I could tell you I was born into this. As was my father, and his father before him. My father was an angry drunk who beat on anything stupid enough to love him, including my mom, but they agreed on one thing: that the races should stay separate. That we were superior. But I guess you already know that.
I grew up on a compound with people who believed the same as my parents did. In my whole life, I’d never said more than five or ten words to someone who didn’t have the same skin color as me. We weren’t allowed to watch TV. We weren’t allowed to listen to anything but white country and Christian music. I play the guitar, but country and Christian is all I play. I also know a few things about doctoring, because my mother was the club’s nurse. As the daughter of the Prez, part of her job was to patch up our club members, and sometimes I helped with that. I think that’s part of the reason I was attracted to you in the first place. Because you remind me of the better aspects of her. The best ones.
I know that’s a strange thing to say with you being black and all. But you have to understand, without these memories, without this carefully cultivated hate inside of me, black ain’t what I saw when I first laid eyes on you.
I saw you. The real you. Not that girl on TV. But the doctor I had mistaken for a nurse, teaching dying kids to sing. I can’t begin to explain how beautiful I found you from the first moment I laid eyes on you. Skin color didn’t have nothing to do with it.
As for the things I said. I can remember saying them now. And even worse, I can remember believing those words. But now…now I know you. Now you’re carrying my baby. A little life we made together with love, not hate.
And when I watch myself saying those words I had memorized by heart, even though I remember giving those speeches, it feels like I’m watching someone else. Somebody young and ignorant, even though that was me just a few months ago.
So now I’m doing what needs to be done to keep you safe. To keep what we made together safe. I’m disbanding Southern Freedom Knights, and doing a few other things to ensure they never ride again. The Feds approached me and Mason a couple of times before my accident, and I turned them down. A few weeks ago, Mason and me had a long discussion, and we decided to approach them this time.
I know your father has a helluva lot of things to say about snitches, but in this case, I think he’ll forgive me for working with the authorities to make sure our club never hurts an innocent again.
I signed our land over to the state, suggested they do something good with it.
And as for that money I was walking around with? Well, technically I got that and a motorcycle in exchange for a conversion van full of guns I drove up from Tennessee. That’s why I wasn’t carrying ID on me. It would have been too dangerous for the club if I’d gotten caught. So yeah, that money’s plenty dirty, but I made it clean. It belongs to UWV/Mercy’s Pediatrics Department now. An anonymous gift.
Why am I doing this? Why am I so determined to protect you and our baby given how I was brought up? That’s what I’m going to try to make you understand now, Doc.
I was broken way before I ever landed in your hospital, and crazy as it sounds, I truly believe that TBI saved me. I truly believe your love healed all the things that were wrong with me. Doc, you’re the one who fixed me.
I know it’s impossible to believe feelings like the ones I used to have about race-mixing could go away overnight. That all these memories could come back to me and look like nothing but a bad TV show I don’t want to be on no more. But that’s the truth of it. The truth as I know it. Fuck everything I’ve been taught, I only want to be with you.
I love you, Doc. I still love you with everything inside me. I didn’t want to scare you with it back in West Virginia. Didn’t want you to think I was both brain-damaged and crazy. But I’m enclosing something that will hopefully explain the way I feel about you, how I felt about you from the start, in a way I can’t with this one letter.
It’s the journal my hospital head doctor told me to start keeping to help me with my memory recovery. He told me to do that two weeks before I met you. But I didn’t pay attention. Not until I saw you.
I hope this helps you understand, Doc.
Yours forever,
Woods
Forget my training. With shaking hands, I put aside the letter and open the journal. Inside I find an unexpected bounty of words that begin with, “Today I saw my future wife for the first time…”
Unable to stop myself, I read a side of this tale that I’d never heard. About a thirty-something amnesia patient who didn’t know anything of his past. Only what was in doctor’s reports. He’s miserable and confused and weak, which he hates. His misery makes him belligerent, and half his PT sessions end with him limping out in a snit. That is until his physical therapist takes him down to the chemo lounge, during one of his mandated walks. He hangs back on the wall, only watching for the excuse to not have to walk for a while. But then she comes into the lounge with her guitar. A nurse with the prettiest hair and eyes he’s ever seen. He loves her the moment he sees her singing with those kids. But he’s feeble at this point, “not half a man,” so he watches from afar. Works harder at the PT. Biding his time for now, but knowing she’s his.
Then one day he calls out to her, and what follows is pages and pages of every word I ever spoke to him. Of how he tries not to stare at my beautiful brown skin or fall into my dark eyes, but how he can’t help himself. In this version of his story, every single thing I say and do means volumes to him. From bringing him lunch to telling him I’ll be the family who can’t be here for him.
“When I hear the word ‘family,’ I don’t get the sense of it as a good thing. But when she says the word, it’s all I can do not to grab her and kiss her the way I been wanting to all along.”
