Husbands and Other Strangers

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Don’t play dumb, Gayle.”

  Something inside of her broke. “I am not playing dumb,” she shouted at him. “Don’t you think I’d say something if I could remember?” And then she stopped abruptly as an idea came to her. They were supposed to have had an open relationship. “Didn’t I tell you why I went to the hospital E.R. when I came back from the road trip?”

  Was she toying with him now? Was that it? Taylor found that he really had to struggle to hold on to his temper. He felt almost mortally wounded.

  “No, you didn’t say a word about it. You just came home from the trip and acted as if it was business as usual. You just looked a little pale around the edges,” he recalled. “Maybe the strain of keeping secrets from me was wearing on you.”

  “I didn’t—” She began to shout a protest that she didn’t keep secrets from him, that she didn’t know if she had any secrets to keep, but the word suddenly began to echo in her brain. “Secrets,” she repeated, not looking at him.

  Secrets.

  She realized that the word had somehow been part of her semidream, as well.

  Did she have secrets from him? If she did, they were secrets from her now, as well.

  “Yes, secrets.” His mouth twisted into a grim expression. “A pretty sterile word for what you did.” And then his temper, his hurt, finally erupted. “Damn it, Gayle, why didn’t you come to me before you did it? Why did you just shut me out this way?”

  “What way?” she cried in exasperation. “What is it that you think I did?”

  How could she pretend not to know? You just didn’t forget something like this, like a missed item in a grocery cart. “You killed our baby.”

  Her face turned completely pale as she stared at him. “What?”

  “This code,” he jabbed at the line with his index finger, “it stands for termination of pregnancy. That was our baby you just swept out of your life. You didn’t even think enough of it, of me, to let me know you were going to do it.”

  He pressed his lips together, trying to get under control. Remembering. They’d sat right there, on the sofa, with her dangling her bare feet over one upholstered arm, talking about the future. And he’d actually felt bad, telling her they were going to have to put on hold for a while having kids. God, he’d been such a fool.

  “You even had me going with that talk about wanting a family.” He looked at her accusingly. “What was that, your decoy plan?”

  The room had suddenly gotten very hot. And air in her lungs had vanished somehow. She found it was hard to focus.

  “I didn’t have a decoy plan. I don’t know anything about this.” Sweat began forming along her upper lip, her lids, her hair line. Slipping down her spine. “I…didn’t…”

  Gayle couldn’t finish, couldn’t push any more words out of her mouth. She was too weak. She started to sway. Her knees felt as if they’d been dissolved, and she didn’t have the strength to stand up anymore.

  “Gayle?”

  She heard a voice. Taylor’s?

  It was coming to her from a long distance away, as if whoever talking was standing on the other end of a long tunnel.

  She couldn’t see who it was.

  Someone was grabbing her hand. Holding her upright. Even with support she couldn’t stand. Everything was spinning.

  The room was shrinking, its edges rapidly becoming outlined in black. What light there was around her was disappearing.

  She tried to scream for help, but the cry became caught in her throat. The darkness swiftly devoured it before a sound could emerge.

  And then the darkness came to claim her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Taylor managed to catch her in his arms before she hit the floor.

  “Gayle? Gayle?”

  Leaning against him limply, Gayle didn’t respond to the sound of his voice. Fear materialized in his chest, growing stronger by the second.

  His pulse racing, Taylor’s first thought was to call 911. But then he thought she might be better off if he took her to the emergency room himself.

  Torn, he looked down at Gayle’s face. She looked so pale, so frail. He was afraid that she’d had a relapse, or that maybe the doctor, despite all the fancy scans at Blair, had still managed to miss something. What if she had a tumor or a blood clot forming?

  Damn it, why had he yelled at her like that?

  Still holding Gayle in his arms, he forced himself to take a deep breath and calm down. He had to think logically.

  Maybe she’d just fainted.

