The Second Man (4 page)

“Did you?” Max did not take his eyes off her face.

She leaned toward him. “Don’t you remember all those conversations we had about what we’d do after graduation? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to sound so, so . . .”

“Disappointed.” It was not a question. “And hurt.”

“I’m not hurt.” Her voice was too loud as she pulled her head back. “I’m just, well, surprised. I mean, I know it was a long time ago, but surely, all that time we spent together . . .”

“Jill,” he interrupted. “I don’t know of an easy way to tell you this, and I’m sure you are expecting me to say something else, apologize most likely for not getting in touch with you before now. So I would like to tell you something right now. Before we say anything else to each other.”

“Go ahead.” She swallowed.

“I don’t remember anything. I don’t remember you. At all,” Max said. “I’m sorry.”

Chapter 4

Jill tried to swallow, but her throat would not work. “What do you mean? I mean we were . . .” Her voice broke. “Close. My god, you don’t remember any of that?”

“No.”

“Oh, I see.” But she didn’t.
Is this some kind of cowardly bull he thinks he can pull to get out of apologizing?
“I don’t know what to say.”

“I’m sure you don’t.” Max hung his head for a moment and then extended his hand across the table. “That’s why I came here tonight. To explain this to you so you wouldn’t be embarrassed if we ran into each other at the reunion.” His voice roughened with emotion. “I am so sorry to hurt you like this.”

She ignored his hand. “I’m not hurt so much as confused. Please stop saying that.”

“I don’t believe that. You have to be. You were in love with me.” He said it matter-of-factly, his rich baritone filling the room.

“Now wait just a minute.” Jill pointed her index finger at Max. “We were just kids fifteen years ago. And while I took our time together seriously, I wouldn’t call what we shared love.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? What kind of love affair ends like ours did? I’d say we were a couple of kids in heat, and that was it.” She stood up and glared at him, aware she was losing control of her emotions.

Max’s mouth tightened. “Let me get the coffee. Please, sit down.” He motioned toward her chair and she sat.

He got up and poured the cups, setting hers carefully in front of her.

“
Tack
.”

“
Du ar valkommen
.”

Jill flushed. A long-buried reflex had led her to say ‘Thank you’ in his native language, and he had replied that she was welcome.

She gulped her coffee and felt like an idiot. She was out of her depth here. She couldn’t think of a thing to say, she just wanted to scream.

Max returned to his chair. “I’m sure you think I’m a complete jerk. And I think I just made everything worse, blurting out what I said. But it isn’t easy for me to explain.” He took a sip of coffee. “I have a lot to tell you about what happened to me. It may take a while.”

“I’ve got a few minutes. Shoot.” Jill took another mouthful, scalding her lips, and flushed to her waist. The last thing on earth she wanted was to hear Max explain why he did not remember her at all.

“Well, let me begin.”

As Max quietly narrated his story, the hurt that had nearly choked her began to fade. Jill realized she should have considered that something like what he was explaining had befallen the young man she had, in fact, been very much in love with.

The car accident, which he could not remember, had left him with a serious concussion, as well as several broken bones and a ruptured spleen, Max explained.

He had nearly died at the scene from blood loss, and then again a few weeks later, back in Sweden, when he developed a clot in his brain. After an operation to alleviate the cranial pressure, his doctors had put him in a medically induced coma for weeks.

After years of physical therapy, his body had returned to nearly what it had been, but his memory had not. He had lost several chunks of his past, the year he was ten, for example, and most of his college years, including his time in California, up to and including the accident. Some of his other lost memories had returned over time, but their year together was wiped-out.

“This is why I decided to come to the reunion.” Max’s voice was tight from his long narrative. “I thought if I connected with people who knew and remembered me, visited places I’d been, that it might trigger something.”

“Why do you want those memories back?” Jill asked. “After all this time, I mean.”

“I don’t want empty spots in my life. Life is short, and I want all of it. Forgetting the year I lived here, the people I knew, it seems too much of a waste.” He looked at her searchingly. “I have a seven-year-old daughter. Olivia. She asks me questions all the time about my past, and what I did as a child and a young man.”

