Tender Deception: A Novel of Romance (3 page)

They fell silent for a few moments, then Raven asked, “Have you been able to remember anything about yourself?”

Lilly shook her head despondently. “Nothing. When I try hard to remember, it’s as if my brain just shuts itself off.”

“Try not to brood too much. I’ve been reading some of my medical books about amnesia. Like Dr. Glenn told you, severe stress, a trauma, an ordeal like the one you’ve been through can cause the memory and personality to become temporarily separated from one another.”

“Are you sure the books say ‘temporary’?” Lilly asked, tears filling her eyes.

“Sure,” Raven insisted, giving Lilly’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “Your mind is going to heal just as your body will. Give yourself time.”

“There isn’t much else I can do,” Lilly said sadly. Then she asked, “Why is my voice so hoarse? I don’t think it was always like this. It sounds strange to me.”

“You had a neck injury, bruises all around your throat. Dr. Glenn thinks your vocal chords sustained injuries. He thinks that will improve too, though your voice may have a permanent huskiness.” Then Raven smiled, “I wouldn’t worry about that, though. It will have a seductive quality that a lot of women will envy. I often wished my voice were more of a contralto rather than up in the soprano range where it is.”

Lilly didn’t feel like continuing the conversation. The heavy mantle of weariness was spreading over her again.

Lilly spent the next few days sleeping much of the time. Rest, nourishing food, and the vitamin injections Raven administered daily slowly brought back her strength. By the end of the week, she was able to spend her time in a chair by the window instead of in bed, and she ventured on a slow journey through the rooms of the small pueblo home, holding Raven’s arm for support.

Her body was healing faster than her facial injuries. At least, it seemed so to her. The soreness when she moved about was almost gone. But still the bandages remained on her face. When the doctor visited her, he treated her facial injuries with medications, then replaced the bandages. Her face continued to hurt and the flesh pulled when she talked or ate. “I had to take some stitches when I first saw you,” Dr. Marshall explained. “You were pretty badly cut up. It will feel better when the stitches come out.”

He refused to listen to her request to survey the damage herself. “Leave the bandages on,” he ordered sternly. “Wait until things heal up a bit more.”

But as her strength returned, so did her normal feminine concern for her appearance. Somewhere she had a husband to whom she would return when she got her memory back. She didn’t want to go back to him looking like a freak.

One evening when she was in her room alone, she searched through a chest of drawers and found a small mirror. With trembling fingers, she pulled adhesive tape free and removed the bandages that swathed her face. She held up the mirror. Her eyes went wide with horror. She heard her own hoarse, choked cry, and she crumpled into a sobbing heap on the floor....

CHAPTER TWO

“Lilly, I’m really exasperated with you for disobeying my orders,” Dr. Glenn Marshall said severely. “If you had only waited another week before taking those bandages off, some of the swelling and discoloration would have faded away and things wouldn’t have seemed so bad.”

Lilly heard the words, but they didn’t register. Since the shock of confronting the disfiguring injuries to her face the night before last, she had sunk into a deep depression. She sat beside the window, staring into space in an almost catatonic state of despair.

How much kinder it would have been, she now believed, if she had been left to die out in the desert. She now hated Henry Brownfeather for saving her. Perhaps it had been intended for her to die, and this was her punishment for thwarting the fates. At times the gloomy thought assailed her that she
had
died and this was a kind of purgatory where she could remember nothing of her past life and had been made ugly beyond description.

She had no desire to eat. Any movement, even so much as lifting a hand, was too much of an effort to bother with. She didn’t feel like talking to anyone. She just wanted to be left alone.

When she had first regained consciousness and realized the problem she was facing—the loss of memory—she’d had the motivation to fight back. She had been eager to get well, to recover her memory, to find her past life and her family.

But she no longer had the desire. It would be better for all concerned if she never remembered the past. If she did, how could she go back with a face that was burned and scarred beyond recognition? How could she return to a husband or to the smiling young man in the locket whom she must have loved very much, only to see the horror and revulsion in their eyes when they beheld the grotesque wreckage of her face?

