Husbands and Other Strangers Read online

  Her hands clenched at her sides, perspiration forming along her forehead, she managed to edge closer to Jake. She glanced back toward her so-called “husband” and saw that the man had taken out a cell phone from somewhere. Suspicion rose immediately. She didn’t trust this guy any further than she could throw him.

  “Who are you calling?” she wanted to know.

  “Dr. Peter Sullivan. He’s a neurosurgeon at Blair Memorial Hospital.”

  Her eyes widened. Without realizing it, she took a step closer to Jake. “I’m not letting anyone operate on me.”

  Finished, Taylor closed the cell phone. He was aware that both her brothers seemed really concerned now. That made three of them. He did his best to keep a poker face. One of them had to look as if they weren’t playing pattycake with panic.

  “It’s not about an operation,” he told her. As he took a step closer to her, he noticed her flinch. She didn’t even seem to be aware of it. Her involuntary action ate away at his soul. “He’s the best in the area.” Which, he added silently, considering that the area was Southern California, a region of the country generally thought to be overloaded with doctors from every field of specialization imaginable, was saying a great deal.

  Her eyes met his. He saw a familiar look of bravado there. It gave him a measure of hope, even if it was getting in his way at the moment. “Or he’s a friend, willing to go along with whatever you tell him to say,” she countered.

  Her sense of paranoia was still intact, Taylor thought. Over the course of their courtship and marriage, Gayle had always been prepared for another retaliation. He was always careful to choose his pay-backs wisely. They fought well and made love even better. Lord, he hadn’t known he could feel this happy, this fulfilled until he’d met Gayle.

  A cold shiver slithered down his spine. He tried his best to ignore it. She was going to be fine. If this was on the level, she was going to be fine.

  If this wasn’t, the woman was dead meat.

  “We’ll be there with you,” Jake assured his sister.

  Gayle turned to look at him and he saw the fear in her eyes.

  So did Taylor. He tried to ignore the sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  Like Rico, Taylor had met Dr. Sullivan while doing renovations on the man’s house just after the surgeon had gotten married. The wedding had made the society page as well as the business section, because the bride was the head of a well-known fashion design company and, along with her younger brother, the owner of the Fortune 500 company that produced the designs.

  He saw the man frowning now as he approached him and his brothers-in-law. They’d been cooling their heels in the waiting room, trying to convince one another that this was nothing more than a stupid joke. Getting nowhere.

  Peter wore the expression of a man who knew he was not the bearer of good tidings. “The good news is that she checks out fine physically and she can go home.”

  “And the bad news?” Taylor pressed.

  “The bad news,” Peter told them, trying to phrase it as clinically, as painlessly as possible, “is that Gayle appears to have sustained a blow to the head and while there doesn’t seem to be any evidence of a concussion, it has apparently triggered a bout of amnesia.”

  “A bout,” Taylor repeated. Fighters had bouts. They were over after a given amount of rounds. A bout with the flu lasted a while, then was over. He rallied around the word. “Which means that it’ll go away.” Taylor silently willed the surgeon to confirm his conclusion.

  Peter took a breath, then said, “Probably.”

  “When?” Taylor pressed before either of his brothers-in-law were able to say the word.

  Peter shook his head. He sympathized with what he knew the three men had to be going through, especially Taylor. “I’m afraid that I can’t really say. Amnesia is still a very gray area for us.”

  Taylor felt as if he was free-falling through space, with a terrain full of nothing but jagged rocks beneath him.

  “‘Appears,’ ‘apparently,’ ‘probably,’” he echoed in protest. “There’s nothing definite here, Doc.”

  “No,” Peter agreed, “there’s not. Amnesia is such a capricious condition. There are no hard-and-fast rules established yet. This could go away in an hour, a day, a month or…” He let his voice trail off, not wanting to utter the word that he knew Gayle’s husband dreaded.

  Never.

  “Capricious.” Jake seized on the doctor’s description. “That makes it sound like it’s all a prank.”

  Peter slowly moved his head from side to side. “I’m afraid not.”

  Taylor had worn a path in the carpet, waiting for the neurosurgeon to emerge. He had to hold himself in check now to keep from pacing again. This just didn’t make any sense to him.

  “But Gayle can’t just forget one thing and not everything else,” he protested. And then that sick, sinking feeling had him adding, “Can she?”

  “I know it sounds crazy,” Peter agreed, “but I’m afraid that she can.”

  “Selective amnesia?” Taylor scoffed at the notion even as he fought to keep the panic he felt from crawling up his belly and into his throat. “How is that even possible?”

  “More easily than you think, Taylor. Actually, all amnesia is selective in a way. A person with amnesia doesn’t forget how to talk. How to walk. How to get dressed. They remember who’s president or how to make change. They forget other things, things like who they are.”

  “Okay, she knows all that. She just claims not to know who I am,” Taylor bit off, frustrated.

  “Has she been taking any new medications?” Peter asked, looking at all three men.

  “No. She’s as healthy as a horse,” Taylor told him. “Why?”

