Forgotten Husband

by Susan Bella Ikin

  I served the dessert course, and started being hopeful that I could make my escape shortly, but then Mitch Barrow turned his head to lock his gaze on me, and I knew that no matter how distracted he appeared to be by the people surrounding his table, wanting to speak to him, that he was always aware of where I was. I began to be desperate, even though I couldn’t reconcile the public person I could see with the man I was afraid he was in private, I didn’t know how I could avoid him without him making good on his threats. Snatching a few moments of privacy in the hallway next to the kitchens, I turned over in my mind exactly what he had threatened me with. He had said he would tell Maeve I was a conwoman, but I wasn’t. Or was I? What did I really know of my life before I woke up in that hospital? I had always believed I was a good person, but I knew there were some members of the police force who had their doubts. I had been questioned a few times about exactly what my husband and I did for a living, with it being explained to me that with so little being known about us, there would always be a suspicion that we were trying to hide something. For the first time since walking out of hospital, I wondered whether maybe there was some truth in that. Maybe Mitch Barrow did know me, but I couldn’t let him anywhere near Michelle, so with that thought I raced into the kitchen and rummaged in my bag, finding my phone and calling Hilary, speaking low so that my voice wouldn’t carry.

  “Hilary? Can you do me a big favour? Can you take Michelle back to your place and put her to bed for the night? I have to stay back, and since it’s Sunday, you don’t have to work tomorrow, do you?”

  “You have to stay back? Is that code for finally getting lucky? Is he tall, dark and handsome? Come on, you can tell me! For as long as you’ve lived next door to me, I’ve never seen one of your dates stay overnight, so if you’re finally getting to blow the cobwebs off, I’m happy for you”.

  I closed my eyes at how close Hilary was to the truth. I hadn’t let any of my dates stay over, nor had I stayed with one of them. I was still distrustful of men, and while I tried to date, things never got past a kiss goodnight. The few that had been patient enough to stick around past my initial rebuffs had eventually got tired of waiting for me to trust them, and had stopped calling after a while. I hadn’t actually had sex since Michelle was born, and how long before that, I couldn’t remember. Hilary was right, my lady parts were a bit dusty from lack of use, and the man that was going to make me late home tonight was tall, dark and handsome, but I certainly wasn’t going to sleep with him. But, it would be easier to let Hilary think that, than explain the truth, whatever the truth was. So I lied a little.

  “Yes, Hilary, he is tall, dark and handsome. But we’re only going out afterwards, I’m not planning on staying the night. I just didn’t want to have to hurry home, but is it going to be a problem for you afterwards? What are your plans tomorrow?”

  “It’s ok, Helen. Frank’s parents are coming over for lunch, and you know they don’t mind having two little kids to spoil. I’ll pack some clothes for tomorrow before I wake Michelle up. Don’t hurry home – you know Michelle will be fine with us, stay out all night if you want to, get some for me, while you’re at it, and give me all the details tomorrow!” Hilary began laughing her throaty, impossible to resist laugh.

  Despite myself, I began to smile as I answered Hilary before hanging up.

  “I won’t be getting anything for anybody, but thanks for your interest. I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow, even though there won’t be anything to tell!”

  I dropped my phone back in my bag and turned around, clutching my bag to my chest as I saw Mitch Barrow standing in the kitchen doorway, one hand holding the door open, and an unreadable expression on his face. He gestured to me.

  “Time to go”.

  “But, I have to help clear up, I’m not finished yet”, I tried to stall, looking around me.

  “No, you don’t. I cornered your boss before, and paid her a premium so that the other staff can cover for you. We’re going now before everyone realises I’m leaving, or I’ll never get away from here”.

  Before I knew what was happening, he had grabbed my elbow and was leading me out to the lobby. I thought of making a scene in the lobby, but decided against it. By the deferential nods he received, he was obviously known here as well. I doubted that any real harm would come to me, Maeve knew who I was with after all, and enough people had seen us together that I thought I must be safe. Even though I didn’t understand why, I also had a feeling that he wouldn’t physically hurt me, and that I would be safe going to his room, as insane a thought as that was. I would just have to be on my guard once we were there, to make sure that I wasn’t wrong.

  Once we boarded the elevator, Mitch Barrow took a key card from his wallet, and swiped the electronic switch before pushing the button for the penthouse suite. Of course, I thought to myself, where else? Then I wondered why I thought that. I was unprepared for the opulence when the doors opened. I had been expecting them to open to a hallway, but there was only a small lobby, which was paved with marble. A small table stood to one side, with fresh flowers in a large vase. A door was immediately in front of us, with a peephole in it, but there wasn’t a room number on the door. Mitch Barrow swiped his card again at a little card reader that I hadn’t noticed, and there was a click from the door. He opened the door and stood to one side, gesturing me in. I hesitated.

