“Did you let him?” I took the preheated cast-iron skillet out of the oven and filled it with the batter. The hot grease in the bottom of the skillet popped and sizzled.
Mops smiled slyly at me. “What do you think?”
I slid the skillet into the oven and closed the door, setting the timer. I stood up and surveyed Mops. If she was this feisty when she was old, I couldn’t imagine what she’d been like in high school. But I also knew how persuasive Pops could be.
“Yes,” I decided.
“Well, you’re wrong.” She dipped the squash in egg and rolled in it cornmeal before tossing it into the hot grease on the stove. “And he failed the first semester.” Mops poured us both glasses of iced tea and we sat down at the small kitchen table. Purple marker covered the right side of the table where I’d colored outside of the lines.
“I let him sweat it out a bit, then told him I’d tutor him. We were going steady less than a month later.” Mops’s face was a mosaic of joy and regret when she talked about Pops.
“But how did you know?” I asked.
Mops looked at me. “He made me laugh. He made me smile, made me want to be a better person. Sometimes I would look at him and my heart would literally hurt because I loved him so much and I didn’t know how to contain it, what to do with it. I wanted to protect him and scream at him all at the same time. And he put up with me, which helped.” She winked at me.
“What happened?” I asked. They’d stopped living together when I was seven. And while there had been love, there’d also been a whole lot of anger.
There was a lifetime in her sigh. “We stopped being good for each other. Life tore us down, and we couldn’t even put ourselves back together, much less each other. It was nobody’s fault, but we were both to blame. I never stopped loving him, but I pulled myself out of that hole we’d climbed into, and he wouldn’t even try.” She got up to flip the squash and spoke with her back to me. “Pops wouldn’t let me help him. I couldn’t live with him. I refused to watch him destroy himself and take me down in the process.”
Exactly. I loved my mother, but if her drinking kept getting worse, she was going to ruin both our relationship and our futures.
“Your mother never forgave me for moving out. My heart wanted to stay with him, but my head wanted to stay sober. I knew I couldn’t have both.”
“Your head is always right?” I asked.
Mops turned down the burner and came back to the table. “No. There’s no always in life.”
“Sometimes I wish I were seven years old again,” I admitted.
“Why?”
Because back then Pops was still alive and my mom still climbed into my quilt tents. Because my biggest worry had been whether or not Santa knew about my latest crime. Because I’d still believed in magic. “Because life wasn’t so complicated then,” I said.
Mops reached over and patted my hand. “It sure doesn’t get any easier, either.”
Great.
IAN
“What happened the night your dad and Luke got into the fight?” Dr. Benson was supposed to be helping me recover my memories and figure out my headaches. He wasn’t doing either. He made me talk about what I did remember to see if it sparked what I didn’t. I spent half the time desperately shifting through the maze in my mind and the other half wishing I were anywhere else.
“You need to talk to Luke about that,” I said for the second time. We’d spent most of the session talking about how I felt about the move and the divorce. I felt they were both Luke’s fault. Exploring that any further was just going to lead to a dead end.
Dr. Benson nodded and leaned back in his chair. “You’re right. But I can’t make him attend his appointments, and I can’t make him talk to me even if he does.”
No one could make Luke do anything he didn’t want to. It was probably one of the reasons Dad always lost his temper with Luke. Luke couldn’t be ordered around like the rest of us. Dad commanded, both at work and at home, and he’d grown used to having things his way. He issued the orders. He wasn’t questioned. Mom had done what he said mainly to keep life peaceful. But Luke was the one person Dad couldn’t really boss around, and Dad hated that. Funny, considering those two were so alike. Dad didn’t take shit from anyone, and neither did Luke. I was like my mom. But the peace was becoming impossible to keep.
“You don’t think it would be easier if you just told me what happened?” I asked.
Dr. Benson’s face tightened. “No, I don’t. Sometimes forgetting is your brain’s way of healing. When you’re ready to remember, you will.”