  “There was this man, a former astronaut actually, who forgot who his wife was. They thought it was the onset of Alzheimer’s, but it was a bad reaction to a statin medication he was taking for his cholesterol. It happens.”

  “She’s not taking anything for cholesterol.” Taylor took a second to collect himself. “So what you’re saying is that it’s possible to forget just one integral part of her life. Me.”

  “Yes, it’s possible.”

  “Why?” Taylor demanded. He hated this helpless feeling that was taking over. He was a doer, not someone who just sat back to wait. Waiting had never been very popular with him. “Why would Gayle just forget me and not her brothers?”

  “I don’t have the answer to that,” Peter told him honestly.

  “Take a guess.” It was a barely suppressed plea.

  Peter blew out a breath. “There might be some sort of underlying reason. The mind is still largely a huge mystery to us. It represses certain memories, sometimes so much so that the person forgets they ever had them. Gayle hitting her head triggered a response, allowing her mind to spring into action.”

  “And erase me.” The words tasted bitter in Taylor’s mouth.

  Peter frowned slightly. “I wouldn’t have put it exactly that way, but yes, erase you.”

  Taylor still needed a reason, something to rectify, to make right. “But why?” He looked at Jake and Sam. Along with concern, there was pity in their eyes. He hated being on the receiving end of pity. His frustration continued to mount. “There’s nothing wrong between us.”

  “No explosive events in the past few months?” Peter addressed the question not only to Taylor, but to Gayle’s brothers, as well.

  “Gayle is always explosive. She’s a hotbed of emotion,” Sam told him. “She always has been.”

  “But there hasn’t been anything out of the ordinary,” Taylor insisted.

  It wasn’t strictly true. There’d been one argument, a minor one really, especially when you took into consideration that it had been with Gayle. She was usually far more vocal than she had been over this last thing. They’d had a difference of opinion over her getting pregnant. He wanted to wait, and she seemed intent on it happening soon. The reasons for his side were purely logical and perhaps a little chauvi
nistic.

  He wanted to save a little more money before they started a family. Through her endorsements as well as her job, they were far from hurting financially, but he thought of it as “her” money. A baby should be raised with money that he provided. He’d said as much and she’d backed away from her position quickly enough. But she hadn’t seemed happy about it.

  The matter hadn’t come up again, so he just thought it was one of those things Gayle occasionally raised, getting on the opposing side of an argument just to goad him. It really hadn’t been much of a disagreement as far as some of their disagreements went. He figured she was just testing the waters to see how he felt. Quite honestly, he’d been rather surprised that the discussion had evaporated so quickly.

  Taylor tried to think of something else, something remotely major that might have upset her. He came up empty. That couldn’t be it.

  Shrugging, he said, “She wanted us to go and visit my parents, but I told her I was too busy and she got a little bent out of shape over that. But you’re not going to tell me that my wife just suddenly decided to wipe me out of her memory banks because I wouldn’t take her for a visit to see her in-laws.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “They’re not the kind of people you’d put yourself out for.” They weren’t even the kind of people you’d bother crossing the street to meet, he added silently, then shook his head. “This can’t be about that.”

  “Whatever it is about, for some reason her mind decided to shut down when it came to things about you. I’m not even sure if anything traumatic is really directly at the heart of this.”

  He felt they were going around in circles. And he was getting dizzy, as well as despondent, because he was beginning to believe Peter. “But you are sure that Gayle doesn’t remember me. That this isn’t some elaborate trick.”

  The doctor’s expression told him as much.

  Taylor’s heart sank even lower.

  “There’s actually a precedent for this,” Peter told him. “There was case several years ago where a woman was involved in an accident. She hit her head and when she came to, she couldn’t remember her husband. But she could remember everything else.”

  Taylor was almost afraid to ask. “Did she ever get over it?”

  “Yes.” The doctor smiled.

  Hope began to rebuild inside of him. “Then it’ll be okay.”

  “Every case is different.”

  Taylor snorted. “You don’t exactly dip into the well of optimism, do you?”

  Peter laid his hand on Taylor’s shoulder. “Most likely she will come around.”

  Most likely. He wanted guarantees, not nebulous words he couldn’t bank on. “What do I do until then?”

  Peter gave him an encouraging smile before he left to see his patient. “Be nice to her.”

  Chapter Three

  “‘Be nice to her?’” Sam repeated in disbelief, looking at Taylor once Dr. Sullivan had left. “That’s his professional advice to you? ‘Be nice to her’?” Stunned almost beyond words, Sam could only shake his head. “Damn it, Taylor, where did you find this guy? In an ad on the back of a comic book?”

  “No,” Taylor replied slowly. “Actually, he’s pretty high up in his field. The guy works miracles.”

  Even as he spoke, he felt as if the words were bouncing around in an echo chamber in his head. As if nothing around him was real.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  He and Gayle had had a rocky eighteen months, but they were learning to work things out, to travel on the same road because they loved each other. No matter how heated things got between them, there was always that to fall back on, the love they felt for each other.

  And now he was supposed to accept the fact that he was standing out there, alone? That he loved her but she didn’t love him because she didn’t even know him from any other stranger on the street? How the hell was he supposed to come to terms with that? What did that do to their marriage? To their relationship?

