Love Untold

Love Untold: Chapter 37

Love Untold: Chapter 37


The computer screen was hurting Chrissie’s eyes and giving her a major headache.  She knew it was her own fault because she couldn’t stop looking...searching...probing every internet site out there that listed the name of possible Horace Willard’s or racing sites for bicycles, motorcycles, car racing -- really, any kind of racing.  She’d become obsessed, barely sleeping, eating, breathing, needing to find her husband again, even if everyone said she was crazy.

Four months had passed since she woke up in the hospital and found out that, not only had she been in a coma due to a work-related accident -- if an eighty pound crystal and bronze chandelier falling on her due to an installer’s negligence could be called a mere accident -- but she had also been told that everything she thought was real, wasn’t.

She wasn’t married, she’d never been married, she wasn’t pregnant, she was only twenty-eight, and there was no Race Willard in her life.  There wasn’t a Race Willard anywhere for that matter.  After searching for him in the white pages, ancestry search engines, and everything in between, she found two Horace Willards.  One died in 1804, and the other had been born three years ago.  As much as she joked to him about the oddity of his name, she wished it was more common.  But did that deter Chrissie?

No.  She moved onto studying racing, looking at videos of races, watching newscasts of races, pouring through magazines and publications about races, and staring at pictures of men in those sports, but none of them looked like Race.  None of them made her heart stutter and her insides feel warm and gooey when she looked at them.  None of them was the man she fell in love with.

And she did love him.  She didn’t care what Dena said, and her doctors said, and the stupid psychiatrist at the rehab clinic said.  It might have been a dream, but it was real in her heart.

Chrissie clicked off the screen and rubbed circles on her throbbing temples.  Headaches were common for her now.  Her head injury had been bad, but no lasting damage, other than the tendency to come down with a debilitating migraine on occasion and a two-inch scar just above her right eyebrow.  Once she’d been cleared for rehab, the doctors at the hospital let her go.  Dena checked her into a center for two weeks to help her regain strength in her muscles and -- Chrissie truly believed this was the true reason she’d been kept there -- to receive psychiatric therapy.  

Upon total awareness and cognition of what happened to her -- and finally gaining the strength to climb out of bed on her own -- and learning what had been taken away from her when she woke up, she threw the biggest fit Dena had ever seen.  The hospital room looked like a tornado swept through it after Chrissie was finally calmed down by drugs.  She refused to accept that Race had been a dream.  And the irony of it all hit her hard, sending her into a cycle of spiralling depression and then right back up to a Herculean determination to find the man she loved.

She’d been released from the rehab center on two conditions.  One, she had to have a live-in adult staying with her -- Dena.  And two, she was prescribed a routine of anti-depressant drugs and sleep-aids, both of which she flushed down the toilet.  She wasn’t crazy.  She wasn’t.  She’d never been more certain of anything in her life.  She would find him, and when she did, they’d be together again...forever.

With that thought, she turned on the web browser again and started all over, making notes and bookmarking sites to cross-check with others.  Dena walked into the home office a few minutes later.

“You should be resting,” her sister said.  Chrissie ignored her.  “The doctor said you shouldn’t be exhausting yourself like this.”

“I’m fine,” Chrissie said, not taking her eyes off the computer.

“You’re not fine--”

Chrissie slapped her palms down on the keyboard, making letters jump all over the search box.  “I’m fine,” she hissed.  “I’m busy.  What do you want?”

“I want you to stop torturing yourself this way,” Dena said sadly.  “You’re not going to find someone that doesn’t exist.”

“He’s real,” she said for about the zillionth time.

“He’s a dream, Chris.”

“He was not a dream!” Chrissie shouted.  “I loved him!  And he loved me!  Why would my mind make up something like that if it wasn’t supposed to happen?”

Dena came over and put a hand on Chrissie’s shoulder.  She shrugged it off.  “Sis, who really knows what the brain must do to survive while comatose?  It’s been different for every coma victim.  Some people remember nothing, no time passage or anything, and others remember nightmares and sensations, but your brain wasn’t predicting the future for you.  It was just passing time.”

“I don’t care what you say,” Chrissie argued.  “He’s real, and I’m going to find him.”

“You’re willing to risk your health, your job, your whole life for something that did not happen?”

Chrissie glanced up, smiling irrationally.  “I found Brian, didn’t I?  He was in my dream, and then he applied for my office assistant, and he was the same person.  It was meant to be, all of it.”

“Chris,” Dena sighed.  “So you found a business geek with the name Brian...there’s like a million Brian’s in this country.  It’s a fluke.”

“No,” Chrissie shook her head, going back to the computer.  “It was fate.  Race is here somewhere, and I’ll find him.”

“And then what?” Dena asked, putting her hands on her hips.  “You’re just going to walk up to him and say, ‘Hi, I’m Chrissie.  I’m in love with you, and you love me back’?  You do that to any man, and he’ll think you’re crazy.”

“I’m not crazy,” Chrissie muttered, rapidly scanning a website for the U.S. Soccer Federation.  Hey, it wasn’t bicycling, but it was a sport, and she was running out of options.

