Page 22 of If She Only Knew (The Cahills 1)

“That’s the trouble, doctor,” she said, looking him straight in the eye. “I don’t know myself at all.”

True to her word, the nurse had bustled into Marla’s room, given her a quick sponge bath, and straightened the sheets. She’d just breezed out the door when Marla’s family arrived en masse. Smiles, hugs, kisses that seemed strained were rained upon her by strangers. All strangers. Marla forced a grin she didn’t feel and tried like crazy to remember these people, only to fail. Just as their voices had seemed foreign to her, their faces sparked no memory whatsoever.

“It’s so good to see you awake and have you back with us,” her mother-in-law said, dabbing at her eyes with the corner of a handkerchief. A petite woman with apricot-shaded hair and small even teeth, she wore high heels that matched her purse, a gray wool suit, pearl-colored silk blouse and a print scarf in tones of red and gold.

“Thanks.”

Eugenia cleared her throat. “That big old house has been empty without you.”

Marla’s heart melted.

Cissy, her daughter, planted an obligatory kiss on her cheek and backed away. She was tall for her age, slender, and dressed from head to toe in black. Her skin was somewhat tanned, sprinkled with a few pimples that her makeup didn’t quite hide and her eyes were rimmed in thick, black mascara. “Hi,” she offered up tentatively.

“Hi backatcha.” It was all Marla could do to wrap her lips around the words. This girl was her daughter? Why didn’t she feel something, have any inkling of a memory of . . . anything? Where was the motherly tug on her heartstrings—the lightning quick flashes of images of giving birth, or of diapering Cissy as an infant, or recollections of skinned knees, the loss of a baby tooth, or the heartache of watching her daughter suffer from her first adolescent crush? Surely all those events had happened, but Marla had no memory of her life at all. It was almost as if she was dead inside. And it was scary. Scary as hell.

“I knew you’d wake up!” Alex’s voice boomed across the room. She turned her head, bracing herself for another blank slate, but as she laid eyes upon her husband, she had a faint sense that she’d seen him before—an elusive image that nudged at her brain then scampered back to the dark netherworld that was her memory. “Oh, honey, it’s so good to see you again.” Dressed in a navy blue suit and an overcoat that was unbuttoned, the belt ends stuffed in his pockets, he was tall and strapping, with gray eyes and a smile as wide as his jaw. He reached over the bed rail and hugged her fiercely. “I . . . we’ve . . . we’ve missed you.” His voice was deep and he smelled of smoke and some kind of musky aftershave. Holding her firmly he planted a soft, fervent kiss upon her cheek.

She felt absolutely nothing for him.

Nothing.

Oh, God, she couldn’t be this hollow. This unfeeling. Tears burned in her eyes and blurred her vision. Reaching up, she held him close, wanting desperately to feel some twinge of tenderness, some sense of belonging, of loving him, but she could only hope that, soon, she would remember. It takes time, she told herself, but was frustrated at the thought. She wasn’t given to patience, Marla realized, and along with a smidgen of gladness for divining something of her personality, decided that it might not be such a good trait.

The phone rang sharply and every one of Alex’s muscles tightened. “I told the hospital that you weren’t to get any calls,” he said, extricating himself from her and reaching for the receiver. As Cissy sat braced against the air-conditioning unit under the window and Eugenia plucked some dead blossoms from a Christmas cactus, he picked up the receiver.

“Hello . . . Hello? Is anyone there . . . shit!” He slammed the receiver down.

“Was no one there?” Eugenia asked and Marla felt a shiver of dread.

“Wrong number,” Cissy said with a bored expression.

“Not when the calls go through a switchboard.” Alex rubbed his jaw and his eyes darkened thoughtfully as Eugenia stopped plucking the brittle pink blooms. “I’ll check on that. Have there been any other calls?”

“No . . . well, not that I remember, but then I don’t remember too much.” She offered what she hoped would pass for a smile.

He sighed. “We heard. We talked to Phil . . . your doctor . . . Robertson before we came up to see you. He warned us that you might be amnesic for a while. The good news is that it should be temporary.”

“Should be,” she repeated on a note of sarcasm. “Let’s hope.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He leaned over and kissed her forehead. “You just concentrate on getting better. Phil thinks you’ll be able to come home in a couple of days.”

She thought she’d go out of her mind if she spent another day lying around doing nothing. “No. I want to go home now.”

“Of course you do. But it’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“I think he wants to run a couple of routine tests. Your vital signs, that sort of thing. No big deal.”

“A big enough deal to keep me in here,” she snapped.

“You just woke up, honey,” he reminded her.

“But I want to go home,” she repeated. “Now.”

No one said a word. Alex glanced at Eugenia, who had moved from the Christmas cactus to a vase of flowers and was removing the dead roses and dropping them into a small wastebasket near the closet. Cissy suddenly found the parking lot interesting and stared out the window, avoiding eye contact with both her parents.

“Listen, dear,” Eugenia stepped closer to the bed. The woman who had been teary-eyed moments before was suddenly all steel and determination. “When you’re better, you’ll come home, of course you will, but right now you need to concentrate on getting well.” She touched Marla’s hand gently, but her eyes, behind her wire-rimmed glasses, silently commanded her not to say a word, as if there was some secret they all shared, a secret that didn’t dare be voiced, here, in the hospital, and Marla felt a new sense of dread.

---