  Women fainted, right? he thought, silently asking himself the rhetorical question. No woman he’d ever known, certainly not Gayle, but he knew it did happen. Maybe it had happened to Gayle.

  He was having trouble thinking straight. At this moment everything seemed completely pulled inside out, upside down and thrown into another, not quite parallel, universe.

  He looked at her again. She was breathing evenly. More evenly than he was, he thought. He felt on the verge of hyperventilating.

  “I used to be calm before you,” he told the unconscious woman.

  Rather than rush to the telephone or to the hospital, he told himself to play it by ear. Picking her up in his arms, Taylor carried his wife over to the sofa, yanking away the plastic as he balanced her against his body. He used one leg propped up against the coffee table to keep her in place. With a section cleared away, he then laid her down, praying he wasn’t making a grave mistake by not summoning help.

  She still looked paler than snow, but her pulse felt stronger. That had to be a good sign. Right?

  Her eyes remained closed.

  “Damn it, Gayle, you’re tying me all up in knots. What’s going on with you? With us?” he whispered, as he gently pushed the hair away from her face.

  A compress. She needed a compress.

  Taylor hurried to the kitchen. After tearing off two paper towels from the roll, he doubled them up to form a rectangle, then dampened them. Once he was back in the living room, he placed the dripping towels on Gayle’s forehead.

  Her eyelashes fluttered. After a moment she stirred. When she finally opened her eyes, Taylor felt as if he’d just been given a stay of execution. It didn’t matter what she’d done, what secrets she’d kept from him, he’d deal with it. They’d deal with it. Nothing mattered except that Gayle was in his life, mercurial, unpredictable, but his. And well.

  Feeling slightly bewildered, Gayle tried to sit up. He gently pushed her back down onto the sofa. “Stay down.”

  This is where I came in, she thought.

  The thought came and went, making no sense to her. She took a shaky breath, feeling completely out of focus. Her head was killing her and there was something wet and clammy on her forehead.

  “What happened?”

  Her voice sounded so reedy, Taylor thought, as doubts continued to plague him. Maybe he should take her to the hospital. He wasn’t qualified to make judgments about her health.

  “You passed out.” Again she tried to sit up and he pressed his hand to her shoulder, pushing her down and trying to keep her still. “I said stay down. I don’t want you passing out again.”

  A very real feeling of déjà vu took hold, refusing to release her. He’d pushed her down like this before, told her not to sit up before. Not that long ago.

  “Fainting,” she corrected weakly. She fought to keep her eyes open and the room from spinning again. “Drunks pass out, I fainted.”

  The contrary statement brought a thin smile to his lips. Now that sounded like his Gayle. “And you’re back.” Taking her hand, he sat down beside her, claiming just the edge of the sofa.

  When she tried to remove the makeshift compress from her forehead, he caught her wrist, stopping her. It was like dealing with a little kid, he thought. An impatient, contrary little kid.

  God, but he loved every contrary bone in her body.

  “It’s dripping,” she protested when he caught her other hand to prevent her from snatching away the wet towels. The excess
moisture had worked its way down her cheeks and hair and continued on a jagged path. “My shoulders are getting wet.”

  With a resigned sigh, Taylor removed the compress and dropped it on top of the plastic-covered coffee table.

  “You look a little bit better,” he told her. “You’ve worked your way from Casper the Friendly Ghost and you’re up to Snow White.” It was meant to amuse her. Instead, he saw her eyes suddenly widened. He couldn’t read her expression. Braced for anything—he hoped—he asked, “What’s the matter?”

  Her heart slammed into her rib cage. She grasped his hand. “I remember.”

  He told himself to be cautious, not to get his hopes up. “Remember what? Why you went to the hospital in Phoenix?”

  As soon as he said it, a deep-rooted chill passed over her. The hospital. Oh, God, the hospital. She fought to keep the sob out of her voice. To keep a sense of horror at bay.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “That. And you.”

  Still he didn’t want to jump to the conclusion he ached to embrace. Disappointment would be too overwhelming if he was wrong. “Remember me how?”

