Husbands and Other Strangers

“That’s enough, Gayle.” Jake was using his police-detective voice. It masked his growing uneasiness. Gayle wasn’t normally such a good actress.

“My sentiments exactly,” she retorted, getting to her feet. The pounding in her head increased twofold, ushering in a dizziness that threatened to make her pass out. She mentally clung to her surroundings as she sank onto one of the four seats on the deck. “Now quit fooling around, guys.” She put her hand to her head, as if that could somehow contain the headache that was consuming her. “I don’t feel right.”

Doggedly refusing to step back, Taylor took a closer look at the woman who had been the bane of his existence as well as the center of his universe for the last eighteen months.

What he saw worried him.

He wasn’t comfortable in this frame of mind. Marriage had never been in the cards for him as far as he was concerned. Never close to either of his parents, he hadn’t wanted a family of his own.

Independent, handy, Taylor had stubbornly made his own way ever since he’d graduated from high school. He returned to college only when he felt that it might give him a leg up in the field that he’d finally chosen for himself: restoring, recreating or just plain overhauling houses that had long since seen their zenith. He took sows’ ears and albatrosses, turning them into things of modern beauty and functionality.

Blessed with vision, Taylor considered himself both a craftsman and an artist with a keen eye for detail. He liked working with his hands as well as his mind. Liked partying hard, too, when the occasion called for it. And always, always moving on whenever the next project called. Moving on alone.

Until he’d met Gayle Elliott.

It was, appropriately enough, at a party thrown by Rico Cimmaron, a professional football player. The party was at Rico’s house, a building Taylor had renovated for a sinfully exorbitant amount of money. Rico had said as much when he’d introduced him to the small, slender and incredibly sexy woman he was currently dating.

Looking back, Taylor thought everyone should have a moment where the rest of the world faded away as the focus zoomed in on one perfect individual. The way he found himself focusing on Rico’s date. Gayle Elliott. He quickly discovered that the golden blonde with the sea-green eyes had an attitude that both pushed him away and reeled him in. By the end of the party, he knew that Gayle was funny, outgoing, witty and as combative as hell when she thought she was right.

He also quickly saw that she was accustomed to being the center of attention, just like Rico. For all intents and purposes, they looked like a golden couple. He didn’t let that stand in his way.

Like Rico, she was a name in the world of sports. His knowledge of that world was cursory, but someone at the party obligingly filled him in about Gayle. She’d earned not one but nine gold medals over the course of the last three Summer Olympics, winning her first gold medal at the age of sixteen. After she’d announced her retirement at the close of the Olympic Games, Gayle turned her attention and all her incredible energy and exuberance to sports commentating.

Her enthusiasm for all sports made her a natural. So did her looks. She quickly found herself courted by a number of local news stations around the country. She chose to remain in Bedford because it was her hometown and took the offer from a Los Angeles affiliated station.

Ratings went up and her temporary stint turned into a permanent spot. John Alvarez, the man she’d subbed for, found himself moved to the morning broadcast.

It was to Gayle’s credit that Alvarez bore her no resentment. Taylor saw that men of all ages fell all over themselves in their attempt to be around Gayle and garner her favor. Which was precisely why he’d initially held back. That and because she was dating a former client.

He realized his reticence was what had attracted her to him in the first place. In his estimation, the pert, sassy and somewhat opinionated woman wanted to leave no man unconquered. He admitted to Sam, although not to her, that Gayle won him over fast enough. And it was difficult to keep his feelings to himself.

They’d had one hell of a courtship. He liked to think of it as two forces of nature coming together. There was no other explanation why a five-foot-three woman had suddenly taken such a dominant position in his life, when, from an early age on, he’d had his pick of any woman he wanted and had wanted none for the duration.

The way he’d wanted Gayle.

From the very beginning Gayle had turned his life upside down.

And had nearly brought it to a screeching stop just now, when he’d believed for several horrible moments that the waters through which she’d always negotiated her way like a mermaid had suddenly and finally claimed her.

