Liz Johnson - Stolen Memories

“Do you remember how you got here?”

She thought about it for a long moment. Blinking her only mobile eye—why wouldn’t her other eye respond?—she tried to peek around the curtain in her mind, to reveal the corners she couldn’t quite make out. The sheet wouldn’t budge, and the harder she tried to move it, the more her head throbbed.

Finally she shook her head.

He scratched at the little point of his chin, his smile dimming for a brief moment, the lines at the corners of his eyes disappearing. “That’s all right. We’ll come back to it. You’ve been through a pretty big ordeal.”

Oh, really? What had she been through that left her straining to uncover her memories and answering a strange detective’s questions? He’d said that it was nice to meet her, but he’d come into her room like he belonged there. Clearly he’d been waiting for her to wake up, and Tammy had gone straight to him. But she wasn’t expected to know him. Why did he seem to know her?

She wanted to ask, but the words just weren’t there.

Zach brushed a wayward strand of dark brown hair off his forehead with the back of his hand, plastering an easy grin in place. Really, it wasn’t so much a smile as it was a visual encouragement, like if he kept looking at her like that she’d be able to get up right then and walk out of this room. “Let’s try something a little easier. We’ve been calling you Julie Thomas because you were found in the park on Thomas Road across from Jack and Julie’s Grill.” So he didn’t know her, and she wasn’t supposed to recognize him. Relief washed over her like the bath she craved. “We didn’t find your ID.”

“It’s in my purse.” It was always in there.

He shook his head slowly. “We didn’t find a purse, either.”

She tried playing out all the movements she’d made before losing her bag. But she didn’t even know where to start. And every possible step was blank. No context. No location. No memories.

“Maybe you can tell me your real name?”

She nodded slowly, controlling every movement to keep the pain from flaring up again. Of course she could. There were just some things a woman never forgot.

He lifted his thick eyebrows as though his anticipation grew with every tick of the clock.

Closing her eye and swallowing against the sandpaper in her throat, she opened her mouth and tried to form the word.

But it wasn’t there.

The name she’d surely heard thousands of times floated just out of reach. Like the string on a balloon caught in the wind, it danced away until her lips sputtered and a tear leaked down her cheek.

Dear God, I don’t even know my own name.

TWO

Zach hated to see a woman cry. More than he despised all-night stakeouts and stale doughnuts, he hated when a woman cried.

He cleared his throat, offering a low whisper. “Your name. Can you tell me your name?”

“I don’t re-remember.” Her words, broken by a soft sob, barely made it to his ears.

He swung another glance across the room to see if the nurse had heard the same thing that he had, but she had yet to return with the doctor.

Turning back to Julie, he leaned a little closer. Maybe he’d misunderstood. “You don’t remember?”

She shook her head again, uneven brown locks falling just onto the white bandage taped to her forehead. “I’m not— I can’t—” She looked away before blinking one watery eye filled with more questions than he could answer. A trembling reached her bottom lip, and she sank her perfectly straight teeth into it. But that wasn’t enough to stop the returning tears from escaping closed lids. Moisture appeared even at the swollen seam of her left eye, still purple and red like an overripe strawberry.

Taking a deep breath, he did the only thing he could remember doing the handful of times Samantha had cried in his presence. With the tips of his fingers, he patted her forearm gingerly, avoiding the patch of road rash just below her elbow. She must have caught herself there because the scrape covered a good bit of real estate.

At his touch, Julie jerked her arm away, then squeaked as every muscle in her body tensed. The veins in her neck popped out, her lips pulling back to reveal clenched teeth.

“It’ll be all right.”

The words didn’t hold much weight. How could they? The only person who could help him solve her case couldn’t remember her own name. She was locked somewhere in her own mind, and he had yet to decipher a shred of evidence to help her fill in the missing pieces, to figure out who had left her beaten and on the brink of death.

The metal legs of the nearby chair scraped along the floor as he pulled it up to the bedside and slumped into it. Scrubbing a hand down his face, he rested his elbows on his knees, wrinkling the creases of his gray slacks.

“I can’t see you.”

He jumped up like her words had set the seat on fire and leaned over her bed, staring into her open eye. “Better?”

The muscles in her neck relaxed, and even the steady beat of her carotid artery seemed to settle from a frantic rhythm. She patted at her mattress until her fingers found his hand resting close by. She didn’t exactly hold his hand. But she seemed to need the touch to confirm his proximity.

He didn’t mind so much. Whatever he could do to help this girl. She sure needed it, and he felt somehow responsible for her. Of course, it wasn’t his fault that she’d been attacked. But since rescuing her, he’d kept an eye out for any word of a missing person matching her description. Nothing yet.

Never taking her wary eye off of him, she said, “We don’t know each other. I mean, we didn’t know each other. Before. Right?”

“That’s right.”

She coughed, the sound low and raspy like her throat was retaliating after not being used for so many days. Grabbing the pink plastic cup from the table, he pressed the straw to her lips, and she drank greedily.

When her gulps began to slow, he pulled the cup away and set it back on the rolling table. “Better?”

Only her eye moved to look in his direction. “No. I still can’t remember my name.” Her words were soft but filled to the brim with a pain he couldn’t even imagine. She didn’t sound bitter, just betrayed. Her mind refused to do what she needed it to—give her the information stored in it.

“It’ll be okay.” Another useless phrase. It promised something he couldn’t back up. But there wasn’t anything else to say, so he patted her hand.

“How did I end up here? What happened?”

He looked down at the spot where her fingers curled into his. She was clinging to anything that felt stable, and he didn’t blame her. The nurse had told him to take it easy on Julie. Telling her the whole truth wasn’t fair to her in this condition. It could send her reeling like a roller coaster. She didn’t know that she’d been some lunatic’s punching bag, that her face, covered with long, narrow bruises, suggested he’d used a pipe or other weapon. At least the doctor had confirmed that she hadn’t been sexually assaulted, and all her internal organs—except her brain—were in good shape. It was her mind he was worried about, so he picked his words carefully. “I was kind of hoping you could tell me.” He chuckled halfway, but she didn’t respond in kind. She wasn’t ready for that yet. “It looks like you got a pretty good knock on the head first. The doctor says you don’t have any defensive wounds, so you were probably knocked unconscious right away.”

She raised a hand to her cheek, covering one of her bruises, unspoken questions brimming in her eyes.

He nodded, confirming her injury. “But I’m not really sure what happened. We found you in Webster Park. Does that mean anything to you?”