“A daughter. So you’re married?” Jill gripped her fingers together.

“I’m divorced. Olivia lives with her mother outside of Paris. While I see her often, it’s not enough.”

“I’m sure that’s difficult.”

“It is.” Max met her eyes. “Do you have children?”

“No.”

“When you do, you’ll understand why it haunts me that I’ve lost pieces of my past. Children grow so fast, one gets a sense of how short one’s life is, and how important each day is. If I lose that part of my past forever, my life will have been cut short. I don’t want that.”

Jill thought again of her mother. Healthy in body at sixty-three, but not really alive in the present, helpless against an incendiary illness that had turned vast swathes of her past into ash.

And now more of my own past is going up in smoke as I sit across from another person who doesn’t remember me.
With this sobering thought, Jill got to her feet. She wanted to be alone. She wanted blackout sleep.

“Thanks for coming by, Max. And explaining all this. I appreciate it.”

“I had to, for me. And for you.” He took a step toward her, only two feet separating them. Max reached into his jacket pocket and brought out a worn envelope that he handed to her. “When I closed up my parents’ home in Sweden last year after my mother died, I found this.”

Jill stared at the envelope. The postmark was fifteen years ago, from the Christmas after Max had disappeared from her life. She knew what the card inside was. And what it said. She had sent it.

Echoes of the words she had written filled her head. “So your mother didn’t give it to you when it came?”

“No, but she kept it. I found some photos also. Several of the buildings at St. John’s College. I contacted the administration and was directed to a very kind professor there who knew me, and you. Dr. Mary Millard. She told me about our class, and that we were a serious couple. I scanned the photos I found and emailed them to her. She and I exchanged several messages and she told me about the reunion.” Max inhaled. “She’s the one who suggested I should come and see you.”

Jill could not find her voice. The relief she had felt at hearing why Max had not contacted her began to turn to despair. Her memories of their intimacy seemed fragile, and she realized that when they began to fade, there would be no one in the world to help restore them.

She tried to smile. “I’m glad you took Dr. Millard’s advice. To come to the reunion. I love Dr. Millard. She was always great. Very insightful.”

“She’s a wonderful woman. She said to tell you she hopes you’ll make some time to talk, that she missed you at the last reunion.”

Jill leaned against the counter. “I’m not too big on reunions.”

“She mentioned that, but said she hoped you would attend this one. Are you coming?”

“I’m not sure.”

Max stuck his hands in his pockets. “I have snapshots of you and me I left at the hotel. And one of you with your hair tied up in a band. I don’t know what you call that.”

“A ponytail.”

“Yes.” He grinned, and for a moment the old Max, his eyes warm and teasing, was standing in the room with Jill. “Yes. Ponytail. Olivia wears those. You may have sent the photos in letters, but I didn’t find any of those. Only the card.”

“You must have been surprised when you read it.”

“I was. After I contacted Dr. Millard, I was furious at my mother. Which is very sad because she’s gone and can’t explain why she acted as she did.” He stared at her intently. “The most urgent reason I came here tonight was to ask your forgiveness for abandoning you. You must have hated me.”

“I could never hate you.” As soon as Jill said the words, she wished she could take them back, for her voice revealed too much of what she had once felt about him.

Still felt
, about the old Max.

“I’m relieved to hear you say that.” He blew out a breath and smiled a familiar crooked smile. “Thank you.”

“Why do you think your mother didn’t give you the letters?”

Several moments passed. “I have no good answer for that. She had issues her entire life with depression. Constantly worried about the state of the world and my father’s safety. He traveled all over Europe for his career.”

She frowned. When they were in college, hadn’t Max had told her his father was a farmer, not a man with an international travel schedule? “That doesn’t explain why she didn’t give her son a letter from a friend.”

Max blinked. “Bluntly, I think she blamed you, and America, for my accident. For making her live through the pain of thinking I would die.”

“I see.” Jill nodded.

“Do you?” He shook his head. “I never did understand her.”

“No?”

