(Blood and Bone, #1) Blood and Bone (4 page)

I laugh, stepping back.

She cocks an eyebrow. “So strong for such a small girl.”

“I guess.” I wink. “With my luck, I was a farmer’s daughter.”

“Now that’s some wishful thinking.” She snorts. “I could go for a cowboy. Maybe you have a cute brother.” She turns to go inside. “Night, Jane.”

I wave and turn to walk toward my town house, with the words I spoke running through my mind.

“Loss of love, loss of limb, and loss of life are equal tragedies.” Where have I heard it before? It has to be from somewhere. Probably
the place that my weird song comes from, or the place where I learned to tie cherry stems with my tongue.
A seedy strip club . . .

The man coming in asking for love in all the wrong places still plagues me, much more than Ronald does. Ronald is easily explained. He went to Berkeley with my doppelgänger—twin—or maybe even clone.

But the man asking for services I apparently offered in a club downtown seems fairly far-fetched. The only thing it ties to is the cherry stem. In all honesty, that is an odd thing to remember. I can easily see a stripper tying a cherry stem with her tongue as a parlor trick. Or maybe the cherry was part of the “love in all the wrong places.” That thought makes me shudder. But two guys looking for the dead Samantha in two days, that is odd. No matter how you slice it, that is strange. Strange and exhausting.

I walk up the driveway of my house, feeling the weirdest desire to circle behind the block and come in through the alley. The whole thing has me discombobulated. I shake my head and walk up to the door. My feet hurt, and by the time I get in the front door I am spent and confused. I don’t even know how to explain the entire situation to Derek, especially not without sounding like I think maybe he has lied to me. Which I don’t. I don’t think that—I fear it.

In some way I don’t want to tell him any of it. I just want the day to end the way it always does, with Derek pouring me wine and making me dinner. He’ll talk and tell me stories about things I don’t remember but I can imagine. Sometimes we watch a movie before we fall into bed laughing and snuggling. There in the dark, he will kiss me and whisper that he loves me more than a single thing in the world. I will close my eyes and forget that the world is full of holes. If I’m lucky he will make me feel safe and make the whole Samantha thing just a case of mistaken identity.

I smile as I open the door to him whistling, a sound he always
makes when he cooks. The noise of him raucously clanging the dishes and cooking is my safe haven. Instantly, I sigh as I close the door and lean against it. I like the simple things in this house. I depend on them. They are what make me happy and at peace.

Binx comes to the door, rubbing against my legs and purring immediately. I scoop him up, rubbing my nose back and forth in his thick black-and-white fur. He hates the over-loving but he’ll tolerate a minute of it. When I place him back on his paws he gives me his version of indignant.

Derek and I don’t have plans beyond the cat and the city. We don’t talk about marriage or kids, ever. I like not needing anything but him and Binx. If anything beyond a stubborn and independent cat needed me, it wouldn’t live. I know that.

I don’t have anything to give except awkwardness and a confused stare. But not to Derek or Binx. No, to them I am enough, awkward or not.

The phone rings as I put my stuff down and slip my shoes off.

“Hello.” Derek’s voice makes me smile again. Everything about him puts me at ease. He creates a comfortable place inside me. His was the first face I saw and the only one I remember.

He sounds winded when he speaks. “I’m not coming in tonight. I came in last night. I’m not on call, it’s my forty-eight off. Where’s Don? Fine, but you have to give me three days off. Fine. Be there in an hour.” He hangs up his phone, sighing.

I walk into the kitchen and wrap my arms around him. He’s so big, it’s hard to wrap around him completely. I don’t melt into him the way he forces me to when we lay together in the dark, but I give it my best shot. “Hi.”

“Hey, I thought I saw Binx running.” He brings his arms back and hugs me. “I guess you just heard that, huh?”

“Yup.”

He spins, tilting my chin up. “I won’t be long, I swear.”

I shrug. “It’s okay. It’s not like you’re a shopgirl. You’re out there saving lives and shit.”

“Don’t mock shopgirls, I happen to be crazy about one.” He lowers his lips to mine, gently placing the softest graze before taking a deep inhale of my cheek. “See you in a couple of hours.” He kisses again, and I nod into it. He turns, blowing me a smooch as he hurries out the door.

And again I eat dinner alone. I wish he were here so I could tell him about my messed-up day. I wish he could tell me that none of it is anything and truly I am just one of the lucky few who found the person in the world who looks like them.

At least he made pot roast and roasted potatoes with a huge salad. It’s delicious with the wine he chose. It always is.

It’s almost better that he left; I doubt I would have been very good company. My mind is replaying a thousand different things. I want to Google things like
love in all the wrong places
and
Irish guys who knew Samantha Barnes
. I want to Google a bunch of things that won’t lead to any answers and will only make me click links until I’m reading about the Irish revolution. I’ve been down this road before. Google is a tricky bitch.

I go to bed, convincing myself that it doesn’t matter. I am Jane, and Samantha and her crazy life are over. Yes, we were identical. Yes, we both had a terrible car accident. Yes, we named our cats the very same strange name.

But my life is on the other side of the country, and I lived through my tragedy.

3. MISTAKEN ME

T
he next day, work feels worse than it did the day before. My feeble attempt at not caring ended before breakfast, and my brain is racked with strange thoughts, making it feel like my worries have tripled. It’s odd considering two men who have mistaken me for a girl named Sam are nothing more than two cases of mistaken identity.

I know I am not Samantha Barnes.

But it doesn’t feel like nothing.

In the bathroom I sit on the toilet and Google on my iPhone for answers to questions that aren’t clear.

There’s one article I find about people who look alarmingly alike, but the pairs of supposed twins are just similar, as in you might assume they’re related, not identical.

