Dear Tori

by Renee Fowler

  I know this isn’t the life my dad envisioned for me, but it’s the only one that makes sense to me right now.

  Chapter Six

  Tori

  I toe off my muddy boots by the back door and come inside. Maggie rushes towards me with a box clutched in her hands. Brandon runs right past her to check on his geckos.

  She drops the dented shoebox on the kitchen table. “I was poking around, looking for those letters you wrote your mom. I thought you might like to have them.”

  “Did you find them?”

  Maggie shakes her head slowly. “No, but I found something else.”

  She stands back and lets me slide the lid off. Inside are dozens of unopened envelopes, all of them addressed to me, and each one from Noah Stone.

  I know that name. I don’t really remember Noah, but I have remembered him, and forgot him again, just like my high school french teacher Mrs. Potts, my best friend Rachel, my dog Buster, and that tawny thoroughbred, Ginger.

  “I had no idea he sent all these,” Maggie says, watching my face as I paw through the envelopes. “Your dad always got the mail.”

  “Why didn’t he give them to me?”

  Maggie wrings her hands together. “He never really liked Noah.”

  “Why not?”

  She gives me a weak smile and shrugs her shoulders. “A lot of reasons. He wasn’t a bad kid, but…” Maggie giggles and slides into one of the kitchen chairs. “He was a year older than you, and drove a motorcycle. He dropped you off home with a hickey a time or two. I had to talk your dad out of shooting him.”

  “Oh, god.” I’m laughing now too, and my face feels hot.

  “He was there the night of your accident. I think that’s really why your dad had it out for him.”

  “A lot of people were there that night from what I hear.”

  “Yeah, but he brought you to that party. Obviously it wasn’t his fault, but there was no telling your dad things like that. I think he just needed someone to put the blame on.”

  I take a spot beside Maggie, and shuffle the envelopes into a thick stack. Part of me wants to shove them back in the shoebox, leave the past in the past. The person he wrote these letters to doesn’t exist anymore, and I don’t even remember Noah. But my curiosity gets the best of me.

  First I arrange them in chronological order with some help from Maggie. The dates on the postmarks give me some trouble, but before long we have them all sorted. There are twenty-nine letters over the span of five years. The first was about four months after my accident. That last is from almost two years ago.

  “How long were we together?” I ask.

  Maggie screws her lips to the side as she thinks. “About two and a halfish years. Maybe three.”

  My fingers tremble as I tear open the first letter. I slide out the folded over sheet of notebook paper, and something small, shiny, and metallic tumbles out too. It bounces along the scratched wood surface of the kitchen table, and flies off somewhere. Maggie lunges for it. She goes down to her hands and knees to retrieve it from beneath the edge of the stove.

  “What is it?” I ask of the small, gold charm pinched between her finger and thumb.

  “A number eight?”

  I shrug my shoulders. If I don’t remember Noah, how am I supposed to know what’s so significant about the number eight?

  Dear Tori,

  I guess you still don’t remember me, otherwise you would’ve picked up the phone by now. I’ve been waiting everyday for it to ring. I’ve been praying to hear your voice again. It’s been months, and people keep telling me to let it go, to let you go, but I can’t.

  You’re the one that taught me what this symbol means, when you helped me in math. It doesn’t have a beginning or an end, and it goes on forever. I guess you could say our beginning was in the library after school, but I refuse to believe that night at the falls was our end.

  We were supposed to be together forever. Even if you don’t end up remembering me, we can start brand new. If all you need is a friend right now, I can do that too, but being apart from you is killing me. Please call me, or at least write back. I need to know you’re okay.

  Love you forever,

  Noah

  PS—I’m sorry about the last time I saw you at the hospital. It was a stupid thing to do, but I was so happy to see you awake again. I promise that won’t happen again. Not until you’re ready.

  “It’s not a number eight,” I say. “It’s an infinity symbol.”

