A Forever Christmas

by Marie Ferrarella

  Trust me.

  That was what the tall, dark-haired cowboy had just said. Why did that make her uneasy? Did she know him, after all? Was he not trustworthy?

  Or was this uneasy feeling generated by someone else? Someone who she couldn’t summon up in her defunct memory?

  She stopped just as he brought her back to the passenger’s side of his truck.

  Gabe noted the tension in her shoulders. “Something wrong?”

  “Other than everything being a perfect blank?” she asked him. It was hard to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

  “Other than that,” he allowed with a slight nod of his head.

  Okay, he asked for it, she thought. “You said ‘trust me.’”

  He was still waiting. “Yes?” Did the phrase have any special significance to her?

  “Can I?” she asked bluntly, adding, “Should I?”

  “Yes and yes,” Gabe answered easily. “Ask anyone, they’ll tell you the same thing. You can trust me.”

  The testimony of strangers didn’t mean anything to her. “But I don’t know anyone,” she said quietly as she got in.

  “True,” he allowed, getting in on his side. “But you’re going to find that, in this world, you’ve got to let yourself trust someone. Otherwise, life gets too hard. Too lonely.”

  It already was too lonely, she thought.

  Suddenly a shiver danced over her, coming from regions unknown. As she tried not to let it shimmy down her spine, she heard herself asking, “But what if it’s the wrong someone? What if I trust the wrong person?”

  What if I have already?

  Gabe paused, his hand on the ignition key, and looked at her, trying to discern what was behind her question.

  “Did you?” he asked. “Did you trust the wrong person?” Were things beginning to fall together—albeit haphazardly—for her? Or was she just tossing out questions, trying to see if anything stuck?

  She pressed her lips together as tears of frustration suddenly gathered in her eyes.

  Was that only frustration, or was there more to it than that? She didn’t know and she was already so sick of that phrase floating through her head.

  She didn’t know.

  Would she ever know? Would she ever know anything about anything?

  The uncertainty was driving her crazy.

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged her shoulders helplessly again. “But something feels that way,” she found herself admitting.

  Gabe merely nodded. This time, he turned on the engine. It rumbled to life.

  “It’ll come to you,” he promised. “All of it. When you least expect it.”

  She slanted a glance at him. Was he talking down to her? Or was there experience on which to base his answer?

  “How do you know?” she finally challenged, not wanting to come across like a simpleton, secretly hoping to be convinced.

  “I just do,” Gabe said easily. He smiled at her. “It’s called faith.”

  Did she have that? Did she have any faith? she wondered. She hoped so. She needed something to hang on to, she thought in desperation. So, for now, maybe it would be faith.

  Faith in the man who was sitting beside her. A man who, though she really didn’t remember it, apparently had saved her life.

  “Okay,” she said quietly. “I’ll have faith.”

  Her answer surprised him, but he made a point of not showing her that.

  “Good.”

  He’d wanted to insert her name here, except that there was no name to use. She hadn’t had any sort of identification on her—no driver’s license, no social security card, no well-creased love letter addressed to her hidden in the pocket of her black dress.

  And if there had been any form of ID in the vehicle, most likely it was now burned to a crisp—as she almost was.

  “I need something to call you,” he told her. Even as he said it, he began going through possible names and rapidly discarding them for one reason or another. And then he had it. Just like that. “I know, how about Angel?”

  “Angel?” she repeated, testing it out on her ear. Like everything else, it didn’t seem familiar, but she liked the sound of it. “Why Angel?”

  “Because you look like one,” he answered simply. “At least, like one of the angels I used to picture when I was a kid,” he told her with an affable grin.

  “Angel,” she said again, and then nodded. It had a nice ring to it. “All right. I guess you can call me that.”

  “Just until you remember your real name,” he emphasized. Although he had a hunch it wasn’t going to be as good as “Angel.”

  She looked at him, wishing she could believe what he’d just said. Why was it so easy for him and so hard for her?

  “You really think I will?” she asked him.

  There wasn’t so much as a second’s hesitation on his part. He saw no point in trying to hedge or qualify his words. This woman didn’t need hesitation. She needed someone to believe for her until she could believe for herself.

  “Yes, I really think you will. Hey,” he spoke up with enthusiasm, “that’s nice.”

  She looked around, but saw nothing unusual and had no idea what he was referring to. “What is?” she finally asked.

  Easing to a stop at the light, he took the opportunity to look at her again. “You just smiled.”

  She wasn’t aware of doing that. “I did?”

  Even as she asked, she ran her fingertips along her lips to see if they were curving. And they were. She took solace in that and grew momentarily hopeful.

  “You did,” he confirmed. “You should do that more often,” Gabe encouraged. “It lights up your whole face. Like an angel’s,” he added with a wink.

  Something fluttered in her stomach when he did that. It mystified her even as she found herself enjoying it.

  She had no idea what to make of any of it.

  The diner was just beyond the next stop sign.

  “Well, we’re here,” he told her, coming to a stop in one of the diner’s designated parking spaces.

  “Where’s ‘here’?” she asked, cocking her head as she peered through the windshield.

