The 7 Lb., 2 Oz. Valentine

by Marie Ferrarella

  He listened and played the name over in his mind. It didn’t mean anything to him. A man’s name should mean something, he thought, aggravated. It was his connection to the future, to the past. To immortality. But the name Brady Lockwood didn’t mean anything to him.

  The redhead Gus had called Erin was looking at him so hopefully, Brady almost felt as if he should be comforting her instead of inwardly railing against his misty prison.

  Brady sighed. “I’m sorry. It just doesn’t sound familiar.”

  Erin rose, bumping against the table with her rounded belly, filled to capacity with his child. Before Brady could prevent her, she leaned over and hooked her finger onto his chain. She pulled it out until the gold medallion lay exposed against the blue background of his shirt. Her trembling fingers surrounded it. Turning it over, she held it in the palm of her hand.

  “I’m Erin,” she said insistently. “Erin.”

  Tears filled her throat. This was almost as bad as finding him dead. Because everything he had been, everything they had had between them, was almost as good as dead. Erin turned the medallion around to the inscription, as if that would give validity to her words, to her existence.

  “The Erin on the back of your St. Christopher’s medal. You have to know me. I gave you that medallion two Christmases ago.” It had been their first Christmas together. They’d made love for the first time that night. Her eyes pleaded with him. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Erin.” He repeated the name as if it was a mantra, a key. But it opened nothing. “No,” Brady replied. “I don’t.” She had no idea how sorry he was that he didn’t, Brady thought.

  Gus rose and placed his hand gently but firmly on Erin’s shoulder. Her eyes shifted to him and he could feel his own heart wrenching within his chest at the misery he saw there.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” he said softly. In response, she sank onto her seat as if her legs had crumpled beneath her.

  Brady sat in the booth, looking at Erin, waiting for the memories to come. Why didn’t they? A man should remember a woman with skin of ivory, with hair like sunset and eyes that shimmered like clover growing wild in the field.

  But he didn’t. His mind was empty. He wondered if she had made a mistake, after all.

  Very gently, Gus pushed the photo album to the center of the table. “Why don’t you show him some of the photographs?” he suggested. He smiled encouragingly at Erin.

  The album. That would do it, she thought, grasping at the straw. That would make Brady remember. She’d always insisted on bringing her camera along with them, commemorating anything they did with a slew of photographs. Brady used to groan every time he saw her raise it to her eye. She hadn’t taken a photograph since he had left her life.

  Quickly, she opened the well-worn book that she’d pored over all these months alone in her empty home. Fumbling, she flipped through pages, searching for something that would really jar his memory.

  “Here,” she cried, stabbing her finger at a photograph of Brady standing in front of the Christmas tree he had helped her select and decorate. It was a sorrylooking tree whose branches had drooped even as they brought it into her house. But she had said it needed love, and he had laughed at her, calling her hopelessly illogical. “Look at this one. I took this the Christmas I gave you the medallion.”

  Erin searched Brady’s face and saw that the photograph and the memory depicted within meant nothing to him. He recognized himself and nothing more. Unease mounted as she flipped to another page.

  “And here.” She found another photograph she knew, hoped, prayed he would recall. “We went to San Francisco that long weekend you finally took off from work.”

  Someone else had obviously taken the photograph, he thought, looking at it for a long time. She was slim then. Her arms hooked through his, she was laughing as they sat on the side of a trolley.

  He remembered a trolley, he realized. But had he seen it in another photograph, or did the memory actually come from the trip she said they had taken together?

  Brady looked at her. What she had said interested him more than the photographs at his fingertips. “Work? What do I do?”

  Though he was grateful for the job Demi had given him, in his heart Brady believed that in his other life he had worked with his mind and not his hands.

  The question sounded strange, coming from him. His job—no, his career, she amended—had always been so very important to him.

  “You’re a physicist.”