  “Can I read it?” she asks meekly.

  Shrugging, I hand it over. It’s a sweet letter, but it doesn’t feel very personal to me since I don’t remember Noah at all. Maggie’s eyes fly across the somewhat sloppy, but still legible cursive.

  “What happened at the hospital?” I ask.

  “You don’t remember?”

  Shaking my head, I lay the small, gold infinity symbol in the palm of my hand. A lot of that year after my coma is a blur, and the first few weeks I came to are completely blank.

  “I let him come up to see you. I thought maybe it would help you remember, and he kissed you.”

  “Oh, boy.” When I first woke up, I didn’t understand what was happening. I didn’t even recognize my own body. “I bet that didn’t go over well.”

  “Not at all.”

  I open up the next letter, and the next. Some of the envelopes have little charms tucked inside along with the corresponding letters, some don’t. Some of those messages detail memories we shared. Some are filled with longing and sorrow over missing me, which feels so surreal. A few make me blush. I don’t let Maggie read those, and she doesn’t ask why. I’m sure she can guess.

  By the time I’m finished, there are ten charms in a little pile, and a whole stack of letters. I still don’t remember Noah, but I feel like I know him a little better. In a weird way, I feel like I know the person I used to be a bit better too.

  “Tori, you should go talk to him.”

  “And say what? I don’t know him.”

  “What can it hurt to go see him?”

  “He said he was moving on, and he hasn’t written to me for a long time.” I arrange the charms in a line, running my fingers over them individually. “And I’m supposed to be getting married too,” I add weakly.

  Maggie tilts her head to the side, and gives me a weary look.

  “Well, as far as Christian is concerned, we might be getting married, and it doesn’t feel right to track down my old boyfriend. We’re on a break, not broken up.”

  “You’re just going to call Noah up and say hi for old times sake. What’s so scandalous about that?”

  Before I can stop her, Maggie reaches for the cordless phone on the counter and starts to dial the number from one of the letters. She thrusts the receiver in my direction, and I take it from her reluctantly. Three short tones sound in my ear, then a feminine, robotic voice speaks.

  I hang up, and hand it back. “The number was disconnected.”

  Maggie gathers up the envelopes. “We’ve still got his address.”

  “Yeah, and the last one was in Pennsylvania. I’m not driving all that way to show up on his doorstep. He might have a wife and kids now for all I know.”

  “Or he might not.”

  “Did I really love him?”

  Maggie nods slowly.

  I don’t bother asking if he really loved me. That’s clearly evident by the length of time he continued to write me letters.

  “Maybe talking to him again will trigger something.” Maggie clasps my hands from across the table. “What if it helps you remember?”

  “What if it doesn’t?”

  “Then you’re no worse off than when you started.”

  But what is that going to do to Noah? He hung onto the memory of our time together for years. Me showing up on his doorstep might just get his hopes up, or dredge up old feelings. Maybe I’ll fall for Noah all over again only for him to realize I’m no longer the girl he wrote those letters to in the first place. No matter
which way I look at it, I just can’t see this ending well.

  I gather up all the letters, envelopes, and charms, and dump them back in the shoe box. “I’ll think about it,” I promise Maggie.

  And I did. I thought about it for hours. I pulled those letters back out and read them again. I pulled my old journals out of the closet, and set to work with a highlighter, marking everything related to Noah, then I tried to see if there was any overlap between the memories shared in his letters and what I had recorded myself.

  I felt a little like an archaeologist digging to unearth buried secrets in my own mind, and I also felt like a moron. Was I double checking the veracity of his letters? I don’t see why this Noah guy would lie to me, but it’s hard to know who or what to trust sometimes. When you can’t trust your own mind, everything becomes suspect.