His nerves were stretched to the very limit. Crouching beside her chair, Taylor took hold of his wife’s shoulders, pinning her against the teak back. Anger flashed across her face as she attempted to shrug him off. And failed.

She was weak, Taylor thought with concern. If she wasn’t, Gayle could have easily worked her way out of his grasp. She had an exorbitant amount of upper body strength.

“You don’t remember me,” he said, stunned by her statement.

What if it was true? a nagging voice whispered inside his head. What if, for some awful reason, she couldn’t remember him?

Gayle exhaled a ragged breath. What was going on here? And why did she feel as if someone had just shot holes through her every thought? She couldn’t remember how she got to this deck. Or even to Sam’s boat. She tried to think back to the last thing she could clearly remember. Everything felt murky in her head, as if it was submerged in a tank overgrown with algae.

Panic fueled impatience. She stared at the man crowding her. “No, I don’t remember you. Why would I lie?” she demanded.

“Because you’re good at it. Not lying,” Taylor amended, “just at being stubborn. At playing pranks. And being a pain in the butt,” he added, his own temper just about snapping. One minute he was afraid she was dead, now she was pretending not to recognize him. His emotions couldn’t handle this uneven roller-coaster ride. “This isn’t funny, Gayle.”

Anger was her only defense. Her face was deadly serious as she looked at this stranger who was intruding into her life with lead-soled combat boots.

“No,” Gayle agreed vehemently, “it’s not.” She looked to her brothers for help. Why were they humoring this character? Why weren’t they coming to her defense? Fun was fun, but this was beginning to be cruel.

“Gayle, you’ve had your fun—” Sam began, only to be waved back into silence by Taylor.

“I’ve known her to get pretty elaborate with her jokes, but even Gayle couldn’t fake that kind of pallor,” he pointed out.

She looked as white as a sheet, he thought with mounting anxiety. And there was something in her eyes that had him coming to the unwelcome realization that his wife wasn’t kidding around.

She didn’t remember him.

Moving closer, Jake looked at his brother-in-law. “You think she might have amnesia?”

Taylor rose to his feet. Before he could reply, Sam snorted in disgust. “Amnesia,” he repeated, scoffing at the notion. “You don’t just forget one person if you have amnesia. It’s not selective.”

Gayle tugged on the leg of Sam’s bathing suit. “Hey, guys, I’m right here. Don’t talk about me as if I were some inanimate object.”

Her tone was angry, but inside she was beginning to give way to fear. A large, overwhelming, all-encompassing fear because this was beginning to feel strange.

What made matters worse, tipping the scales in Sam and Jake’s favor, was that her brain really did feel as if there were holes running all through it.

She clenched her hands in her lap. No, not possible, she thought. Things like this didn’t happen. Not to her. Okay, so she couldn’t remember the events of this morning. Couldn’t remember how she came to be here, but those were just a few random events. And there were all those facts and figures crowding her brain. It was only natural to forget a few things along the way.

Besides, Sam was right. You didn’t just forget a whole person, at least not a significant one and husbands definitely came under the heading of significant people. How could she forget a husband and nothing else?

This had to be a prank. And once she got them to admit it, she was going to make them all pay for it. Sam and Jake and especially the man with the superserious expression.

“We need to take her to the E.R.,” the man was now saying to her brothers, talking again as if she had no more mind than the red cushion against the chair. But at least he was making sense. It was the first thing out of his mouth she agreed with. A doctor would take care of the cut on her forehead, give her something for this awful headache and tell these bozos to quit yanking her chain like this.

“Boat’s already turned around,” Sam assured him. The next moment he returned to the helm and the wheel he’d left on automatic pilot.

“Good,” Gayle declared in a voice she prayed didn’t sound as shaky as she felt. “The faster we get this squared away, the better.” With superhuman will, she forced herself up to her feet again, then mentally defied that woozy feeling to return. For the moment it seemed to remain at bay, hovering just outside the perimeters of her consciousness.

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 chauvinistic.

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.