  “Physicist.” Brady rolled the word around on his tongue. It seemed to fit, through it evoked no flavors, no thoughts. He glanced at another photograph on the page. Nothing. It might as well have been taken of someone else. “Do I like it? Being a physicist, I mean.”

  For the first time, she smiled and laughed softly at the irony of the question.

  “Like it? You live and breathe work. Or did.” It would always feel as if she had to move heaven and earth to get Brady to take a little time off, or, at the very least, not work extra-long hours. Brady would always become immersed in his work, and then time would somehow seem to stop for him.

  Just as it seemed to have stopped now, she thought.

  Brady drew the album closer and began to page through it methodically, starting at the beginning and working his way to the end.

  Just like Brady. She watched him in silence, afraid to form a thought, a prayer. Hoping. She had her fingers crossed without realizing it.

  Finally, when he was finished, Brady closed the album and sat back. With a sigh, he moved the book across the table, pushing it toward Erin. He shook his head in response to the question in her eyes.

  “Are we married?” he asked suddenly. Even as he did, he looked at her left hand. It was bare.

  Erin shook her head slowly. But they were going to be, she remembered with a bittersweet pang. It was one of those understandings that went without saying. But how could she put that into words for this stranger with Brady’s face?

  “No.”

  But she was something to him, Brady decided. There were too many photographs for there not to have been some sort of a connection between them. “Divorced?”

  That was the kind of question Brady would ask, she thought, a sad smile twisting her lips. He was in there somewhere. She just had to find a way to set him free. “No, we never got that far.”

  Her phrasing intrigued him. His eyes shifted to the swell of her abdomen.

  He didn’t have to form the words. Erin raised her chin without realizing it.

  “Yes,” she answered, telling him what she couldn’t bring herself to tell him that day he’d walked out on her. That she was carrying his child—and had been for the last eight months. “The baby is yours.”

  Her answer disturbed him. Then why hadn’t he married her? Was he that kind of person? The type to selfishly abandon a woman who was pregnant with his child? The discovery left a bad taste in his mouth.

  What other things were lurking in his past that would make him uncomfortable with himself? For the first time, Brady wondered if perhaps his accident had been for the best, after all. It amounted to a second chance. A way to leave off the old life and start fresh with a new one.

  But he couldn’t do that if there were ends left to be tied. And she was very obviously one of those.

  “And I walked out on you?”

  He didn’t remember, she thought. None of it. And certainly not the heated words they had exchanged that had left her so numb and generated the horrid feeling in the pit of her stomach that had made her nauseated. Sadness washed over her, bleaching her very bones.

  She watched Brady’s eyes as she spoke, slowly, deliberately, hoping that her words would stir something within him.

  “No, you walked out on a…discussion we were having. You went to cool off. You just never came back.” Erin pressed her lips together and swallowed. She wasn’t getting through to him. But it didn’t matter, not right now. He was alive and that was all that counted. She could take it from h
ere. “Until now.”

  2

  There were so many questions scrambling over one another in Erin’s mind, vying for prominence, all demanding answers. But above them all was one that echoed over and over again in her brain.

  Why don’t you know me, Brady? You said I was the only thing in your life that ever mattered to you besides your work. And you forgot us both.

  Confronted with the fathomless look in Brady’s eyes, Erin felt overwhelmed. She clenched her hands in her lap, struggling to regain control. This was no time to fall apart. She was going to have to serve as Brady’s key to the past. She couldn’t unlock anything for him if she allowed herself to indulge in self-pity. It was Brady who mattered right now, not her hurt feelings or anything else. Just Brady.

  “There’s just so much I have to ask you,” Erin began, trying to organize the questions that were slamming into one another like untrained skaters on the ice for the first time. Where were his clothes? He’d had a suitcase with him when he disappeared. Was that gone? Did he remember anything? She chose the first question that popped up. “How did you happen to wind up working here?”