  The next morning I wake up after too little sleep, firmly decided not to contact Noah. Maybe I’m back in Brockton for a while, perhaps even permanently, but I’m treating this as another new start. What good will digging back into my past do me now? I take a quick shower to wake up. There is fresh coffee downstairs waiting thanks to the automatic timer on the coffeemaker. Maggie and I have been switching off mornings to attend to the first milking, so this morning I’m up at four-thirty and she’ll sleep in an extra hour before getting Brandon ready for school.

  Things are done a lot different here from when I was a kid. We’re all organic now. No antibiotics or artificial growth hormones. Special feed, and the cows are rotated out to pasture throughout the year. It’s really the only way for small operations like this to turn a profit anymore.

  The milking process is still the same from what I remember, all machines, but I spend a bit of time with each cow checking for signs of illness. That’s the real drawback to doing things this way. If one of the dairy cows gets sick, it’ll spread like wildfire through the small herd unless it’s caught early enough and they are quarantined. I’m extra vigilant as I work my way up the row. One oversight or missed symptom, and the farm’s very slim profit margin could vanish in a flash.

  Maggie keeps asking me what I think she should do, like I’m at all qualified to be giving anyone advice. The farm is in both of our names, but I’m as undecided as her. I know she’s concerned about Brandon’s future right now. With a small place like this, every year is a gamble. If the weather doesn’t cooperate, if the summer is too hot, or the winter is too cold, or a mystery illness ravages the herd, we’re screwed.

  But they’ve diversified a bit in recent history. Organic produce, some grown outdoors in the soil, some hydroponically in a large hothouse that was constructed a few years back. Maggie has a small, but growing hive of bees she attends to. The honey gets sold, and in the spring she has a apiarist come to move the hive from farm to farm. With the bees dying off, people will pay to have their crops pollinated now.

  In short, we’re busy. Before long we’ll be harvesting the remainder of the summer crops, then it’ll be time to bail and store hay for the coming winter.

  I don’t have time to track down an old, forgotten boyfriend. I don’t have time or want to think about Christian, or answer his nonstop calls. I don’t really have time to grieve over my dad either. There’s no time, which makes Maggie’s continued insistence that I track down Noah so unwelcome.

  “He lives right in town,” Maggie says, when I come inside to wash up and eat later that morning. “I looked him up online. There was no mention of a Mrs. Stone, and he’s only a fifteen minute drive away.”

  “That’s fifteen minutes I don’t have today.”

  “I’ll take the afternoon milking. You have time.”

  “What about Brandon?”

  “He’ll tag along with me. He likes to help.”

  “Maggie, I don’t even know what to say to him.”

  “It’s easy. You knock on his door, and say ‘Remember me? I’m Tori, the love of your life.’ What’s so hard about that?”

  “The love of your life?” I mutter under my breath, laughing.

  “You two were crazy about each other.”

  “Then why did Dad hate him so much?”

  “Because he was your father, and you were his teenage daughter. It was his job to hate any boy that came sniffing around.”

  “I don’t know, Maggie. That was a long time ago.”

  “You’re really not even curious?”

  I am insanely curious. I’m full of questions about Noah, and about the person I used to be, but I still have my reservations. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to go have a chat,” I say reluctantly.

  ***

  That afternoon I pull into the narrow driveway of the address Maggie wrote down for me, and climb out of my car on shaky legs. I have a tote bag slung over my shoulder with those letters and notebooks. I’ve prepared an entire speech that is rattling around my brain as I knock on the door of the small cottage.

  There’s a scratching sound from inside, then a loud bark. Maybe Noah’s not home, but his dog is.

  Suddenly I hope he’s not home. What am I thinking, just showing up here unannounced? This is crazy. It’s high past time I leave the past alone and move on with my life.

  I turn to go, and I’ve almost made it back to my car when a loud, familiar rumble distracts me. Blinking in confusion, I watch Buck pull up behind my car.

  Appearing as bewildered as I feel, he slowly removes his helmet and slides off the motorcycle. “Tori, what are you doing here?”

