by Edie Claire
And he had apparently saved her life. Somehow.
“It sounds like I owe you a lot,” she offered sincerely. “Thank you. I don’t completely understand what happened, but whatever you did for me, I appreciate it.”
The man whose name she had already forgotten shrugged at her with a smile. An amazing smile. It came with straight white teeth, a twinkle of the eyes, and whatever mysterious, indescribable quality for which the phrase “lit up the room” was coined. “It was nothing,” he replied in a smooth baritone that completed the package. “My friend Ben was the one who spotted you. And carried you in from the beach. We’re both just glad you’re okay.”
“Well, thanks to both of you, then,” Laney insisted, feeling awkward. The thought of having some other man she didn’t know carrying her unconscious body anywhere was disconcerting. Having this one stand here, looking at her like he wanted something, was even more unsettling. What on earth could he want? Perhaps he was just jazzed about being a hero and wanted additional props. She could do that. “I’m still not sure what could have happened to me,” she admitted. “I’m usually a very good swimmer.” I actually set a college record in the women’s breaststroke, she added mentally, which makes this whole situation even more mortifying.
Mr. Hostel Owner responded with such a high-voltage, flirty smile that she nearly looked behind her to see who else he could be aiming the thing at. God knew she looked like roadkill. Did he turn on this much charm with every female he met?
Evidently.
“Well, you never really had a chance to swim,” he explained. “When the wave hit, you lost your footing, and when you fell you hit your head.”
“A wave knocked me over?” Laney asked curiously. “But how? Why didn’t I see it coming?”
“You had climbed up onto some rocks that jutted out into the water,” he continued. “It’s a common mistake people make when they’re not familiar with the ocean. You look at where the waves are breaking now, and you assume you’re out of range. But wave heights can change quickly. You didn’t see the larger waves coming because at the time you were looking up… at the sky.”
There was a question in his voice. For a brief moment Laney could feel a strong wind buffeting her cheeks, tangling her hair. She could see gray clouds swirling overhead, hear the whining, incessant roar of an atmosphere in motion. But she was remembering other times, other storms. In her memory, there were no waves. As much as she had studied ocean weather patterns and the physics of tides, her practical knowledge of ocean safety was admittedly zero. Her experience of oceans was zero, period.
She felt self-conscious as his remarkable eyes studied her. What could he possibly find so fascinating? Perhaps he just thought she was weird. Well, that she was used to. “I guess I should explain. I look at the sky because I’m a meteorologist. Storms are what I do.”
“Well, this all makes perfect sense, then!” the doctor proclaimed. “No wonder you came to Tofino! People come from all over the world to storm-watch at our beaches.”
Laney made no response. Having never heard of this place, she was almost certain that wasn’t the reason. Still, it made the most sensible explanation so far.
“I asked Jason to come by to see if your talking to him again could jog your memory a bit,” the doctor continued. “I’m guessing it hasn’t. But don’t worry. I’ve spoken with the neurologist and he’s confident you’ll make steady progress. We just have to be patient and let nature take its course.”
Laney nodded, but she was sure her frustration showed. She was not a patient person. When a problem presented itself, she researched and she took action. And not always in that order.
“Looking through your bag might help, too,” Mr. Hostel Owner suggested. “Your phone and your laptop are in there, as well as some papers.”
Now that sounded like a good idea, Laney thought. Evidently his pretty head contained a brain.
“I should confess that I did take a look in there,” he apologized. “We were trying to locate your next of kin when you were unconscious, and I thought you might have packed something that would help. Sorry if I shouldn’t have.”
Laney shrugged. All her important stuff was password protected. She didn’t give a hoot who saw her underwear, at least not when she wasn’t wearing it. “That’s okay,” she replied, managing a smile. “I would have done the same, I’m sure. Thanks for making the effort.” She turned her attention back to her bag. After a moment’s digging, she unearthed the holy grail.
My phone!
She wasn’t sure how she looked as she pulled out the device, but whatever her expression, it made both men laugh out loud. She looked up at them with a thankful smile, anxious to get to work. “I’m sorry,” she said to the cute guy, “but I don’t remember your name.”
“Jason,” he answered, flashing another Hollywood grin. “Jason Buchanan.”
“Well, thank you, Jason, for not letting me drown in a fit of my own stupidity,” she offered. “And thank you, Doctor,” she couldn’t remember his name either, dammit, “for being so encouraging. I hope to be out of all your hair as soon as possible.” She clamped her phone to her chest, waiting.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to be very careful with that phone,” the doctor warned. “I understand you’re anxious to reconnect, but overstimulating your eyes and therefore your brain could have some very unpleasant consequences. We’ll have to monitor your responses very closely. I’d say no more than five minutes on the phone, to start.”
“I’ll be careful,” Laney insisted.
The doctor didn’t look convinced, and Laney didn’t blame him. She had things to figure out, and she was going to take care of business, come what may. He threw her a skeptical look, then turned to the door and gestured for Jason to join him. “I’ll send someone in to check on you in a few minutes.”