  “Miss Joan’s diner,” he told her, unbuckling his seat belt and getting out.

  Rather than head straight for the diner’s door, Gabe rounded the hood of his vehicle and opened the door on Angel’s side. He offered her his arm and stood waiting to help her out.

  Though her memory continued to be a complete devastating blank, some distant instinct whispered that this wasn’t what she was accustomed to. That having someone open the door for her and help her out of a vehicle was a completely new experience for her.

  What a very strange thing to catch her attention, she thought, walking through the door of the diner as Gabe held it open for her.

  Unlike the bone-chilling temperature outside, the inside of the diner embraced her with warmth the moment Gabe closed the door behind him.

  Warmth and the scent of—

  Fried chicken?

  Angel stopped moving toward the counter for a moment, stunned by what was, she realized, her first fragment of a memory.

  Gabe was immediately at her side, looking to see what had caught her attention. Nothing out of the ordinary popped up. But, he realized, that was his ordinary. It might not be hers.

  “What’s wrong?” Gabe asked. The expression on her face was difficult to place.

  Angel turned toward him and said, “Fried chicken. I smell fried chicken.”

  There was mounting excitement in her voice, the way there might have been in the voice of the fifteenth century Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon the moment he realized that he’d stumbled across the long-missing Fountain of Youth in Florida.

  “That’s because that’s the special of the day,” Miss Joan informed her, calling out the information from her place behind the counter.

  In the past few months, Miss Joan had finally broken down and married the man who’d been courting her for longer than anyone could rememb
er. But, wedding or no wedding, everyone still called her Miss Joan. And Joan Randall Monroe definitely would not have had it any other way.

  “C’mon over here, darlin’,” she called, beckoning Angel over to her. “Pull up a stool and rest yourself. I’ll bring you a plate of chicken that’ll make you swear you’ve died and gone to heaven.” She paused a second before heading to the kitchen. “White or dark?” Miss Joan asked.

  Angel looked at the still-attractive strawberry blonde blankly. “Excuse me?”

  “What’s your preference, darlin’?” Miss Joan rephrased her question. “Do you like white meat or dark meat better?”

  Angel blew out an edgy breath. Even that was a mystery to her. What kind of a woman didn’t know if she liked white meat or dark meat?

  “I don’t know,” she answered unhappily.

  As if not knowing was perfectly plausible, Miss Joan never missed a beat. “Then I’ll bring you both.” But before leaving, her almost-violet eyes shifted toward Gabe. “And you, handsome? What’ll you have?”

  “Dark,” he said with finality. “And if you don’t mind, make both to go.”

  Miss Joan looked from Gabe to the young woman beside him and then shook her head, as if mystified at the way any mind under fifty worked. “A little cold to be having a picnic, isn’t it?”

  “No, no picnic,” he told her. “We’re on our way to Pine Ridge.”

  Gabe thought nothing of sharing that sort of information with Miss Joan. Everyone did. Besides, the woman had a way of finding things out whether or not she was directly told. This just wound up saving time for both of them.

  “Nothing wrong, I hope,” Miss Joan said sympathetically. No one went to Pine Ridge unless it was to utilize the services of the hospital located in that town.

  This time Gabe decided to just leave a vague response to her query but it was Angel who spoke up. “I don’t know who I am.”

  To their surprise, Miss Joan took the response in stride. She merely nodded and chuckled. “A lot of that going around, darlin’,” she assured Angel. “Don’t let it worry you.”

  The woman probably meant something of the ordinary variety, Angel thought, like a person trying to “find” themselves. She wished that was her problem instead of the one she faced.

  “No, I don’t remember anything.”

  Miss Joan thought of the memories that crowded her brain, as well as a couple in particular that had, until her recent marriage, haunted her nights.

  An enigmatic smile played on her thin lips. “Sometimes, honey, it’s better that way.”

  That same strange chill slid down Angel’s back, as if in response—and agreement—to what the outgoing woman had just said.

  Now what did that mean? Angel couldn’t help wondering.

  Chapter Five

  “So, according to the CT scan, there’s no damage?” Gabe asked Dr. Thom Holliman, the tall, imposing radiologist.

  He and Angel had been at Pine Ridge Memorial Hospital for the better part of the day, during which time she’d been seen by a neurologist and had undergone several tests, the last of which had been a head CT scan.

  As a favor to Dan, who had gone to medical school with the radiologist, Dr. Holliman had put a rush on the CT scan and had then personally interpreted the findings—or as it turned out, lack thereof.

  Dr. Holliman shook his head, an action which caused his thick, dark brown hair to fall into his piercing dark blue eyes.

  “No swelling, no indication of any bruising, or bleeding,” the physician replied matter-of-factly. “Just that bump she sustained when she hit her head on the steering wheel, was it?”

  The last was a question, since Holliman had just skimmed over the details of the car accident. Gabe had been the one to fill in the description because Angel still had no recollection of what had happened just prior to her temporarily regaining consciousness in Gabe’s vehicle.

  “Steering wheel,” Gabe confirmed. The air bag hadn’t deployed on impact, leaving Angel even more vulnerable. Luckily she hadn’t sustained any more damages than she did. “So that’s it?” he pressed the radiologist, repeating, “No damage?”

