by Rodney Jones
“Have you eaten?”
“Not in a while, no. Have you?”
“No.” She noticed his feet doing their nervous dance—the right heel bouncing up and down. “Want some anchovy pizza and beer?”
“Really? You like anchovies?”
She gave him a curious glance. “The rolls Mom and I make.”
“The rolls…” He lowered himself onto the sofa immediately behind him.
“You know, the anchovy rolls. There’s some in the freezer.”
He studied her eyes, as if the mystery of her might unravel there, but then caught himself staring. After seeing photographs of her, he’d asked about her age, as she looked somewhat younger than him, and learned that she was in fact older. But now, standing before her, he found that hard to believe. “Anchovies?” He smiled. “Okay… I’ll give it try.”
She searched his face for a clue. Why are you doing this? He had, in the past, made it abundantly clear that her anchovy rolls were among his favorites. Do you really not see how hurtful that is? She was determined to avoid being baited into another pointless confrontation. Not now. She had leaned, all along, toward believing that his alternate reality stories were like some crazy, twisted act of aggression, though perplexingly out of character. And the motive? Another mystery. If there was one, it was likely too subtle and too complex to be pinned down. She had at one time, though only briefly, considered the possibility that Roland was suffering a breakdown, which of course he would have no control over—an idea, which now seemed to warrant further consideration.
“Well, okay then”—she forced a smile to her lips—“I’ll heat up a pizza. I think you’ll like it. If you don’t, no problem, I can make you something else. Would you like a beer?”
“Yes, thank you.”
She disappeared into the next room. A light came on. Roland heard a squeaky hinge, and then footsteps on creaking stairs. The room in which he waited had an abundance of art on the walls, much like his home in Arizona, though from an entirely different set of artists. He’d noticed the pair of paintings on the wall behind Dana as they were talking, just minutes before. There were a few striking similarities between the two paintings. Were they done by the same artist? He got up from the sofa and stepped closer. Dana, carrying a small bundle wrapped in aluminum foil, walked past the archway at his right, glanced his way, then stepped into the kitchen.
She set the pizza roll on the countertop by the stove and turned the oven on. It was simply heating a frozen dish. Still, there was something inherently pleasing in the act—a routine domestic activity, preparing a meal for someone other than oneself—relaxing, and oddly enough, disarming. For the moment, her life felt as if it had returned to normal. Perhaps contrast played a part in that. She removed a mug from the freezer, filled it with beer, then took it into the living room, where she found Roland standing before the same painting, studying it as though it was new to him.
“It’ll be just a minute.” She handed him the mug.
“Thank you.”
Again she left the room. Roland turned to the opposite wall, where a glossy black, console piano stood. Above it hung another work of art. He stepped in close for a better look—a loosely stylized representation of a face, a strangely comical head with two dots for eyes, a wide nose, a mouth that resembled a football, and a comical little hat that stuck up from the top of the character’s head like a smoke stack. The piece was signed by one of his favorite artists—no longer unfamiliar, but all at once looking like what it was, a Miró.
“How was the drive?” Dana said, entering the room, and then taking a seat on the couch.
“Mm… okay.” He pointed to the Miró. “What’s H.C.? At the bottom of the drawing.”
Dana gave him a puzzled look. He knew the art in the house far better than she. He’d once informed her of the meaning of the letters H.C., but she’d long since forgotten. She had not, however, forgotten that the piece he was referring to was a lithograph, and not a drawing.
“Why don’t you tell me?” she said.
He turned back to the Miró. It then dawned on him, what was happening. He turned toward Dana and said, “Howard Coots?”
She smiled. The smile spread from her lips to her eyes, and then stretched into a grin.
“No, really, I don’t know. I can see it’s a…” He placed his hands on top of the piano and leaned in closer to the image. “Is it a lithograph?”
“Are you playing with me?” she said.
“It is a lithograph,” he said. “Well, it looks almost like a drawing.”
“If you’re playing with me, please… stop.”
“I’m not. Seriously, I wouldn’t do that.” He sighed. “I really didn’t know.”
Her eyes, full of questions, were fixed on him as though he was performing magic tricks and she might catch his slight-of-hand. He stepped back to the couch and sat not far from her.
The phone rang.
Dana’s head twisted toward the next room.
A second ring.
She jumped up and went to the phone.
“Hello?”
“Dana?”
“Oh, I completely forgot.”
“Is everything okay?” her sister said.
“Yeah, everything’s fine. We’re just getting ready to have dinner. I’m sorry if I worried anyone.”
“Well, I just called to make sure you were okay. Ed told me he ran into Roland at the Uni-Mart. He said he was acting weird. It spooked him, I think. He’s there?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, Jesus, Dana, be careful. Is he acting weird?”
Her eyes shifted toward the living room. Roland, still seated on the sofa holding a half-full mug of beer, was staring at the wall opposite him. “No, Mary. Everything’s fine here. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
“Okay. Just checking. We’ll talk later then.”
She hung up the receiver.
“That was Mary. I promised Ed I’d call her, and then forgot.”
Roland simply nodded.
