Wanting to Remember, Trying to Forget (Meet the Shepards #1)

by Jacqueline Francis

  “Back off, Jennifer,” came Amber’s voice from behind her.

  “Screw you, Amber. I’m not done yet.”

  Lauren also appeared out of nowhere and took the woman by the arm. “I think we should sit down. This is not the time or the place for this, dear.”

  Jennifer yanked her arm out of Lauren’s grip. “You, too, mom? I can understand these bitches lying to me, but you knew about this as well and you didn’t say anything to me.”

  “Come on, Danny,” Amber said, grabbing her wrist and leading her back to their table.

  Danny’s head was spinning. So many words yet so little information. Everything Jennifer said only caused more questions to swirl around her head. “What the hell is going on, Amber? Who’s Richard? Who was Max dating? What is she talking about?”

  Before Amber could answer any of her questions, Lauren caught up to them. “I am really sorry about all that, Danielle. My daughter has a sharp tongue.”

  “You said she wasn’t going to be here, Lauren,” Amber snapped.

  “She was supposed to be in Arkansas, visiting family, but she came home early and my husband suggested that she come along with us.”

  Danny noticed the looks that were exchanged between the other two women, as if there were more secrets and lies that they were trying to keep from her. “What’s going on?” she shouted.

  “It’s just Jennifer being Jennifer,” Amber said. “She’s being bitchy because she’s jealous. She wanted Max and now you have him.”

  That answered some of the questions but not all. They reached the table and Amber’s eyes locked on Max. “I think you need to take her home.”

  Although surprised, Max did not argue and stood up immediately. Danny released a heavy sigh, realizing that no-one was going to answer her questions. Just a short while ago, she had felt like the pieces of her life were finally beginning to fit together. That feeling was long gone now. Everyone knew something she didn’t, holding back information about her life. She left the party feeling as lost as she did the day she woke up with no recollection of the past ten years.

  * * *

  Danny waited for Max to open the door of their apartment and walked in first.

  “Who’s Richard?” she asked before he had even pulled off his jacket.

  He froze, his jaw clenching, but he didn’t respond.

  “Who’s Richard?” she asked again.

  “Richard is just another asshole you dated.”

  That made sense. He must have been the man she dated before Max. What didn’t make sense, though, was the timeline. Jennifer would not have been so angry had this not been a recent thing. “When did we break up?”

  His jaw tightened again and she could see that she was stirring up the anger that he always tried to keep so well hidden. His guard went up almost immediately.

  “Drop it, Danny!”

  “Stop doing that to me. Just tell me.”

  He took a deep, calming breath before he answered. “You guys broke up right before you and I got together.”

  That wasn’t a straight answer. He was keeping something from her. All of them were and she didn’t want to be kept in the dark anymore. He was sidestepping and she decided to change her line of questioning to get more information out of him. “Why did we break up?”

  His breathing became unsteady and his fingers balled into tight fists. She could actually see the rage filling up inside him. Whoever Richard was, he had certainly gotten on the wrong side of Max.

  “Richard,” Max said, gritting his teeth, “was a low-life cheat who was only after one thing.”

  “He cheated on me?”

  “Fuck, Danny! Just forget about him, forget you ever heard his name!”

  His words ignited her anger. “Don’t you get it, Max? I’ve already forgotten. My whole life is one big, gaping hole and I’m trying so hard to fill it with all this lost information. Everything I know about my past is because of you. I am living vicariously through you. I don’t remember anyone or anything from the last ten years. You don’t know what its like.” Tears filled her eyes. “You don’t know what it feels like to wake up every morning to a life you don’t know. You don’t know what it feels like to not remember the places you’ve been, the people you’ve dated.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand as the tears rolled down her cheek. “It’s like someone telling me a story about my life. You don’t know what it’s like to feel…this empty.”

