by Joy Fielding
“And so we got married and lived happily ever after.”
“I hope so,” he said sincerely, reaching across the seat to take her hand in his, withdrawing it when he felt her body tense. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I promise I won’t rush you.”
“I know that,” she agreed. “I’m sorry too. I want so much to remember.” She looked out the window at the cars moving freely in the opposite direction. “I wonder what’s causing the delay.”
“I suspect we’ll find out soon enough. I see ambulance lights ahead.” He regarded her carefully, as if he were studying her face to see how she might react.
“What?” she asked again, as she had asked earlier when she caught him looking at her in this same way.
He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.
“So, what else can you tell me?”
He tossed his head back across the top of his spine, as if looking to the roof of the car for inspiration. “Well, you’re a big one for causes.”
“What do you mean? What causes?”
“Lately, you’ve been very concerned with protecting the environment, and saving the rain forests. That sort of thing. And I don’t mean it to sound like you’re one of those dilettantes who dabble in whatever cause is the current rage. You’re not. Just that when something genuinely concerns you, you become totally committed. You’re a great one for righting wrongs,” he said with obvious admiration.
Her mind formed an immediate mental image of a blood-splattered blue dress and a laundry bag full of hundred-dollar bills. Had she collected these items while busy “righting wrongs"? Was she some misguided, latter-day Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the homeless, her latest cause of the hour?
“Tell me about the kinds of things we do together,” she said, willing the blood-soaked image away with the sound of her voice.
“We play tennis; we go to movies, the theater; you’re even gotten me addicted to the Boston Pops. We spend time with friends; we like to travel whenever we get the chance….”
“Where do we go?”
“Well, we haven’t had a real holiday in a couple of years, but we did manage a trip to the Orient about four years ago.”
“What about the jungle?” she asked, recalling the strange dream she had had while tunneling her way through the CAT scan.
“The jungle?” He sounded surprised.
“You said I was concerned about rain forests. Have we ever visited one?”
“I think you were interested in preserving them, not visiting them.”
She smiled, marveling at the strange way her past was trying to infiltrate her subconscious. An interest in preserving the rain forests had snaked its way into one of her dreams. If her unconscious self could remember such relatively insignificant details of her life, surely it wouldn’t be too long before the rest of her caught up, especially once she was back in her familiar environment.
Should she tell Michael about the money and the blood? she wondered. She had planned to tell Dr. Meloff, but then that other young doctor, Dr. Borovoy, had confused everything by knowing who she was, and the opportunity had passed. Maybe Michael knew something about it. Maybe, as unlikely as it seemed, it was all rather innocent, carrying a relatively straightforward explanation. Maybe he might be able to help her. He was her husband, after all. They shared a life, a child. He loved her. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind about that. So why hadn’t she confided the whole story to him? Why was she hesitating, even now?
She knew the answer without having to form the words: self-preservation. Saving the rain forests was one thing; protecting herself was something else again. The rain forests would have to wait. As Michael would have to wait to hear the whole story.
“Don’t look,” he was saying.
Immediately, like a child who has been told not to stare and can’t help herself, she looked in the direction he had told her to avoid. There were three automobiles, several police cars, and an ambulance pulled over to the side of the road. She caught a quick glimpse of twisted metal and broken glass, of a young man crying on the pavement, his head buried in his hands. She saw a stretcher being pushed inside the ambulance, its doors closing before she had a chance to absorb who had been injured and how badly. A policeman was standing beside the young man, trying to coax him into one of the waiting police vehicles.
Traffic came to a complete standstill as the ambulance roared away from the scene, sirens blaring. The young man allowed himself to be helped into the police car, which took off immediately, so that only one police car remained, undoubtedly awaiting the arrival of a tow truck. Everyone else had left the scene. Jane wondered what had caused the accident and how many people had been involved, how many had been injured, and how it would affect the rest of their lives.
“What are you thinking about?” Michael asked, watching her intently. He looked as if he were afraid that she might bolt from the car.
She told him her thoughts, and he seemed relieved. She was about to ask him why, thought better of it, and asked instead, “Where did we go on our honeymoon?”
If he thought the question a strange one at this particular time, he said nothing, simply answering her question. “The Bahamas,” he said, watching the road, waiting for the flow of traffic to resume.
Her imagination immediately brought forth images of white sandy beaches and bright-blue water, of wildly colored fish swimming just beneath the ocean’s surface, of attractive low buildings in shades of pink and yellow, of lovers joined at the hip, barely able to keep their hands and lips to themselves as they flirted with the water’s edge.
She saw herself, wearing her modest black bathing suit, jump from the photograph Michael had brought with him to the hospital and onto the Nassau beach. She saw Michael beside her, watched them trip over each other’s feet as they sought to keep in step while wrapped in each other’s arms. She saw them give up the attempt and collapse onto the cool white sand, rolling over one another as if they were waves.
