In Medias Res Read online

  In Medias Res

  Sometimes you have to forget who you were to remember who you are.

  For Sydney Stanton, nothing could be closer to the truth. Suffering from amnesia, Sydney finds herself alone in the middle of O’Hare Airport with no idea how she got there, where she’s headed, or even who she is. Her only clues to her identity are the ticket to Key West in her hand and the items in the backpack slung over her left shoulder.

  Halfway around the world, Dr. Jennifer Rekowski, Sydney’s best friend and longtime confidante, holds the key to unlocking Sydney’s memory. But Jennifer, nursing a broken heart and trapped in the middle of a civil war, remains agonizingly out of reach.

  Can two women united by love and divided by circumstance find each other—and themselves—before time runs out?

  In Medias Res

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  E-Books from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  http://www.boldstrokesbookshop.com

  E-Books are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.

  In Medias Res

  by

  Yolanda Wallace

  2010

  In Medias Res

  © 2010 Yolanda Wallace. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 10: 1-60282-142-2E

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60282-142-9E

  This Electronic Book is published by

  Bold Strokes Books, Inc.

  P.O. Box 249

  Valley Falls, New York 12185

  First Edition: March 2010

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Credits

  Editor: Cindy Cresap

  Production Design: Stacia Seaman

  Cover Design By Sheri ([email protected])

  Acknowledgements

  A wise woman once told me that a writer should be a person on whom nothing is lost. With that in mind, I am fully aware of the tremendous opportunity I have been afforded by Bold Strokes Books to make my dream of becoming a writer a reality. Thank you to Radclyffe and the Bold Strokes family for making my dreams come true. Thank you also to my patient partner, who loves me even when I’m suffering through the throes of writer’s block.

  Dedication

  To Dita.

  Thank you for choosing me.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  About the Author

  Books Available From Bold Strokes Books

  In medias res is Latin for “into the middle of things.” It usually describes a narrative that begins, not at the beginning of a story, but somewhere in the middle—usually at some crucial point in the action. The term comes from the ancient Roman poet Horace, who advised the aspiring epic poet to go straight to the heart of the story instead of commencing at the beginning.

  —Jack Lynch, Glossary of Literary and Rhetorical Terms, 1999.

  http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Terms/inmediasres.html

  (accessed December 2009).

  Chapter One

  I was in the middle of the airport when it happened.

  I was running as fast as I could, dodging one startled person after another, when I realized I didn’t know where I was running or why. I couldn’t even remember my own name. I know it sounds clichéd—like the opening lines of a bad film noir—but it was true.

  I hazarded a glance over my left shoulder to make sure no one was chasing me. When I turned around, I nearly collided with an elderly woman pulling a rolling carry-on bag behind her. The bag—Louis Vuitton or a very good knockoff—was bigger than she was. She brushed my cooties off her crisp linen suit and muttered something I couldn’t hear. Biting back a more colorful response, I apologized to her, then stepped aside to catch my breath. With my heart pounding the way it was, that wasn’t easy.

  My first reaction was abject panic. It’s one thing not to know where you are. To not know who you are? That’s something else altogether.

  Standing with my hands on my knees, I sucked air into my burning lungs. I looked like a track athlete after an especially grueling race. Only I didn’t have a medal to show for it.

  A couple of people looked at me with concern on their faces as they passed by me. Most kept walking as if they had seen it all before. No one stopped and, more importantly, no one seemed to recognize me.

  Security personnel wandered the concourse, but I couldn’t bring myself to ask any of them for help. I felt vaguely ashamed. As if what was happening to me—or had already happened—was somehow my fault.

  My mind raced as fast as my heart beat. I had signs to tell me where I was—Welcome to O’Hare, they blared—but I had nothing to tell me who I was. Or did I?

  In my left hand was a ticket to Key West. Coach, with a connecting flight in Miami. I was on my way to Florida and I wasn’t rolling in dough. Two things I could now be sure of.

  I dove headfirst into the steady flow of foot traffic, allowing myself to drift with the current until it led me to the nearest board that displayed the list of departing and arriving flights. The flight that corresponded to the ticket in my hand was taking off in ten minutes. That explained why I had been running. Another mystery solved.

  I was standing in gate seventeen. The one I needed was fourteen gates away. After shifting into top speed again, I made it to the gate just as the attendants were preparing to close the doors. I thrust my ticket toward the nearest attendant, who flashed me an irritated smile.

  “We’ve been paging you all over the airport,” she said as she ran my ticket through the scanner. “Running a little late, are we, Mrs. Stanton?”

  “That’s the least of my problems.”

  Through the window, I could see the ground crew deicing the plane. I wanted to be out there with them. I needed a nice blast of cold air to cool me down—and to dry the semicircular sweat stains that darkened my T-shirt.

