Memory Lapse

by Kathleen O’Brien

  She held up a long steel trowel. “Poor Damian,” she said, turning it over in her hands. “He thought that just because I could sketch a little I might be able to sculpt, too. He would have liked it so much if I had had some talent—”

  Then suddenly, as if someone had switched off the sun, her world went black. One minute she was looking down at the trowel, the next she was filled with a suffocating sense of imminent danger. Her heart pounded so hard her head felt as if it might burst, and she was staring, wide-eyed and horrified, at the long, sharp, serrated blade of a knife.

  Oh, God... No. The steel flashed in the moonlight. “No,” she cried, but her throat was too tight, too frightened to permit passage of any sounds. She wanted to run, but her legs wouldn’t move. She wanted to faint, but her eyes wouldn’t close, fixed on that horrible, thrusting knife. There was nowhere to go for help, no one to tell, nothing that could save her....

  With an anguished cry, she dropped the trowel into the toolbox, and as she did so the terrifying memory receded. The glinting moonlight disappeared, and the green sunlight returned, blinding her. Her knees had turned to water, and she clutched at the shelf for support as she drew deep, hoarse breaths. Oh, God. Oh, God.

  Drew’s voice seemed to come from nowhere. “Laura, what’s wrong?” Suddenly he was beside her—how long he had been there she had no idea. He had one hand around her trembling shoulders, the other roughly cupping the side of her head, jostling her, trying to get her attention. His voice was sharp and strained. “Laura, talk to me. What is it?”

  She couldn’t tell him. She could hardly bear to remember what she had seen, much less talk about it. She had no idea what it meant, except that it had been a moment of electrifying, paralyzing fear, and she never, never wanted to feel that way again.

  She had to get out of here. Sobbing, she wrenched away from Drew, driven blindly toward the door by her fear. She couldn’t breathe in this wet, clinging air, and her heart was thudding violently in her ears, deafening her. She ran without thought, ignoring the wet slapping of long, slippery leaves against her face and shoulders. Oh, God, she had to get out.

  But the door wouldn’t open. Whimpering like a child caught in a bad dream, she tugged at the knob. And then she felt hard hands at her shoulders, gripping tightly, holding her.

  “Laura. Don’t. Don’t run away.”

  Drew. He had somehow gotten to the door ahead of her and was standing against it, blocking it.

  “Let me out,” she whispered through her tears. “Let me out.”

  “Don’t, Laura.” Though she struggled, shaking her head from side to side and digging her fists into his shoulders, he dragged her in closer, up against his chest. “You don’t want to run away.”

  “Yes, I do,” she cried. Why wouldn’t he let her go? “I do!”

  “No, you don’t.” His voice was low, slow and soothing. He had begun to stroke her back, though she was still writhing in his arms. “You can get past this, Laura. Whatever it is. Just try to relax.”

  “I can’t.” She choked on a half cry, half cough, and hot, salty tears fell into her mouth. “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.” Ignoring her sobbing, he stroked his hands slowly down either side of her spine, then back up. Then down again. “Breathe, Laura. Breathe deeply. You're going to be fine.”

  “I can’t,” she wept, but then, as if his rising, falling hands were showing her how, her lungs dragged in a deep, slow breath. She filled her lungs, but coughed, choking on the wet air.

  “It’s okay. Try again.” He stroked up, prompting her body, simulating the motion of her lungs. “Take it deep, Laura, let it in.” Mindlessly, she obeyed, opening her mouth and accepting the oxygen that pressed against her throat.

  “Relax, Laura. Let it go deeper. You can take more.”

  She did.

  “Good girl. Now hold it. Hold on to it, sweetheart.” He massaged her shoulders, stroked softly down her hair as she held the air in her lungs, letting it seep through her body until it reached her dizzied head. “That’s it, honey. Now let it go, just let it all go.”

  It was a miracle. Gradually her tears slowed and finally stopped. Then, in response to his patient, knowing hands, amazingly she felt her muscles relaxing, loosening their death grip on her heart. It was a sweet relief, and she clung to him, too grateful to put it into words, to weak to speak.

