Dr. Forenski was waiting for them. Petite, almost fragile looking, with short-cropped white hair and a face weathered by the sun and time, the doctor stood and offered Lucky her hand.
“Well, you’ve been through a terrible ordeal,” Dr. Forenski said, motioning for Lucky and Greg to have a seat.
The sympathy in the doctor’s tone was echoed in her eyes, and Lucky liked her immediately. Too often people looked at her with suspicion, never thinking how she had suffered.
“When Chief Braxton contacted me, he told me what happened,” she continued. “I’ve read the papers—which, of course, can’t be trusted—and I have your test results, but I would like to hear the details from you two.”
Greg began first, relating how Dodger had found the car. Then Lucky explained how she’d awakened with no memory of the past, having not a clue as to where she was or how she’d gotten there. Dr. Forenski listened silently, nodding sympathetically and putting Lucky at ease.
“You didn’t recognize yourself in the mirror and became
…
upset,” the doctor said. “Do you know yourself now?”
Lucky shrugged. “I guess. My reflection seems more like me without my hair frizzled around my face like—” she
searched for the word for a second before it popped into her mind, “like a tumbleweed.”
“Interesting. You don’t recognize your face and you don’t remember your name. You should, because you would have looked in the mirror thousands of times and used your name repeatedly. That should imprint them in your mind, unlike the material that’s a one-time image that is filed in your episodic memory bank.” Dr. Forenski studied Lucky thoughtfully, evidently believing her and searching for an explanation. “I wonder why it isn’t working.”
“Could it have something to do with the fact that Lucky still has her sense of smell?” Greg asked.
“Possibly,” Dr. Forenski admitted. “I saw that on her charts and immediately called a colleague of my late husband, who is on staff at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Robinson’s done a lot of research on Hoyt-Mellenberger syndrome. Since it’s so rare there isn’t much data, but he did know of one case where the sense of smell was still intact.”
“Is it important?” Lucky asked. “I just want to be hypnotized so I can find out my name.”
The doctor smiled reassuringly.
“
It’s important only because the sense of smell and episodic memory are located at almost the same place in the brain. That’s why the most vivid memories we have come to us when we smell something. One whiff of apple pie baking and poof
”
—she snapped her fingers—“I’m six years old again, sitting in my grandmother’s kitchen.”
“I would give anything if I could just remember my grandmother,” Lucky said. Dodger must have sensed her anguish, for he trotted over and gave her a quick swipe with his tongue.
Dr. Forenski leaned
forward and touched her arm. “
The nice thing about our brain is its amazing ability to recover. You know, there are people out there functioning—literally—with half a brain. Many others have been in worse accidents than you and have gone on to lead normal lives. When we find your family, they’ll tell you all about the past, and your brain will
process the information until you will almost believe that you do remember the past.”
The other doctors had told her the same thing, but somehow hearing it from this woman comforted Lucky. Cody Braxton; might despise her, but he’d found someone who truly wanted to help her.
“Are you ready to get started?” Dr. Forenski asked.
“Yes,” Lucky replied. “May Greg and Dodger stay?”
“If you like.”
Lucky nodded and looked at Greg. If he was surprised by the request, he didn’t show it. The doctor glanced quickly at them both. No matter what they learned, no matter how bad the news, Lucky wanted Greg to know the truth and to hear it firsthand.
1
2
G
reg watched as Dr. Forenski settled Lucky onto a chaise, half tempted to slip out of the room. Why had Lucky asked him to stay? He just wanted her to tell them her name so he could get rid of her.
“There’s nothing to be concerned about,” the doctor said as she pulled her chair next to the chaise where Lucky was reclining, then motioned for Greg to move closer. “Under hypnosis, people don’t do anything they wouldn’t do in normal circumstances.”
“I understand,” Lucky responded, and Greg decided he really liked this doctor. She was taking time to put Lucky at ease and she seemed to genuinely care about this case, unlike the doctors who had originally diagnosed Lucky.
“I want you to look directly at the clock on the wall,” Dr. Forenski told Lucky. “Concentrate on it and slowly count backward from one hundred.”
“One hundred
…
ninety-nine
…
ninety-eight
…
ninety-seven
…
ninety-six
…
”
Greg studied Lucky as she counted, thinking how vulnerable she looked. For a moment, he almost believed her.
“
You’re beginning to feel very comfortable
…
very relaxed, aren’t you?”
Lucky nodded. “Seventy…
s
ixty-nine…
sixty-eight
…
”
“I want you to close your eyes and relax even more.”
With a sigh, her lids fluttered shut. “Sixty-seven
… sixty-
six
…”
“You’re beginning to feel ve
ry tired, very sleepy, aren’t
you?”
Again Lucky nodded and Greg watched her closely, looking for any sign that she was faking. Ben
eath the pale blue shirtwaist
her breasts rose evenly, as if she were already asleep.
