The Memory of All That

by Gibson, Nancy Smith

  Mrs. Oberle was speaking. “That lamp there,” she said, pointing to a table lamp by the front door, “was on the floor.” She turned toward the dining room. “There were papers all over the floor, and this chair”—she advanced into the room and put her hand on the back of one of the chairs sitting at the table—“it was turned over. When the police came, they took pictures of everything then they told me I could straighten it up.”

  Memories hovered around the edges, trying to gain entrance to Marnie’s consciousness. She felt as if she had to get away from someone. Her eyes darted one way and another, looking for escape, until they lit on the framed photographs sitting on a table in the living room, and the dam finally broke.

  Rushing to the pictures, she snatched one up and held it to her chest as sobs rose in her throat and a piercing cry burst forth. Overcome, she almost fell to her knees, but the man with her put his arm around her and led her to the sofa. It took Marnie a minute to remember David’s name, the flood of memories was so strong.

  He sat beside her and pulled her against his chest, making comforting sounds as he held her close, placing his cheek on the top of her head.

  But she could not be comforted, and the billowing sobs continued until she didn’t have the strength to utter another sound.

  “Should I call the doctor?” the landlady asked.

  “No. I think not,” David said. “I think it’s her memory coming back. It’s upset her, but it had to happen at some point. The doctor back home who saw her said something traumatic had caused her amnesia, and it might be traumatic to regain her past. Giving her a sedative might knock her out and prevent her from remembering. I can get her one later if she needs it. I’d say something happened to her in this room. Who is the little boy in the picture she’s holding?”

  The sobbing had eased somewhat, and before Mrs. Oberle answered, she struggled to speak. “D . . . Da . . . David. I’m not . . . not who you think I am.”

  “Shh . . . sweetheart, it’s OK. I told you, we’ll work through whatever it is, whatever you did.”

  “N . . . no! No! David . . . I’m not your wife,” she stuttered amid the sobs.

  She pulled herself away from him, and loosening her grasp on the picture, she gazed at the little blond boy in the photograph.

  “I . . . I lost him. I lost my baby . . . and now I’ve lost Jonathan, too.”

  “What?” David couldn’t follow the train of thought.

  Still looking at the picture, she answered. “This was my son, Thomas. Tommy. And he’s dead!” Tears that had lessened started to roll down her face once again. “And Jonathan isn’t my son, so I’ll lose him, too.”

  “Then you aren’t . . . aren’t Marnie?” David asked.

  She shook her head, trying to still her shuddering voice.

  “No. I’m Martie.” She buried her face in his chest, unable to speak any more.

  David looked to Mrs. Oberle and raised his eyebrows.

  “My goodness, what a turn! I thought she looked just like Martie when I answered the door. And sure enough, she was.” She frowned at David. “Do you mean you didn’t know it wasn’t your wife? That seems strange to me. Wouldn’t you recognize your own wife, or rather, know when it wasn’t her?”

  “I knew . . . I knew she was different somehow, but she looks just like Marnie except that she was pale and thin. Her actions and words—her personality—were different, but she had lost all her memories, and although I thought it was odd she acted dissimilar to how she had been, after a while I accepted it.

  “You see, my wife, Marnie, had run away with another man—the man in the picture I showed you. I was very angry and upset because, not only had she left me and our son, but also because she and the man, Ray, had stolen something very valuable from me, and I had to find it.”

  “Well, how in the world did Martie end up with you thinking she’s your wife?”

  “When she showed up, everyone assumed she was Marnie—the doctor, who has known her since she was a child, and everyone in the household. We told her that’s who she was, and she just accepted it. You don’t realize how identical they are!”

  “But how did she come to be there where you live?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know,” David said, “and I’d like to find out where Marnie and Ray are.”

  Martie lifted her head from David’s chest.

  “They were here,” she said. The tears were spent, and she could speak once again. The memories weren’t flooding back but were returning one by one. “They wanted me to pretend to be her, to throw you off trying to find them by giving false information.”

  “Had you been in touch with Marnie all along?”

  “No. She got in touch with me not long before they showed up here. She said she wanted to meet me and was coming to visit.”

  “You weren’t in contact with your identical twin sister?” Mrs. Oberle asked.

  “No. In fact, I only learned of her existence a few months ago and had no idea how to get in touch with her. I was surprised when she called me. Surprised and thrilled. I was excited over the prospect of meeting her.”

  “So she and Ray showed up here?” David asked.

  “Yes, and they said they wanted me to do something for them. They wanted me to pretend I was Marnie, but I said I wouldn’t do it. They tried very hard to persuade me, but I kept refusing. Finally, they lost patience with me, and the man, Ray, grabbed me, and they both held me down while he gave me an injection of some sort. I passed out. The next thing I remember I was standing at the top of a hill—the hill at the back of the park. I wandered down to the park, and you know the story from there.”

