Look into My Eyes

by Glenda Sanders

  After what seemed a very long interval of awkward silence, she asked, “Do you like working at the library?”

  “It’s been interesting seeing how everything is organized, and how much work it takes to keep it that way,” he replied thoughtfully. “But sometimes it gets monotonous doing the same thing over and over.”

  “Like straightening picture books.”

  “Picture books and biographies and general fiction and nonfiction—” He paused, and changed inflection as he observed, “You must like children, to be a children’s librarian.”

  “Yes,” she said, smiling. “I do. I love children.”

  Gin brought their sandwiches and told them to signal her if they needed anything. For a few minutes, they ate in silence. Holly did not find the grilled cheese sandwich particularly comforting. She was too aware of the male presence on the seat opposite hers. Her legs were tense from hugging her own seat in an effort to keep her knees from brushing his beneath the narrow table.

  “Children like you, too,” he said.

  Holly hadn’t been expecting him to resume their conversation so abruptly. She met his gaze without actually responding to his observation.

  “I’ve watched you with them,” he said. “I’ve seen the way they respond to you. They hang on to every word when you read to them.”

  I’ve watched you with them. He’d inadvertently stumbled onto the problem she was here to discuss with him.

  “Holly?”

  Wrested from deep thought, she looked at him blankly.

  “Are you...is everything okay? You seem—”

  Holly drew in a lungful of air and exhaled slowly. “I have a confession to make.”

  He leaned against the back of the seat and crossed his arms over his waist. His eyebrow lifted slightly. Significantly. Too significantly. “A confession? This sounds interesting.”

  A blush heated Holly’s cheeks. “I—” She swallowed. Her voice was stronger when she began again. “I had an ulterior motive in inviting you here.”

  A despicable grin slid over his face. Despicable, but beautiful. And sexy.

  Too sexy.

  “If you thought you’d soften me up with a grilled cheese sandwich and then take me home and have your way with me, I have to warn you that I’ll probably offer very little resistance,” he said.

  “That’s not—” At that moment Gin arrived at the table.

  “Are you finished with those plates?” she asked.

  In response to their nods, she picked up the plates. “You folks need anything else? A cup of coffee? A piece of pie? A refill on the milk?”

  “I’ll take another glass of milk,” Craig said.

  “Just a glass of water,” Holly said.

  “One H-two-O, one cow juice, coming up,” Gin said, already on her way to the kitchen. She was back in less than a minute with their beverages. “Sure I can’t interest you in some pie?”

  They shook their heads in unison. “Bottoms up, then. Just give me a holler if you change your minds.”

  Silence dropped like a settling cobweb over the booth as she walked away, leaving them alone. Holly cleared her throat and shifted self-consciously, forgetting that his long legs were within touching distance until a chance collision of knees gave her a shocking reminder. “Excuse me,” she said hoarsely, drawing away from the contact as quickly as possible.

  “I believe we were discussing your plan to seduce me,” he said.

  “We were discussing no such thing,” Holly said, regaining some of her composure. “That is not the reason I invited you here.”

  He released an aggrieved sigh. “Oh, gee. That’s too bad.”

  “In fact, it’s just the opposite.”

  “You want me to seduce you, instead?”

  “I want you to quit staring at me!” she said, then took a steadying breath. He seemed not to notice the silence, which Holly found intolerable. “I don’t want to make a big deal of this,” she said with forced calm. “I decided to talk to you about it directly before mentioning it to anyone else, but—”

  His smirky grin was gone, replaced by a somber expression.

  “I’ve tried to tell you, without having to confront you like this,” she said, “that the way you look at me makes me uncomfortable, but you haven’t taken my hints.”

  His somber expression grew into a full frown.

  “I have a right to do my work without feeling uncomfortable,” she said.

  After a long pause, he said, “I never intended to make you uncomfortable. You just...I told you...you look so familiar.”

  “That accounts for the first day you were on the job. Or the first time you asked if we’d ever met. This has been going on for two weeks, and it’s getting worse instead of better. If staring at me is your way of trying to...score, then you’re in for a big disappointment, because I’m not—”

  “I’m not trying to score.”

  “Oh, right. With all the talk about my seducing you, or you—”

  “I was teasing,” he said.

  “I wasn’t amused.”

  “That much is obvious.”

  The atmosphere in the booth was charged with tension. Holly studied a drop of condensing water trail down the side of her glass.

  “You didn’t seriously think that I thought you brought me over here to seduce me?” he said.

  Holly touched a drop of water near the top of the glass with her forefinger, then watched it split into two rivulets before raising her gaze to his face again. “It’s not appropriate for you to be joking with me about a possible sexual liaison, and it’s certainly not appropriate for you to stare at me when I’m trying to work.”

  “Appropriate?” He growled the word.

  In the narrow booth, he suddenly seemed larger than life. And volatile. For once, Holly could not read his emotions. They were fogged by intensity. She wondered if she’d made a gross error in judgment by confronting him here instead of at the library when other people were around. She didn’t know this man, didn’t know what he was capable of, yet she’d provoked him.

