Look into My Eyes

by Glenda Sanders

  “Your family’s fine,” Scalisi said. “I talked to your sister earlier this evening. Everyone in Ohio is fine.”

  Tim wasn’t buying it, not for a minute. “Look, my head may be hurting, but my brain still works. If everything’s fine, why are cops talking to my sister?”

  “Try to remain calm,” Dr. Kale said.

  “Did someone hit me over the head? Is that it? Have I been lying in an alley somewhere for two days?”

  “What is the last thing you remember before waking up in the emergency room?” Dr. Kale asked.

  “I’ve been trying to think back, reconstruct the day,” Tim said. “I had lunch with Tom—”

  “Tom who?” Scalisi asked.

  “Tom Mitchell. He was my best friend in high school. He’s stationed at Patrick Air Force Base. He’s been after me for ages to fly down to Florida for a visit, so I routed my trip through Orlando. He picked me up there and brought me to Cocoa. We spent a couple of days doing the beach scene. After lunch on Thursday, he left for Patrick. I had a couple of hours before I had to catch the shuttle to the airport, so I decided to hang out at the beach a while. That’s the last—”

  He wiped his face with his hand. Damn, his head hurt. “Weren’t you going to get me some aspirin or something?”

  “Acetaminophen,” Dr. Kale said. “It’s ordered. The nurse should be bringing it anytime.”

  “Do you remember being at the beach?” Scalisi asked.

  Tim closed his eyes and concentrated, then opened them. “Yeah. Yeah. We had lunch at that place out on the pier, and I stuck around there and then—”

  It came back to him in a rush. “My wallet! Some guy jogging down the beach grabbed my wallet. I...ran after him.” He looked at the cop who did all the talking. Scalisi. “It was him, wasn’t it? I chased him up a side street. He ambushed me, didn’t he? That’s why you called my sister.”

  That explained it. He’d been notifying next of kin. But why his sister? Her last name was different. Wouldn’t they have found his parents more easily?

  “That’s not exactly what happened,” Scalisi said.

  “Then what?”

  It was the doctor who spoke this time. “You were brought in after being hit by a car.”

  “A car?”

  “According to the driver, you ran right out in front of him,” Scalisi said. “We’ve been trying to figure out why.”

  “I must have been chasing the guy, not paying attention—”

  “That was one of our theories,” Scalisi said. “Since you didn’t have identification on you.”

  “No ID?” Tim said. He hoped that nurse showed up with the pain pills soon. “Oh. Of course. He had my wallet. Then how did you locate my sister?”

  “Actually,” Scalisi said, with a cautious exhalation, “your sister found us.”

  “I must have been hit on the head harder than I thought,” Tim said. “None of this is making any sense. How would my sister—”

  “She was checking your mail,” Scalisi said. “Your wallet was returned by a Good Samaritan who found it in a trash can, cleaned out except for a video-store membership card with your name and address on it.”

  “How—did they send it by overnight mail? But—”

  “You were brought in after the traffic accident as a John Doe,” Dr. Kale said. “That was—”

  Tim’s guts curled with apprehension. What were they trying to tell him?

  “—some time ago,” the doctor completed.

  “Some time?” Tim repeated. “As in...how much time?”

  “Months.”

  Tim shook his head, denying the possibility. “Are you trying to tell me I’ve been...unconscious or something? That’s impossible.” They didn’t send unconscious patients to the emergency room. And they didn’t wait several months to sew them up. “But my head...they just sewed it up.”

  “This was a different injury,” Dr. Kale said. “This time, you fell and bumped your head.”

  “A different...but—” Tim swallowed the lump of fear in his throat. “You’re scaring me. How—”

  “Can you tell me the date of the last day you remember?”

  “Easy. It’s the day I was going to leave for Europe.” He told them the date.

  “That was the night you were brought in following the automobile accident.”

  “But—you said it had been months.”