  “In every way.”

  Memories came flooding back to her in no particular order, with no distinct rhyme or reason. It was as if she was standing in front of a dam and not just the floodgates but the very dam walls had broken. The water came rushing at her, threatening to wash her out to sea.

  Her fingers tightened on his hand, as if that would somehow help her brace herself.

  Panic filled her voice. “Taylor.”

  He slipped his arm around her. “I’m here, honey, I’m here.” Even as he said it, he saw that she had started to cry. It was remorse, he thought. Remorse for what she’d done. Any anger he’d felt at the deed, at being shut out, all disappeared. He just wanted her to be all right again. “Maybe I’d better get you to the hospital.”

  “No, no more hospitals. Please,” she begged. That was what her weird dreams had been about in the hotel room, she realized suddenly. She wasn’t dreaming; she was remembering. Remembering being in the operating room. They’d only given her a local, but everything had become unclear during the procedure.

  She held on to Taylor, feeling hollow. “I lost our baby.”

  “I know,” he told her softly. Holding her close to him, he did his best to comfort her.

  Gayle drew back, shaking her head. She knew what he thought. And he was wrong.

  “No, no, you don’t,” she cried. “You don’t understand. I lost it. My body aborted it. It was a miscarriage. I started bleeding in the hotel room and I drove myself over to the hospital. I got there just in time to be too late. The baby was gone.” Her mouth twisted in self-mockery. “I thought I was so damn healthy.” When she looked at him, there was a bottomless sadness in her eyes. “I haven’t been sick a day in my life since the second grade.” It didn’t make any sense to her. “But I couldn’t keep the baby.”

  Her words replayed themselves in his head. “You miscarried?” Taylor could only stare at her. “You didn’t go in for an abortion?”

  Everything inside of her scrambled together, braced. Ready to mount a defensive. How could he think that about her?

  “No!” she cried.

  “Then why didn’t you tell me?” It didn’t matter if it didn’t make any sense. What mattered was that Gayle had gone through all this alone, he thought. He should have been there for her. “Why didn’t you tell me you lost the baby?” Another question quickly occurred to him in the wake of his first. “Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant? And how could you be pregnant? You’re on the pill.”

  She lifted her shoulders in a shrug she felt too drained to even complete. She’d asked her gynecologist the same question.

  “Dr. Roberts said these things happen. Chances are small, but they do happen.”

  So the doctor had known, he thought. She probably knew about the miscarriage, as well. He struggled not to feel like an outsider in his own life. “I still don’t understand, Gayle. Why didn’t you tell me you were pregnant?”

  Emotions welled up in her. Trying to keep a tight rein on herself, she hadn’t allowed herself to mourn properly. She banked down tears now. Tears wouldn’t help. “I tried.”

  Was she having another memory lapse, he wondered. “When?”

  “That conversation I had with you about having kids.” She could see by his expression he needed a few minutes to recall it. “That was supposed to be my way of segueing into telling you.” Supposed to be, she thought. Except that it had turned sour on her. “But then you were so firm about waiting, about not wanting any kids until you felt you could provide for them yourself.” She closed her eyes, remembering his exact words. “You said there was nothing wrong in waiting and that right now you were perfectly happy with it being just the two of us.”

  A sadness entered her eyes as she looked at him again. “I tried to get you to change your mind by saying that maybe by the time you felt you were ready, I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant. That the longer you wait to get pregnant, sometimes the harder it is.”

  Now he was beginning to understand, or at least to see it from her perspective. His own words came back to haunt him. “And I said that if it was never more than just the two of us, that would be okay with me.” He realized now how that had to have sounded to her. “I said that for you, Gayle.”

  Maybe her brain was still foggy. She didn’t understand. “For me?”