  She stood like that, her arms up around his neck, her body pressed against his, for a hundred breaths. Passively, she let Drew set the pace, determine the depth, the rhythm, the volume, as if she had forgotten how to breathe of her own volition. And always his hands were stroking, smoothing, easing the pain of muscles that had knotted themselves in tangles of fear.

  “See?” He spoke into her hair, his warm breath feathering against her scalp. “You don’t have to keep running, honey. You can beat this thing.”

  Finally, when her breathing was even and coming of its own accord, he twisted her gently in his arms. With firm, tender fingers he pulled her face away from its hiding place against his damp shirt and turned her so that she looked toward the conservatory.

  “Come on,” he murmured. “Let’s go back. Show yourself that you can do it.”

  No... She balked slightly, her legs unwilling to take her forward, but he exerted a tiny pressure at the base of her spine, and suddenly she was moving. Farther, deeper into the jungle of greenery from which she had just escaped. She could hardly believe she was going back, back to where the blackness had swamped her, drowned her.

  But the blackness wasn’t there anymore. When they reached the statuary in the center, Laura could tell, almost with a sixth sense, that the spot had somehow lost its malignant power over her. She looked around, blinking as if she had just awakened from a terrible dream.

  It wasn’t that she had forgotten her vision. She could still see the knife in her memory, its curved, vicious point, its wide, notched blade. She could even remember, now, that the knife had had a strange blue and green handle, ornate and oddly Oriental, rather like cloisonné. And she was certain, deadly certain, that she had once seen that knife pointing toward her own throat.

  Her heart beat faster as she remembered how frightened she had been at that long-ago moment, when the cold point had touched her skin. But, in spite of its fearsome ugliness, somehow it was a normal memory, one she controlled. Though it was unquestionably disturbing, it no longer threatened to steal her sanity, to drop her into the bottomless well of the past from which there was no escape.

  She looked at Drew, who was still holding her shoulder with tense fingers, as if he expected her to faint helplessly away at any moment.

  “I'm okay,” she said, wishing she could be more eloquent. Though he might not know it, what he had just done for her was incredibly important. He had, in some wonderful way, given her a sense of power over her life that she didn’t ever remember possessing before. “I'm sorry, Drew.”

  His eyes clouded. “For what?”

  “For getting into such a crazy panic.” She took another deep breath, just to be sure she still could. “Thank you for helping me get through it.”

  “You did it, Laura.” He slowly dropped his arm from her shoulder, as if demonstrating that she could stand on her own. “I didn’t do anything except block the door. You did the rest yourself.”

  “Thank you for blocking the door, then.” She smiled weakly. “Thank you for making me stay and face it.”

  “Laura.” In a raw voice he spoke just the one word. And then he looked away, as if he couldn’t bear for her to read his thoughts. But she could read them anyway, because the same thoughts were echoing hollowly through her mind.

  Thank you for making me stay and face it.

  It was, they knew, what she should have done three years ago.

  * * *

  AFTER THAT the day seemed to hang heavily over her, pressing on her spirits just as the gunmetal snow clouds pressed on the sky. She couldn’t quite settle down, her nerves humming with a strange sen
se of waiting. But waiting for what?

  Several boxes of old papers still needed to be sorted, but she couldn’t bring herself to go up and work on them, even though Drew had retired to his office, explaining stiffly that he had to make a few decisions before the markets closed.

  But, for Laura, just the thought of being cloistered in the airless, dusty chill of the attic made her feel claustrophobic. She needed to be outside, where she had room to breathe, where she could think about the implications of her memory without allowing them to overwhelm her.

  She took her sketchbook with her, but she couldn’t quite settle down. She walked for an hour, thinking, her boots squeaking rhythmically as she traversed the freshly fallen snow. If only she could stitch the memory of the knife to some larger backdrop—anything that would give it shape and meaning. A time, a place, a person, a motive. But she simply couldn’t do it. The memory remained brilliantly clear yet eerily out of context, like a jewel knocked loose from its setting.