  “They brought you in as a John Doe,” Dr. Kale reported. “You were relatively lucky. The car had slowed. You had some nasty lacerations and a few broken ribs, but the most serious injury was a concussion. You were unconscious for thirty hours. When you regained consciousness, you showed no signs of the brain damage we had feared, but you suffered an acute retrograde amnesia.”

  “Amnesia? I couldn’t remember anything?”

  “Certainly not your name or any of your personal history.”

  “I didn’t know my own name?” Tim asked. It was too fantastic to be believed.

  “I was assigned to your case,” Scalisi said. “We monitored missing persons reports and put your picture out over the wire services. You were a tourist in good physical health. Unfortunately, that was all we had to go on.”

  “What—my family?”

  “You were supposed to be in Europe,” Scalisi said. “At first, everyone was irritated that you didn’t write, but apparently you don’t hang around post offices under the best of circumstances. Anyway, your sister assumed your parents were getting mail, and your parents were up at their summer place in Wisconsin and assumed that they were getting mail at their house. When they finally figured out no one had heard from you, your sister remembered an odd call she’d gotten from an old high-school friend of hers. He asked if she knew how to get in touch with you, and gave her some story about a track team get-together. He was a cop in some little berg outside Chicago.”

  “Randy Holloway,” Tim said. “He ran the four-hundred meter.”

  “Turns out he saw the picture of you and thought it looked like you, but he didn’t tell her why he’d called, because she told him all about the award you’d won and your trip to Europe. He assumed our John Doe was just someone who looked like you. She got concerned and went through your mail and found the wallet and called the local cops, who put out a missing persons and gave us a call. As soon as we confirmed the identification, Officer Newmark went out to tell you the news.”

  “Your name triggered a return of your memory, you fainted and knocked your head on a table on the way to the floor,” the doctor said.

  Tim still couldn’t believe it. Architects from Ohio didn’t get hit by cars while chasing pickpockets in Florida and wake up with amnesia! “What—” He was almost afraid to ask. “What’s today’s date?”

  The doctor told him.

  Tim chortled at the irony. “Tomorrow’s my birthday.”

  Something—he would have said it was a gasp, but he wasn’t sure—drew his eyes to the librarian. The cop—the one who didn’t say much—had his arm around her, which probably explained her presence. She looked—he was too upset himself to be particularly analytical—but she appeared unsettled about something. Her voice even sounded a bit strained as she asked, “How old will you be?”

  Concentrating on the math made his head hurt. “Twenty-nine.”

  She paled, as if the answer somehow disturbed her. But Tim had too many problems of his own to give her reaction much thought. “If I haven’t been unconscious, and I don’t remember anything since the day I was supposed to fly to London, what...what was I doing for over three months?”

  “You were assigned a social worker,” Dr. Kale said. “You chose a name, and she helped get you situated in a furnished apartment. You’ve been working at the library.”

  Instinctively, he turned his attention to the librarian.

  “Yes,” the doctor said. “I believe you worked with Miss Bennett.”

  “I worked at a library?”

  “You were a shelving assistant,” Miss Bennett interjected helpf
ully.

  “A shelving assistant? I shelved books all day?”

  “You had no credentials,” Dr. Kale said. “No social security number, for that matter.”

  It was all too much to comprehend. “This isn’t a cruel practical joke by any chance, is it?” Tim asked, knowing it wasn’t and wishing it could be.

  Their faces confirmed his worst nightmare.

  “I...I think I need some fresh air.” The librarian. Speaking to the cop who still had his arm around her shoulders. “The hospital odors, I guess.”

  She forced an apologetic smile, and despite everything that was going on, Tim found the energy to feel a stab of envy for the cop comforting her.

  “I’m glad the bump on the head wasn’t too serious,” she said. Then she hesitated oddly, as though choking on the words. Finally, she added, “Timothy.”

  11

  “I SHOULD HAVE STAYED,” Holly said. They were in Josh’s car, on the way home from the hospital.

  “You were pale as a ghost. I was ready to get you out of there even if you hadn’t said anything,” Josh said.