Dana returned to the front room, and stood in the middle. The fact that Roland had offered nothing about his encounter with Ed baffled her. She stared at Roland—her brow heavy with creases. “Do you even know who I’m talking about?”
He shook his head.
“You didn’t know who that was at the gas station?”
“Oh… him. I asked, but he wouldn’t tell me.” He closed an eye and peered at Dana with the other. “So that was Ed. And Mary’s your sister?”
“Yes, my sister.” She frowned.
“He was a bit scary,” Roland raised his eyebrows.
Dana squinted at him. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”
He looked at Dana, grateful that he at least wasn’t being accused of acting out some ridiculous hoax. “I’ve seen pictures. Brian has pictures of us.” His focus drifted inward. “I don’t have those memories though; I have other ones.”
“And just how did that happen?”
An image of his kitchen came to mind, him standing there over the food prep island, slicing a red bell pepper. “I don’t know.”
An alarm went off in Dana’s kitchen… followed by silence. “Well”—she sighed—“dinner’s ready.”
“May I use your bathroom?”
Her eyebrows lifted. “My bathroom?” She let out a huff, then left the room.
Assuming she was showing him to the bathroom, he followed. It quickly became clear that she wasn’t.
She stepped into the kitchen, pulled open a cabinet drawer and dug out an oven mitt, then turned and caught a glimpse of Roland as he left the room in search of the bathroom. “The opposite corner, then right.” She gazed toward the mitt in her hand, wondering who it was she was talking to.
A few minutes later, he was back. Dana pointed to the place she’d set for him at the table. “More beer?”
“Oh, I left it in the other room.” He hurried back into the living room, grabbed his beer-mug, then returned to his seat at th
e table. “Okay,” he said, smiling, “Ready. You ready?”
“I sneaked a few bites while you were running around looking for your beer.” She faked a grin, then watched as he lifted a slice of the anchovy pizza roll to his mouth and took a bite.
He chewed, nodded, then took another bite. “I like this. I’ve never had anything like…” He stopped.
“Come on. You really don’t remember having this before?”
He shrugged then took another bite.
“It’s always been one of your favorites.”
He’d anticipated moments like this on his way there, but came to no conclusions as to how he would manage them. Resisting a sigh, he swallowed. “Mmm… I can see why. It’s good.” Her eyes were fixed on his. He gazed off into the corner, to Dana’s left, where the wood paneling met the plaster ceiling. It appeared the room was added on as an afterthought. He turned, taking in the art hanging on the walls. “You have some nice art.”
Dana glanced about the room, and then at Roland, pausing for a moment before speaking. “What exactly do you remember?”
Memories… It was one of the few things he’d gotten clear about while on the way there. He wasn’t going to talk about his past—not with Dana, not until she knew him better. “You know,” he said, “I’m not sure that what I remember is important. I have memories, no less than I ever did, but… I don’t know, there’s something… I don’t know if I can even describe it. It’s like my memories have a different color to them now.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I know I’m not really answering your question. I remember a lot, but they’re just memories. Perhaps that’s all they’ve ever been.”
Chapter forty-six – the mend
Troubled by the awareness that Roland, asleep in the guestroom, was only a few feet beyond the other side of her bedroom wall, Dana tossed and turned in her bed. He was a few feet away, but missed more than she had ever missed him before.
Nothing… nothing—doesn’t remember meeting, falling in love, nothing of our life together. Sixteen years—our years… Nothing.
She turned onto her back and began tracing back through those last few years with Roland. A sunny, late-winter day came to mind—cross-country skiing through a snow-covered forest, south of Akron, just her and Roland, as happy as ever. She skipped to an earlier memory, the houseboat they’d rented with his family—Roland at the helm, relaxed, smiling, content, a gentle breeze brushing back his hair. Then, the night of the fireworks—that same vacation, same boat—the night he was burnt. They were sitting together, drinking, laughing, having fun, when a rocket, launched from the deck above, went spiraling into a crazy loop, then shot down into the bow and exploded on Roland’s back. The memory was so vivid, as if it had happened only yesterday—her jumping up out of her chair, the rocket, still spewing sparks, clinging to Roland’s shirt as she swatted wildly at it. It left a serious burn. They were out in the middle of a large, remote lake, late at night. No one had a clue how far the nearest hospital was, or where it was. What would a doctor do, anyway? Keep ice on it? That’s exactly what she ended up doing—staying up the whole night, holding a damp washcloth, with ice wrapped up inside, over his wound.
How do you forget a thing like that?
A clear picture of the scar, left by the burn, was stuck in her mind—a triangular-shaped patch of skin, a few shades lighter than the healthy skin around it—unavoidably noticeable.
What memory would he have now? What story to explain his scar?
The chance that he’d replaced this memory with another seemed every bit as disloyal as the phony “other woman” story. She glanced at the clock on the nightstand. 1:22. She got up, put on a robe, and went to the doorway of the guestroom. It was open; the room was dark. She stood there for a moment listening to his slow, steady breath.
She spoke just above a whisper. “Roland?” And again. “Roland?”
He rolled over and peered toward the doorway.
