style="font-size:15px;"> The best thing for me. No. The best thing for me would be to remember being Deborah.
“Did the headshrinker fill you in?” Greg asked. He gave me a quirky smile in response to my blank look. “Sorry. The psychiatrist.”
I repeated by rote what Dr. Royce had told me. “He said that you knew me from Sinclair. In the Catskill Mountains three hours north of here. You have a getaway cottage there. You’re a friend of Nicholas Steele’s. You’ve known him for five years. You’re tennis partners.”
I continued in a monotone. “Nicholas was married for two years and then two and a half months ago his wife, Deborah, disappeared. You saw my photo in the newspaper clipping and recognized me as Deborah Steele.” I might have been giving a canned speech at a conference. Nothing that I said had any foundation in reality for me. I felt like I was talking about someone else altogether. Deborah and Nicholas. They were both no more than phantom beings. I felt no connection to either of them.
Greg leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, palms capturing his square chin. He seemed unfazed by my mechanical presentation.
“You must have been mugged the first day you got to the city,” he said. “I checked out the area where they found you. At night, it’s a pretty desolate spot, but there are a few designers who have lofts in that neighborhood. You always had a thing for searching out new fashion designers. The best-dressed woman with the most original wardrobe in Sinclair. Not that Sinclair’s exactly a fashion mecca, but we do have our country-club set.” He winked, clearly expecting to garner a little laugh or a smile from me at the very least.
But my mouth was stuck in a tight line. To make matters worse, I became horribly self-conscious about the drab cotton print sundress that hung loosely on my narrow frame. My meager wardrobe, culled from the hospital’s thrift shop with a few hand-me-downs from a couple of nurses tossed in, was about as far from designer wear as one could get. I was certainly not the fashion plate of the New York General.
Greg leaned a little closer. I squirmed under his scrutiny, thinking he, too, was none too impressed with my attire, nor with my whole appearance. But how I looked and what I was wearing turned out not to be what was on his mind. “I know all this must be hard for you, but it’s hard for me, too, Deborah. You really don’t remember anything? Anything at all?”
Slowly, I shook my head. “This feels very unreal. I don’t even know whether to believe any of it. I keep thinking…you must have made a mistake.”
“No mistake,” he said confidently. And then he added, “Maybe this will help.” He withdrew a photo from a manila envelope and extended it toward me. As much as I wanted to look, I felt frozen to the spot. I couldn’t even reach out my hand to take the photo from him.
Eventually he laid it in my lap, facing me.
Still, it took several long moments for me to manage to lower my eyes to it.
It was an eight-by-ten glossy of a blond-haired woman in a bikini, smiling provocatively into the camera as she posed on the bow of a sailing sloop. What emerged most from the shot was the vibrancy of her coloring—the healthy, glowing golden sweep of hair, the tanned skin, the glamorous red lipstick, the vibrant blue eyes that sparkled with such youth and vitality.
Was this me? A me in happier times? Had my blue eyes ever shone like that? Had my blond hair ever looked so lustrous? Had I ever been so carefree? So curvy?
Incredible as it was, the similarities were undeniable. Not just that our eye color and hair shade matched, but it was there in the shape of the eyes. And in the mouth. Even our noses weren’t all that different. The jawlines…Well, they weren’t the same. Hers seemed to jut out more, giving her an air of defiance. It went with the seductive glint in her eyes. She seemed so sure of herself. And maybe a little full of herself, as well. That was the heart of the difference between us. I was certain that was what Dr. Royce saw, too, when he examined the photograph.
“You just need to put on a bit of weight, get out in the sun again, and—”
“Tell me about her,” I said, cutting him off.
He looked slightly startled. Then he smiled. “Well, she’s beautiful, vivacious, fun loving…”
But those were all qualities I could see myself in the photo. I wanted to know about the parts of her—of me?—that I couldn’t see.
My disappointment must have shown on my face, because he gave me a tender smile. “You always looked very sure of yourself, but you didn’t always feel that way. Not by half. We were good friends, Deborah. You…confided in me. You told me how important painting was for you. You talked about how lonely you were as a child.”
“My family…?”
A flicker in his hazel eyes told me it was a sad story. “Your father walked out on you when you were a small child. You always wished you could at least picture him in your mind, but you couldn’t. Your only memory of him was of a red plaid shirt he’d worn. You used to…tear up a little and say, ‘Can you imagine remembering nothing at all about your father but a dumb old shirt?”’
I hung on every word Greg spoke, struggling to make them mean something to me. I could feel for this sad child, but I couldn’t identify with her as being a part of myself.
“And my mother?”
He sighed. “She died when you were nine. You went to live with a maiden aunt in Omaha. I always used to tease you that no one really lived in Omaha.”
“And…and what would I say?”
“You’d say, ‘I didn’t live there, Greg. I existed there. Just barely, at that.”’
I sat very still, tears slipping down my cheeks. It sounded so much like the feeling I had here in the hospital. This was the first real connection I felt to Deborah.
“I honestly think that once you’re with Nick at Raven’s Cove, it will all come back to you,” he said in a soft murmur.
“Raven’s Cove?”
Greg grinned. “From Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven.’ An appropriate name for the abode of a renowned spook writer. Not that Nick takes any of that nonsense seriously. I think it was his cousin who named the place.”
“His cousin?”
“Second cousin once removed, or something like that. Lillian. She sort of looks after things. Very quietly and unobtrusively. You needn’t worry about old Lill.”
“I’m worried about everything,” I confessed readily. “I don’t think I’m really able to take it all in.”
He went to reach for my hand, but instinctively I jerked it away. Even though I remembered nothing about the assault, it had left me with an uneasiness about being touched. I started to apologize, knowing Greg meant only to comfort me, but he waved off my apology.
“Deborah, listen to me. You don’t belong here. You won’t get well here. And that’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Of course, he had to know I wanted that more than anything.
I asked shakily, “Have you…spoken with him already?” I couldn’t say his name yet. Nicholas?