“Just so you know,” Jason added cheerfully, “if they spring you before the week’s out, you still have a room at the lodge. You have a few things left there — wet things drying out, mostly. If you want me to bring any of them here, just give me a call. Here’s my card.”
He sounded so earnest; his tone so legitimately friendly. Were all Canadians so hospitable? Laney didn’t know. But unless this one was perversely into hospital gowns and brain damage, his playful flirtatiousness must be a default setting. She took the card, said a polite goodbye to both men, waited for the door to close behind them, then lay back on her pillows and turned on the phone.
As her screen sprang to life, showing the last picture she’d ever taken with her mother, a noxious wave of emotion overwhelmed her. She was a horrible daughter; she was forgetting something! Something important, something she should know. It was painful, horrible, unbearable. And it was waiting there, just beyond her reach…
A bolt of pain shot across her skull, and she groaned and shut her eyes. What the hell was going on? Were these feelings real, or just another symptom of her injury?
She focused on breathing slowly, and in a few seconds the pain faded. Oh, Aunt June. I need to talk to you!
Her phone battery was very low, but it would have to do. She pulled up her aunt’s name in her contact list and pushed call. The tone rang for a frighteningly long time before a warm, beautifully familiar voice met Laney’s ear.
“Oh, honey!” June said with enthusiasm. “What on earth is up with you, darlin’? Where did you go in such a hurry?”
Laney blinked. “You… you don’t know where I went?”
There was a pause. When her aunt spoke again her voice was slower, almost cautious. “Well, no. I asked you, but you didn’t seem to want to explain.”
Hot tears welled up behind Laney’s eyes. What was wrong with her? “I had a little accident, Aunt June,” she said, embarrassed by the tremor in her voice. “I’m fine now, except I have a concussion, and I can’t remember what happened the last few days…” She told the story in as coherent a fashion as she could manage.
June was understandably horrified
, and Laney spent the next several minutes turning down offers for various relatives, friends, and complete strangers to travel up to Canada to fetch her immediately.
“I really am okay staying here, for now,” Laney insisted. “Everybody at the hospital keeps telling me I’ll get better faster if I rest and try to relax. At least for a week. Apparently I’d planned to stay here that long anyway. Is Gran okay? Where is she?”
June assured her that May was doing as well as could be expected in her new home, and as soon as the memory care center was mentioned, Laney found she could envision it. But still, her anxiety didn’t abate. “Are you sure I didn’t give you or Amy any clue why I would want to go to Canada?”
“You didn’t say a word about where you were going to either of us,” June insisted. “We just knew that something had really upset you. It must have happened when you stopped in to see your Gran that last time, because I’d talked to you on the phone earlier, and you seemed fine then. But that night you were so upset… you just looked awful, honey. I think your Gran must have said something to you, but you wouldn’t say what.”
Another wave of foreboding arose in Laney’s gut. So, something had happened. Something horrible.
“She’d been getting you confused with your mother a lot, and sometimes she didn’t seem to know you at all, which I know upset you. But I could tell it was more. She’s gotten pretty doggone mean with me once or twice lately — maybe that was it, that she got a little ugly with you? Lord knows she gave me and Amy both an earful this morning!”
Laney swallowed. “Maybe. I… I really don’t know.”
“Well, honey, all I can tell you is that night you wasn’t hardly yourself. You just looked like a ghost. You said you needed to go on a road trip somewhere and you’d be gone for a while — maybe a couple weeks. I asked where you were headed and why, but you just kept saying it was a personal matter, and that you were sorry but you really had to go.”
“So I drove,” Laney murmured. If she had driven herself to British Columbia, then her car must be here! Comforted by the thought, she sat up and rooted around in the suitcase for her keys, but couldn’t find them. She had probably left them in her backpack. Hadn’t Jason mentioned some stuff left in her room? She needed her stuff back. She needed her life back.
“Aunt June,” she pleaded as a new, duller pain crept into the back of her skull. Moving her head was not a good idea. “Is there anything else I said that could explain why I would drive all this way? Did I say anything about wanting to see the ocean?”
“Not that I heard, honey,” June replied. “But if that’s all you wanted, don’t you think you’d have gone down to Biloxi or Gulf Shores? Who on earth drives all the way up to Canada just to see the ocean? In the middle of winter?”
“Nobody,” Laney agreed. It was enough of an undertaking just getting to the Gulf of Mexico. She knew because she’d spent half her life wanting to do it, but could never quite afford to make it happen.
“Now, you did ask me a couple of questions I thought were odd,” June added.
“Like what?”
“Like asking me what I remembered about the tornado. But of course I couldn’t tell you anything you didn’t already know about that. And then you asked me about your daddy, how often we’d gotten to visit with him when he was alive. What we did for holidays and such.”
Laney felt like crying again. “Why on earth would I ask any of that?”
“I wish I knew,” June replied with frustration.
“Is Gran really all right? I mean, now?”