  There were a great many questions he couldn’t answer, at least this one he could. Brady’s eyes shifted to the policeman beside her. He wasn’t sure what he would have done without the man’s support.

  “Gus brought me. Demi gave me a job waiting tables to carry me over until my memory returned. I’m still waiting.” A self-deprecating smile curved his generous mouth. “No pun intended.”

  “Demi?” Erin repeated.

  She looked from the uniformed man at her side to Brady, her heart accelerating again, this time in alarm. Was there another woman in the picture now? Had the new Brady, the one who couldn’t remember her or the life they had shared, found someone else in these last few months? The possibility had never occurred to Erin before.

  “My sister,” Gus explained quickly, noting the look of distress rising in Erin’s eyes.

  Leaning out of the booth, Gus beckoned to a ravenhaired woman standing behind the cashier’s desk. She approached them on long, shapely legs that made Erin’s heart sink a little lower.

  “This is my sister, Demitria Tripopulous,” Gus introduced the woman to her. “Demi, this is Erin Collins, the woman who ran the ad that Grandmother read.”

  Demi smiled warmly as she shook Erin’s hand. “Nice to meet you. So?” She looked hopefully at her brother and then Brady, taking them both in in one long, sweeping glance. “Any luck?”

  Gus shook his head. In his own way, he felt as disappointed about the outcome as the chief players were. “Not yet. The doctor said these things take time.” Gus explained to Erin, “Some amnesia victims completely regain their memory within a few weeks of their loss. Others take years and still others just keep waiting. In general, it takes a few months.”

  “And some never recover,” Brady added. He remembered how the words had sunk deeply into his soul when he first heard the doctor utter them. It felt as if he had been branded by a red-hot iron.

  “And some do,” Erin interjected. Erin had very little knowledge about amnesia, but she was well schooled in optimism, and that was something she had always tried to drum into Brady’s head. If you were optimistic, the time you spent waiting was always upbeat. She intended to remain upbeat now. After all, she’d found him, hadn’t she?

  Brady looked at Erin sharply as a feeling of déjà vu whispered through him. But it had no substance, no breadth. He couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t examine it any further. And then it was gone. Frustration beat through him as it did a hundred times a day. He sighed and shrugged in response to her words.

  “I think,” Demi said brightly, “in honor of Brady learning his last name, a celebration is in order. What’ll you have?” she asked Erin. “On the house,” she added when Erin said nothing.

  Food was the last thing on her mind right now. Erin held the photo album, pressing it against her chest. Somehow, just holding the visual evidence of their life together comforted her. She offered an apologetic smile to Gus’s sister.

  “I’m afraid I’m not hungry right now.” She looked around the restaurant. The lunch crowd had thinned out, but Aphrodite’s was still far from empty. “Is there somewhere private where Brady and I can talk?” she asked Demi.

  Anticipation and apprehension vied for space within him. As much as he wanted to know who he was, he wasn’t prepared to face it in a busy restaurant with onlookers. Something told him he was a private person.

  Brady rose from the table. “My shift’s not over yet.”

  “Wow.” Demi shook her head in bemused surprise. “I wish everyone who worked here was as dedicated as you are.”

  He didn’t see it as dedication particularly, just living up to an obligation. She paid him to work, not to sit and talk. As eager as he was to find out who he was, he realized that it wasn’t going to happen with a bolt of lightning striking him.

  Demi tugged on his apron strings. The apron loosened and she pulled it away from him. “Yes, it is.” He looked at her questioningly. “Your shift is over,” she emphasized.

  Brady surprised them all by taking the apron from her hands. He needed a routine to hang on to. However small, he needed some sort of structure in his life so that he could build from there.

  “No, not yet,” he told Demi quietly.

  Though she felt frustrated by his actions, Erin was heartened at the same time. That much was still Brady, Erin thought, that stubborn, methodical way that he approached everything he did.