She sat beside the window with the gold locket clutched in her hand and grieved for the pretty, blue-eyed young woman who smiled innocently from the picture. That young woman had died out on the desert. All that was left was a disfigured robot, a broken doll who had no more purpose in life.

It was all too much for her. She felt totally overwhelmed. Life was no more than a monstrous joke with no point or purpose, a foolish journey that had no meaning, ending in death and the grave.

She knew that Raven and Dr. Marshall were talking, but the words meant nothing to her. She shut them out, wanting to hide in the safe, secret corner within herself, closed away from the world.

Dr. Marshall sighed as he turned to Raven, whose dark eyes were strained with worry. “She’s been like that ever since night before last,” Raven said. “I can’t get her to eat. She won’t talk to us.”

Marshall nodded. “She’s in a bad state of depression. There’s no getting through to her.”

“I feel so guilty. I should have watched her more carefully to see that she didn’t take those bandages off.”

“Don’t go blaming yourself, Raven. She had to find out sooner or later. I was just hoping it would be later, after she’d gotten stronger and the wounds didn’t look so bad. It has been too much of a shock, right on top of everything else she’s been through.”

Marshall turned to Lilly again. He drew a chair closer to the window, took Lilly’s hands in his and spoke to her again, patiently, gently. “Now I want you to listen to me, Lilly. Yes, your face is pretty much of a mess right now. It’s the truth. You were burned and there are some deep gashes. But it doesn’t mean you’re going to be permanently scarred or disfigured. I have a friend in Albuquerque who is an excellent plastic surgeon. I’ve seen him do miracles with facial injuries that were much worse than yours.”

For the first time that morning, Lilly allowed herself to pay attention to her surroundings. She found herself listening to Dr. Marshall’s words, permitting them to pass the barricades she had erected in her mind. She frowned and gazed at him suspiciously. “You’re saying that to make me feel better,” she whispered.

He shook his head. “No, I’m simply telling you the truth. You’re going to need plastic surgery, yes. But the injuries to your face can be repaired, and I can tell you that flatly with no equivocation. Believe me, Lilly. The kind of injuries you have can be repaired by a good plastic surgeon so you won’t have a scar left.”

Tears began to fill Lilly’s eyes. “If I could be sure...if I could really believe you,” she murmured, a glimmer of light flickering in the darkness. But then a fresh wave of despair engulfed her. “But plastic surgery is terribly expensive. And I have no money. Perhaps my husband could afford it, if I could remember my past life. Judging by my engagement ring, he must be a successful man. But I don’t know when I’ll be able to remember...my mind still feels so confused. And even if I could remember, I couldn’t go to him looking the way I do now—”

Marshall leaned back in his chair, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “I’m sure my friend would allow you to pay for the surgery later, either after you find your husband or if you get well and can get a job. But there would be hospital expenses, the operating room, medication. I was wondering if you would consider selling your jewelry. The watch alone would bring quite a bit, and the rings appear to be worth a great deal of money. I’m no judge of such things, but we could have them appraised.”

“I’d forgotten about the jewelry!” Lilly exclaimed. “Certainly I’d be willing to sell it. Everything except—except the little gold locket. I don’t think that would bring much anyway. And I’d want to keep my wedding band. But the watch and the diamond and the dinner ring, I would sell them in a minute. What good are they to me now? Do you think your friend would be able to help me? It would take a miracle.”

“Plastic surgeons perform miracles every day,” Dr. Marshall said confidently. “But first you must get your strength and health back. No more of this sinking into fits of despair and giving up. You must eat and begin to exercise, Lilly. I’m going to prescribe one of the new anti-depressant medications that can help you fight off the depression. But you must get back some of your own fighting spirit, too. There’s a limit to what we doctors can do.”