  Quickly, so quickly that she didn’t have time to anticipate his movement, he reached across the table and grabbed her wrist. Holly gasped. Fighting back an instinctive urge to jerk away from him and run as fast as she could, she froze, staring at her wrist as though it were something separate from her body. When she finally moved, it was only to tilt her head back far enough to lock her gaze with his. Her breathing was ragged.

  The seconds that followed seemed like hours. Then, as quickly as he’d grabbed her, he lifted both his hands with fingers spread. “I’m sorry. I—”

  He dropped his hands to the table and closed his eyes. His chest vibrated with a wracking sigh. For a moment, he was so still that Holly wondered how he could be breathing.

  When he opened his eyes again, the loneliness was there. And the intensity.

  “Do you want to know why I stare at you?”

  “I—” Holly couldn’t complete the thought. She wasn’t sure what he was asking.

  He looked into her eyes. Again, time was distorted, seconds stretched into hours. “It’s because you’re the only person I’ve seen in this city who looks even remotely familiar to me.”

  “I don’t understand,” Holly said. “Did you just move here? Are you homesick?”

  “I have no home,” he said with a chilling softness. “No one I care about.”

  He’d been homeless, she thought. He’d been homeless and, somehow, he’d made it to Cocoa and gotten the job at the library. It tied up all the loose ends that had earned him the Mystery Man designation with Meryl and Sarah.

  Overwhelmed by the force of his anguish, she covered his hand with hers. “If you need to talk about it, I’ll listen.”

  A sympathetic ear was all she had to offer him; she hadn’t any strength to share, no explanations for life’s injustices. She’d used up all her strength accepting Craig’s death, she’d gone through all the possible explanations without finding even one that
could make sense of what had happened.

  “Maybe I should talk about it,” he said.

  “Sometimes it helps,” Holly said. Sometimes it was the only thing that did.

  He was silent so long that she wondered if he’d changed his mind about confiding in her. When he finally spoke, his voice was uncommonly soft. “Five weeks ago, I woke up in Cocoa General Hospital without the slightest idea where I was, who I was or how I’d gotten there.”

  “Amnesia?” she asked incredulously.

  “Retrograde amnesia,” he said. “I don’t remember anything before waking up in that hospital room.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Not my name, not who I am, not where I came from. I don’t remember reading Make Way for Ducklings or what my comfort foods are. I don’t even remember whether I had a mother to feed me comfort foods.”

  Holly tried to absorb what he’d told her. She tried to imagine what it must be like to wake up without a past, without an identity. “Someone must know who you are. How did you get to the hospital? Someone must have brought you.”

  “I got there in an ambulance. The paramedics peeled me off a side street half a block from Highway A1-A. The driver who hit me said I came out of nowhere and ran right out in front of him. He braked, but there was no way he could stop in time. The witnesses—and there were several—all corroborated his story.”

  “You didn’t have identification on you? A driver’s license?”

  His shoulders lifted slightly in a weary shrug. “A few dollar bills folded in the pocket of my T-shirt. Aside from that, I was in what the cops referred to as typical beach clothes—nylon shorts that double as a swimsuit, a Ron Jon’s T-shirt. They said the shirt was new, that I’d probably bought it within a day or two of the accident.”

  Holly’s fingers were curled around his hand now, not merely on top of it. “Surely someone reported you missing.”

  “If there’s a human being on earth who cares about me or knows who I am, they haven’t come forward. They put a story with my picture over the wire services, but...” The sentence faded into a sigh. “The theory is that I was here on vacation, and no one’s missed me yet.”

  He paused, swallowed. When he spoke again, his voice was tauter than ever. “That theory gets weaker as time passes. People come to Florida for two weeks, not two months.”

  “This must be awful for you.” She had both her hands across the table now, sandwiching his left hand between them.

  He covered the outside hand with his right palm and curved his fingers around it, clinging to the clump of their clustered flesh. “It’s hell. The unanswered questions—”

  They passed a long moment in silence. Holly hoped that her presence comforted him. Finally, she asked, “How did you end up working at the library?”

  “They assigned a social worker to help me. I went through the jobs offered at the employment office, and working in a library was the only one that appealed to me that didn’t require a degree or related experience. My social worker pulled some strings with the county to get me hired.”

  He smiled unexpectedly. “And then I saw you and, for the first time, I thought I recognized someone or something from my past. I was so sure—”

  He squeezed her hands. “You can understand why I stared, can’t you? Even when you insisted that we’d never met. I still...no one else seems familiar.”

  His eyes were so filled with sadness that Holly’s heart ached for him. “I wish I could tell you that I know you. I wish I could tell you who you are and help you remember, but...if we’d met, I would remember.”

  “I believe you. I just...it’s so disappointing. I keep thinking—hoping—that you’ll jog a memory of some kind.”

  “I still could. Obviously I resemble someone you care about.”

  “But not necessarily someone who cares about me.” His hands convulsed around hers. “God, what kind of monster does a man have to be that he can fall off the face of the earth and no one notices.”

  “It hasn’t been all that long.”

  “Only an eternity,” he said.

  Holly wished for magic words, but she knew anything she said to encourage him would sound shallow and placating. Another silence ensued, heavier than the previous one.