  Chapter 41

  An hour later they were back at the hotel. Martie felt both uncomfortable and relieved to be with David. She had argued that since she was not his wife she ought to stay at her own home even though the thought of being alone frightened her. Too much had happened there, and it made her nervous and upset. Still, she didn’t feel right staying with a married man, much less one married to her sister. But David insisted she remain with him. Her emotional state was too fragile, he argued, for her to be alone, and he didn’t want her to be at her apartment in case Marnie and Ray returned for any reason.

  “In reality,” he added, “I want to keep you near me because it feels right, like it’s where you belong, close to me. I have fought, these last weeks, not to fall in love with the woman I believed was Marnie, but evidently I haven’t fought hard enough. You are in my heart, and not because of, but in spite of thinking you were my wife.”

  It was comforting to have David close by, to listen when she wanted to talk and to hold her when she cried. He would help her get through anything that came along, but she felt guilty using her sister’s husband in that way. She needed him, though, really needed him to keep her from breaking down. She needed him to assure her that everything was going to be all right. Being alone was unthinkable.

  David immediately called Detective Mendez and told him they had located Ms. Kelley—she had been visiting relatives in Colorado and everything was OK. “That is the simplest way to handle it,” David explained to Martie. “If it turns out to be something the Phoenix police would get involved with, I’ll try to explain more at that time.”

  “Let’s start at the beginning. You can tell me anything you want to. Take your time, and try to not get upset. If it gets too hard, stop for a while.”

  Martie was lying on the king-sized bed, a wet washcloth covering her swollen eyes. The puffy duvet felt cool to her skin, and the air conditioner hummed softly in the background. She removed the cloth and sat up.

  “OK”—she folded the cloth—“but where to start?”

  “Any place you want to,” David answered.

  She wandered to the window and looked down upon the city.

 
“I guess I should start when I was little girl.” She sat in a nearby chair. “Although some of this I just learned recently.

  “My parents, I guess I should say our parents, divorced when we were little. Evidently it was a very acrimonious parting. Neither one of them wanted to see the other one ever again. But, if Marnie and I were kept together, there would be constant visitations and switching us back and forth, and they would have to deal with each other for years. So they split us up. I went with our father, and Marnie went with our mother.

  “By the way, you might be interested to know that Marnie is not your wife’s real name.”

  “Not her real name?” David said, amazed. He walked over and sat in the chair facing Martie.

  “No. My name is really Martha, and Marnie’s real name is Marnetta. We were named for a couple of aunts we had never met. Anyway, we ended up being called Martie and Marnie from babyhood on.

  “We were young when we were separated, but as I grew up, I vaguely remembered having a sister. My father refused to talk about her, though, and brushed the subject aside anytime I asked about her or my mother. Eventually, I came to the conclusion they had both died and it was too painful for my father to talk about. I was wrong, of course.”

  “When did you find out Marnie was still alive?”

  “Some time after my father’s death, when I received a letter from my father’s lawyer. Let me skip over that part for a while.”

  “OK.”

  “I had a perfectly normal childhood and adolescence. I grew up and fell in love and got married.” She stopped talking and put her hand to her mouth, holding in the sob that threatened.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” David said and started to stretch out his hand to her, but he pulled back.

  “No, it’s OK,” she said. She got up and walked to the bathroom to get another tissue. “I have to tell it.”

  When she returned, she continued the story. “Greg was my college sweetheart, but I didn’t really know him as well as I ought to have before getting married. We should never have married. He wasn’t ready to settle down and be a husband and father. The best thing about the marriage was our son, Thomas.” She paused again as tears silently rolled down her cheeks.

  David reached over and took her hand in his.

  “I have to know. Are you still married?”

  A great shuddering sob shook her, and it took a moment before she could answer.

  “No. He’s dead. He and my baby, my Tommy, are dead. And when they died, I wanted to die along with them.”

  “What happened? Can you tell me? Or is it too painful?”

  “It’ll be painful, but it feels good to be able to talk about it. All this time, I’ve had nobody to talk to. I didn’t want to tell such personal things to casual friends.”

  “You don’t have to tell me, either, if you don’t want to.”

  “David, I want to tell you. You’re the first person I’ve wanted to talk to since I came to after the wreck and realized I was still alive but my baby wasn’t.”

  Chapter 42

  “By the time Greg and I graduated from college, we had only been dating about six months or so, but we were in love and didn’t want to be separated when we went out into the ‘real world,’” Martie said, using her fingers to make air quotes. “So we went to Las Vegas and got married. I must admit I felt kind of alone in the world, and it was very comforting to have someone by my side as I went out there to find a job and an apartment.”

  “Where was your father? Wasn’t he around?” David asked.