  He calmed down almost instantly. “Danny…I’m sorry. That…that was a stupid thing to—”

  “Save it,” she cut in, lifting her hand to silence him. “I’m done talking.”

  She walked past him, into her bedroom, and shut the door.

  It was over an hour later when she heard a light tap on her bedroom door. Max walked in and sat down beside her on the bed. She kept her back to him, not ready to face him just yet.

  “I’m sorry about what I said earlier. It was dumb.” He shifted closer but made no attempt to touch her. “When I hear Richard’s name, it gets under my skin and…I guess it makes me a little crazy. I shouldn’t have said that, though. You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like and I’m sorry.”

  She turned to face him then. “It makes you a lot crazy,” she said with a small smile.

  He returned the smile. “I have something for you. I didn’t even think about it until now, but it’s definitely better than just hearing stories.”

  “Okay.”

  Max stood up and she followed him back to the living room, where she saw a large box filled with DVDs. He lifted one out of the box entitled First Christmas with Danny. He inserted it into the DVD player and pressed play.

  Danny sat quietly on the sofa and watched two teenage boys, shoveling snow in the front yard. “That’s my brother, Kevin, and his best friend, Perry,” Max explained.

  He had told her about them before. They wore thick woolen hats and their heavy jackets were zipped up to the top so she still could not see their full faces, but somehow seeing actual people made the stories seem more real.

  “Are you going to pay us for this, Mister Shepard?” Perry asked, looking up at the camera.

  “He’s a little cheeky,” Max said beside her. “He’s like a younger version of Chris Tucker.”

  She simply nodded even though she didn’t know who Chris Tucker was, not wanting to speak because speaking would be an unnecessary distraction. She took in every detail on the screen. The large country-style house in the background. The tree-lined street at the end of the driveway. Her nose tingled, almost like it was trying to remember the rich smell of whitebark pine on a cold day.

  Kevin, unlike Max, had two dimples instead of one. Another difference she noticed was that Kevin’s eyes weren’t brown, they were a strange shade of blue. Although he had a boyish face like Max, it was a little more rugged, a little more serious. Perry was much taller than Kevin, with brown eyes that twinkled with mischievousness, and was also incredibly good-looking. Teenage girls probably fell over themselves trying to get these two to notice them, Danny thought.

  “Perry,” came a thick voice from behind the camera, “you technically live here for free. I think that’s payment enough.”

  “I think your dad is trying to bring back slavery,” Perry murmured to Kevin.

  Kevin stopped shoveling and turned to face him. “You can’t play the race card if he’s got both of us doing it.”

  Before Perry could respond, Max burst through the front door, running down the stairs towards his father.

  Danny shifted on the sofa when she saw a younger version of herself on the screen. It was almost surreal seeing herself in a moment that she had no recollection of. Her long, dark brown hair ended below her shoulders and thick bangs covered her forehead. Same face, different hair. Same person, different life.

  She had an overwhelming urge to force her mind out of her current body into the body of the person on screen, to know for just one second what it was like to be her, to know what she knew. Sh
e had not noticed she was crying until she felt Max gently rubbing his hand up and down her back.

  She watched her younger self pick up a large chunk of snow and roll it into a ball.

  “Don’t even think about it, Danny,” Max shouted from the other side, but the camera remained fixed on her, only moving with the snowball as she flung it across the driveway. The camera shifted to Max just in time to see it hit the side of his face, fragments of snowflakes sticking to his hair.

  “You don’t speak to me for the next two hours,” younger Danny said before storming back inside.

  “What happened?” Max’s dad asked.

  Max shrugged. “Scrabble.”

  Perry walked up to Max and tapped him on the shoulder. “Damn, Max! That girl is fine as hell.”

  “Yeah, easy, Tiger,” he responded playfully. “That one is mine. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s my future wife.”

  Danny smiled to herself. Those few sentences reaffirmed so many things. Max had always cheated at games, she had always resorted to violence, and he had not been lying about when he started liking her more than a friend. It must have been very early in their friendship if this was her first Christmas with his family.