  “I have a friend in the police department,” she said. “Maybe he could help.”

  “The police have done everything they can.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “They fingerprinted me. It’s reassuring to know I’m not a criminal. At least not one who’s ever been arrested. Unless, of course, the computers just missed the critical match.”

  “If a computer could miss a critical match, then a human being could miss a critical missing persons report, couldn’t they? It wouldn’t hurt to have someone double-checking.”

  “I’m not feeling very optimistic at this point. But, sure, let him check away. I can use all the help I can get. I’ll give you the name of the officer assigned to the case.” He paused thoughtfully, then peered deeply into her eyes. “I wish I could assure you that I have nothing to hide, but the questions.... God, if I just knew why I ran out in front of that car.” He sighed. “Who am I kidding? I’d give an arm just to know my name.”

  “Craig Ford isn’t your real name,” she mused aloud.

  “The car that hit me was a Ford,” he said. “Some heritage, huh?”

  “And Craig?” she said, choking on the name. “What made you choose Craig?”

  “Once, in the hospital, I woke up kind of hazy from the painkillers and there was a really heated scene on the television. A man was whispering, ‘Marlena, Marlena,’ and the woman whispered back, ‘Craig. Oh, Craig!’ It sounded like a good, solid name. A man’s name.”

  “Yes,” Holly agreed. She’d always loved it, so rough and male, just like—

  He laughed wryly. “Maybe I was hoping I’d get as lucky with women as the guy in the TV soap seemed to be.”

  “You probably don’t have much trouble in that department,” she said without thinking.

  His eyebrow shot up with prurient interest. “Is that an objective opinion or a personal one?”

  “Purely objective,” she said. “You needn’t be modest. You lost your memory, not your eyesight. Look in the mirror.”

  He tilted his head back until it rested against the high back of the booth. “Sometimes at night, I lay awake and wonder if the fact that I was thinking about ‘getting lucky’ means that I’m not married.”

  He could be married.

  He could be a lot worse, she realized with a shiver. A criminal. A killer. A child molester. Even he didn’t know.

  So what are you doing holding hands with him in a public place? she asked herself.

  As if he’d sensed the direction of her thoughts, he withdrew his right hand, and relaxed the fingers of his left. “I’m sorry I made you uncomfortable. I’ll try not to stare at you anymore.”

  “I won’t be as skittish now.”

  His grin came easily. “Then maybe I’ll stare a little from time to time. Just because I like the view.”

  3

  “YOU WOULDN’T HAPPEN to have a beer, would you?”

  “Sorry, Josh. If I had known you were coming by—” Holly had called her fiancé’s partner to ask him to see what he could find out about Craig Ford. He had told her he’d get back to her, but she hadn’t expected him to show up on her doorstep, especially in the middle of a monsoonlike storm.

  He shrugged. “Then I’ll take anything that’s wet.”

  Holly opened a soft drink for each of them and put a bowl of pretzels on the coffee table within Josh’s reach. He stretched out as though he owned the place, his head and shoulders nestled into a trio of throw pillows, his long legs spread out with his sneakered feet hanging off the edge.

  She settled into an armchair, drawing her legs up under her, as Josh reached for a pretzel. “This is about Craig Ford, isn’t it? Did you find out something?”

  Something significant enough to bring him out in the rain so he c
ould tell her in person?

  “I talked to Mick Scalisi, the officer assigned to the case. Your friend was brought into emergency as a John Doe, just like he said.”

  Holly didn’t realize that she’d been harboring doubts about the extraordinary tale Craig had told her until she felt the surge of relief the verification brought. “Thank you for checking.”

  He washed down the pretzels with a generous mouthful of soda. “It was just a matter of finding Scalisi and asking a few questions.”

  “You didn’t have to go out in this weather,” she said. “You could have phoned.”

  “I haven’t seen you in a while. I wanted to know how you’re doing.”

  Holly smiled her gratitude. Josh Newmark was almost as protective of her as Craig had been, although she suspected his solicitude grew from an old-fashioned chauvinistic philosophy that women needed someone to take care of them. He and Craig had been partners, and he took that partnership as seriously as he would have a family bond. He felt duty-bound to watch over Craig’s woman. He would have felt the same way no matter who Craig’s woman had been.

  “I’m getting along, taking one day at a time.” She paused, then asked, “Do you think you can find out anything new about...my friend?” She couldn’t call the shelving assistant Craig in front of Josh. The memory of the Craig they’d both cared about was still too vivid to both of them.

  “Trust me, I intend to find out everything I can about your friend, Holly.”

  “I don’t think I like the way you said that.”

  “So sue me.”

  “Don’t be a horse’s backside, Josh. He’s just an acquaintance. There’s nothing like that going on.”

  “Right. The first time I hear from you in three months, and it’s to ask a favor for an acquaintance.”

  Holly was tempted to remind him that his phone had buttons, too, but she decided against it. After all, he was trying to help her.

  “This guy’s trouble,” Josh said, trying her patience even more. “I can smell it.”

  “I thought you said his story checked out.”

  “Oh, it checks out. But it’s a crappy story. It has more holes in it than a truckload of Swiss cheese.”