I Google her again, becoming obsessed with her name and face. I widen the photo on the phone, almost dropping it when I see the fine scar along her chin. It’s my scar. It’s identical.

My whole body starts to tremble as if the temperature has dropped twenty degrees in the concrete room.

I zoom in, narrowing my gaze and then holding the phone closer and farther away. No matter what I do, I can’t stop seeing myself in the picture or seeing the scar that before I never even noticed.

Two girls, on opposite sides of the country, who are identical, including scars, both have a terrible car accident. One dies and one lives but remembers nothing. They name their cats the same thing?

It doesn’t add up.

It’s a bad science-fiction movie.

Jesus, I am a clone.

I remember nothing because three years ago I was cloned from Samantha or she was cloned from me or I am the clone of Samantha. Wait, I said that already. I’m losing my mind.

But honestly, it’s the only answer.

I wipe, realizing my pee has actually dried on my body, and wash my hands. In the mirror my eyes get stuck on the scar. I don’t know how I got it. I don’t know how I got any of them. Some are bad, from the accident. The worst is the one on my back that looks like a hole. It’s where something stabbed in from the car. The slice across my ribs where they had to do emergency surgery is pretty grim. The only one I actually kind of like is on my forearm where glass shards cut me.

I have scars everywhere and remember none of them. I have given each of them a limited amount of thought, as they are foreign to me, like my past. They are part of the unimportant. The things on the other side of the fog.

But the scar on my chin just got very important. I wish the picture were in color so I could see if her eyes match in color.

I hurry out front and nod toward the door. “I have to rush home tonight. You mind if I’m off an hour early?”

Angie shakes her head. “No, go on with ya. I have to do some chatting with my lawyer anyway, and it’s a cold day. No one is going to be shopping today.”

I wave and dart out the front door. I’m nearly running when I get to the house, bursting through the door huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf.

Derek comes into the foyer, puzzled but smiling the moment he sees me. “Hey, you’re early.” I nod, but the moment he sees my eyes he loses his grin. “What?”

I hold my phone out with the picture showing. “Samantha Barnes. Who is she?”

“Don’t know. Who is she?”

“Her.” I hold it up so he can see better. “She’s Samantha.”

“This is you?”

I shake my head. “That’s not me. Look at the date on that.”

His eyes flick to the phone and then me. “Wow, she really looks remarkably like you. Different hair, though. Different look in the eyes too.”

“You don’t know anything about this?”

I think I see him check for humor, but when he doesn’t find any, he swallows his laughter. “What? Know about what? No? I don’t know the right answer here. Do I know a random girl who looks like you and failed to mention it? Is that what you’re asking?”

“I think I’ve been cloned or am a clone.”

The mocking leaves his tone completely. “As far as I know you have never been cloned. It’s still illegal, as per my understanding. I could be wrong. I have been before. You recall that time when I thought the movie had Ingrid Bergman and you said no, it was Katharine Hepburn?” His joking is lost in the things I can’t comprehend. And my hands are trembling when he wraps his around mine and pulls me to him, kissing my head while shaking his. “I have seen this a dozen times in other places and other people—identical people who don’t know each other. It almost always turns out that they’re related distantly or something along those lines.”

“She could be my twin.”

“No. You didn’t have a sister, and you weren’t cloned. You’re a girl from California, and your life was amazing until three years ago.”

I lift my face, still totally mystified. “But she is identical. We even have the same scar.”

He smiles wider. “Everyone has that scar.” He lifts his chin, sticking it out. “See!” It’s true—he has the exact same scar. I never noticed his before either. “What brought this on? Is there something going on in your head? Have you been having delusions? Have you been keeping things from me?”

I shake my head again, hating the worried look I have placed in his eyes. “Some guy—some guy named Roland or Ronald or something. He came up to me saying I went to Berkeley and asked me how I was and called me Sam. I told him I wasn’t her, but he was insistent I was Samantha Barnes. He was sure I was her. So I Googled and found this.”

“Have you ever met this man before?”

“No. I don’t know him. He truly just knew Samantha Barnes.”

He takes my phone and reads the article. “Well, it’s sort of sad, isn’t it then? She’s dead. She died in an accident.”

“I could have died in my car accident.”

“Oh, Jane, stop.” He chuckles, sighing and looking at her picture once more. “I’ll give it to you, it’s spooky, but trust me—you are not her and vice versa. You are Jane, my Jane.”

“Her cat was named Binx.”

He chuckles softly. “There were many black cats named Binx after that
Hocus Pocus
movie. It’s weird, that’s all. I guarantee you’re somehow related.” He pulls me in tighter again, wrapping me in him. That’s when I melt. I close my eyes and wish I could forget the entire three days, all of it.

He makes it so it doesn’t even matter that there is a second guy
calling me Sam. He makes it so it doesn’t matter about my past or my clone. He makes everything better.

We eat in peace and don’t talk about it anymore. It isn’t an awkward silence; it’s just different. I can see that I have stressed him out with my talk of clones and other fantastical things. That’s the problem with brain injuries—you have one lapse in sanity that any other person might have, and people think you are crazy because you actually have the injury to make it so.

When we climb into bed, he kisses me on the cheek and whispers, “Let it go, Jane. No matter what, even if your mother did give up a child and you did have a twin—”

I tilt my head back to him to ask why he would say that, but he silences my questions with a finger on my lips. “Let me finish. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, she did give a child up—your twin, even. Your mother is dead; your father is dead. You were an only child, and you have no family in the US. Your parents emigrated from England, so you are fairly alone in this world, apart from me and Binxy. Do you need someone else to grieve? Is adding a dead identical sister to the mystery a good idea? Will positive things come from turning this into something to focus on instead of being in the moment?”