  Gathering the album and her purse, Erin struggled out of the booth’s confinement. Freed, she rose to her feet and turned toward Brady. It was hard standing so close to him and not throwing her arms around his neck, not holding him close and sobbing her relief, but she contained herself. She didn’t want to frighten him away. In a way, she realized, this was almost like the beginning of their relationship. She had fallen in love with him the moment she’d seen him. It had taken her a year before she convinced him that he felt the same way.

  “All right, why don’t you come home—to my house,” she corrected. “When you’re through working?”

  Maybe that was a better idea, anyway. The three months before he had vanished, he had practically lived at her house. She might not be able to trigger his memory, but maybe something there would. At least she could hope. She could always hope.

  Brady looked at her, trying to remember. He shook his head. “I don’t know—”

  Anticipating his words, Erin stopped Brady with a wave of her hand before he finished. “Could I have your pad and pencil, please?”

  He gave it to her wordlessly and then watched as Erin tore off a sheet. Flipping it over to the blank side, she wrote down her address for him.

  “Here.” Erin handed the paper to him. “This is where I live.”

  It felt so strange having to tell him her address. Brady had helped her choose her condo. She’d consulted with him on all the new furnishings, secretly knowing that one day this would be where they would live. In her own haphazard approach to life, Erin had planned it all out.

  She fought back a fresh onslaught of emotion. They’d made her home together, and now he didn’t even know where that had been.

  Brady looked down at the address, then raised his eyes to hers. “I’m not that familiar with the area.”

  Gus moved next to Brady and glanced at the paper in his hand. “It’s where I found you.” Brady didn’t have a driver’s license yet, nor did he have a car at his disposal. Demi had given him a place to stay behind the kitchen, so there was no urgent need to get a license. It occurred to Gus that he didn’t even know if Brady remembered how to drive. “Look, why don’t I come by here later and run you up there myself?”

  Brady nodded, grateful for the help. He folded the piece of paper and tucked it into his shirt pocket. “Seven o’clock all right with you?” he asked Erin.

  Erin nodded, blinking back tears. She wanted to cry out, “No, come home with me now. I
’ve been through hell and back in the last five months. I don’t want to wait another five hours.” She didn’t. Instead, she struggled to control her emotions. He was so formal, so polite. Just as when they’d met. Back to square one. But she had won him over once, and she would do it again.

  She had to.

  She pressed her lips together before answering. “Seven is fine with me.”

  Despite all her best efforts, one of the tears she was trying so valiantly to hold back slid down her cheek.

  The sight of it saddened Brady, stirring him. Stirring something.

  “Um, hey, don’t.” He had no idea what prompted him, but he reached out and gently wiped away the tear from her cheek with his thumb. Maybe it was because she looked so sad. Or maybe it was because he knew that he was responsible for its existence.

  Touching her cheek prodded something in the recesses of his mind. But the next moment, it was gone, fading as if it had never been. It was like a two-step, he thought. One step forward, one step back. When would he finally be on his way forward?

  “Maybe I’ll remember soon.” He dug into his pocket and handed her his handkerchief.

  Erin sniffed as she accepted it. That was so like him, she thought. He was the only man she’d ever known who actually carried a handkerchief.

  She shook her head, wanting only to leave him with a positive impression. “No, it’s not that.” She wiped her eyes, silently forbidding herself any more tears. “It’s just that I’m so glad you’re alive.”

  People around them were staring, she realized. Not that it really mattered to her. But it always had to Brady. He never liked attracting attention. When he had held her hand in public, she had thought of it as a major event.

  Erin blew out a breath and handed the handkerchief back to Brady. She mustered the cheeriest voice she could. “I’ll see you at seven.”

  Brady nodded. He was still standing in the same spot, watching her as she walked out of the restaurant with Gus holding her arm.

  Gus opened the front door and held it for her. He had to be getting back. This was his lunch hour. He looked down at the small woman beside him. “Do you want to go home?”