She saw them later in their hotel room, their bathing suits now in a careless heap on the floor. They were a round ball of arms and legs, their bodies shiny with sweat as they arched toward one another, her hands falling to the small of his back, his lips grazing the tips of her breasts. She watched his head move between her legs as she slipped her tongue along the middle crease of his buttocks. She groaned out loud.
“Are you all right?” he asked quickly.
Please don’t ask me what I was thinking, her eyes begged his, and he did not. “I’m fine,” she reassured him, trying to blink away the stubborn image of their imagined lovemaking. Were they really so good together? Was she really so provocative a lover? Were his hands as gentle as the hands her mind had lent him?
She directed her gaze out the side window and was surprised to see how quickly they were moving. As if he could read her thoughts, he said, “It should just be another few minutes.”
She tried to smile but anxiety seized her lips and kept them resolutely straight. A fresh fear invaded her body like a steady stream of ice water. It traveled from her breast bone to her bowels, and for an instant, she thought she might have to tell him to pull over and stop the car, but the urgency faded, although the fear did not.
“Tell me about our friends,” she said, hearing the quaver in her voice.
“Would you like them in descending order of favorites?” He laughed, and she laughed too, thinking this a wonderful idea. “Well, let’s see, first on the list would have to be Howard and Peggy Rose, who are spending the summer in the south of France, as they have every summer for the past ten years. Next is probably the Tanenbaums, Peter and Sarah, who we always beat at tennis but who are wonderful sports about it. And then there’s the Carneys, David and Susan—they’re both doctors, and then probably Ian and Janet Hart, and Eve and Ross McDermott. Do any of these names mean anything to you?”
They meant nothing; she shook her head. “What about girlfriends?” she asked.
“Mine or yo
urs?”
“Let’s start with mine,” she said, acknowledging his wry smile. “Do I have any?”
“A few. There’s Lorraine Appleby—you used to work together way back when—and Diane somebody-or-other, I can never remember her last name.”
She thought of the note she had found in her coat pocket, saw the name PAT RUTHERFORD scrawl itself across the car’s windshield in invisible ink. She held her breath. “Anyone named Pat?”
He gave the name a few seconds’ thought before answering. “I can’t think of any Pats,” he said finally. “Why? Does the name Pat mean something to you?”
“It’s just a name,” she lied. A name I found scribbled on a piece of paper stuffed into my coat pocket along with almost ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. Oh, and did I also neglect to mention that the front of my dress was covered in blood?
He shrugged, as if assuming that someone named Pat was of no further consideration to their lives. Maybe he was right. After all, there was no telling how long that note had been lining her pocket. “There’s the cutoff just ahead.” He pointed to the sign that announced the city of Newton, a suburb of Boston bordered on three sides by the Charles River. Newton was composed of fourteen diverse villages that managed to blend effortlessly into one another. “We live in the village of Newton Highlands,” Michael said, pulling off the highway. “Does anything look familiar?”
She toyed with the idea of pretending that she recognized a particular street, had fond recollections of a certain well-tended garden, but tossed the idea aside with a shake of her head that said, no, nothing looked remotely familiar. Hartford Street had no more meaning for her than did Lincoln or Standish. One garden looked the same as the one beside it. The houses, large, attractive wooden structures, spoke of prosperity and calm. There was no clue as to what kind of disorder might lie just beyond each threshold, no hint of the possible chaos inside. She wondered if she would recognize her own street, whether she would be able to identify the house she lived in. Would these things find some way into her subconscious as the rain forests had done? Would they beckon to her like a kind of second sight?
“This is our street,” he told her, putting an end to such speculations. Forest Street, the sign proclaimed, no forest anywhere in sight. The street was as anonymous as the ones preceding it, flanked on both sides by the familiar wooden houses, one painted gray with a large screened-in front porch, another painted blue and almost hidden behind several monstrous oak trees. “There we are,” he announced, pointing. “Third house from the corner.”
The third house from the corner on the left-hand side of the street was no more, no less, imposing than any of the other homes in the area. It was an inviting, two-story structure, painted white, a double row of red and pink impatiens running along its base, underlining its storybook appeal. There were black shutters around each window and flowerboxes filled with red and pink impatiens below. Several steps led to the large black front door, and a double garage was situated to the left of the house, its doors also black. She noted the presence of a stained-glass window in one of the upstairs rooms.
It looked to be a very comfortable house in a very comfortable neighborhood. She could have done a lot worse than to find herself sitting in a new-model BMW in front of a beautiful home in the tony suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, married to a handsome and sensitive pediatric surgeon.
So why had she chosen to escape into a hysterical fugue? What had driven her out of her comfortable house in this most comfortable of neighborhoods?
“Who’s that?” she asked, catching sight of a woman in an old pair of Bermuda shorts watering the front lawn of the house directly across the street from her own. The woman had become so distracted at the sight of Michael’s car that she had ceased paying attention to what she was doing and was now diligently hosing down her front door.