  I open my mouth, about to ask him the same thing, when my eyes fall across the stitched on patch decorating his pale-blue work shirt. “Noah?”

  I’m so confused. Why is Buck wearing a shirt that says Noah? What is he doing at the address Maggie gave me for Noah? Why is he striding towards me fast with such an intense, fiery look burning through his brown eyes?

  His hands close on either side of my face, and his mouth crushes against mine before I know what’s happening.

  It’s a hard kiss. Desperate. Hungry. It overwhelms all my senses. This is obviously not the first time our lips have met, as there is an aching familiarity to the slant of his mouth against mine. My palms go up to his chest to push him away, but somehow my fingers end up twisting in the fabric of his shirt. All I can do is hold on as I try to make sense of why I’m kissing him back when I should be shoving him way.

  My mind doesn’t remember him, but my body sure does. My lips remembers this unique pressure. My tongue can recall his taste. The way his palms slide up my back and press me against him firmly is so reminiscent.

  He kisses me like the world is ending, and I’m his dying wish. I clutch at him like I’m drowning, and he’s the only thing that can save me.

  I’ve never been kissed like this in all my life, but something tells me I’ve been kissed like this many times before by the man I’m currently clinging to.

  My phone rings from inside my bag. That distinctive ringtone washes over me like a bucket of ice cold water.

  Christian.

  I shove against the solid chest of the man who is a stranger to me. I don’t even know his name. Is he Buck or Noah? Right now it doesn’t matter, because he’s not my fiance. I push harder, until he falls back a step and our lips disconnect with a loud, audible smack.

  The smack of my palm against the side of his face is even louder.

  He presses a hand to his cheek, and his eyes are huge. Stumbling backwards, I press my stinging hand over my mouth. I can’t believe I did that. I didn’t mean to hit him, but why did he kiss me?

  Chapter Seven

  Noah

  Tori staggers back from me a few steps, and wobbles like she might fall. I reach out to catch her, but she lifts a finger towards my face. “Don’t touch me.”

  I’m speechless and confused. I don’t know what to think as she digs through the bag hanging over her shoulder. Her phone is going off, some annoying ringtone that barely touches the ringing in my ears.

  Damn, if she didn’t slap me hard.

  Tori presses s
omething on her phone to silence the racket. Now there’s just the buzz of insects in the trees, and the sound of both of us breathing hard. She shoves the phone back in her bag and addresses me with a pissed off, flushed face. “Who are you? Are you Buck or Noah?”

  “Noah! You just called me Noah.” My chin tips down, and I realize she was only reading my shirt.

  “Why did you tell me your name was Buck?”

  “Because… I’m an idiot. I’m a fucking moron, that’s why.”

  “What kind of answer is that? Just tell me why you lied to me.”

  “You don’t remember me.” I try and fail to keep the misery out of my voice. For one perfect moment, I thought she knew who I was. I believed everything would go back to the way it should be. “I grabbed the wrong shirt last week, and you assumed I was Buck, so I just rolled with it. After you never wrote me back, and the last time we saw each other, I didn’t think you’d want to talk to me.”

  Tori smoothes her hair down, and crosses her arms over her chest, but not before I notice her nipples hard and straining against the fabric of her blouse. Her face is flush, and she’s still panting. Maybe she slapped me, and she wants to act all pissed off that I kissed her, but she kissed me right back.

  “That’s actually what I wanted to talk to you about,” she says in a shaky voice. “I just found those letters last night.”

  “What?” I ask sharply.

  “My dad never gave them to me.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Well, he’s not here to ask anymore, but from what I hear, he wasn’t your biggest fan. And thanks to those missing years, I was kind of like a twelve year old trapped in an eighteen year old’s body, if that makes sense. So, I suppose you could say he had his reasons.”

  My mouth opens and closes a few times as that sinks in. I knew she lost memories, but for some reason I’d never made that connection before. “Jesus. I would’ve never kissed you at the hospital if I’d realized.”