“You may stop counting when you are fully asleep,” the doctor instructed, then waited until Lucky mumbled the nu
mber
forty-seven and stopped there.
“How do you know she’s really under?” Greg asked. He couldn’t help being skeptical, remembering how Lucky had behaved that night in the closet. He still couldn’t decide if she had been telling the truth or if she had been acting.
“Are you having a problem with this?” Dr. Forenski asked.
He suspected she could see straight through him, could see through most people, actually. “I don’t really believe in hypnotism,” Greg admitted.
“Lucky, you can hear me, can’t you?”
“Yes,” came Lucky’s soft reply, as if she were far away.
“I want you to open your eyes and stand up.”
Lucky swung her slender legs to the floor and rose, her eyes opening. The dusky sweep of her lashes, shadowing her eyes, and her slightly parted lips were sexy as hell, but was this just an act? If so, what in hell was she trying to prove?
“Please stand on one foot with the other leg straight out behind,” the doctor said and Lucky balanced herself on one foot. “Good. Now put all your weight on the ball of your foot and stretch out your arms.”
It looked like a ballet position to Greg as Lucky balanced on tiptoe, one leg raised, her arms out like wings.
“Perfect,” said Dr. Forenski. “Hold it right there. Don’t move.”
Dodger rose to his feet from his crouch beside Greg, his eyes trained on Lucky. She stood stock-still, perfectly balanced like a statue, not a real person. Greg became increasingly intrigued as the seconds passed, wondering how she managed it.
“She knows we’re here, don’t you, Lucky?”
“Yes, you and Greg and Dodger are sitting there watching me.” Her lips moved as she spoke, but her body never wavered.
“Only the most highly trained dancer is capabl
e of holding such a position,”
the doctor informed him. “Yet under hypnosis anyone can do it, because their mind is in an altered state, unencumbered by the usual distractions around them. They have total control over their bodies and, more important, over their minds.”
“Her eyes are glazed over,” Greg said. “That’s how she looked the night I found her, except that she was babbling and acting weird, too. I kept talking to her, but she didn’t seem to hear me.”
“She was probably reliving the events just prior to the crash. It’s a fairly common reaction.”
He remembered Lucky’s hands in his pants and his own unwilling response. If she’d been reliving something that had just happened, she had been with her lover. The thought caused a twinge beneath his breastbone that he refused to call jealousy. Greg barely heard the doctor tell Lucky to go back to the chaise and close her eyes.
“Can you hear me?” she asked, and Lucky replied that she could. “Good. Now I want you to tell us your name.”
“They call me Lucky.”
“What do you call yourself?”
“Lucky Braxton,” she answered immediately.
The intimate pitch of her voice brought him up short. Lucky
Braxton. The name sounded so
…
right. Uhh-ooh. What in hell was he thinking?
“Is that your real name?” the doctor asked, and Lucky admitted it wasn’t. “Why do you call yourself that?”
“
Greg started calling me Lucky because I was so lucky to survive the crash. I added Braxton because it’s really scary not to have a last name. Anyway, I feel I b
elong with Greg. He found me…
and
saved me when I was in jail…
and I’m staying with him.”
A constricting knot of tenderness tightened in his throat, and it was all he could do to swallow. She really, truly appreciated all he’d done for her. He was touched in a way that he could never have verbalized.
“I understand, but do you know your real name?”
“No, I honestly wish I did…
but I don’t.”
Greg let his hand drop to stroke Dodger’s head, expelling his breath in relief.
She didn’t remember.
The thought hammered through his head. Clearly, Lucky was hypnotized, and all she could think was that she belonged to him. She had been telling the truth. What about the closet? She must have been leveling with him then, too. She had been afraid but didn’t know why.
“All right, now I want you to go back in time. Let your mind slowly drift backward to the day of the accident. Tell me what you see.”
“See? I can’t see anything except
…
well, these waving bands of light, like I’m in a fog. No, not fog. It’s more like water.”
“Is it rain you’re seeing?”
Lucky hesitated, and Greg thought that perhaps she was remembering the storm that had pummeled the coast the night he’d found her. “No, it’s water. It’s like I’m in the ocean, under the water. All I see are these shifting bands of light, filtering down from above where the sun must be.”
Dr. Forenski leaned toward Greg and spoke in an undertone. “This is the way most amnesia patients describe the past when it isn’t there. You’d think they would see nothing but darkness.
They don’t. Most report some sort of light, but they can’t see anything because there is nothing there to see.”
Greg couldn’t take his eyes off Lucky. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth, the way it often was when she was at the computer concentrating on what was on the screen. She was trying desperately to see the past, but it wasn’t there. His heart went out to her, the way it had the day he’d found her in jail with people gawking at her, making fun of her.