  “Lunch is ready,” a familiar voice sang.

  Danny recognized it immediately, but the camera was still focused on Max and Perry. She felt anxious, almost wishing she jump in there and move the damn thing herself.

  “Great,” Perry chirped. “I’m starving and I’m gonna stuff my face. Roast chicken and sweet potatoes. Momma J’s cooking is da bomb!”

  “And then dessert,” Kevin added. “Ice cream!”

  “With chocolate sauce,” Perry agreed with a nod.

  They did a weird little handshake, something that looked like it was only shared between the two of them.

  “You guys are making me hungry,” Max’s dad said, finally shifting the lens back to the door.

  “Jake.” His name caught in her throat. She fumbled to get the remote and pressed pause, freezing the gray-haired man on the screen. She slowly shifted off the sofa and moved towards the TV, tracing her fingers on the edges of his pixelated face. Somehow looking at the only person she remembered and knowing that he was no longer there only reinforced every lonely, empty feeling inside her. Her life truly was one big, gaping hole; an abyss filling with incomplete memories and other peoples’ versions of the truth.

  She sat there for quite some time, staring at the wrinkles near his eyes and the tiny mole below his lip. This was the only form of Jake she had left and she wanted to hold onto it for as long as possible.

  Max walked towards her, leaned down, and placed a kiss on the side of her head. “I can see you want some time alone.”

  She could only manage a nod. She waited for him to leave the living room before she pressed play again. She watched the rest of her first Christmas at the Shepards, putting more faces to the names in her head. Jordan. Shane. Dominic. His parents. They were a beautiful family and she felt privileged that Max would let her be a part of something so special. They laughed and joked and told stories around the Christmas tree. It made her greedy for more.

  She went through DVD after DVD, not caring that the information overload was causing her head to spin. She wanted to feel every feeling those moving pictures invoked. Whether it was joy or sorrow, she didn’t care. Anything was better than emptiness.

  Some of the videos included Amber, especially the ones from college, some had Lauren, but most of them were of her and Max. At college. At the beach. At Rocko’s. She even got to see the flash mob he had told her about. Every moment with him was playful and energetic. She knew from their past conversations that she’d had other boyfriends, but from the videos it was very difficult to pin point exactly when her and Max had started dating. They always behaved like a couple.

  The casual arm around her shoulder, the quick kiss on the side of her head, the distant admiration in his eyes, those things were captured in almost every video. That made sense because he had admitted that he liked her from the very beginning. But the reason why she was still confused was because of the fleeting glances she kept seeing in younger Danny’s eyes.

  Every now and then, younger Danny looked at Max the same way current Danny did, with eyes that seemed like she was crushing on him in the biggest way. It was strange that it took such a long time for them to get together because from the videos it was clear that they were in to each other years ago.

  She stumbled upon a more recent video. From the date stamp in the corner of the screen, it was in early February this year. She watched herself in a powder blue dress, kick off her shoes and meet Max in the middle of the dance floor. He smiled and they proceeded to perform the cutest, most incredibly dorky dance known to mankind. The song was catchy, but the music was too loud to hear the words that were exchanged between them. They bounced and turned and did the robot and Danny had to cover her mouth to mute her giggles. They were adorable together.

  When the song ended, Max pulled her into his arms and he probably said something stupid because she pulled a weird face. Right after that, Danny grabbed the remote again and pressed pause.

  Except for younger Danny’s occasional glances of affection, everything she had seen so far was unfamiliar, something she didn’t recognize. But now gazing at herself and Max in that moment frozen in time, she finally saw something she could relate to. A feeling encompassed in her hazel eyes. She felt the same way now for the same man and the similarity brought a sense of comfort because it meant that she was on her way to getting her life back. And it was all because of him.