  By the time she got to the dock, she had just about given up. Her head ached from the effort to remember, and her intuition was warning her that struggling would only make the rest of the memory even more elusive. She was too tense, trying too hard. If she could only relax, she thought, perhaps the rest of it would come to her naturally.

  She sat on the edge of the dock facing the house and took out her sketchbook and charcoal. She wasn’t much of an artist, but she enjoyed the feel of the charcoal smoothly stroking across the clean white pages. She liked the way such nonverbal expression cleared her thoughts and steadied her mood.

  She looked at the house, seeking a subject, which shouldn’t be difficult. Winterwalk had been designed by one of her mother’s ancestors, and family lore had it that the man had hired five hundred workers to build it in one year so that he could give it to his bride as a wedding present. Laura shivered, and wondered anew what emotions the blushing bride must have experienced at her first glimpse of her new home. Her husband the architect had probably carried her over the threshold in a dead faint.

  Laura’s gaze fell on one of the gargoyles, a beast she could only describe as a demon dog. He seemed to guard the entrance with wings outstretched, poised at the moment of attack, barely restrained by a heavy chain that looped around his neck. Almost without thought, Laura began tracing the outline of his flat, ugly head, sketching in the jagged horns that rose aggressively between his ears. She sketched quickly. There was something subtly satisfying about it, as if by recreating the monster she was somehow gaining power over him.

  She almost smiled at the thought, her fingers busily sweeping across the page. She was certainly big on finding her personal power today, wasn’t she?

  When the horns were finished, she moved to the beast’s mouth, which was open in a silent screech. She quickly drew in the pointed teeth that were bared by the grimace, and then she leaned back, double-checking. Yes, that was it.

  Flipping to the next page, she scanned the roofline, choosing her next subject. Ah, the terrible monkey. This gargoyle sat hunched over, hugging his knees to his chest, training his fiercely concentrated gaze on the world below him. Laura sketched his jutting brows, low over piercingly human eyes that stared salaciously at her. She was pleased with her efforts. Like the real gargoyle, her charcoal gargoyle seemed to be hugging himself in unholy anticipation of some sick pleasure to come.

  And then she drew a beast man whose mouth was opened greedily. This was Laura’s most dreaded gargoyle, a monster who was gnawing on a hapless, headless creature it held in its paws. She squinted, trying to distinguish details, using her memory to fill in what she couldn’t see. The body in the monster’s paws was rather like a bird, wasn’t it? She rounded the smooth breast, sketched the rough impression of a wing, trying to capture the essence of terror and defeat that Winterwalk’s artisans had conveyed so well.

  Finally finished, she leaned back with a small puff of satisfaction to assess her efforts. Yes, it definitely had been therapeutic. Even with these ugly faces glaring at her, she felt much better now, much cleaner and stronger.

  After a few minutes she heard the sound of footsteps crunching over the snow. Looking up, she saw Drew hiking across the white expanse from the house to the dock. He was carrying her blue coat, and suddenly, looking at the thick wool, she realized she was very, very cold. How like him to sense what she needed even before she did. She smiled and waved and then sat to wait, her back propped against the ornate railing of the dock.

  “Finished for the day?” Smiling her thanks, she accepted the coat he handed her and moved her sketchbook out of the way so he could sit down beside her. She hoped he could stay, hoped he didn’t have to go back up to the office for more wheeling and dealing with Ginger. But suddenly she realized she hadn’t seen Ginger at Winterwalk in a couple of days. She frowned lightly. “Isn’t Ginger working today?”

  “Ginger’s taking a couple of weeks off,” Drew said, his tone perfectly calm, giving Laura no hint of any deeper meaning.

  She couldn’t help probing, though she knew that exhibiting so much curiosity completely destroyed any hope of pretending indifference on the subject. “Vacation?” she asked.

  “Yeah, vacation,” Drew echoed. “And then relocation. Ginger’s decided to work in our Los Angeles office for a while.”

  She slanted a sideways glance at him, searching for signs of emotion on his face. His vagueness was frustrating. How long was a while? Could it be a euphemism for forever? Had Ginger been fired? Or had she been fool enough to reject Drew? Or had she just left the field for a couple of weeks, preferring not to share the house with Drew’s ex-fiancée?

