Her Miracle Man

by Karen Sandler

  But the computer completed the boot sequence flawlessly. An icon in the system tray told him the Internet connection was functional. Jack retreated to his own chair, wishing he had the materials to build a wall partitioning his office.

  He couldn’t keep his gaze from straying toward her. She operated the computer with ease, double-clicking the browser and rapidly typing search terms into his favorite search engine.

  “There’s another entry on the list of things you’re good at,” Jack said, watching her.

  “Computers. Cooking. Drawing. Science.” She ticked the items off on her fingers. “But what does it all mean? It’s not as if I could enter those into a search box and Mia would pop up, complete with my full identity.”

  “They’re obviously a significant part of you,” he pointed out.

  “You do them without thinking, without having to work at it.”

  “But it still gets me nowhere.” She stabbed the touchpad on the laptop, bringing up a new screen. “Maybe one of these Web sites will give me some answers.”

  Over her shoulder, he read the home-page title. “Psychogenic amnesia.” She leaned into the screen as she read, as if to better extract from the text the secrets her mind had hidden. Her hands lay on the keyboard, tension in the set of her fingers.

  He wanted to reach across, take her hand. Assure her she’d find herself again. Soothe that furrow between her eyes, the tightness in her shoulders.

  Here was the real danger in sharing this space with her. He was so raw, so torn open, he couldn’t keep his emotions straight. Just as he’d raced headlong into a relationship with the scheming Joanna, he was at risk of convincing himself that holding Mia in his arms would heal him.

  Turning away from her, he opened the several documents and spreadsheets that next needed his attention. He’d learned over the years to compartmentalize himself; he would have gone mad otherwise. Now he used that knack to close himself off, building a mental box around himself. He strengthened its walls and seams until he felt quite alone, until he could almost believe that Mia was no longer there.

  He couldn’t hold back the despair. But he told himself that didn’t matter.

  While Jack’s voice rumbled in her ear, Mia clicked through to one Web site after another that dealt with psychogenic and dissociative amnesia, searching for some kind of holy grail to shed light on her blocked memories. Some of the pieces targeted the layperson, others were geared toward professionals, the sophistication of the terminology varying with the audience. The more technical the language, the more comfortable she felt reading it—she could separate herself from the condition, pretend her research was for someone beside herself.

  “Dissociative amnesia.” She read the frightening diagnosis with as much dispassion as she could muster. “Inability to remember past experiences or personal information.” She fit that to a T.

  “Usually caused by a stressful or traumatic event.” But what? A car accident, Jack had suggested. But when she pictured in her mind driving, losing control of the vehicle, careening off the road, she didn’t feel any particular distress. Nothing like the black fear that visited her in her nightmares, had attacked her that day in the snow.

  She scanned the list of treatments. Psychotherapy, cognitive therapy, hypnosis. Art therapy. She glanced over at Jack, saw the headset still in place. He listened intently to whatever the caller was saying, then with mouse clicks interspersed, typed at his keyboard.

  As he turned to grab a file, he caught her looking at him. The manila folder he’d just laid his fingers on slithered to the floor, the papers scattering. She saw irritation in his face and something darker, meaner, in his eyes. Fear bubbled up inside her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly.

  “Dammit, I have to call you back,” he barked into the headset. He tore the device from his head and threw it toward his desk. It bounced off the monitor and to the floor.

  When he turned back toward her, the breath caught in her throat. His dark eyes now blazed with anger, turned blue-black in their rage. As she watched, his hair, sleek and straight, seemed to change shape, grow shorter, curlier, paler in color.

  She tried to shake off the hallucination, to see the real man beneath it. Told herself, This is Jack. He won’t hurt you. There’s no reason to be afraid. She forced herself to kneel on the floor to help gather up the mess. But she kept one eye on him, on the face that wasn’t Jack’s face.

  Then his hand brushed against her left arm, and pain lanced through her. She gasped, scrambling away from him.

  He sat back on his heels. “What’s wrong?”