  Damn it, he had no frame of reference for this. No idea how to cope.

  “Sure doesn’t look as if he worked any miracles on Gayle,” Sam countered in disgust.

  “I think it makes sense,” Jake said in his even, quiet voice.

  Taylor had to concentrate to keep the fog from closing in around his brain. He looked at Jake and realized he hadn’t been listening. That he’d been mentally trying to catch up all the marbles in his hand at once, but they kept insisting on slipping through his fingers and rolling away.

  “What does?”

  Jake nodded in the general direction that the surgeon had taken. “What the doc said about being nice to Gayle. All you can do is be patient.” He put his hand up, forestalling the words he knew had to be coming. “I know it’ll be hard, but this condition has got to be a temporary thing.”

  Taylor wished he had Jake’s ability to see the bright side of things. But he was a realist who knew that sometimes, the worst could and did happen. “And if it’s not?”

  Jake’s small mouth curved ever so slightly, his expression more philosophical than amused. He put his arm around Taylor’s shoulders. “Now you see, there’s your problem, Taylor. You can’t think of this negatively. You’ve got to believe. Believe that it’s going to be all right. Before you know it, Gayle’s going to be back to normal.” Although the smile remained, there was an enormous depth of feeling behind every word.

  “Yeah, and then before you know it, you’ll find yourself missing her not knowing you,” Sam speculated.

  “Yeah,” Taylor bit off.

  How many times over the course of the last eighteen months, at the height of one of their “disagreements,” had he wished he’d never met her? The woman seemed to go out of her way to drive him insane. And yet…

  And yet he knew that life before Gayle had been nothing more than an existence, marked by pockets of work he was really proud of and interludes with women that left him feeling empty and somehow lacking. Until Gayle, he hadn’t realized exactly what it was that had been lacking. After Gayle came into his life, rolling in like a tempestuous storm, he knew that what had been lacking was color, vibrancy and a zest that had him greeting each day with the enthusiasm of an adventurer poised to take the first step into the greatest adventure of his life.

  That was what living with Gayle was like, a constant adventure. Sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always, always stimulating.

  There was no way he was going to give that up. No way he was going to give her up.

  Okay, he thought. This was going to be just another adventure in a long series of adventures. A little strange, but then, life with Gayle had never exactly been what one would call normal.

  As long as he kept his eye fixed on the light at the end of the tunnel—as long as he kept telling himself the light was there even when he couldn’t see it—he could get through this.

  “The doctor said Gayle could go home,” Taylor said aloud, more to himself than to Sam and Jake.

  Jake nodded, as if to say that this was a good next step. “Then let’s go get our girl,” he said.

  Taylor returned the nod, grateful for his brother-in-law’s support. He knew that he could count on both Jake and Sam. Not just because Gayle was their sister, but because he was part of the family. There were times when he caught himself thinking how odd that felt. Eighteen months and he was still adjusting to the idea that he had more than himself to lean on. That he wasn’t alone anymore. It was a fringe benefit for getting involved with Gayle.

  Flanked by Jake and Sam, Taylor entered the curtained area, ready to pick up the fight where they had left off. Gayle had called him a liar just before the nurse had drawn the curtain around the gurney so that she could change into a hospital gown.

  Words melted from his tongue and his head the moment he looked at the woman who no longer remembered that she was his wife. He couldn’t recall ever seeing Gayle looking so small, so vulnerable as she did lying in that bed—and yet so defensive at the same time.

  She was
probably scared. But then, who wouldn’t be, in her position? Part of her memory had been whisked away like a so-called alien abduction. That would have rattled anyone. And although she was outgoing, Gayle had never been what he would have called the blindly trusting type.

  Which was why she’d been so suspicious of him. Why she was still suspicious of him, if that look in her eyes was any indication of the state of her mind.

  This was going to take a hell of a lot of patience, he warned himself. More than he’d ever had to dig up before. Taylor really hoped he was up to it.

  You have to be up to it, he upbraided himself. The prize was far too precious. And he had no intention of losing it.

  “The doctor said you could go home now,” Taylor told her.

  Gayle deliberately looked toward her brothers. The less encouragement she gave this poor joke of theirs, the better. Not that she wouldn’t have been interested in spending some time with this guy her brothers had dug up. The man had definite potential, especially around the mouth and eyes.

  His dark-blue eyes looked as if they’d been the inspiration that had led someone to coin the phrase about eyes being the windows of the soul. His looked as if they were almost bottomless. And his mouth—there was something incredibly sensual about his mouth even though, so far, she’d only seen it looking unhappy.

  Or maybe her reaction to him was because his mouth was pulled back into a frown.

  This wasn’t the time. She was letting her mind wander, taking her thoughts on a wild and very obviously purposeless chase.

  She had to keep her mind on her goal. Getting out of here.

  “Good,” she declared.

  Gayle began to look around the small enclosure for her clothes. And then another thought struck her. With a sense of foreboding, she had the uneasy feeling that she wasn’t going to like the answer to her question.