* * * * * * *

“Well,” Raven Brownfeather exclaimed, “today is the big day!” She stood just inside the doorway of the hospital room in her crisp, white nurse’s uniform, holding a huge bouquet of flowers.

For the moment, Lilly’s chaotic thoughts became centered as her gaze focused on the cluster of blood-red chrysanthemums in Raven’s arms. Her heart filled with warmth at the devotion and kindness Raven had shown her in the past weeks. “They’re beautiful!” she murmured. “But, Raven, you shouldn’t have gone to such an expense.”

“They’re from the whole Pueblo tribe,” Raven explained. She crossed the room, her crepe soled white shoes whispering on the tile floor. “They’ve made you my adopted sister.” She arranged the flowers in a vase on a table near the window, then turned, smiling. “An occasion like this calls for a celebration with flowers and wine.” She winked mischievously. “I sneaked a bottle of champagne up to this floor. The head nurse is a buddy of mine. She’s cooling it in the refrigerator.” She giggled.

Lilly had been resting on the hospital bed. Now she sat up. She had awakened early this morning, bathed and dressed in a light cotton dress Raven had lent her. For the past hour, she had been listening to the muted sounds of the hospital, the murmur of nurses passing in the hall, the voice on the hospital intercom calling a doctor’s name, the rattle of breakfast trays. The hopes and fears of the past weeks were culminating in this morning’s drama.

She could feel the chill in her body, the trembling of her fingers. “Raven, I’m scared—”

“Sure you are,” the Indian girl nodded sympathetically. She moved to the side of the bed and clasped Lilly’s hand. “After all, it isn’t every day a woman gets to see her new face.”

Lilly looked down at the hospital identification band on her wrist. The name “Lilly Smith” had been placed there by the staff. It was a made-up name. Everything she had was borrowed, the dress she was wearing, even her last name. Tears blurred her vision. If only she could think clearly!

Her mind was spinning with thoughts of all that had happened since Dr. Marshall had brought her to Albuquerque from the Indian village. He had checked her into this hospital. The sale of her jewelry had been enough to cover hospital expenses. She had been introduced to Dr. Edmund Graves, the plastic surgeon. He had given her a careful examination. He assured her the damage to her face could be repaired, but there would have to be a series of painful operations, then a period of convalescence. She had readily agreed to the operations. By then, pain was nothing new to her.

Pain killers and tranquilizers had kept her mind so hazy that those weeks seemed like a dream. After the surgery, Raven had moved her to her apartment in the city to convalesce. Her mind had been in a fog during that time.

“I’d rather you didn’t look at your face without the bandages,” Dr. Marshall had told her. “I’d hate for you to be thrown into another spell of depression.”

“Yes,” Dr. Graves had agreed. “Until things start to heal, plastic surgery can make matters look even worse. Your face will be swollen and bruised and, for a while, the incisions will be obvious. In time, all that will fade away.”

This time, she’d needed no doctor’s orders to keep her away from mirrors. She was too afraid to look, afraid that the hope the doctors expressed would turn out to be empty words, afraid that she was condemned to spend the rest of her life a pitiful freak.

Whenever her groggy mind could grasp a rational thought, it tried to reassure her. Every time the surgeon had examined her, he had expressed satisfaction with the way the surgery was healing. Raven had applied prescribed medications to her face every day, and each time had assured Lilly that everything was progressing as it should.

Nevertheless, Raven had discreetly removed all the mirrors from the apartment and kept a light gauze mask on Lilly’s face so she wouldn’t see her reflection in a window pane or bit of shiny metal. Lilly preferred to spend her days in the apartment with the shades drawn like a sick animal hiding from the world. Daily headaches continued to torture her.

Raven had brought her back to the hospital the day before for a final examination. She had spent the day having various blood tests and X-rays made. Now she was waiting half with anxiety, half with terror for the arrival of the doctors on their morning rounds.

What would their final verdict be? Was she going to be condemned to a life of hiding away from the world? Would her face be better, but still a mass of scars? Or would it be halfway normal again?