Читать книгу You Must Remember This - Marilyn Pappano - Страница 5

Friday, June 6

The emergency room was bustling, with every cubicle occupied, every chair in the waiting room taken. Some patients waited quietly. Others were vocal about their discomfort—and their displeasure.

The man walked past all the waiting patients to the broad hallway, where a harried clerk stopped him. “Can I help you?”

He looked blankly at her. Did he need help? He wasn’t in any pain except for the headache, and it would go away soon enough. The crack to his head had left him a little dazed, but that would go away, too.

“Sir? Are you hurt? Do you need to see a doctor?”

The bright lights in the hall made the ache in his head throb. When he closed his eyes to block the glare, he swayed unsteadily, and the woman took hold of his arm. “Sit down over here, and the doctor will see you as soon as possible. Did you hit your head?”

He sank into the chair against the wall and realized how good it felt to sit. It had been a long walk from the banged-up car on the highway to the well-lit hospital.

“Sir?”

Lifting one hand, he touched the knot raised when his head came in contact with some part of the car. “Yes, I…”

She crouched in front of him, pen poised over clipboard. “What’s your name?”

He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. Nothing. In a flash, the muscles in his stomach knotted and panic surged through him. It was a simple question, the simplest question in the whole world. What was his name? It was…

Still nothing.

“Sir, I need your name for our records.”

When he reached out, his hand trembled. When his fingers made contact with the clerk’s hand, they wrapped tightly around it. She tried to pull free, but he didn’t let go. Instead, he leaned closer, staring fearfully, desperately, into her face. “I don’t know… I don’t…”

Oh, God, he couldn’t remember.

* * *

“Should I list him as John Doe?”

He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling, only half listening to the medical staff around him. He had been examined, poked and prodded, X-rayed and interrogated and, finally, medicated. His clothes had been searched for identification, but none was found. His wallet—if he’d had one—was gone. His driver’s license was gone. His identity was gone.

On the up side, so was his headache.

“He doesn’t look like a John to me. Can we pick another name?”

“How about Chris?”

“No…he’s not the Chris Hemsworth type.” The answer was dry and mocking and made him wonder for the first time what he looked like. Did he have blond hair and blue eyes, like the actor? If he saw a photograph of himself, would he recognize it? If he walked over to the mirror above the sink, would he find himself facing a stranger?

He didn’t have the nerve yet to find out.

“Hey, I know what we can call him. Martin—”

The other female voice joined in. “Smith. Yes, of course. Perfect.”

“Who is Martin Smith?” That was the doctor, sounding disinterested as he made notes in the chart.

“He’s a character on the soap we watch. He’s tall, blond, blue-eyed—”

One of the women gave him a furtive glance that he caught from the corner of his eye, then lowered her voice. “A hunk.”

That was good, wasn’t it? It meant he didn’t look half as bad as he felt—and even without the headache, he felt pretty damn bad. He was scared.

Ever since he’d been brought back to the examination room, he’d been talked at, around and about. Finally, the doctor spoke to him. “You want to be Martin Smith?”

No. He wanted to be— He wanted to be whoever the hell he really was, not some soap opera pretty boy. He didn’t say that, though. Instead he simply nodded. He could be someone he wasn’t. He knew how to do that. Then, sooner or later, he would find out who he was.

Wouldn’t he?

“All right, Mr. Smith. You can get up now. We’re just about finished.”

He sat up on the examination table so that he was facing the mirror. Once he found the courage to look, he saw blue eyes and blond hair. The man in the mirror needed a shave. He confirmed it by rubbing his hand along his own jaw. He combed his fingers through his hair, then touched his face again. The mirror image did the same.

He was looking at himself.

He was looking at a stranger.

“If you’ll wait by the desk, Mr. Smith, I’ll have the admissions clerk call the police. Maybe they can help you find out who you really are.”

He nodded numbly, slid to the floor and followed the doctor to the desk. The chairs were still all full, so he wandered around the large room, pausing to look at bulletin boards and pictures, listening to the conversations around him to distract himself from his own problems.

“Yes, Doreen fell down the stairs when the lights went out. Doctor thinks she might have broken…”

“Melvin was in a wreck right downtown. The stoplights quit working, just like that, and some idiot who had a red light before just kept on…”

“The lights went off, and—poof—Randi just disappeared. From her own wedding! I declare…”

“Isn’t it awful about Olivia Stuart? To suffer a heart attack on the day of her son’s wedding! The poor woman.”

He stopped moving and pretended to study a poster advertising first aid classes at the local Methodist church. Olivia Stuart. Did the name mean anything to him? He couldn’t say. It felt…not familiar, but different from Doreen, Melvin and Randi.

“I heard Josie Reynolds went to her house looking for her when she didn’t show up at the wedding and found her unconscious on the kitchen floor. Bless her heart, maybe being the mayor has just been too much stress for her.”

Olivia Stuart was mayor of this town. That must be why her name stood out. That must be why he felt some vague response to her heart attack. It probably wasn’t anything—“Mr. Smith?”

If the police officer hadn’t spoken the name practically in his ear, he wouldn’t have responded. How quickly he’d forgotten the soap opera hunk. Forgetting could be a fatal error, one he rarely made.

“Will you come with us?”

As he left the waiting room with the two officers, he smiled the faintest of smiles. This time he’d forgotten the biggest, most important, most vital thing of all.

He’d forgotten himself.