [Acosta, Marta]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2010-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

eleven

Countrycide

When I awoke, I looked at the clock by the bed. It was almost four o’clock in the afternoon, and I still didn’t remember this place or Oswald. He’d said that this kind of amnesia lasted an average of six hours. I’d paid enough attention in my math course at F.U. to know that the median was more important than the average.

Something terrible had happened to me to make me look like I did. Or maybe not. Maybe it was just a wild week, or I’d finally gotten the flu or had contracted a slight case of Mad Cow. I hoped it wasn’t the latter because I could hear my mother Regina’s comments now.

I got up and put on the ill-fitting pointy booties. Had I lost all my fantastic fashion sense in the intervening two years? What else had happened in my life?

In the bathroom, I found a hairbrush, a new toothbrush, and toothpaste. I forced myself to look in the mirror. Oswald was quite dishy, and I looked hideous.

I tilted my head forward until it touched the cool glass of the mirror. Don’t panic, I thought.

I went to the window and looked out. The garden had so many of my signature touches, including Kathleen hybrid musk roses, that I should have known it was mine immediately. Oh, I’d made an herb knot just like I’d always wanted to! This was the bright side.

I walked to the kitchen and called, “Hellooo?”

There was a glass pitcher on the table with red liquid. Just looking at it made my stomach spasm with want. I got a tumbler, served myself, and took a sip. It was a tasty fruit juice, heavy on the raspberries. I gulped it down and had another glass.

I wandered through the house to the study.

Oswald was on the phone and when he saw me, he said, “I’ll get back to you when I learn more. Yes. Bye.”

“Hey, Oswald.”

“Hello,” he said, rather flirt-deficient.

“I haven’t remembered anything yet. What exactly is the range of time for this kind of memory loss?”

He hesitated for worrisome seconds. “At first I thought that you had transient global amnesia, but it’s possible that you have dissociative amnesia as a result of emotional trauma.”

“I’m badly dressed, but not traumatized. Why have you abandoned the injury theory so quickly?” I felt the back of my head again. “I could have internal hemorrhaging, or maybe a weevil is eating its way through my brain.”

“If you had taken any serious courses in college, you wouldn’t be bringing up brain-eating weevil theories.”

“Spoken like someone who couldn’t get past the first chapter of Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” I snipped. “What happened to your bedside manner?”

“I’m sorry, Mil. I’m under some pressure today, and I’m having a problem handling this.”

“Apology accepted. So what’s stressing you out?”

“Besides your condition? My grandfather is visiting. He’s out sightseeing now,” he said. “But don’t worry about that. I got in touch with a psychiatrist through a, um, professional association. She was visiting her folks in Seattle and hopped on the first flight down.

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