  “I’m not going to eat you, you know”, he said, with what I could only describe as a wolfish grin on his face as I glanced at him. As I made to walk past him, my face flamed as I heard him say quietly:

  “Not unless you want me to, anyway”.

  ~

  I paused as I surveyed the room in front of me. It was enormous, it had to be bigger than the entire house that Michelle and I lived in, and it was only a hotel room. There were clusters of chairs in conversation groupings scattered throughout, with one cluster directly in front of what looked like a fireplace. A baby grand piano stood to one side, in what looked like an entertaining area. Not far from it was a pool table and a bar area, with some stools in front of the bar, and plenty of bottles on shelves behind the bar. No tiny booze bottles here, came the thought, then I wondered where that thought had come from. I couldn’t remember ever having been in a hotel room before, but I must have been, at some point in my life, maybe that’s where the memory had come from. I was drawn to the wall of windows where I could see the city lights, and could make out by the breaks in lights where the harbour must be. Mitch Barrow moved to the bar and began pouring drinks, and I looked over my shoulder to the door, judging how far away it was. He must have seen the direction of my gaze, as when he approached with the drinks, there was a slight smirk on his face. He put a drink into my hand, and as I gazed at it, I wondered what it was. I took a tentative sip, then a longer sip as the delicious taste beckoned to me.

  “Well, at least that hasn’t changed”, he said as he stared at me over the rim of his own glass.

  “What is it?” I asked, savouring the flavour in my mouth. It was familiar, and yet not.

  “What else would it be? Kahlua and milk, your favourite, of course. Unless you would prefer something else?”

  I shook my head, wondering anew if this man really did know me. I didn’t have money for alcohol at home, and the few dates I had been on were usually dinner dates, and we drank wine. I never asked for anything else, not knowing what I liked or didn’t like, and not wanting to explain my peculiarities to someone new. But I did like this drink, and could easily believe that it had been my favourite in my past. That gave me pause for thought. If Mitch Barrow really knew me, then maybe he had been telling the truth. Maybe I was a crook. I staggered slightly as I remembered how he had introduced himself as my husband.

  “Are you alright?” he asked as he guided me into an armchair, “You were working quite hard tonight, maybe you should sit down?”

  I nodded silently, trying to gather my thoughts, as he settled into an armchair opposite mine. I needed to take control of this conversa
tion.

  “Look, Mitch Barrow, I think….”

  “Why would you call me that?”

  “Well, you didn’t seem to like Mr Barrow, and after what you said about me using your first name, I’m a bit uncomfortable calling you that”.

  The infuriating man threw back his head and laughed.

  “I’m not going to apologise about that. You’ve been throwing out some really weird signals to me since we met tonight, so I said that to get back at you a bit, which it seems I did. Call me Mitch, please, anything else sounds wrong. Now, what were you going to say?”

  My mind was blank just then, when he had laughed, it had felt so good, then so wrong, then my head had started to ache. I remembered what my counsellor had said. It could be uncomfortable when the memories started to come back, especially if I was forgetting my past for a reason. It seemed that I was, there might be things about myself I didn’t want to know, but I had to push on.

  “I was going to say that I don’t know why you’re doing this. I don’t know you. You claimed to be my husband, but that’s impossible. My husband is dead. He died in a car crash, and I’ve seen his death certificate, our marriage certificate and our passports. Our marriage certificate says I was a spinster when I married. Not a divorcee. So we can’t have been married. You might have mixed me up with someone else, and I’m sorry if that’s hard for you, but that’s how it is. Now that I’ve told you all that, I really think I should go”.

  I made to rise, but Mitch held up a hand in a ‘stop’ gesture as he rose. I shrunk back into my chair, but he walked off to the side, to a table I hadn’t noticed before, and picked up a laptop.

  “Bear with me, Helen, and I’ll show you why I don’t believe what you’re saying. Once you see this, then perhaps you’ll stop your charade, and we can get on with finding some truth, ok?”

  Mitch fired up the laptop and with a few clicks searched for something. He came to sit on the arm of the armchair I was sitting in as he passed me the laptop. I took it from him, looking up at him as I did, seeing a grim look on his face. He was angry again, and I didn’t know why.

  Blinking, I tried to make sense of what I was seeing. There was a photo on the laptop, a wedding photo. The groom was clearly Mitch, and I vaguely registered how handsome he looked in his suit. But it was the bride’s face that drew my attention. She looked like me, but not quite. Her nose and cheekbones were a little different, but her eyes, they looked like mine. As I stared at the photograph, I realized that it was actually part of a newspaper story, and I registered the headline in shock.

  “Billionaire’s wife missing, believed dead”.

  I would have dropped the laptop if Mitch hadn’t caught it, and he then placed it on the floor, watching me as he did. I raised my eyes to stare at him, unable to see him properly through the tears.

  “But I don’t understand. Is that a hoax? It can’t be me. When did it happen?”

  Mitch grabbed my chin, turning my face to look at me as he spoke.