  She stared at Max, the cute dimple on his cheek. “I think I’m falling in love with you,” she whispered. “I think…I’ve always been in love with you.”

  Max tossed over and looked at the alarm clock on the side of his bed. It was already two in the morning and he could still hear the faint sounds of the television.

  His phone buzzed on the night stand.

  Jordan: Can’t sleep?

  Max: No. Why are you up?

  Jordan: Obsessing over some guy. You?

  Max: Worried about Danny. How did you know I was awake?

  Jordan: Irish twins have the same psychic ability as normal twins.

  Max: Or you’re just bored and looking for company at 2 in the morning.

  Jordan: Yeah, that too :)

  He rolled out of bed and walked to the living room where he saw Danny sleeping on the sofa. He knelt down beside her, noticing fine lines where tears had dried on her cheek.

  Everything that had happened today made the guilt even more unbearable. When she had asked him about Richard, he was at breaking point and ready to reveal it all. But he couldn’t because the thought of Richard brought back all his insecurities.

  If she knew that he had lied to her about being her boyfriend, if she knew that she and Richard were still technically dating at the time of the accident, then what would stop her from going back to him?

  He had made the choice for her. Who would she choose if she knew everything? He had always wanted her to choose him, but this was rickety scale that would tilt in Richard’s favor if she found out what he had done. Maybe he wouldn’t lose her to Richard, but he would lose her. He couldn’t risk telling her the truth with so much hanging in the balance.

  It couldn’t be that bad, though. Lying to her couldn’t be that bad. They were happy. She was happy. How could it be bad? He would tell her eventually. As soon as she felt like she had just as much to lose, he would tell her.

  He gently ran his fingers over the scar on the side of her head. “My future wife,” he whispered and for the first time ever, he felt like those words might actually be possible.

  * * *

  “Let’s play a game,” Danny said, walking into the kitchen with a notebook in her hand. “And at least this is a game you can’t cheat at.”

  Max chuckled and continued chopping cucumbers for the salad he was preparing. He shifted the chopping board to the islan
d counter so he could face her. “Sure.”

  Sitting down on the barstool, she opened her notebook. “You said that I haven’t changed,” she explained. “So I want to test that. I have here a documented list of all my favorite things. You tell what they were before and I’ll compare it to what I have now. That way I can see if it really is the same.”

  He nodded, somewhat amused. “Okay. Shoot.”

  “My favorite color?”

  “You don’t have a favorite color. You think there are too many pretty colors to choose just one.”

  Her eyes widened and she couldn’t hold back her excitement. “That’s exactly what I wrote here.” She put a quick tick next to Favorite color on her notebook. “Okay, next one. Favorite movie?”

  “You know you don’t even need to ask that question and I don’t need to answer.” He tossed the cucumbers into the salad bowl on top of the lettuce.

  A tick was placed next to Jerry Maguire on her notebook. “Favorite song?”

  “Timbaland, The Way I Are. You’re sentimental like that.”

  “Is that our dorky dance song?”

  He nodded as he reached for a tomato, cutting it down the middle and then into neat slices.

  “I have a different one now,” she said, looking down at her notebook. “I found an old CD in the box you gave me and there’s this one song called Kokomo.”

  The light expression on his face dropped and he shook his head with disappointment. “The Beach Boys? Really, Danny? That song is like a hundred years old. And it’s clear that you haven’t listened to much music since the accident.”

  “Don’t be mean.” She laughed and threw a dish towel at his head. “Favorite food?”

  “Anything made at Rocko’s,” he replied instantly.

  “That one also changed. I got here anything made by Max, especially chicken-a-la-king.”

  He smiled, almost a shy smile, as he walked to the fridge to get out the feta cheese and olives. She continued down her list, asking about her favorite place to hang out, her favorite book and all her other favorites. As more answers were revealed, she noticed that not much had changed since before the accident. It surprised her but what surprised her more was how much he knew about her. He answered her questions quickly, without having to really think about it.