“Are you sure?” I needed to know that I could reach this goal.
Dr. Benson frowned. “No. The brain is a complicated system.”
“And doctors don’t know as much as they pretend to.” They guessed. Sometimes they groped in the dark. It didn’t matter how many degrees he had hanging on his wall. I had to figure out a way to get better on my own. And I would.
“We don’t know everything, no,” Dr. Benson admitted.
“I’m sorry.” I smoothed over the tension out of habit. That had always been my job. “Do you remember high school?” I asked.
Dr. Benson looked surprised. He paused, and I wasn’t sure he was going to answer the question. “Parts of it,” he said finally.
“Why is that?” Why did some things disappear while others remained burned into our brains?
“Not all parts are worth remembering, I guess,” he said.
That was what I was afraid of. Maybe my missing months weren’t worth it either.
“Who did you take to prom?” I asked him. I thought back to the picture I had seen, the one of the blonde girl laughing. Happy. Why couldn’t I remember her?
“Mary Beth Anderson,” he said.
“Why do you think you remember that so easily but not other parts?”
“Because Mary Beth Anderson is now living in my old house and getting a sizeable portion of my income.” Dr. Benson smiled at me. “Why are you asking me this?”
Because collecting other people’s memories was easier than finding my own.
“I keep seeing a blonde girl,” I told him. “Like a hallucination or something.”
Dr. Benson’s face was guarded. “Go on.”
“That’s it. I saw a picture of her at my house, though it’s suddenly disappeared, and twice she’s shown up, standing in front of me.”
Dr. Benson smiled. “See? You’re remembering.”
“But I’m not!” Didn’t he see that? “I have no idea who she is.”
“Don’t force it,” Dr. Benson said. “You’ll remember when you’re ready.”
“But what if I don’t?” I asked.
Dr. Benson shifted in his chair and tilted his head to look at me. “Ian, we’ve only just started. Give yourself time.”
I didn’t know how much longer I could afford to wait. There were so many things I wanted, and most of them started with recovering what I’d lost. Memories. My family. Myself. I was tired of stumbling around in the dark.
The timer went off. “That’s it for today.” Dr. Benson and I both stood up, and he clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I’m proud of you,” he said. “You’re getting there.”
Sometimes it didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere at all.
“I’ll call your mom, see if she can talk Luke into coming.”
I shrugged. “Maybe.” But I wasn’t counting on it.
I hadn’t spoken to Luke since our argument. I hadn’t even seen him. And while he’d promised he would stay away from Jenna, I knew him well enough to know he was lying. I just didn’t know what I was going to do about it yet.
Mom was pulling weeds in the front yard when I got home from my appointment. It was late afternoon, but it was murderously hot and her face was red and streaked with sweat and dirt.
“How’d it go?” she asked, leaning back on her heels.
“Fine.” I always told her it went fine. I wasn’t sure if there were a more accurate
response. I was still having headaches. I was still having bad dreams. I still couldn’t find all of my memories. But I hadn’t choked the incompetent doctor, so I guessed that meant things were going fine.
“Your dad called again,” Mom told me.
That was new. We hadn’t heard from him in weeks, then all of a sudden we get two calls in two days. “About?”
“He finally got hold of the superintendent this morning. The state athletic association is going to vote in a couple of weeks on whether or not you’re eligible to play football.”
“Oh.” I should have known. Dad was only interested in how many passes I could complete. Yesterday all he’d wanted to talk about was what I was doing to stay in shape. I figured the vote was probably a technicality at this point; if Dad wanted me to play, he’d make it happen. He could be very persuasive. “You need help?” I asked.
Mom looked surprised. “Sure.”
We knelt in the dirt on either side of the porch steps, pulling the intruding weeds and tossing them into a pile behind us. “I could just mow,” I offered. The weeds were thick and tall. It would have been easier to just chop everything down and start again.