  For a moment, the healing scratch on her left arm turned bloody again, the wound throbbing with pain. Then her vision cleared and the phantom blood vanished. Jack’s face resolved into its familiar features, his dark eyes concerned.

  She levered herself back up in her chair, edged it backward. Felt close to tears. “I thought you were going to hit me.”

  He stared at her as if she’d grown a second head. “Why in God’s name would I do that?”

  “I don’t know.” She tried to swallow past a tight throat.

  “You looked so angry. Your face…”

  He kept his gaze fixed on her as he finished gathering the papers. “I’m going to call Dawson back, tell him we’ll have to continue the meeting later. Then we’ll get some lunch.”

  She nodded, swiping away the tear that had escaped down her cheek. Too unsettled to continue her research, she shut the laptop, then left Jack’s office. She sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fire, shivering despite its cheerful glow.

  A few minutes later, Jack put out a hand to help her up. “Sit in the kitchen with me while I heat some soup.”

  She hesitated before laying her hand in his. Shaking off the renewed spurt of fear, she let him pull her to her feet. He let go immediately, and she followed him to the kitchen.

  While she seated herself at the breakfast bar, he opened two cans of soup. “What happened?”

  She dragged in a calming breath. “When the papers fell and you were so angry—”

  About to pour the soup into a saucepan, he looked over at her. “I wasn’t angry. Annoyed at my clumsiness maybe, but not mad.”

  “I saw something…different in your face.” Rubbing at her brow, she tried to remember. Realization struck her like a burst of light. “I was seeing someone else. Someone who was angry. Enraged,” she finished on a bare whisper.

  “Who?” Jack asked.

  Her stomach clenching at the memory, she forced herself to remember. “Blue eyes. Short, curly blond hair. Maybe…smaller than you.”

  “Any idea who he is?”

  Pursuing the memory, she felt like a magnet, her north pole facing the north pole of the mystery man. They repelled each other, an invisible force rejecting both bodies.

  Then a curtain dropped, obscuring the face. She huffed with impatience. “It’s gone.”

  He stirred the soup as it heated. “Have you learned anything on the Web this morning?”

  Too restless to sit, she busied herself slicing bread and arranging it on a plate. “With simple amnesia, physical damage leads to a loss of information. But assuming what I’m experiencing is dissociative amnesia, my memories still exist, but they’re deeply buried. By some theoretical traumatic event.”

  “Which you also can’t remember.”

  His tone was neutral, but frustration welled up in her anyway. “Of course I can’t! It’s part of the whole process. If I blocked anything, it would be the event itself.”

  He served up soup and they sat opposite each other at the breakfast bar. “And if you could remember that trauma…”

  She couldn’t suppress a shudder. “The rest of it would probably come back.”

  Even considering the possibility closed her throat, set off a tremor in her hand as she took a sip of the beef barley soup. Crawling down that tunnel of fire just to confront the monster at the end was unthinkable. She’d rather crawl into a hole s
omewhere, pretend her past never existed.

  But as much as she might wish it, she couldn’t just start her life over from this point. She couldn’t keep her past buried because she was too much of a coward to face it.

  Her appetite for the soup gone, she forced herself to eat several spoonfuls then picked up the slice of sourdough bread. Agitated, she twisted the crust off to give her hands something to do. “You said your wife was a psychologist?”

  Sopping up the last of his soup with his bread, he eyed her warily. “Yes.”

  “Is there anything…” Her throat bone dry, she took a sip of water. “Are there any methods she might have talked about that could work for me?”

  He stared at her, mouth open. She could see him consider an option, then just as quickly reject it. “No.”

  “What were you thinking just now?”

  “I’m not a psychotherapist, Mia. I’m the last person who should be mucking around in your head.” He went to the sink, back to her as he rinsed his bowl.

  She moved up beside him with her own dishes. “But if you know something that could help—”

  “It’s nothing.” He shook her uneaten lunch down the garbage disposal. “A relaxation technique. It crossed my mind it might work for you, to get past the fear. But I don’t know what I’m doing, Mia. I could make things worse.”