He goes on and on like this. And yes, there’s the map he drew for me that one day when we were doing cognitive exercises, with the label “Drew this for her because she asked me to.” Then comes a dark moment with the cane and the smoking resident. He thinks he’s scared me away forever, that I’ll never come see him again. He’s pondering how to find me downstairs now that his walking around privileges have been revoked. Trying to figure out how to convince me to come back to him when the journal entry abruptly cuts short. Only to pick up at the next entry proclaiming that I miraculously showed up in his room, “more worried than scared.” And though I didn’t come back after he kissed me, he knows. He just knows. “If we could make it through that, we can make it through anything.”
My heart clenches reading the words, so indicative of the John Doe I knew. So sure of himself. But so naïve when it came to matters of love.
The journal ends the Monday after I take him home. “I’m outside now. Not in the hospital’s outside, but in her outside and down to my last page. She’s brought me home. Maybe because she’s a very good person. At least that’s what she’s probably telling herself. But I think she’s feeling it, just like me. That we belong together. That now we’ve found each other, we ain’t got no business ever being apart. She ain’t my wife yet, but I know it’s just a matter of time. We’re going to be something to each other. She’s going to agree she loves me, too, and at the end of this story, she will be mine. All I gotta do now is wait.”
By the time I’m done reading, the diary pages are damp with my tears. And the car, I realize, is still parked.
I look over at Mason. “Why are we still at the…”
I trail off before I can finish because I see we aren’t still at the gas station. I was so absorbed in reading, I didn’t notice that not only had we left the gas station, we’ve driven about forty miles. And now we are sitting outside of a building I’d only seen before in online images. A spaceship-like structure constructed of brushed aluminum and glass that looked as far from my little brick two-story apartment building in West Virginia as you could get.
Yet, on the steps sits a long, lean figure I still associate with West Virginia. Except he’s not dressed in sweats now, nor leather. To
day he’s wearing a simple Henley with jeans and he has a piece of paper in his hand.
He stands as soon as I get out of the car.
“Dixon…” I say, not knowing what to make of the fact that he’s here at my new home. As if I conjured him out of thin air with my tears.
But he shakes his head and holds up the document in his hand.
“I filed for a name change,” he tells me from above. “My name—my real name—is going to be Woods from now on.”
He lowers the papers and says, “I ain’t John Doe no more, Doc. And I could never ask you to love Dixon Fairgood. But do you think you could love Woods Mello? Because believe me, he loves you more than anything else on this earth.”
We stand there like that. Him above and me below. The ultimate question hanging between us, along with both our pasts. Waiting for my answer.
Epilogue
“What did you say?” Lilli, the new peds nurse, asks breathlessly after I finish my story.
I widen my eyes at her. “What do you think I said? I told him no freaking way! I don’t care how many times you change your name. Ain’t no way we are ever, ever getting back together.”
Apparently Lilli’s a lot more romantic than I am, because she looks absolutely crushed by my story’s lack of a happy ending. “But what happened with the baby?” she demands. “And where’d he go after you said no?”
“Right on into her new apartment with her,” a voice answers from the door.
“Damn it, Woods, I had her!” I complain as my husband strolls into the break room in a sweatshirt declaring him a medical student at Washington State University—Seattle. “She’s been in Japan for the last few years, so this whole story is totally new to her. I could have kept it going until Sandy showed up in September!”
“Un-huh,” Woods says, pressing a tender kiss into my forehead. “And what would you have done when I kept on showing up here for lunch every day during my school break?”
“Wondered why you weren’t at home studying for the Step 1, just like I am now,” I answer.
Woods lifts an eyebrow. “C’mon, Doc…you know how I feel about lying,” he says. “And Taylor Swift quotes.”
“More like teasing. A gentle hazing if you will,” I answer. “And Taylor writes very quotable songs. What can I say?”
“Well for starters, you could tell…” he throws Lilli an apologetic look and she supplies, “Lilliana. Lilliana Tucker. But everybody calls me Lilli.”
Wood sticks out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Lilli. I’m Woods Mello. Sorry my wife’s been pulling your leg. What she should have said is after a whole lot of talking and some couples’ counseling, we figured it out. And now we’re very happy living in a big old house in Maple Valley with Nitra’s parents and our little boy Curtis. I got accepted into the combined med school program over at WSUS, and somehow we’re making it work. Our life is crazy, but it’s good. In fact, it’s better than anything either of us ever could have imagined.”
“Yeah, I could have told her that,” I agree, looking up at Woods with all my love. “But how funny would it have been when Sandy showed up with the cameras, and we were all like, ‘Psyche! We living happily ever after, Lilli!”
Lilli shakes her head with a quizzical look. “Really? Because I don’t see why that would be so much fun for you...”
Again Woods apologizes for me, “My wife will never admit it, but truth is, now that we’re on a serious docu-drama that actually received a Peabody award last month, she’s missing all the fake drama.”
“Maybe,” I concede. “But not any of the real stuff,” I promise him. “I like our life just fine.”
“I bet,” says Lilli with a laugh. “Your story is crazy, but I’m glad you two figured it out. Can I ask what happened with Colin Fairgood? Oh, and how about Mason and the girl you think he might have been secretly in love with?”