“Lucky, let’s go back even farther. Let yourself slip back in time now. It’s summer of 1990. Can you tell us where you are?”
Two beats of silence, then, “No. I can see there’s light but it’s distorted, like a cheap prism. I have no idea where I am.” Greg listened, convinced that Lucky had told him the truth, as the doctor regressed Lucky to earlier and earlier periods of time. And she never saw anything except gauzy light.
Finally, Dr. Forenski turned to him. “It’s clear to me that her memory bank has been entirely erased, which is consistent with Hoyt-Mellenberger syndrome, but it doesn’t explain why she cannot remember her own name.”
“Isn’t there anything else you can do?” The last thing Greg wanted was to be right back where they started. Not only would he have to face his skeptical brother, but he would have to spend yet another tortured night under the same roof as this woman who thought she belonged to him.
Dr. Forenski considered the situation for a moment, running buffed fingernails through the short hair at her temples. “I could try to take her back before her fourth birthday. Most people can’t recall this time period. They think they do, but studies have proven they’re injecting memories from other sources.
“Different kinds of memory are stored in different parts of the brain. It’s possible that Lucky is among the rare few who can recall this period in their life. Even if she does remember, though, she may not know her last name at such a young age, or if it’s an unusual name, she won’t be able to spell it.”
“It’s worth a shot.” He kept hearing Lucky saying she belonged to him. If she didn’t remember anything at all—ev
en from her earliest childhood—
she
would
belong to him, at least until someone claimed her. This thought filled him with an unexpected sense of elation.
“
Lucky, I want you to go back even farther in time
…
way, way back. You’re very young, very little. You haven’t been walking long or talking much. Go back
…
back to those days when you were a toddler.”
Lucky’s teeth released her full lower lip and a subtle change came over her face. She cocked her head to one side as if listening. Dodger rose to his feet, his body trembling beneath Greg’s hand. Lucky seemed so
…
different. Instinctively, he knew she wasn’t acting.
“Lucky, tell us what you see.”
“It’s dawrk,” she said with the voice of a very young child.
One by one, the fine hairs along his nape stood at attention. Dodger stopped quivering, his sleek body now rigid beneath Greg’s palm.
“What did you say?”
“Dawrk. Dawrk.”
“Is it dark where you are?” The doctor slanted a glance at him. “Do you see any light at all?”
“Unda the door.”
“There’s light coming from under the door?” Greg spoke for the doctor, who obviously hadn’t a clue.
“Umm-hmm.”
Her response was childlike, and something else that he couldn’t quite put his finger on for the moment. Then it hit him. It was the threat of tears in her voice—the voice of a child. Either she was about to cry or had been crying. Man, oh, man. What next?
“Do you know where you are?”
Lucky turned her head away from them, burrowing into the chair, but not before Greg saw the tears seeping from between her closed eyelashes. “Inna closet.”
“A closet!” The words shot out of him as he recalled the child’s cries that had awakened him. Aw, hell. Couldn’t be! Yet he knew it was.
Dr. Forenski put a finger to pursed lips to silence him. “You’re in a closet?” she asked, and Lucky nodded, turning back to them, tears silently tumbling down her cheeks. “What are you doing in a closet?”
“Hidin’.”
The word came out, followed by little hiccuping sounds that resembled a sobbing child. It triggered a chain reaction of raw emotion. For a second he wanted to take her into his arms as if she were still a small child, then he was angry, furious that someone would abuse a child. He tamped down his feelings and the rational world returned, reminding him there wasn’t one damn thing he could do. She was reliving an event from her past.
Dr. Forenski looked concerned, but she didn’t know the half of it. In discussing the case, they had concentrated on the night Greg had found Lucky. They hadn’t mentioned Lucky hiding in the closet with a butcher knife for protection.
“Who are you hiding from?”
She opened her mouth, struggling to speak, but nothing came out. Then she gasped and shuddered. “Mom-m-my.”
Greg’s gut twisted, a juggernaut of painful memories returning with startling clarity. But when he’d done battle with Aunt Sis—forced into hiding more than a few times himself— he’d been a lot older, better able to defend himself.
“
Why is your mommy upset with you?
”
Dr. Forenski asked.
Greg wanted to scream, Don’t you get it? But he could see that she did indeed suspect something. The doctor was just trying to draw it out of Lucky as she huddled in the chair, a traumatized child, reliving the past.
Lucky balled up one fist and rubbed her eyes, a childish mannerism that made his throat tighten even more. Dodger echoed his feelings with a low whine and an imploring look that seemed to say “Stop this.”
“I be bad. Berry, berry bad.”
It was all Greg could do not to yell at the doctor to stop. With each word Lucky’s face contorted even more, until it was obvious she was in pain. Having suffered so many beatings himself, he knew that she must have been beaten severely.