“No, I want the bushes and flowers. I think there was some pretty nice landscaping here, before it all grew up. We have to thin these out to see for sure.”
The yard was wild and unruly, bordered by woods and a broken fence. There was a pond out back. It was nothing like our yard in Massachusetts. The weeds there shriveled up from Dad’s glare alone. Everything had been tidy and orderly. Dad always made sure there was nothing troublesome in our yard. And if anything did show up, he tossed it out.
“Dr. Benson knows what I can’t remember, doesn’t he?”
Mom stared at the pile of weeds in her hand. Just when I thought she wasn’t going to answer, she nodded.
“Why doesn’t he just tell me?” I asked. “Why don’t you?”
When Mom turned to look at me, there was so much heartbreak in her face that I immediately regretted the question.
“It’s that bad?” I whispered. My brain was a maze of twisting corridors separating me from the truth. And since Luke didn’t seem the least bit interested or capable of fixing what was broken, that meant I had to do it. The only way I knew how to repair the cracks was to remember what had shattered us in the first place.
I needed everything to lay flat. I had to replace Kyle Couty as starting quarterback. That was going to be nearly impossible because of small-town politics, but if I succeeded on the field, my family would be less fractured. My parents had spent their lives putting themselves into Luke and me, making sure we were successful in everything, and Luke had thrown that back in their faces. I wouldn’t. I would show them that everything they’d ever done wasn’t a waste. Maybe if I worked hard enough, those skeletons in the basement would finally disintegrate and Mom could stop worrying.
“It’s that bad,” she said. Her voice broke, and she wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t stand to see her so sad.
I changed the subject. I told her about Kyle and Steven. I talked about Repete’s and the lake. I put just enough hope and enthusiasm in my voice that she didn’t warn me to be careful. I made sure she heard the unspoken promise—that things were going to be fine, that I was going to patch everything together, that I was going to be what she’d always hoped I would be. Mom worried she hadn’t done the right thing by dragging us down here. I would show her it was going to be okay no matter where we were. Because I would make it that way. For all of us.
“It’s going to be great,” I promised Mom. There was a sizeable pile of weeds behind each of us, and we’d managed to clear out most of the bed in front of the house. The ones on the sides taunted us, but we wouldn’t be able to tackle those tonight. Small steps. Everything could be accomplished with small steps forward.
Mom leaned back and smiled at me. It reached her eyes for the first time in months. “I know it will be,” she said. She stood up, stripping off her gardening gloves and dropping them on the porch. “I’m glad you’ve met some friends.”
She disappeared into the shadows, and I scooped up the weeds and tossed them into the garbage can. The screen door slammed as Mom stepped back outside. She sat down on the top step and handed me a glass of ice water. Nothing had ever tasted so clean.
A small puff of air became a slight breeze and dried the sweat on my skin. Two squirrels chased each other up the trunk of the large oak tree at the end of the driveway. One of them leapt from the oak toward a thin branch on a nearby pecan tree. He soared through the air, completely oblivious to what would be a fatal drop if he couldn’t catch the limb. He landed on the very tip of the branch, which dipped and bounced, then he shot into the thick leaves at the top. The other squirrel fussed and barked from the safety of the oak.
“I love you,” Mom said. “I haven’t said it enough lately.”
She hadn’t said it at all lately. “I know you do,” I told her. “Me too.”
She leaned over and kissed my cheek. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d done that either. “Now go take a shower. You smell like a goat.”
I laughed. “You don’t exactly smell like roses.”
She slapped the side of my leg. “You got some stuff in the mail, too. I put it in your room.”
The house was cool and quiet. Luke’s door was shut when I passed, and I felt no inclination to open it. There was a large stack of mail sitting on the corner of my desk, and all of it had been forwarded from Massachusetts. Boston University. NYU. Colorado State, Virginia Tech, Baylor. They topped off an already large stack.