I grimace while Woods whistles low.
“Well, Colin and his family are coming to visit us at Christmas, but Mason—that’s a whole ‘nother story,” he tells Lilli.
One I’m perfectly willing to tell, since Woods is maybe totally right about me missing drama that doesn’t involve coordinating schedules, potty training, and staving off ever more aggressive questions from my parents about when I’m going to give them another grandbaby to spoil. At this point, other people’s gossip is just about the only thing I have left from my old life.
But before I can give Lilli the goods, Harriet Fields, the director of our hospital, sticks her head into the break room, looking all sorts of peeved.
“Miss Tucker, there is a possible Japanese donor in my office who would like to go over a few questions he has about the hospital with you.”
“Um…” Lilli starts. “I only speak a little Japanese, and I also just started here a few weeks ago, so maybe I’m not the best choice...”
“Yes, I’m well aware of this, Miss Tucker,” Harriet answers. “Nonetheless, he is here and asking for you. Specifically. He says you were… associates in Japan?”
Lilli starts. “Me?” Then she asks, “What is his name, exactly?”
“Norio Nakamura.”
Lilli’s mouth drops open, as if she’s just heard the name of a ghost. A very scary ghost.
“Norio Nakamura,” Woods repeats into Lilli’s shocked silence. “Are you talking about that billionaire who just bought the Seattle Fishers?”
“He did what?!?!” Lilli asks, like Woods has shocked all the breath out of her.
“Yeah, I know, only in his 30s, and now he owns a major league baseball team. That’s all they were talking about on sports radio this morning,” he answers Lilli. Then he asks Harriet, “Are you talking about that guy? Because if so, that’s a mighty big potential donor you got waiting in your office.”
“Yes, he is,” Harriet agrees, shooting Lilli a sour look. “So if you could follow me, Miss Tucker.”
I can tell by the way Lilli stands there as if her feet are rooted to the ground that she doesn’t necessarily want to see this mysterious billionaire claiming to be an associate of hers.
“Wait a minute, Lilli’s on her lunch break,” I protest on the stunned nurse’s behalf. “Plus, we’re having a very important conversation. You can’t just come in here and tell her she has to go answer this guy’s questions.”
“Oh, yes, I most certainly can, Dr. Dunhill!” Harriet insists. “Do you know what kind of donation could be on the line here?”
I’m about to show our director my weird talent for getting as close as humanly possible without touching while shouting into another woman’s face when Lilli suddenly unfreezes.
“It’s okay,” she assures both of us, or maybe just herself.
She expels another long breath, shaking her whole body out, before saying, “Yeah, yeah, I can do this. Sure, it’s no problem for me to show him around.”
I watch Lilli follow Harriet out of the room and down the hallway with my lips clamped together until Woods observes, “There you go again…”
“There I what again?” I ask, shifting my attention back to him.
He draws me into his arms with a lazy smile. “Worrying big about people you’ve only just met.”
“Well, it worked out with you, didn’t it? With just a little bit of drama in-between. At least so far.”
“At least forever,” Woods corrects, pressing another tender kiss to my forehead. “I don’t care how much drama life throws our way, I ain’t never giving up on us.”
His commitment to our love and our family continues to make my heart beat faster two years, one adorable baby boy, an expensive house, and one very real reality show later.
But before I can let that thought guide me toward kissing him, I remember the question he never answered, “Seriously, why are you here? I thought you’d be studying for the Step 1 all summer break.”
“Yeah, about that, Doc.” He grimaces. “I got to thinking about spending the only six sunny weeks Seattle gets a year doing nothing but studying a test a
nd not seeing much of you or Lil’ Curt and I decided, “Nah, not for me.”
“Not for you?” I repeat, shaking my head with real alarm. “What are you trying to say? Are you dropping out of med school? But I thought you loved it, even with the crazy class schedule and having to study all the time!”
“More like I decided to take the test without the studying all hours of the day part.”
“What?!?!” I all but shout. “Tell me you did not take the most important test of your medical school career early, just to get out of studying!!”
“And to see you and Lil’ Curt more,” Woods reminds me.
“Woods, tell me you didn’t do that for any reason…!”
Woods wags his head from side to side. “I would tell you that, Doc. But remember those vows we exchanged about being honest with each other at our real wedding?”
“Oh my God! You know they don’t let you re-sit the exam if you get a low score. And this could affect all your matches!”
“There you go thinking again, Doc,” he answers with a lazy smile.
“No, Woods, this is serious! Don’t try to distract me with all your cuteness. We need to figure this out. I guess we’ll just have to wait until your score comes back to see what you got...”
Another grimace. “That’s kind of why I’m here. I just got my scores back.”
“What?!?!” I shout again, even louder this time. “But you just finished your academic year last week. How are you already getting your scores back?”
Usually I can’t help but laugh when my lethal husband screws up his face like he’s afraid of getting hit by little ol’ me. But it’s not so funny when he does it as he answers, “Because I took the test during spring break.”
The Very Bad Fairgoods - Their Ruthless Bad Boys Page 47