Lost Past (4 page)

             
             
             
             
             
             
             
***

             
Linda sensed John’s familiar presence just before her flight landed. She felt his presence grow stronger as the airplane taxied toward the terminal, and the lack of change of intensity when the airplane stopped told her John wasn’t currently moving. She always wished she could get a sense of direction from her awareness of someone, but all she could do was play “warmer-colder.” When she walked the wrong way due to the vagaries of airport geography, her consciousness of him diminished until she headed to the exit, allowing her to walk confidently toward the increasingly stronger signal.

She recognized his car before she recognized him. He saw her and popped the trunk, and she had a grateful rush of feeling that perhaps the amnesia was gone, but she sensed uncertainty from him. How odd, she thought. John was never uncertain.

His thoughts came at her in a rush, and they weren’t flattering. He thought her coat looked like it was worn a few too many winters, and the way she fixed her hair, in a low ponytail, was not only unflattering, it demonstrated she didn’t care how she looked. She should lose a few pounds, because if she were overweight at twenty-two, she might have serious health problems later on. He was never that unguarded with his thoughts in her presence, and her brief flash of resentment closed the channel faster than usual, leaving her confused.

             
Linda considered warning him about her telepathy, but she wasn’t sure she trusted this new John. She contented herself by saying, “Your memory isn’t back,” as a statement rather than a question.

             
“I recognized you from a picture. Mary said you were going to finish your exams.”

             
“I did. I’m not sure how well I did on the last one, but I’m through. Do you want me to drive?”

             
He hesitated briefly and then nodded. After she adjusted the seat, left the airport, and drove onto I-195, he asked her, “Why do I usually have you drive?”

             
“At first, it was to give me practice. That was genuine. Later, you said you didn’t like driving . . .” She paused as she moved into the correct lane to get onto I-95. “I don’t drive very much, and I really do need the practice.” There was a period of silence.

             
“You were going to say?” He wasn’t looking at the road, but at her.

             
“You want to watch people when you talk to them,” she said wryly. “Like you’re doing now.”

             
“Is it intrusive?”

             
“No. Not for most people. They like that you’re paying attention to them. You pay attention to everyone, except Mary.”

             
“Why didn’t I pay attention to Mary?” he asked with surprise.

             
Linda smiled with real pleasure, because it was unusual for John to ask her for information. “You never told me, and I never asked.”

             
“But you know?”

             
“I think so.” Actually, she knew the answer, because John didn’t always guard his thoughts. “You didn’t want to break up my father’s marriage.” John was an attractive man, but somehow he avoided attracting Mary. He also avoided attracting Linda, which Linda realized was an interesting feat. She loved him as a parent, but didn’t love him as a man. It wasn’t until she went away to college that she realized she never developed a crush on John, which was surprising, considering she went through adolescence with him living in the same house.

             
She paused long enough for him to respond, and when he didn’t, she continued. “You disappeared into the background for her. You were Dad’s friend, but never in competition with Mary. You were a parent to Tom and me, in spite of the lack of age difference.”

             
“You’re twenty-two and I’m thirty-four,” he said with a bit of uncertainty.

             
“That’s what they say.”

             
“You don’t believe it?”

             
“No. I think you’re older, maybe much older. I know it doesn’t make sense, because you could go to graduate school and no one would think you were a returning student.” He was surprised by this observation, and Linda wondered if her statement was silly. John always seemed so mature, as if he belonged in her father’s generation. 

             
“Perhaps I wanted to portray an image with you as well.” He was clearly not certain.

             
“Of course you did. You’re always acting, but this is something deeper. I don’t know what it is.” When he didn’t jump in after she paused, she continued, “Acting is an exaggeration. It wasn’t really acting; you were forcing yourself to
be
a certain way, not
pretending
to be that way. I’m glad to see you still have the same mannerisms. You know when to be silent to get people to say more.” Acting was definitely an exaggeration, because she never heard him think he should pretend to be something he wasn’t. The closest he came and the one time she caught a thought about Mary, it was a fleeting,
She’s coming. I should clean the sink later. She’ll be going to bed in an hour
. He stopped cleaning the sink, but the next morning, Linda saw it was clean.

             
Linda’s thoughts were interrupted by John saying, “I haven’t said enough now. I should be asking how you are doing and saying kind words about your father.”

             
“Why?” she said with genuine surprise. “You don’t remember him, do you?”

             
“No.”

             
“And you know how I’m doing.”

             
“What makes you say that?”

             
“You read people, me better than most,” Linda explained.

             
“But I should ask how you’re feeling to give you a chance to express it,” John said.

             
“I’m sort of on hold, not really believing, not disbelieving. I go back and forth between reaching for hope and trying to grieve. I believe he’s dead, because common sense says so. I believe he’s alive because I can’t believe he’s dead. He’s my father, damn it, and he may have been too busy to spend much time with me, but I love him and I can’t give him up
because someone said a plane crashed.” She realized her voice was becoming almost hysterical, but she shouldn’t have to tell John this. He understood, he always understood. She was a bit ashamed of her outburst. “Is that what you wanted?”

             
“I understand,” he said.