  Holly rested her forehead against the side window. “You know what’s ironic? I hadn’t even thought about tomorrow being Craig’s birthday.” Her breath drew a hazy circle on the cool glass as she exhaled a weary sigh. How could she have forgotten Craig’s birthday? “Not just the same date, but the same year.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Holly, but it’s just another coincidence.”

  “I know. It’s...it was all coincidence. All of it. But—” The very same day of the very same year.

  “You’re fogging the glass,” Josh said.

  “Sorry.” She shifted away from the window.

  Minutes passed before she spoke again. “I should have stayed.”

  “It’s after midnight and you’ve had a rough night. One person collapsing is enough.”

  “He might have had questions.”

  “Scalisi and the doc can answer the questions he has right now. He’s just trying to absorb the fact that he’s lost some time. You can fill him in on the details later.”

  They had reached the apartment complex. Josh, gallantly, walked her to her door and offered to come in. Holly shook her head. “I could use some time alone.”

  Josh shrugged, kissed her cheek and left.

  Holly had forgotten about the blood. The dark stain greeted her as she entered the apartment. For a few seconds, she stared at it with morbid fascination, wishing she had accepted Josh’s offer to come in and keep her company. Then, suddenly, that ugly patch of drying blood became a symbol of every bad thing that had ever happened to her. Craig’s death. Timothy Sotherland’s betrayal—

  Oh, yes. It was a betrayal, his failure to recognize her. Although she knew he had not chosen to forget her, she was not ready to forgive that lack of recognition. She was still too stunned, too wounded, too fragile from his rejection to be fair or forgiving. She would have been more tolerant, although no less hurt, if he had discovered that he had a wife. But to look at her as though he’d never seen her before, as though she were just any woman who’d chanced into his room—

  It was crushing.

  How many times had he assured her that if he’d had a wife, he would remember? How many times had he told her he could never forget her, or the love he felt for her? How many times had he said they would work it out, no matter what they found out?

  Why did you just forget me, Timothy? Why couldn’t you have been a wanted felon or something else just as simple.

  With clenched-jaw determination, she attacked the stain with a large sponge, a can of carpet cleaner and a bucket of water. A quarter of an hour later, the spot was lighter, but still vivid against the pale gray carpet, and the water in the bucket was a hideous scarlet. Holly stared at the sponge, also dyed rusty red. Her shoulders slumped forward and she bowed her head, too weary to hold it upright. The thought that the blood in the sponge, in the bucket, in the carpet might be all that remained of...Timothy in her life flitted through her mind, but she dismissed it as the sick notion that it was. There was nothing left of him but her memories—the same memories his mind had misplaced.

  As she knelt next to that accursed stain, holding the sullied sponge, the fear and disappointment of the day culminated in sobs that tore from her chest to clog her throat and wrack her shoulders. She cried until her throat was raw, her nose was red and every muscle in her body was sore and aching.

  Finally, exhausted, she tossed the sponge in the trash and flushed the bloodied water down the toilet. Then she showered, put on her oldest, softest, rattiest sleep shirt and settled on the couch to watch Pepe Le Pew and eat part of the pizza that had arrived along with the paramedics hours earlier.

  * * *

  TIM STOOD in the center of the library, mystified and slightly disoriented as he surveyed the room. To one side, chrome and fake leather furniture provided a place to relax with a book, a newspaper or magazine and in front of him, book-laden shelves stood in straight lines like ranks of soldiers on a parade field.

  It was like every library he’d ever seen, but there was absolutely nothing familiar about it. Could he really have worked here, spending hours—entire days—pushing carts of books between those shelves? Incredible, but true. He had the word of a neurologist, two cops and the owner of the Victorian house he’d been living in. Why would any of them lie?

  Neither of the two woman running bar codes over electronic sensors at the checkout desk was the one who’d been in his hospital room. He’d been hoping to see her again, especially since Scalisi had told him she and the other cop who’d been in the room that night were just friends—which left him with a few questions. Like why she happened to be at the hospital. And why he was at her house when he fell and cracked his head.