  “You sound disappointed,” Dr. Holliman observed. “Most people see this as good news.”

  Gabe didn’t want the doctor to misunderstand. “It is, but—”

  Gabe got no further in his explanation. Angel spoke up, interrupting him.

  “If there’s no sign of any injury to my brain, why can’t I remember anything?” she asked. “Why can’t I at least remember my own name?”

  “You do remember some things,” Dr. Holliman pointed out.

  How could he say that? Her mind was as blank as a white sheet of paper.

  “Like what?” Angel asked.

  “Like all those things that you do automatically and take for granted.” The skeptical look on her face had him elaborating. “How to walk, how to talk, how to dress yourself—those are all skills that, had you had a brain injury, you might not recall how to do. As for your recollection of who you are—”

  She wanted the doctor to understand the full magnitude of the problem. It wasn’t just her name. “And where I came from. Who my parents are and the thousand and one other details that go into forming memories as well as filling up my life. I don’t remember any of that,” she stressed.

  Dr. Holliman inclined his head indulgently. “As to that, it could all very well be a matter of hysterical amnesia.”

  The assessment felt like a put-down to her. “I’m not hysterical,” she told him, doing her best to sound calm, although it was getting more and more difficult for her. There was a wall of panic just beyond her calm facade. “I’m just empty. Completely empty.”

  The description was both a statement and a plea, the latter addressing the fact that she desperately needed something to help her find a way to regain what she had lost.

  As Dr. Holliman stood regarding her thoughtfully, neither he nor Angel noticed that Gabe had taken a few steps back from them.

  The next moment, Gabe called out, “Hey, Angel, catch.” As he voiced the instruction, he tossed a small ball of aluminum foil toward her. The foil came from the take-out lunch he’d gotten at Miss Joan’s diner and brought with him on the trip to the hospital. He hadn’t realized until a couple of minutes ago that after balling it up he’d shoved it into his pocket.

  Reacting, Angel’s hand shot out to catch the small, shiny ball before it hit her or fell to the hospital floor. Still holding it in her hand, she looked at Gabe as if he’d lost his mind. Why was he throwing balled-up aluminum foil at her?

  “What are you doing?” she asked, clearly surprised by his action. She threw the aluminum ball back to him.

  He caught it easily. “Congratulations, you’re right-handed,” he told her, this time tossing the crushed aluminum ball into the wastebasket.

  “What?” Angel looked at him, confused.

  With a grin, he began to explain. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the doctor nodding in approval. The man obviously understood what he’d tried to do.

  “When I tossed that ball at you, you reached for it with your right hand. You did it automatically, without thinking. That means you’re right-handed.” Gabe could see what she was thinking, that there was a whole host of things she wanted to know about herself before finding out which hand she used to pick up her fork. Gabe lifted his shoulders in a good-natured shrug. “Gotta start somewhere, right?”

  Gabe was right and she was acting like a petulant child, Angel thought. God, she hoped she wasn’t one of those spoiled brats who expected to have everyone focusing their attention only on her, granting whatever wish she made.

  The next moment, even that thought had her heartening just a little. The simple fact that she was aware of people like that meant that things were coming back to her, just not nearly as fast and furious as she would have liked. Still, baby steps were still steps.

  “Right,” she acknowledged. “Gotta start somewhere,” she echoed.

/>   “Well, I have more than half a dozen X-rays, MRIs and CT scans waiting for my attention,” Holliman announced, signaling an end to the meeting. “I hope this reassures you two a little,” he added, then reached into his left breast pocket and took out a card. “If you find you need something further, or if you experience any complications, feel free to give me a call.”

  “Complications?” she echoed, looking down at the business card he had just handed her. The word sounded ominous to her. “What sort of complications?” she asked.

  “Complicated ones” was all Holliman had time to answer before hurrying back through the swinging doors that separated the people in the waiting room from the actual area where the tests were performed.

  Gabe could see that she was disappointed. He supposed he couldn’t blame her. She wanted a solution, a clear-cut reason why she had lost her memory. And then, she wanted to do whatever was necessary to fix that and get her memory back.

  Except it wasn’t that easy.

  Which in turn had to be very frustrating to her.

  “Focus on the positive side,” he advised as he opened the door that led out into the long corridor and held it for her. “There’s no brain damage, no abscess or lesion, nothing ruptured.”

  That all sounded well and good—except for the fact that she was still very much in the dark. “No rupture,” she repeated. “The screen just went blank.” There was a touch of sarcasm in her voice.

  That was one way of putting it, he supposed. “Right. But since there’s no problem with the wiring, the picture’ll come back on. You just have to give it time.”

  She nodded, knowing he was right. Still, that didn’t make waiting any less difficult. “It would be a lot easier to do if I knew how much time I have to give it.”

  “That’s simple,” he said cheerfully. When she looked at him quizzically, he added, “You have to give it until the picture comes back.”

  “Very funny,” she retorted in a tone that said the exact opposite.

  “Just trying to lighten things up a little,” he told her. And so far, I’m not doing all that well, he thought. “Did you know that doctors believe that laughter really is the best medicine?”