  She grabbed his arm, turning him around toward her. “What if I want to risk it? Shouldn’t that be my choice?”

  “Except if you got hurt, that would be on my head.” Under her hand, his arm flexed, the muscles as hard as stone. If she stroked him there, would that tension ease? If she put her arms around him, would he hold her as he had last night?

  She stepped out of reach. “Still, I’d like to try it.”

  He shut off the water, dried his hands. “It’s a damn bad idea.”

  “Please, Jack. I’m getting nowhere trying to remember on my own.”

  His gaze fixed on her for a long moment, then he nodded in reluctant assent. “After dinner.”

  She should have just said thank you and walked out of the room. Instead, gripped by impulse, she rose up on tiptoe and pressed her mouth to his. A quick kiss to express her gratitude transformed into light and heat in a flashover moment.

  He pulled her against him, one hand at the small of her back, the other at the nape of her neck. Excitement shot up her spine at the feel of him, hard against her belly, the curl of his hot breath against her face. She felt consumed by him, incinerated by the flame of their sudden passion.

  She would have done anything in that moment—let him strip her naked, take her on the cool tile of the kitchen floor. Anything that would blot out the doubt, the questions, the myriad unknowns.

  With a gasp she pulled back from him, jamming herself up against the counter. His chest heaved, his dark eyes looked dazed. He lifted one hand as if to reach for her again, then strode from the kitchen as if pursued by demons.

  She felt pretty crazed herself. Raising a trembling hand to her mouth, still feeling the pressure of Jack’s kiss, she retreated to her room. As she sank onto the bed, her hand fell on the art pad. Leaning against the pillows, she propped her legs up to act as an easel, and picked up the pencil.

  She shut her eyes, let herself drift. She tried to picture the face she’d seen overlaid on Jack’s, the angry eyes, the rage-twisted mouth. Instead of sketching only what was in front of her, maybe she could draw that face from that memory.

  At the edge of her awareness, she heard Jack slam shut the door to his office. Despite what had happened in the kitchen, knowing he was nearby gave her a sense of security. She opened her eyes, let her hand move. The pencil seemed to lay lines on the paper of its own accord.

  Head down, she kept her focus, ignoring the cramp in her hand, the stiffness in her neck. She didn’t know how long she drew, but by the time her hand finally stilled and she looked up, the shadows of the trees had lengthened across the snow outside. Late afternoon, which meant she’d been drawing nearly two hours.

  Setting down the pencil, she let her gaze fall on the sketch in her lap. Her heart fell when she saw what she had drawn in such careful detail. Not a window into her past, but a view of the present.

  Unsmiling, but his eyes soft and kind, a near perfect depiction of Jack Traynor stared up at her from the page.

  The last of the dinner dishes stowed in the dishwasher, Jack pressed the start button and dried his hands on a kitchen towel. Mia waited for him in the great room, her game smile as she’d left the kitchen not quite masking the apprehension in her eyes. The savory meal she’d prepared—beef stew and biscuits—sat like a rock in his stomach. His dread of making a mistake with Mia competed with the increasing pain of the impending anniversary.

  Stuffing the towel over the handle of the oven door, he strode into the great room. Seeing Mia there on the sofa, huddled and small, all his misgivings exploded. What the hell did he think he was doing? He wasn’t Elizabeth, with a doctoral degree in clinical psychology and thousands of hours of counseling experience. What he knew about Mia’s condition he could fit into a micrometer.

  “Ready to delve into my darkest thoughts?” Her voice trembled, her smile faltering.

  “This might not do a damn thing for you.” He switched off the room lights, leaving just the fire for illumination.

  “Probably won’t.”

  She let out a long gust of air. “Maybe.”