  One of the women spied him, flashed him a friendly smile and waved. As soon as she finished with the stack of books she was processing, she left the desk and walked over to him. “Hello.”

  “Hello,” Tim replied, feeling at a distinct disadvantage, since she obviously knew him.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said, then suddenly tried to cover self-consciousness with a nervous smile. “I guess we’re supposed to call you Timothy now.”

  “Tim will do.”

  She held out her hand. “I’m Sarah. We...worked together...you know—”

  “When I had amnesia,” he said.

  She nodded her head furiously, then said, “Holly told us about...everything.”

  Holly! The woman at the hospital.

  “How’s your head?”

  “It’s healing nicely, thank you.”

  Sarah chewed on her bottom lip thoughtfully, then asked, “Does anything...look familiar?”

  “I wish it did.”

  An awkward silence followed. Finally, Tim said, “Would you do me a favor and tell everyone thank-you for the get-well basket?”

  “Basket?”

  “At the hospital. The card was signed ‘The Library Staff.’”

  “Oh. The basket Holly put together.”

  Holly again.

  “You...uh, probably want to tell her thank-you. Personally, I mean.”

  She seemed to take it as a foregone conclusion that he would want to talk to Holly, which he found interesting. Scalisi’s attitude regarding Holly had been equally intriguing. And with every assumption by the people who knew him as Craig Ford that he had a particular interest in Miss Holly Bennett, Tim’s lists of reasons for wanting to talk to her grew longer. “Maybe I should.”

  “She’s in the children’s area. It’s Story Hour, you know. Oh, you probably don’t know. We have Story Hour on Thursday afternoons. They should be about half done.”

  After a moment, she prompted, “The, uh, children’s area is down the center aisle, past those shelves and to the left, if you want to wait for her.”

  Tim did not miss the persistence in the librarian’s voice or the anxiety in her attitude; he’d been the target of matchmakers often
enough to recognize it for what it was. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll do that.”

  From their brief encounter in his hospital room, Tim had a vague impression of Holly Bennett as pretty. When he reached the children’s area and saw her seated in a chair surrounded by two dozen children, he decided that his head must have been hurting worse than he’d realized that night. Holly Bennett wasn’t just pretty; she was just...plain...delicious. She not only had the face of an angel, she had a voice like honey and a smile like sunshine.

  She was reading aloud about an English country goose with no sense of direction. The goose was trying to fly to her cousin’s London house for tea and kept landing everywhere except in London, encountering an Irish setter in Ireland, a Scottish terrier in Scotland and a dachshund in Germany along the way. The children laughed rowdily as Holly read the part of the flustered goose with an English accent and breathed personality into each of the dogs she met on her pilgrimage. Her accents were far from perfect, but they were, without exception, adorable, and the children were charmed—along with Tim.

  His suspicions that he and Holly had been more than cordial co-workers bore thorough investigation, he decided. He was stuck for at least a week while the travel agency tried to make sense of his botched travel arrangements. It might be nice to have some pleasant companionship while he waited.

  The wayward goose ran into a French poodle named Charmaine and Holly’s accent hit the tickle bone of a little boy in the audience. The child giggled aloud. “She sounds like Pepe Le Pew!”

  “Yeah!” several of the children agreed. “Pepe Le Pew!”

  If Tim hadn’t been watching her so intently, he might have missed the way Holly suddenly tensed. He might not have caught the stricken expression that flitted over her face for just an instant before she put on a false smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Up to that point, her attention had been directed either at the book she was reading or the children hanging on her every word, but now she looked up, over their heads.

  Her face registered surprise as she spied Tim, and for several seconds, she seemed to lose her focus entirely, staring at him blankly. Then one of the children, the same boy who’d laughed about Pepe Le Pew, followed her gaze to Tim and announced, “It’s the Big Bad Wolf!”