  But she couldn’t think how to ask without seeming to pry, so she lowered her gaze and fiddled nervously with her sketchbook. The movement caught Drew’s attention, and he reached out to flip the pages over, looking carefully at every sketch.

  His eyes widened. He glanced from Laura to the gargoyles, then back again. “I'm impressed,” he said. “I thought you said you had no artistic talent.”

  Inexplicably embarrassed, she tore the three sheets from the notebook and began to wad them up in her hands. “I'm terrible,” she said. “I don’t know why I even—”

  But he whisked the pages away from her before she could destroy them. Smoothing them out, he studied each gargoyle in turn, his face expressionless. Self-conscious, she busied herself slipping her arms into the sleeves of her coat and tugging the front tightly around her. The coat was deliciously warm from being carried against his body, and she slid her fingers into the cozy pockets.

  “I told you I was terrible,” she said finally, when he didn’t speak. He seemed completely absorbed in the sketches, which she knew was unwarranted. But it did give her a chance to study him. He was sinfully attractive, she thought, in that jacket. It was suede, a mossy green that matched his eyes, and it had a fleecy collar and lining that were just about the same chestnut brown as his hair.

  Suddenly he slanted her a mischievous glance from under his thick brown lashes.

  “They're very good,” he said slowly, “but I'm not sure you're really quite finished. I think some of the details need fixing.”

  “I'm not?” She couldn’t believe she’d missed anything. She knew these monsters too well.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  He looked down at the snarling horned dog in much the same way he might have looked at one of his misbehaving nephews, shaking his head and tucking one corner of his mouth in reproachfully.

  “Listen, Bucko,” he said to the dog. “I honestly think you need to relax, kid. All this aggression can’t be good for your blood pressure.”

  And then he pried the charcoal out of her fist and, squatting down, smoothed the page across the hard, rounded muscles of his thigh. After a few minutes, he held up the sketch.

  “There,” he said, waving his hand toward the altered drawing. For a minute Laura was dumbstruck at the metamorphosis, and then slowly she began to laugh. Drew had added just a couple of sm
all details, but they turned the demon dog into a cartoon mutt. He now wore a baseball cap perched sideways on his head, giving him the half-baked look of a goofy teenager. And Drew had bent one horn and one wing, so that they looked slightly cockeyed, as if the dog were tipsy.

  “That’s better, don’t you think? It’s good for you,” he said pleasantly, addressing the dog. “You'll live longer.”

  Laura shook her head, still smiling. Drew had always had such an irreverent attitude toward these loathsome creatures. To her surprise, for the first time she found it contagious. “What about him?” She indicated the malevolent monkey.

  Drew grimaced. “I'm not sure we want him to live longer.”

  “Oh, surely he can be redeemed, too.”

  Drew studied the monkey. “Maybe,” he said thoughtfully, and then he crouched down and began to fiddle with the sketch. He didn’t take long, so Laura feared he couldn’t have accomplished much of a transformation, but when he showed her, she laughed out loud.

  He had made only two small changes, but they were enough to completely disarm the nasty creature. He had transformed the intense pupils in the monkey’s eyes by adding two dots in the inside corners, making the animal look hopelessly pie-eyed. And he had redrawn a few lines, tilting the whole gargoyle an inch or two onto its side, so that the poor beast seemed to be hugging its knees in a desperate, drunken attempt to maintain its balance.

  “My turn,” Laura said, eager now to play the game. She reclaimed the third sketch, the monster that was munching greedily on its victim. She studied it for a minute, then started in. Erasing the pitiful bird, she sketched her best approximation of a beer can. Then she added a slack and lolling tongue protruding from the monster’s mouth.

  Pleased with her efforts, she stood back with a flourish. “Voilà!” she said, backing toward Drew so that he could see all three sketches.

  To her delight, he laughed with an obviously sincere appreciation. He hooked his arm companionably around her shoulder, pulling her farther back so they could view their handiwork all at once. It was truly ridiculous—three reeling, cross-eyed, drunken monsters trying to look intimidating and failing miserably.