Michael raised his hand in what was simultaneously a wave and a signal of reassurance. The gesture acknowledged the woman’s presence while communicating that everything was under control. “Her name is Carole. Carole with an e. Carole-with-an-e Bishop,” he enunciated clearly. “She and her family moved here a few years ago from New York. By family I mean a husband, two teenage children, and an elderly widowed father. Unfortunately, the husband moved out again last fall.” He pulled into their driveway. “I take it none of this rings a bell.”
“Should it?”
“Well, you and Daniel used to go running together a few mornings a week. Daniel is her husband. Was,” he corrected. “Or soon to be was, at any rate.”
“I’m a runner?”
“Occasionally. You haven’t done much running since Daniel moved out.”
“Why was she looking at us like that?”
“Like how?”
“I think you know how. You seemed to signal to her that everything was okay.”
He shook his head. “You still don’t miss a thing, do you?” His voice carried equal traces of admiration and amazement.
“I take it she knows about my disappearance.”
“She knows,” he said, clicking the remote-control unit fastened to the sun visor of his car. The double garage door automatically lifted, revealing a silver Honda Prelude. Her concentration shifted from her neighbor to the small automobile inside the garage.
“Is that my car?”
“That it is.”
So she hadn’t abandoned it on some city street. It was safe and sound at home, the way she should have been. Michael drove slowly into the garage. For a second, she felt as if she were entering a tomb.
“Scared?” he asked.
“Terrified.”
His hand reached for hers and this time she didn’t pull away. “Just take it slow,” he urged. “If you don’t recognize anything, and you probably won’t, don’t worry about it. I’m right beside you and I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Do we have to go in yet?”
“We can sit here as long as you like.”
They sat in the garage for some minutes in silence, their hands intertwined, their breathing short and irregular, until she said, “This is silly. We can’t sit here all day.”
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
And she said, “I want to go home.”
SEVEN
HE pushed open the front door, then stood back to let her step inside. She hung back, half expecting him to scoop her into his arms and carry her over the threshold, as if they were newlyweds making their first entrance into their new home.
In many ways, this was exactly how she felt. Her heart beat with the same kind of nervous apprehension, the excitement at beginning a new life, the trepidation that accompanied that first step into the unknown. Did modern-day grooms still carry their brides across the thresholds? Probably not, she decided, looking to the man who had been her husband for eleven years for one of his reassuring, soft smiles and not being disappointed. The world had grown too sophisticated, too blasé, too jaded, for such simple pleasures. Besides, from everything she had seen and heard on Oprah and Phil and Sally Jessy and Geraldo, today’s women didn’t want or need to be carried through any symbolic doorways, and today’s men were in no condition to support their weight.
“What do you think?” Michael was asking, his apprehension palpable even as he tried to hide it. “Think you want to go inside?”
Jane exhaled a long deep breath of air and forced her eyes to focus on the small front hall, papered in delicate red flowers. There was a central staircase painted white and carpeted in pale green, as was the entire downstairs, altogether an attractive beginning. It was an inviting house, one that beckoned a visitor to enter. She took another deep breath, forced one foot in front of the other, and stepped inside.
Her first impression was one of light. It poured in from everywhere, from the large front windows of the living room on her left, from the equally large front windows of the dining room on her right, from the mammoth skylight that looked down on the central hall from the second floor.
The hall narrowed once it passed the stairs, leading to the rooms at the back of the house.
Jane walked slowly into the middle of the hall and stopped, not sure whether her legs would sustain her.
“Would you like the tour?” Michael suggested, not asking whether anything looked familiar. She nodded, following him into the spacious dining room, papered in red-and-white stripes, that somehow managed to be bold and subtle both. The top of the dining room table was a green marble slab; the eight chairs that sat around it were covered in the same red-and-white stripes as the walls. There was a glass cabinet filled with a delicate red-and-white floral china, and a glass server crammed with multicolored bottles of liqueur. Several tall plants rested in Oriental vases by the front window. “Everything’s very nice,” she said, wondering whether they had picked up the vases on their trip to the Orient, and following Michael across the hall into the living room.
It was a large room running the full length of the house, and papered in a variation of the floral chintz that covered the walls of the hall. A chintz sofa and matching chairs were grouped around a large stone fireplace, on one side of which rested an impressive-looking bookshelf and on the other an elaborate stereo system. On the opposite wall stood an upright piano in shiny ebony. Jane tentatively approached the piano and let her fingers, slide across the keyboard, carelessly tracing out a melody by Chopin.
The delicate sound caught her by surprise. She looked at her fingers, which turned automatically clumsy and forgetful. It seemed her playing was a reflex action that could not withstand close scrutiny.
“Don’t worry,” Michael said. “It’ll come back to you. Just try not to think so hard about what you’re doing.”
“I didn’t realize I played.” Her voice was wistful.
“You took lessons as a child. Every now and then you sit down to play that same old piece by Chopin.” He laughed. “Actually, it was one of the things I was hoping would stay forgotten.” His smile faded almost immediately. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound glib.”