  “The tears look genuine, I’ll give you that, but you fooled me once before, so why should I believe you?”

  I threw off his hand, and stood up, pushing him to the side as I did. Dashing the unshed tears from my eyes with the backs of my hands, I shouted at him.

  “Why should I believe you? That’s just an internet page, you could have made that up!”

  He rolled his eyes and drew in a breath.

  “Look, let’s just get this clear, Helen. You played me, and you did a great job of it. I thought my world had ended when you disappeared, and I got that ransom note. I would have given anything to get you back, and clearly you knew that, because you asked for a fair amount of my liquid cash. I didn’t think of it at the time, how a kidnapper could know how much cash I could lay my hands on quickly without alerting the authorities to the fact that something was going on, but obviously the information came from someone who knew. You. I made the drop, but you didn’t come back. For a long time, I thought that I had done something wrong, that maybe you were dead, but your body never turned up. Now I know why that was - you weren’t dead, but I didn’t know that then. Over time, it became harder and harder not to believe what everyone was telling me, that you had set the whole thing up. Somewhere deep inside, I resisted that belief, thinking that there must be some explanation for your absence. Until tonight, when it became crystal clear what it was. So what happened? Did you get played too? Did your accomplice run off with all my cash, or are you just waitressing for fun?”

  Through the increasingly hostile tone of his voice, I could tell that he was hurting and angry, but it still didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t have done all of those awful things. Or at least modern day me couldn’t have. Even though I couldn’t remember my past, surely I couldn’t have changed so much that I could have been such a bitch in my past? I saw the laptop still sitting on the floor, and I reached to grab it before he could stop me. I looked at the date on it. My face blanched. I quickly scanned the article, trying to work out when the kidnapping was supposed to have happened. My heart rose into my mouth as I made the calculations. According to this article, I had been the wife of Mitch Barrow when I was kidnapped two and a half years ago. Just as I fell to the floor in a dead faint, my brain plagued me with two questions. Who was Bruce Whittaker, the man who I thought was my husband? And how did I tell this angry man that he and I had a child?

  ~

  A cool damp cloth on my forehead revived me. I opened my eyes, realizing that I was in a different room. I was lying on a bed in a darkened room, and as I lifted the wet cloth from my head, I sensed that I wasn’t alone. Mitch was lying next to me, on his side, with his head propped on one hand, watching me.

  “Well, that wasn’t acting, that’s for sure. That’s probably the most genuine thing I’ve seen you do all night. What upset you the most? The fact that I found you, or the fact that I know you for what you are now?”

  I looked at him, at the blazing hatred I could see in his eyes, and I started crying. Not the dainty tears that heroines on television let slip as they sniffle prettily, but big, bawling gasps of pain. What made my pain worse, was that Mitch did not move to comfort me at all. I was still struggling with the fear that all I knew of myself was a lie, and that this man, who had hinted at his devastation at my disappearance, now seemed to feel nothing for me at all, nothing except hate. I tried to sit up, but he moved to hold me down.

  “Not yet. Not until you give me some answers. All you’ve done so far is faint and cry. I accept that the fainting was genuine, and the crying probably is too, but as far as I know you’re just crying because you got caught. You know I have to report this sooner or later, the police will want to close the file on you, but you’ll have to answer their questions anyway, so I want to hear it first. Tell me your side of the story Helen, tell me why I shouldn’t be happy to see you rot in jail for what you did”.

  I shook my head, gulping in big mouthfuls of air as I tried to stop crying. Finally I calmed enough to stop sobbing, and indicated that I wanted to sit up. Mitch eased his hold so that I could slide up the bed until my back was resting against the pillows. I started my story.

  “I can’t tell you anything about what happened when I got kidnapped, or whatever happened, whatever you believe, because I can’t remember. My earliest memory is waking up in a hospital bed, and the doctors and nurses wouldn’t tell me much at first, eventually they brought in a psychiatrist who asked me a lot of questions before telling me that they thought I had a form of amnesia brought on by trauma. I was in a car accident, the accident that killed my husband – or the man I thought was my husband – and I had some head injuries. They had to reset my upper face, and that’s why I look a little different, but it was only cosmetic damage. If the airbag hadn’t gone off I might have lost my sight, as it was I only broke my nose and cheekbones. The doctors thought my memory might come back when the brain swelling went down, but it didn’t. I was seeing a counsellor for a while, but I still can’t remember anyth
ing. The counsellor thought I didn’t want to remember, and maybe he was right, if what you are telling me is true. For what it’s worth, I can’t believe I could have done that to you, but I don’t know how to make you believe that”.

  Mitch had sat up during my story, and moved around so that he was sitting on the bed cross legged, facing me. As I spoke, he watched me very closely, watching my eyes and flicking his gaze from time to time to my hands as I gestured. I suppose he was trying to work out how much of what I was telling him was the truth, so I ventured a little more information.