             
“You understood before I said anything,” Linda said.

***

             
“You’re always acting.” John remembered Linda’s words that evening and tried to make sense of them. It confirmed Arthur’s message and what he was discovering about himself. In a way, it also confirmed his thoughts earlier when he wondered if he were an actor or a salesman. Apparently he was both, selling the image he acted, to everyone but Arthur. He also sold himself as a source of knowledge about psychiatry without actually giving direct information. Why not just tell people and why couldn’t he be himself with others? Who was “
himself
?” 

             
Linda obviously wasn’t completely sold on his image, but he didn’t know if anyone else guessed, well, whatever he didn’t know about himself. He felt he had a real connection with Linda: parental, not sexual. On the other hand, her brother Tom, who recently drove from medical school, quickly forgot that John lost his memory and dropped into the familiar relationship. There was no uncertainty on Tom’s part. Why was Linda different?

             
Whatever the answer was, he felt more comfortable asking her about her mother. Natalie Saunders was a stay-at-home mother who inexplicably disappeared. The only clue was a broken lamp and an un
locked front door. Arthur was
on
a
plane to
a physics conference
and the children were at school. Arthur was suspected, of course, because the husband was always suspected and he could have hired someone
, making his alibi meaningless
. He opened up his finances to the authorities, and if anyone was hired, it was hard to figure out where the money came from. Natalie took care of the family’s money and kept meticulous records. She was an accountant when Arthur met her. Arthur spent very little money and could hardly have squirreled away very much from the pocket money he carried. He didn’t even buy lunch because Natalie packed lunches for him.

             
Of course, other scenarios were considered, but no one who knew Arthur Saunders considered him dangerous. He enjoyed exercising, but it was obviously to stay in shape, not to become a fighter, in spite of an occasional self-defense class. He was small and wiry and, by all accounts, a very gentle person.

             
It was even considered that he might have done some research for someone else and “sold” his results for murdering his wife. He produced spectacular results every three or four years, but had a dry period that ended with the paper he was presenting when Natalie disappeared. Nothing was published by anyone else in his field that was a reasonable candidate for this bizarre scenario.

             
The police were polite to Arthur, because he was an important person, but they investigated him thoroughly. Arthur didn’t resent this, because he realized they wouldn’t spend much time searching for other leads, until they eliminated him as a suspect.

John asked Linda if her dad told her this. She said he hadn’t, with a mulish look that suggested further inquiry would be unproductive. He asked her what happened next, rather than pursue the source of her information.

             
Mary Chen came into Arthur’s life three months after Natalie’s disappearance, and she moved in about
five
months later, but as Linda said, “Dad told me a few weeks after Mom disappeared that there was no hope of her being alive. He knew she wouldn’t have
left voluntarily. She never would have deserted us. Besides, even if she did, she would have told all of us. She must have been kidnapped and killed by someone who wasn’t doing it for ransom. The body was disposed of somehow.”

             
After hearing that, John wondered about Arthur’s character. He was unable to build a picture of him. He had a photograph from one of Tom’s emails, but it didn’t help. John saw a small man with dark hair and a pointed nose who looked his age, which was fifty-one. By all accounts, they were best friends, although they were nearly a generation apart. 

***

             
“I don’t think I want to stay here,” Linda said to Tom. They were in her bedroom, which was Arthur’s study when they were gone. Linda sat on the captain’s bed whose drawers were full of the possessions she didn’t bring with her to graduate school.  Not being overly sentimental, she wasn’t sorry that her property was ruthlessly pruned when her father sold the home she grew up in. She recognized the reality that she didn’t have the storage space to keep what she didn’t need. The move gave Linda an excuse to discard her mother’s well-used gardening gloves and dictionary. These mementoes had no use because Linda used an online dictionary and didn’t garden. She kept photographs of her, but they took little space. Her mother didn’t wear jewelry and her clothes wouldn’t fit Linda. She kept her collection of annotated gardening books, enjoying looking through them to see comments such as, “This didn’t work,” or “Does well in a southern exposure.” Mom considered knick-knacks to be dust catchers and owned nothing that wasn’t practical.

             
“It will be crowded,” Tom replied. Linda knew Tom was referring to John’s apartment. Mary previously told them that her mother and brother were flying in from California the next day. There was no discussion of where they would stay, but Linda and Tom both assumed Mary would prefer to have her family in the condo.

             
They both paused. Linda didn’t want to say what she was thinking, but the channel opened, and she heard Tom thinking the same thing. Saying it wouldn’t make things better, but worse. Usually, she told Tom when she read him, but there seemed no point this time. With their father almost certainly dead, they lost all connection to Mary. She was their stepmother in name only. Arthur was their father, but he was so involved with his research that he spent little time with them. Since Linda was twelve and Tom was fifteen, John had been their parent.

             
As Tom pulled out his cell phone, he glanced a question at Linda. She nodded and the channel closed gently as Tom called John and invited himself and his sister to stay with him starting the next night. Neither of them commented on the fact that they were moving to a much more crowded location. Mary looked relieved when they told her, and seemed surprised when Tom said, “You don’t mind if we leave most of our stuff here?”