  Elizabeth had taught him the relaxation technique during grad school, when the stress of finishing his doctoral thesis had overwhelmed him. Everything had come at him too fast—starting at UC Berkeley at age sixteen, earning his BA in three years and launching into the doctoral program in civil engineering. By the time he started work on his thesis at twenty-three, he was on the brink of burnout. Then he met Elizabeth, two years older and much more grounded. She’d saved his life.

  If only he could have returned the favor five years ago.

  He focused back on Mia. “Lie down.”

  She’d stacked two pillows from the bedroom against the arm of the sofa and now she leaned against them. She shut her eyes, her fingers laced together, the tension in them clear.

  He sat at the end of the sofa. Her feet, in a pair of Elizabeth’s white ankle socks, were just shy of his legs. He remembered sitting like this with his wife, rubbing her feet, a prelude sometimes to lovemaking.

  Except this wasn’t Elizabeth and he damn well wasn’t going to think about sex. “Let go of your hands, let them fall to your sides,” he told Mia.

  Once her hands lay slack, he started on the script he remembered Elizabeth using. “Starting with your feet, relax the tension. Imagine the tightness as rosebuds. As they bloom, the petals relax, one layer after another. Each breath relaxes them even more.”

  That had been Elizabeth’s imagery; he felt awkward using her words. But he could see the tautness ease, Mia’s toes uncurl, feet dropping to either side in relaxation.

  “After your feet, move up to your ankles…” He could imagine his hand there at her ankle. “…calves…” Fingers stroking upward. “…knees…” Dipping into that indentation where her leg folded. “…thighs…” Palm cupping the tender skin just before the apex.

  His voice had grown raw, hoarse, as blood beat hard and hot low in his body. He yanked himself out of his fantasies, shutting his eyes to Mia lying there. He would have moved from the sofa to the recliner, but he would risk disturbing Mia from the calm the exercise had instilled in her.

  He had to do a little of his own creative imagery, picturing his body a million miles away, only his voice lingering here in the dim, fire-lit room. His words took on an hypnotic rhythm, and he realized his own tension had seeped away. At the same time, a chord of awareness, a bright white connection had formed between him and Mia.

  He’d felt this with Elizabeth. The scientist in him would reject it as a trick of the mind, an illusion. But he couldn’t deny the way it steadied him, filled him with peace. Each breath he would take during tho
se sessions with Elizabeth would move from her, through him and back through her again.

  As it did now with Mia. He didn’t have to open his eyes to see that her chest rose and fell in perfect timing with his own. Didn’t have to feel her pulse to know it beat in tandem with his.

  In this crystalline moment, they’d become one being. This was far more intimate than lovemaking and far more dangerous.

  He pushed himself to continue, moving to the next step in Elizabeth’s process. “In this moment you are protected. No matter what your mind remembers, you are perfectly safe.”

  What now? Where did he take her? Certainly not into the moment of the trauma, but how far back? Again he felt the weight of his ineptitude. He could so easily mess this up.

  “Inside your bubble of safety, go back to a month ago,” he said softly. “It’s an ordinary day. You wake up in bed. Turn to look beside you.” He forced out the next question. “Is there someone there with you?”

  Her breathing lost its steady rhythm. Her fingers flexed at her sides, her legs shifted. Tension seemed to crawl back up her body.

  He had to pull her out of wherever he’d put her, and quickly. “You’ve left your house, still safe, still protected. You’re at work now.”

  He waited until she relaxed again, the momentary distress draining away. “Where are you? What do you see?”

  She answered in a near whisper. “I’m at a desk. A well-lit room. Lots of other people.”

  “Do you recognize any of them? Are they coworkers?”

  “No. They’re people I work with but not…” She reached out, as if to grasp the truth. “It’s a classroom. They’re my students.”

  “You’re a teacher.”

  “There’s a periodic table of the elements on the wall. A model of DNA.” Her brilliant smile took his breath away. “I’m a science teacher.”

  “Can you see your name anywhere? Hear anyone calling it?”

  “Yes. Someone new just entered. He’s coming to the front of the room…”