“She’s doing a little better every day,” June said firmly. “She’s even got a friend already. Woman just down the hall named Hazel. Don’t you worry about your Gran, honey. You worry about getting yourself better. You hear me?”
Gulping through another irritating bout of tears, Laney made all sorts of promises to her aunt with regard to her own health, safety, welfare, and future communications before saying goodbye. She barely managed to hang up before her phone died completely. She gazed out the window into the dark and the soaking rain. No wonder it had taken June so long to answer. In Missouri, it must be the middle of the night.
Her head ached abominably. She rolled onto her side and closed her eyes. She hadn’t come to Tofino just to see the ocean, stormy weather or no. There was something else. Some other reason. Something so awful it terrified her. Oh, why could she not remember!
The tears kept coming, squeezing out through her tightly clamped lids.
Perhaps she didn’t want to remember.
Chapter 7
Peck, Missouri, Six Days Ago
Laney surveyed the papers spread out across her great-grandparents’ antique dining table. The big old house was unnervingly quiet. Although Laney had grown up inside these walls, before this week she could count on one hand the number of times she had slept here alone. Last night made two in a row, but on neither occasion had she noticed the silence. She had been far too exhausted to feel anything except anticipation for sweet oblivion. Now, as the sun rose while she savored a very dark cup of coffee, the quiet seemed deafening. The resonant tick-tock of her Gran’s family clock, which had sat on the fireplace mantel since May herself was a child, was as much a part of the house as its brick walls, high ceilings, and wainscoting, and its absence left the space feeling wholly alien. There were no creaks from human footfalls, no hum of the toilet running in the upstairs hall, no fresh bacon crackling on the stove. Laney was alone.
Two days ago, Aunt June had taken May back to her house for a “short visit.” Amy’s whole family had then descended upon the big house, helping Laney to sort through May’s most precious belongings, hauling the curated collection to the memory care center, and then moving it into May’s new space, where they had tried to recreate the familiar right down to the arrangement of pictures on her walls. The undertaking had been both daunting and sorrowful, but two nights of quality sleep had at least managed to refresh Laney’s brain enough for her to tackle the mountain of financial and legal chores that had piled up over the last month.
Unfortunately, getting everything laid out in a logical and organized manner had succeeded only in making the tasks ahead loom larger. Gran’s financial situation was not good. Grandpa Auggie, whom Laney remembered as a big, strapping man with a large belly and a laugh like Santa Claus, had been a bedrock of his community and a well-loved local businessman. The funeral home he had inherited from his father had served the town of Peck and much of the surrounding countryside for generations, but as the larger neighboring towns grew, competition had increased, as had his costs for overhead and upkeep. Never as skilled at bookkeeping as he was at charming people, Auggie eventually wound up underwater, and by the time a heart attack compelled him to sell the business, he and May had no cushion on which to retire. Laney was aware that, after his death over a decade ago, Christi herself had bought the family home from her mother. What Laney hadn’t realized was that if not for Christi’s good credit and largesse, May would have had to reverse-mortgage the house just to get herself out of debt. The only funds May had now to put toward assisted living were social security and her veterans’ widow’s benefits, which would not be enough to cover her monthly costs.
Laney rubbed her face in her hands. She would likely inherit some money from her mother eventually; Christi had worked as a bank teller for decades and did have a life insurance policy and some meager savings. But after Laney paid the family’s still-accumulating bills, her best guess was that the sum remaining could support May for at most three years. After that, without additional funding coming from somewhere, Gran’s only option could be a Medicaid-approved nursing home.
The house has to be sold as soon as possible, Laney announced to herself. There was little else she could do to change the financial calculus except finish her doctorate and pray for a good job.
She lifted her chin and set about reordering the paperwork. The thought of returning to school in Oklahoma gave her a dull sense of despair, bu
t she ignored it. Her feelings about the various institutions she attended didn’t matter and never had. She went wherever she could get the degree she needed while accruing the least amount of student debt. Full stop.
She dove into the tasks at hand. Unfortunately, addressing even the most immediate among them required an entire morning of phone calls and forwarded documentation. At noon she forced down some reception leftovers and headed back to Sikeston. The plan had been for June and Amy to move Gran into her new room first thing this morning. Laney was to arrive mid-afternoon and then stay with May through bedtime.
By seven PM, Laney was exhausted all over again. The staff assured her that Gran’s reaction to the move was typical, but that didn’t make all of May’s tears, confusion, and remonstrations any more easy to handle. Laney did her best not to take the attacks personally, and in this she was aided somewhat by the fact that Gran continued to mistake her for her mother. In between the pleas to go home and the crying jags associated with her newfound fear of hell, May did occasionally coo over the fine furnishings, lovely outdoor courtyard, and — of all things — the old-fashioned popcorn popper in the day room. All things considered, Laney was pleased with the staff and facility and was confident that May would be well cared for. Even so, she couldn’t shake a crippling sense of sadness. And when, just before her scheduled departure time, May’s dark eyes fixed on her with fresh hostility, it took all Laney’s strength not to collapse into tears herself.