  I was dressed in layers—a long-sleeved compression shirt under a Rolling Stones concert T-shirt topped off by a wool peacoat. My jeans weren’t lined, but my boots certainly were. I could feel the faux fur rubbing against my wool socks.

  Stress, embarrassment, and my mad dash from whatever had been my starting point combined to ratchet my body temperature up a good ten degrees. I pulled off my coat and draped it over my left arm. I used the other arm to wipe perspiration off my forehead.

  The attendants, crisp and cool in their airline-issue uniforms, looked like they wanted nothing to do with me. I couldn’t blame them. God knows how I must have looked. The window behind them didn’t act as a very good mirror. In it, I could see a faint reflection of myself. I was tall and angular with shoulder-length blond hair and haunted brown eyes. I wasn’t covered in blood and I wasn’t in pain, so whatever trauma I had experienced to deprive me of my memory must ha
ve been mental instead of physical.

  I was filled with questions, but I didn’t know where to find any of the answers. Were they in Miami, Key West, or Chicago? What did I have to lose?

  I had come to the airport for a reason and that reason was obviously to go to Florida, so I kept going in that direction.

  I retrieved my boarding pass then headed down the corridor and stepped onto the waiting plane.

  “Welcome aboard,” one of the flight attendants chirped. I mumbled a thank you and began making my way to the back of the aircraft. The other passengers threw daggers at me with their eyes as if the flight crew had held up the flight for me. The proud owner of a seat in the tail section, I doubted I was that important.

  I collapsed into my seat and quickly fastened my seat belt. I wanted to get settled in so I could examine the contents of the backpack slung over my left shoulder.

  A black leather clutch inside the main compartment of the backpack housed $500 in cash, a driver’s license, a couple of gold credit cards, a debit card, a medical insurance card, and what I guessed were family photos. A checkbook register indicated I had just shy of $14,000 in the bank, supplemented monthly by $6,000 deposits noted in the register as “allowance.” Nice work if you could get it.

  The driver’s license was issued by the state of Illinois on July 16, 2007, and was due for renewal on August 24, 2011. The accompanying photo looked more like a mug shot, but I was more interested in the information the tiny piece of plastic imparted than in whether the picture was a good likeness of me.

  According to my license, my name was Sydney P. Stanton. I lived on Waveland Avenue. I was five foot eleven, weighed one hundred and thirty-five pounds, and I was an organ donor. That last part was good to know. I was in desperate need of a brain transplant. The one I had wasn’t working. Sputtering along, it hadn’t shut down completely. I still knew with relative certainty that two plus two equaled four, but processing more complex thoughts took a concerted effort. It felt a bit like walking through mud. I got where I was going, but it took me a while to get there. And I got awful dirty on the way.

  The passenger across the aisle from me was reading what I assumed was a current copy of the Chicago Tribune. The headline on the front page announced “Subway Slasher Gets 10 Years.” I looked at the date above the forty-eight point type. January 12, 2010. I compared the date on the newspaper to the one listed on my license as my date of birth. In seven months, I would be thirty-two years old.

  “Too young to be senile, but old enough to know better.”

  The phrase popped into my head unbidden. The voice reciting it was a woman’s voice, but it wasn’t my voice. My mother’s, perhaps? My grandmother’s? Was I remembering something from my past, my present, or was I going crazy on top of everything else?

  I sifted through the photos in the wallet, hoping that one would strike a chord in me and my memory would come rushing back completely instead of a fragment here or there. Then again, if seeing my own face couldn’t bring me around, how could I expect it from someone else’s?

  The first photo was a twenty-year-old picture of my parents, my brother, and me. I knew not because I remembered but because of what was written on the back. “The Paulsens—Sidney, Patricia, Sydney, and Patrick—December 1990.” The four of us were decked out in festive Christmas sweaters in front of a roaring fire. The fire was obviously fake, but our smiles seemed genuine.

  Brown-haired with a soft chin and round body, my brother looked like my mother; I looked like my father. I guess that explained the names.

  I stared at the smiling faces, willing myself to make a connection with one or all of them. For all the kinship I felt for the strangers staring back at me, the photo could have been nothing more than a pre-packaged insert that had come with the wallet.

  The second photo was of me and a woman who looked enough like me to be my sister. The back of the picture, however, revealed she was something else. “Jennifer and Sydney, best friends for life,” the handwritten caption proclaimed.

  The photo was undated. It looked fairly recent but not new. In it, Jennifer and I wore matching uniforms. Our arms around each other’s shoulders, our index fingers in the air, we were apparently attending or participating in some kind of sporting event. Basketball? Soccer? Softball? The picture was cropped too tightly for me to tell what sport we were dressed for. Our upraised arms prevented me from seeing the name of the team we were so proud of. I could make out a patch of green in the background but, unable to see the lines, I couldn’t tell for what sport the field of play was marked.