“Well, you sound crazy,” Dena muttered right back and stomped out of the room.  Chrissie barely noticed that she left.

Finding Brian had been a sign, she was certain of it.  He was fresh out of college, just like her coma-memory of hiring him, and he looked just the same, even down to the ugly glasses and unruly hair.  And he knew how to run an office, which was a plus, because she’d been avoiding working more than absolutely necessary, and her business had started to suffer.  Finding Brian two weeks ago had been what she needed to get her mind on straight.  

Maybe her brain had only been passing time while it fixed itself, but she knew in her heart that there was a man out there waiting for her.  Race said it had been love at first glance for him, and Chrissie believed that.  She believed that when she found the man she was supposed to be with, love would stab them both through the heart, and there would be happiness in her life again.  There would be Race -- or someone just like him.

It was destiny, and it was genuine, and yes, it was a little crazy, but it was love...a boundless, enduring, untold love...and it would be hers again.

The true craziness of her dream had been that it all seemed like a movie played in her mind.  She’d been an actress in the unreal film, playing her part until it finished, and the she got to see Race’s side, like sitting down in a theater, remembering how she lived that life, and then watching Race live his part in the dream.  It was the only way she could explain living that life and then knowing how Race thought and felt and reasoned her behavior...it made her love him all the more for seeing his responses after the fact.

Yet, like every dream, the details and chapters of the story were starting to fade away, leaving only a muted, obscure memory, and that scared the life out of Chrissie.  She didn’t want to forget that happiness of being married and pregnant and a whole live ahead of her full of more happiness and love.  She could see Race’s face, and his smile, and remember his scent and his voice, and the feel of his hands and mouth and body on hers, but the times they spent together in her mind were slowly evaporating into a strangled nothingness.  For two months, she went to sleep every night, terrified that she’d forget all about the love she shared with that fantasy man, and with the rays of morning’s light, she discovered that more and more little pieces of her coma dream had vanished.

It was the fear that drove her crazy.

As she scanned through a list of bios and photos of players, she accidentally clicked on a banner ad for a national sports store chain, and...

There he was.

It’s him!  A photo of the CEO graced the front page of the website for the store...and it was him.  The name was different -- David Elliot -- and his eyes were darker, but that could just be from the graphics of the computer, and he looked older than she thought he’d be -- nearing forty.  However, the dimples were there, and the face was nearly identical to Race’s from her dream.  It was him!  It had to be.  The store chain was the same as Race’s sponsor, and that just couldn’t be a coincidence.

“Dena!  I’ve found him!” she shouted at the top of her lungs.  “It’s him!  He’s real!”

Dena rushed into the office and leaned over Chrissie’s shoulders.  “Are you sure, sis?”

“I’m sure,” Chrissie said, crying happily.  “It’s him.”

“His name is David, and...uh, oh,” she moaned.  “Sorry, sis, but that can’t be him.”

“Why?  It is him.  I know it!”

Dena pointed to the small paragraph under David’s photo.  “Married for six years and has two kids,” she read.  “I may not have my degree in marriage counseling yet, but that’s a road you don’t want to take.”

Depression swamped Chrissie as she read the words describing David Elliot.  No...  She closed her eyes and squeezed out desolate tears.  She found him...it was the man she fell in love with...and she was too late.  Six years too late.  Dena patted Chrissie back, trying to soothe her.

“Chris...It’ll be okay.”

“No, it won’t,” Chrissie sobbed.  “Oh, Dena!  I don’t know what to do!”

Dena sighed and hugged her tightly.  In a brighter tone, she said, “Maybe it’s his brother...”

Brother?  Chrissie’s head jerked up.  Brother!  Yes, Race had a brother!  An older brother.  That’s it!  She just had to find David Elliot’s brother.

“Yes!  His brother!” Chrissie asserted and cleared all the tabs from her computer screen, pulling up the genealogy database she recently subscribed to.  

“Chrissie, I think you’re grasping at straws here,” Dena moaned, but she scooted up another chair to help go through David Elliot’s family history.  Chrissie gave her a watery smile, and said, “Thank you, D...if you didn’t believe me, then...”

“I didn’t say I believed you,” Dena returned, but she wrapped an arm around her sister’s shoulders.  “But I love you, and I’ll help in any way I can.”

“I love you, too, D.”

For the rest of the afternoon, they searched and cross-referenced and deliberated the life of the man who looked so much like Race, it was scary.  Their only real obstacle was the number of David Elliots in this country.  Since the CEO of the sports store pretty much kept his family and personal life out of the limelight, the sisters had little to go on.  All they knew was that he was in his mid to late thirties, married with the two children, and might possibly have a brother.  With Chrissie typing away at the keyboard, Dena made a list of prospects for his brother on a legal pad.

By midnight, they had twenty-three brothers of a David Elliot to further explore.  And by that time, Chrissie’s headache could not be ignored any longer.  She staggered to her bed, crawled under the covers, still fully dressed, and cried herself to sleep.