“No. She was not happy a day of my life that I recall.” Max appeared uncomfortable, as if he had said more than he wanted to. “But enough about childhood. Let me just say she was a tough woman to deal with.”

Besides sending the letters, Jill had made a telephone call to his mother. In her mind she heard the echo of the dismissive, angry tone in his mother’s voice. “Maximilian is not here. Do not call this number ever again.” The words followed by the disconnect buzz of the telephone.

It would not help anything if she told Max about that call. “So, both of your parents are gone then?”

He nodded. “Yes. And yours?”

“My father died seven years ago. My mother is alive, but in an assisted living facility. As of yesterday, actually. She has Alzheimer’s disease.” She swallowed.

“This happened yesterday? And now I show up? Pretty bad timing on my part.”

“Things happen when they happen. You had no way of knowing.”

“Your mother is young, though, yes? How old is she?”

“Sixty-three.”

“Life is filled with tragedy.” Max shook his head. “I’m sorry for her, and for you, Jill. I know how frustrating it is, not to know your own past. Not to remember those who love you.” He shuddered. “Do you have sisters and brothers?”

“No. I’m an only child.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ve been very insensitive tonight. I shouldn’t have just dumped all this drama from my past on you. And I shouldn’t be asking you all these questions about, about people I should remember.”

“There’s no need to apologize. It’s an unusual situation, all around. There aren’t any rules to cover this kind of thing, are there?”

“No. No rules for this.” Max glanced at his shoes, and then up at her. “Well, that’s the whole story then. I hope it’s helped in some way, to tell you about it.”

She felt raw. “Thank you for thinking of me. What are you going to do to try and remember. Talk to other people, too?”

“I don’t know. I think so, although it’s awkward.” He sighed and stood up. “Thank you again for being so kind, not just slamming the door.”

“I’m not that kind of girl,” Jill said, trying to keep it light, but she sounded hurt.

“I can see that.” He stepped toward her. “I was a lucky man.”

She looked down, her face red, and then quickly back at him. “I could help you. Try to help you, I mean. If you want me to.”

“What?”

“I could drive you around, share my memories, and help you reconstruct some of the gaps. If you have time, you and I could talk again, meet . . .” Jill cleared her throat. She should have thought more about this before she spoke, she realized. But Max had always done this to her. Made her drop her guard because he was so honest, so open. “Maybe that’s a dumb idea.”

“No, my gosh, no. It’s so generous. You’d do that for me? I’d appreciate hearing anything you could tell me, details about things I said and did.” He paused. “We were lovers,
ja?
”

She put her hand to her throat. “I, we. Yes. We were.”

“If you don’t mind, I want to know about that, too. Our past.” His eyes flashed. “My doctors said I might remember something, particularly something as emotionally charged as an intimate relationship.”

“It’ll be a pretty one-sided story. I’ll always be the one in the right.” Again she tried to joke and keep her voice light. She failed.

Max blinked, digesting what she had offered. “And your husband? Or boyfriend? They won’t mind you doing this to help me?”

“There’s no one who would mind.”

Suddenly Max pulled her into a hug. “I must say again, old friend, I am sorry. For your pain all those years ago. And I hope now that you know the facts, you’ll never worry again what kind of man you were in love with.”

Jill relaxed in his arms for a moment, reveling in the strength and solid feel of him, the realness of him, but then pushed away, terrified she might revive a passion only she could recall.

“Like I said, we were just kids when all this happened. You disappearing from my life was a blow, yes, but I recovered. I married another man a few years after you left, as a matter of fact.”

“I see.” He leaned on the kitchen counter. “And were you happy?”

“No. Not at all. But it wasn’t because of you.” She cleared her throat, a bubble of happiness growing inside her. “So let’s wipe the slate clean. You’ve apologized. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Max glanced at his watch. “I don’t know your schedule, but may I take you to dinner tomorrow? We could fill in the details about what’s happened with each other the last decade or so. It can be a very unusual blind date.
Ja?”

At that moment, Max was exactly the same guy she used to know, full of charm and energy. “Ah, I’m not sure of my schedule then . . .”