  In addition to being “best friends for life,” were Jennifer and I sports fans, former teammates, or both? The way I was sucking wind in the airport, whatever athletic career I might have had was a distant memory. In more ways than one.

  Then something occurred to me.

  I flipped back to the first photo. The one of me and my family. The name on the back of the picture was different from the one on my driver’s license. At twelve, I had been Sydney Paulsen. Nineteen years later, I had become Sydney Stanton. That meant I was married. There on the ring finger of my left hand was the proof—a diamond wedding ring and a matching platinum band. How had I not noticed them before?

  I stared at the rings for a long moment but couldn’t force myself to feel like they were a part of me, no matter how deep the indentations they had made in my skin.

  I searched the wallet for photos of my missing husband.

  Behind another family portrait, one even older than the previous—I was an infant in this one; my brother looked to be about two or three—was a snapshot of me and a handsome man with black hair and shining green eyes. The picture was taken on or for our wedding day. I was wearing a stunning strapless white gown with a mile-long train. He was resplendent in a dark gray tuxedo. Standing next to a four-tier cake, we each held a glass of champagne. Our arms were entwined as we leaned in close to take a sip of the sparkling drink.

  I pulled the picture out of its plastic cover so I could read the back. “Dr. and Mrs. Jack Stanton, 6-12-08.”

  I flipped the photo over. I was a doctor’s wife, the envy of single women everywhere. I had been married to the man in the picture for nineteen months. Though I had obviously loved him at one time—loved him enough to commit my body and my life to him—I felt nothing for him now. Shouldn’t the love of my life, if that’s what he was, prompt at least a glimmer of recognition?

  Where was he? Did he know where I was? Did he even care? What about the rest of my family? Were they tearing their hair out looking for me or were they going about their daily lives blissfully unaware that something was very, very wrong with me?

  There was a cell phone in the side pocket of the backpack, but it was of no use to me. As the plane taxied down the runway, the flight attendant who had welcomed me aboard had announced that the use of cell phones was prohibited during the duration of the flight. I would have to wait until the plane landed in Miami before I could scroll through the phone’s menu and search the entries in the directory.

  I was supposed to touch down in Key West at four thirty-five p.m. Eastern. I glanced at my left wrist, where a silver Citizen silently kept track of the time. It was only ten thirty a.m. Central. With another five hours to kill, I continued searching through the backpack.

  The fact that I was headed to Key West was firmly established. What was uncertain was my reason for going there. Was I on vacation? Abandoning six feet of snow and negative wind chills for eighty-degree temperatures seemed like a good idea. Was I meeting someone? If so, who? And why weren’t we flying together? Where would I stay? A five-star hotel? Too ritzy for the way I was dressed. A roach motel? Too college road trip for someone who had reached the dark side of thirty. Perhaps something in between.

  Behind a bag of toiletries was a leather-bound day planner. With the year only twelve days old, the book wasn’t much help. Aside from daily entries at ten a.m. for “gym” and entries on Tuesdays and Thursdays at noon for “spa tr
eatment,” there were precious few additional notes.

  On January 1 was “watch bowl games with Team Paulsen.” That had been an all-day affair.

  January 4 had seen me running all over town. At eleven a.m. was “get oil changed.” At one p.m. was “meet Mom for lunch at Bob Chinn’s.” At two thirty was “dentist appt.” At four was “p/u dry cleaning—d/o Jack’s tux.” (I translated the shorthand as “pick up” and “drop off.”) At five was “committee meeting @ Gale’s—make sure members stick to agenda or it will turn into a sleepover!!” A squiggly line was drawn from seven thirty to nine. Next to it was written, “call out for dinner—Chinese or Thai?”

  The next three days had been relatively quiet, with only one entry on January 7: “pick up steaks for party—marinate overnight.” There were four entries on January 8, however. At nine thirty a.m. was “p/u Jack’s tux.” At five was “get to Athena’s early for last-minute inspection.” From six to eight was “Jen’s party.” And from eight until one a.m., a five-hour block of time had been carved out for “welcome back Rekowski.”

  The sole entry on January 9 was at eight p.m.: “dinner w/Jack at Ambria—talk to him!!” The word “talk” was underlined four times. Underscored with such force that the pen had bitten into the page. That was the last entry until June 12, which was marked with a tentative “anniversary in Paris?”

  With no mention of work, I had no idea what I did for a living—if anything. My monthly allowance seemed generous enough to cover all my expenses—the gym membership and trips to the spa, among other frivolous things. My schedule made me sound like a glorified errand girl. Perhaps being a doctor’s wife was my only identity. With the constant trips to the body shop for toning and buffing, I apparently worked hard to maintain that identity.