“I’m sorry for waking you, but there’s something I need to ask you.”
“Oh?” He blinked a few times.
“I couldn’t sleep. I was just thinking… about things that we’d done over the years. The houseboat we rented with your family and the scar on your back.” She hesitated, then said, “Do you remember the houseboat?”
“Uh… when was that?”
“Eighty-seven, I think. Or… it may’ve been eighty-eight.”
He shook his head. “I don’t remember.”
“The scar… Do you remember how you got it?”
He yawned. “I have a scar?”
“Yeah, about five inches down from your right shoulder.”
Roland sat up and reached back over his shoulder. “Do I?”
“Can I see? You mind if I turn the light on?”
“No, go ahead.”
She switched on a small lamp sitting on top a nearby dresser. Roland turned his back to her. Unable to see the scar, she moved closer, then reached out and touched the spot where she remembered it being. She stepped back to the door and flipped the overhead light switch. Roland squinted toward her, and then, again, twisted around. Dana moved closer and stared. The flesh on his back appeared healthy—not so much as a hint of a scar.
The next morning, as Dana headed toward the bathroom, she noticed Roland standing at the window in the breakfast nook, looking out over the backyard. She stepped into the kitchen doorway behind him. “Hey.”
He turned. “Good morning.”
The shirt he was wearing at first looked unfamiliar, but then it came to her—the blue shirt, the thin, red, vertical stripes—the shirt from the curious vision she’d had months before.
His eyes filled with a mix of bewilderment and concern. “Is something wrong?”
“No…” She shook her head, then pulled her eyes away. “I’m going to take a quick shower, then make us some waffles, okay?”
After breakfast, Dana and Roland went for a walk down the bike path. It was a chilly, but sunny morning. The missing scar had left her restless. She’d struggled through the night, trying to find a footing of logic, the end or beginning of any one of the tangled fibers that her and Roland’s story had become. And there was something else pestering her, something he’d said the night before. “Did you mean what you said last night… that what you remember isn’t important to you anymore?”
Roland glanced into Dana’s eyes and wondered if Joyce was perhaps, at that very moment, struggling with the same questions that Dana was. He hoped that the other Roland, the one who Dana remembered, was there with her, filling the void that his disappearance had left in her life. “I’d be lying to myself if I said the memories of my past aren’t important to me,” he said. “But equally, it’d be a mistake to continue living there. I’m no longer there, am I? I’m here.”
“I’m sorry that I didn’t believe you.”
He stopped and turned, his brow furrowed. “You do now?”
“I kind of do, and I don’t, but I’m trying to.”
“Yeah…” The crow of a rooster came from somewhere up the path ahead of them.
“It’s not easy.”
“Right. It’s not natural,” he said.
Dana looked off to the left, into someone’s leaf covered back yard. “You can stay, you know… live here. I have extra bedrooms.”
“Really? You sure about that?”
She nodded. “I think we’d get along okay.”
“But, what would I do here?”
“What were you doing before?”
“Well... It’s not that simple.”
“I know. You don’t have to decide now though.” She stopped, bent down, and picked up a small branch. “You’d like it here. There’s lots of cool things to do. Music, art… food…”
Later, as they were on their way back to the house, Dana described the work her husband did at the art gallery in Buffalo. At the corner of Clinton and John, she said, “You could maybe get your old job back.” She checked up and down the street for traffic—“Mr. A
nderson, the owner… he’s a kind man”—then stepped into the street. Roland followed immediately behind her. “You could maybe tell him”—she searched her mind for an amusing angle—“you came down with a bad case of amnesia, and…” She glanced back over her shoulder; he was right there, a step away, wearing that blue shirt… She’d nearly forgotten—the shirt, the corner, the vision. A sudden distinct dread filled her, like an emphatic premonition.
Roland smiled. “And I forgot to call in sick?”
She held her hand out for his. He hesitated for a brief moment before accepting it. Her grip was firm as she pulled him with sudden urgency toward the opposite corner. He took a quick peek up the street—no apparent danger. She dragged him into the park, forcing him to keep up with her.
“Dana?”
Nearly breathless, she stopped and turned, then released his hand.
“Are you okay?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.” Her eyes were moist with tears. “I’m sorry.” She turned away and wiped her cheeks. “I’m just really glad you’re here.”
They walked on, her hand swinging close to his. He caught it and took hold of it. He held it, not so much for himself, or even for her, but for the other Mr. Bax.
Chapter forty-seven – the dancing (part one revisited)
Following the beam of her flashlight, Joyce stepped past the rocks, cactuses, and small shrubs scattered along the path leading to the butte. She swung the light to her left, pointing it toward the ground, where she heard a rustling come from below a shrub with long, skinny, dried-out seedpods dangling from its twisted branches. The instant she stopped, “it,” whatever had made the noise, stopped as well. She turned and looked back at the house in the distance behind her. Like the nightlight in a child’s bedroom, the bulb glowing by the backdoor served only as a symbol of security. She again scanned the ground around her feet. There was nothing to see—no snakes, lizards, or detached human hands crawling about.