  “In case things didn’t go the way we planned when we were ready. I didn’t want you to feel that you had to give me a baby.” He felt so helpless now, thinking of what she’d gone through. First believing he didn’t want the baby she was carrying, then carrying the overwhelming sadness of the miscarriage by herself. “You should have told me, you know. You shouldn’t have had to face that by yourself.”

  She knew that now. But at the time she’d felt emotionally estranged from him, believing he didn’t want the baby in the first place. “I thought you’d be upset that I was pregnant. And then when I lost the baby, I was afraid that you’d be relieved that our life wasn’t going to change. I couldn’t have stood that,” she told him. “It was easier just not telling you.”

  How had signals gotten so confused between them? It felt as though misunderstanding had just built on misunderstanding. And then he thought of the way he’d wrapped himself up in his anger and accused her of having an abortion behind his back.

  A rueful expression played on his lips. “I’m sorry I went off like that. But when I saw that the code numbers meant ‘termination of pregnancy’—”

  He’d jumped to a conclusion, she thought.

  “You assumed that I had an abortion.” She looked at him, wondering if either one knew the other at all. “How could you have thought that, knowing how I feel about kids?”

  Taylor dragged a hand through his hair. She was right. He should have known better. Should have known she wasn’t capable of that, certainly not without telling him first. But after everything that had happened, part of him had felt as if he didn’t know anything at all.

  “It hasn’t exactly been a normal few weeks,” he said. “I felt cut out of your life because life with me was the only thing you couldn’t remember. And then to find out that you were keeping things from me—”

  “I thought you didn’t want the baby,” she repeated. “And when I lost it, I was really afraid you’d say something like, ‘it was for the best’ and then I’d wind up hating you. I just couldn’t risk something like that happening.” She splayed her hand over her flat belly. Fresh tears rose to her eyes, threatening to spill out. “I guess in my mind I felt it was all so awful. When the accident happened, my brain seized the opportunity to wipe it all out of my mind.” She looked at him. “Including the father of my baby.”

  He forced a smile to his lips. “I guess that’s as good an explanation as any.” The doctor had told him there were no easy solutions, nothing they could hold on to as gospel when it came to things like amnesia. He was jus
t damn relieved that it was all behind them.

  Taylor gathered her to him again. Part of him felt reluctant to ever let her go again. He knew that, given her independent streak, saying as much would probably go over like a lead balloon. So he just held her and was grateful.

  “Sure you don’t want to go to the hospital to get checked out?” he asked several minutes later.

  She moved her head back and forth against his chest in reply before she gave voice to her sentiments. “No, I’ve had enough of hospitals for a while.” And then she raised her face to his. “But I wouldn’t mind if you wanted to play doctor and check me out.”

  Instead of agreeing, the way she’d expected him to, she saw Taylor frown as he looked at her. “Are you sure you’re up to that?”

  More than up to it, she thought. She needed it. Needed to feel for a moment that there was nothing else in this world but pleasure. “Don’t treat me like a fragile doll, Taylor. It’s all I’ve been thinking about since yesterday morning after you left for work.”

  He looked at her in surprise. “What, making love with me?”

  She nodded. “That, and coming home to you.” She smiled at the sound of that. Home. This falling-apart building she found herself living in with Taylor was home. Taylor was home.

  He had missed seeing her smile—that smile of self-deprecation that only he got to see. “I guess I fell faster for you the second time around,” she said.

  Yes! something inside of him cheered. Outwardly he tried to remain the picture of calmness. “Practice makes perfect.”

  Well, that wasn’t exactly what she’d thought she’d hear. “How about you?” she prodded.

  He looked at her with an innocent expression. “How about me what?”

  “Why did you stick around?” She realized she meant the question seriously. Another man would have said a few choice words and left, wife or no wife. Yet he had stuck it out. “I was pretty horrible there for a while.”

  There wasn’t even a hint of a smile on his lips as he deadpanned. “And this would be different from your normal behavior how?” Immediately Taylor hardened his muscles, knowing what was coming. The next second, Gayle’s doubled-up fist made contact with his biceps. Hard.