The Stranger in the Mirror(64)

She smiles. “Yes. My mother’s pearls.”

Now when she looks back at our wedding portrait, into which I’ve photoshopped her face, and sees the pearls around her neck, she’ll believe it’s her. It will evoke a memory of her mother’s necklace.

“Now you have me and Valentina. Do you remember her birth?”

Her brows knit together. “I can’t. Can you tell me about it?”

“You didn’t carry her, remember? We used a surrogate. But she gave birth to her here in the house with a doula, and you were the very first one to hold her.”

“I held her,” she repeats. “Why couldn’t I carry her?”

“Your uterus. You kept having miscarriages. But it’s okay. We went to a specialist, remember?”

She shakes her head. “I can’t remember.”

“Take a deep breath,” I instruct her. “We drove to the appointment in my Jaguar, and you were nervous and kept cracking your gum. When we met in the doctor’s office and she told us the results, you cried, and I comforted you. Can you remember that room?”

She nods.

“I want you to see the desk she’s sitting behind. It’s a dark wood. There are pictures of babies on the wall. And you’re sitting in a comfortable chair. It’s beige with white piping. Can you see it?”

She nods again.

“What does the doctor tell you?”

Her voice shakes. “That I can’t carry a baby successfully.”

“Right. But you can still have your own child with your egg and my sperm.”

“Valentina is my baby.”

“Yes,” I say in a soothing voice.

“She’s with your father,” Amelia says.

Good, she’s making the associations on her own. “When was the last time you saw her?” I say gently.

“Before I went away to get better.”

“Right. Why did you go away?”

“I was depressed. I tried to hurt myself. I was hearing voices. But I’m better now. I’m taking my medicine like I should. But when I stopped taking it, I crashed my car, and my face was messed up.”

“Yes, so remember that Valentina might not recognize you at first. You have to let her get used to your new look.”

“I’m her mother,” she insists.

“Yes, you are.”

I glance at my watch. We’ve been at this for five hours, and I need to stop for today. I bring her out slowly. When she opens her eyes, she looks exhausted.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She sits up slowly. “I just feel tired. I think I’d like to go upstairs and rest for a while.”

“Okay, darling.”

I’m finding working with Amelia much more challenging than with Cassandra. Then, all I had to do was manipulate her existing memories. Now I’m creating a whole new set of memories for Amelia, in addition to erasing her old ones. Using drugs to aid the hypnosis is helping this along, though, and so far, it seems to be working.

She goes up to our bedroom and gets under the sheets. If I squint I can almost believe it is Cassandra; they look a lot alike, especially now, with Amelia wearing Cassandra’s clothes and doing her hair the way Cassandra used to. Amelia’s nose is smaller, and she’s ten years younger, so her face is unlined. I’ve had to photoshop the new Cassandra into all my old photos. It pained me to have to replace my true love with this substitute, but it’s the only way. Of course, I’ve kept our original wedding portrait, hidden along with other pictures and mementos I’ve held on to so that I can still feel her presence here.

I’ve taken Amelia for a new driver’s license, pretending she lost hers. Even though she’ll never truly replace Cassandra in my heart, I am growing to care for her. The more I shape her to become like my darling wife, the more I honor Cassandra’s memory. I’m sure Cassandra would be pleased to know that she’s not being supplanted as Valentina’s mother by someone new. It’s almost as though she were still here. And Amelia will be so much happier with the history I’ve created than the one that fate dealt her. She’ll never have to remember what she saw that day in her family’s house. She’ll never have to mourn the sister, mother, and grandmother she lost. Instead, she’s going to have a wonderful life with me and with her daughter. Things have a way of working out for the best, don’t they?

One thing that I am worried about is Valentina’s reaction to Amelia. I’ve never tried my protocol on someone as young as Valentina, but I have no choice. I’ll have to try it when I pick her up from my father’s. The fact that she’s only three works in my favor. Memories from before that age are rarely accessible, as the hippocampus is not mature enough then to form and store them in a way that makes them retrievable later.

In the meantime, there is still plenty of work to do with the new Cassandra—I can’t think of her as Amelia any longer, lest I slip and call her that. Henceforth, I will only think of her as Cassandra.

I draw the shades, unzip my pants, and shrug out of my shirt, folding my clothes and putting them neatly on the chair. I pull down the covers on my side of the bed and get in next to her. She’s half asleep, but she responds to my caresses. Her arms encircle me, and she moves against me, moaning. She pushes me onto my back and sits astride me, her head forward, her long hair on my chest. The pleasure is so intense that I actually cry out, and as I do, I try to push away the disloyal thought that this Cassandra is much better in bed than the other one ever was.