  “Dad was there, sort of, and he cautioned me about jumping into marriage too soon. From things he said, I got the notion he and my mother had done so, although I still was under the impression she and my sister were dead. But the sad thing was, by that time my father was beginning to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease, which would later overcome him entirely. When I tried to talk with him, he couldn’t stay on the subject, couldn’t remember what we had talked about the day before. It took everything he had to get through each day. I offered to move in with him, to help him, but that suggestion angered him. So when Greg and I married, we got an apartment close by so I could check on him often.

  “It wasn’t long, though, before he had to enter a nursing home, and even though I visited often, he ended up not recognizing me at all.”

  “That must have been very sad for you,” David commented.

  “Yes, it was. At first I was happy I had Greg to depend on. We both had good jobs. I was a sales rep for a paper goods company, and Greg sold computer systems to big corporations. We were doing well financially, and when I got pregnant, we bought a house. ‘A big house for a big family’ is what we said. We were so happy to have a baby on the way.” She smiled at the thought, but soon her face was sad once again.

  “But all the good times changed when it became obvious something was wrong in our lives, something to do with finances. When Tommy was almost a year old, I hired someone to come in and care for him, and I went back to work. Greg and I both had well-paying jobs and ought to have been able to easily support our lifestyle. But, all of a sudden, bills weren’t getting paid, and collection agencies started calling.”

  “That must have been rough,” David sympathized.

  “Yes, it was. When I questioned Greg, he would say it was just a mistake, a foul-up in accounting, but when the foreclosure notice came on the house, I knew it wasn’t a mistake. By this time we were fighting all the time. I had already threatened to leave him, to take Tommy with me, and he said I’d never keep him from his son. But the worst was when the men came to the door looking for him.”

  “Men?” David straightened abruptly. “Who were they? What did they want?”

  “They wanted Greg. They wanted the money he had borrowed from their boss. And they wanted it right then.

  “It seems Greg had developed a gambling habit. Sometimes, when I thought he was on a sales trip, he was in Las Vegas gambling and losing. When he ran through all our savings, he borrowed money, and the men were there to collect on past due payments.”

  “My God,” David exclaimed, sitting back in his chair. “It sounds like something out of a movie.”

  “Well, I’ll never again enjoy that kind of movie. They were insistent, and I was frightened. I confronted Greg over it, and he admitted what was going on. We were about to lose everything we had. There was no one to go to, nowhere to turn.”

  Martie wished David would gather her in his arms, kiss her, and tell her not to worry, that he would take care of everything. But the reality of the situation was that he was not her husband—he was her brother-in-law. She had no right to be in his arms, no right to kiss him.

  “What happened next?” he asked grimly.

  “I consulted an attorney about a divorce. That wouldn’t have helped the existing debts, but if we were divorced, any new debts Greg accumulated wouldn’t be my problem. We were filing for bankruptcy. Greg insisted bankruptcy wouldn’t solve a thing with the men, ‘goons’ he called them, who were out to collect the debt he owed their boss.

  “We were fighting about custody of Tommy—I wanted custody with visitation for Greg—when he showed up at the house one day, picked up Tommy, and walked out with him.”

  “My God! What did you do?”

  “I rushed out after them. I couldn’t physically stop him, so I got into the car with them. I might not be able to stop him from taking Tommy, but, I reasoned, if I was with them, at least I’d know where Tommy was—be with him.”

  “What was Greg’s plan? What did he think he could gain by snatching Tommy?”

  “I don’t think he had a plan. He had been drinking and decided to take his son. That was it, plain and simple. He wanted his son, so he took him.

  “We were arguing. I was trying to convinc
e Greg to take us back to the house, and he was telling me he wouldn’t do it. He was driving faster and faster, and the more I begged him to slow down, the faster he went. He was weaving in and out of traffic, passing cars with little room to get back in line.

  “Tommy was in the back seat.” Her voice broke as she recalled that day. “He wasn’t even in a car seat. I kept telling him to put the seatbelt on and pull it tight, and he was scared and crying. ‘Make Daddy slow down,’ he begged me. ‘He’s scaring me.’”

  She took a deep, shaky breath. “That was the last thing my baby ever said.”

  David reached over and took her hand, holding it in both of his.

  “When I looked back at the road, he had pulled out to pass a car, and there, coming toward us, was a big rig with its brakes screeching, headed right toward us. Greg tried to pull back into the right lane, but he hit the car that was there. The last thing I remember was heading into that collision—lots of pain—rolling over and over—then blackness.”

  Chapter 43

  David got to his feet, and taking both of Martie’s hands, he drew her up out of her chair and into his arms. Her tears dampened his shirt as she wept silently. After a couple of minutes, Martie put distance between them. “Let me finish telling you,” she said. She squeezed his hands then released them and sat back down in her seat. David went back to his chair.