I had to do it right if I was going to make it right. Everything was going to have to be perfectly put together by the time I graduated. Because college was going to be how I surgically removed Luke from my life. His grades were bad and his record worse. There was no way he was going to get into college. So everything was going to have to be lying flat by the time I left. And it would be, no matter what I had to do to make that happen.
NINETEEN
JENNA
Steph called on Friday afternoon and invited Ian and me to play laser tag in Middleton with her and Steven. She misinterpreted the hesitation in my voice, thinking it had to do with the plans when really I was afraid of calling Ian and getting Luke.
“Please,” Steph begged, “if you don’t come, Steven is going to make me invite Kyle and Dani, and I have so totally filled my quota of Dani Peters.”
I laughed. I’d filled my quota for the summer after five minutes.
“Sure.” The answer came easier than it should have. What was wrong with me?
I called Ian before I could change my mind. There was a wild moment of uncertainty when he answered, because for a second I wasn’t sure if he was Ian or Luke.
“Ian? It’s Jenna.”
“I was just thinking about you,” he said. He sounded like he was telling the truth.
“Steph and Steven want us to go play laser tag in Middleton,” I explained.
There was a beat of silence, then Ian spoke. “I’d love to see you again, if that’s okay with you.” His sincerity solidified my guilt, especially since, after hearing his voice, I really wanted to see him again too.
“Let me just text Steph and see what time and everything. I’ll let you know.”
An hour later, I was sitting in the back of Steven’s Jeep Cherokee on our way to pick up Ian. Steph and Steven were arguing over the radio station. I chewed on my lip and picked at a hangnail and prayed silently over and over again that Luke wouldn’t be home when I got there.
Steven tapped the horn as soon as we pulled in the driveway, and Ian met us in the front yard. His blue polo shirt made his eyes bluer than I would have thought possible, and he smelled like soap and aftershave. My heart flopped over when he leaned in and kissed my cheek.
It was like he’d been a part of the group since its inception. He teased Steph about her emo choice of music and talked football with Steven until I thought my ears were going to
bleed. There were no shadows in his face or disappointment in his eyes. No mocking smile. Instead, there was laughter and possibility and hope. I didn’t have to be a mechanic when I was with Ian; he wasn’t broken.
Middleton was an hour away and our closest link to civilization, but it only pretended it was a city. It had plenty of businesses and a little traffic. There were movies, restaurants, even a community college, but Middleton was still a child, all bony knees and scraped elbows. While it was the biggest place I’d ever been, it was really just an overgrown town that sprawled across more land than it needed. But it wasn’t Solitude, and that fact made it a little endearing.
Ian absorbed everything. He was like a wide-eyed kid looking at Christmas lights. He wanted to know what certain buildings were and how many times I’d been there and why that restaurant had closed if I thought they had the best seasoned fries. I saw Middleton in a whole different way when Ian looked at it, because he really looked at it.
Ian was solid—he was sure about his future, his place, maybe even me. The fact that he’d been tossed into a new environment didn’t seem to unsettle him at all. And while I’d lived around here my whole life, I wasn’t sure about anything.
The list of things I didn’t want was getting more concrete, while the things I was certain of kept shifting. I didn’t want to settle when I didn’t have to. I didn’t want to wake up twenty years down the road and realize I hadn’t done any of the things I’d said I would. I didn’t want to trade happiness for convenience. I didn’t want to have my choices taken from me or let someone else determine what I ended up being, or let fear keep me from making a fool of myself if that was what I needed to do. And I didn’t want to lose either one of them.
The Middleton Laser Tag Center was in an abandoned Walmart building in the older part of town. A skinny boy with glasses checked our vests and made sure our guns were working. There were two other groups of people going in, all about our age, and Steven took charge like he always did when Kyle wasn’t there to do it for him, declaring it a battle between the sexes. Steph and I were on a team with five other girls, two of which looked slow. I was pretty sure we were going to get our butts kicked.
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