He hugs me again, again with just that left arm. I watch the right, but it doesn’t twitch. That worries me. Almost as much as this conversation does.
“If I remained faithful, I must have known you were out there, and I was just waiting for the right time to come back.”
He’ll find out as soon as he goes back to the club. If he does, I correct. But as soon as they see him, Titsy, Sheila and the others will be all over him. I decide to leave it, I’m laying far too much on him now.
But he’s remembered too well. Seems I couldn’t control the expression on my face.
“There’s more, isn’t there? Tell me. Tell me now.” He waits.
“Lizard, you didn’t have a special someone, but you didn’t go wanting if you know what I mean.”
“Babe?”
“The MC has club girls…”
“Oh fuck.” He looks and sounds horrified. “Babe…”
I decide to be honest. “Liz, I didn’t like seeing it, but you didn’t know you were married. You can’t be blamed for something you didn’t know you’d done.” Am I being truthful letting him believe I accept it? It hurts. A lot.
But he sees the pain in my eyes. “I’ll never hurt you again, Vanna. I promise.”
“I only found out about ten days ago, Liz. I came to find you. Why doesn’t matter for now.” I don’t want to heap more problems on him.
“I want to see Cas.” He says after a moment, “How old is he again?”
“He’s fourteen. And he’s here. Do you want me to get him?”
“Yeah,” the word’s breathed out. “So much to get my head around. My baby’s a teenager, almost a grown man.”
“Is it too much? Do you want to rest before you see him?”
“Rest?” he huffs. “I’m fuckin’ terrified I’ll forget everything if I close my eyes and sleep. Twelve years, babe. Twelve years have gone by and I don’t fuckin’ remember. And before that? Another period I blanked out apparently.” He grimaces. “What if I forget everything again? What if I forget who I fuckin’ am? What if I end up a vegetable, unable to remember anything at all?”
Seeing my big strong man scared out of his wits is horrifying. I wonder if I’ve made a mistake, but Mace was right. I couldn’t have done otherwise. I couldn’t have hidden how I’ve aged and the resultant body changes, and soon Liz will notice his. I couldn’t have paraded Cas in front of him, when he last remembers him as two years old. What else could I have done?
“You won’t forget,” I tell him firmly. “The doctor said there’s probably a link between the tumour and the original brain injury. Now that’s gone, there’s no reason to think your faculties will decline again.”
“I want to see Cas,” he repeats.
“I’ll go and get him.” I start to stand, but Liz holds me back. His eyes examining my face, this time, as if memorising it.
“Don’t take long,” he says quickly. “For fuck’s sake, Vanna, come back.”
“Lizard,” I tell him firmly, knowing what he’s worrying about, “you won’t forget me again. I promise.” Hopefully he can’t see my fingers crossed behind my back.
As I go to the door, I hear him say to himself in disbelief, “Twelve fucking years.”
Cas stands as soon as I enter the waiting room. “He remembers? Can I see him, Mom?”
“He remembers, but only up to the start of his last tour. I’ve explained to him Cas, but…”
“He expects a two-year-old.” Cas looks tense. “Mace told me.”
“I’ve told him, Cas. He knows to expect a teenager, but he is struggling with the idea.”
“Does he remember the club at all?” asks Demon, tersely.
I give him a sad look. “I’m sorry, no. Or not yet. But he’s just had a major brain operation, so who knows what to expect?”
“How’s he physically?” asks Beef.
“I’m really not sure,” I tell expectant faces. “Weak. He should be sleeping but he’s afraid to give in. He doesn’t seem able to move his right-hand side, but he’s ignoring that for now. He’s too worried about what’s going on with his head.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Lizard
Vanna’s gone to get my son. The boy I’d forgotten about for twelve years. How the fuck could I do that? Twelve years!
I’m a biker? A member of an outlaw gang? Jeez. If she’d told me I’d flown to the moon, I could just as well believe that.
“You feeling okay, Mr James?” A nurse comes in and checks the readings of the machine beeping beside me. “It looks like you’re becoming stressed. You really should try to get some rest.”
“I’ve forgotten twelve years,” I tell her. “I remember my wife as a twenty-two-year-old, she’s now thirty-four. And I’m apparently nearing my forties. How the fuck do you think I’m feeling? I’m scared I’ll forget even more.”
“Calm down, Mr James.”
“Calm down? How can I fuckin’ keep calm when I don’t understand what’s going on in my head?”
She looks at me for a moment. “I’ll get someone to talk to you, okay?”
“I don’t need fuckin’ therapy. I need to know what’s wrong with my head.”
“I can help you with that,” a deep voice says. “Mr James. I’m the consulting neurologist. I performed your operation.”
“I’ve woken up remembering my wife who I’ve apparently forgotten I had for twelve years, Doc, as well as everything that happened over that time. Am I going to forget again?”
He pulls up a chair and regards me seriously. “I work on brains every day, and things never cease to surprise me. You originally suffered a TBI, a traumatic brain injury. It’s not unusual that triggers a loss of memory. Sometimes it’s physical damage to part of your brain, sometimes it’s PTSD, or simply that you want to forget. For example, if your marriage wasn’t happy, you could have hidden it from yourself.”
“No fuckin’ way,” I tell him. “I love Vanna, and she loves me. We’ve got a son…” my voice trails off. I have a son who I’ve apparently neglected for a very long time because I didn’t know he existed.
“You know we only use a fraction of our brains?”
I recall hearing that somewhere. I raise my chin.
“You’re an interesting case, Mr James. Sometimes memories are still there, but locked away, unable to be accessed. There have been cases of people who’ve forgotten who they are, then get flashbacks and finally remember years on. You suffered a traumatic event and injury to your temporal lobes. If I was a betting man, I’d place money on that being the cause of your initial loss of memory, particularly as I understand that after your original injury your short-term memory was affected as well. That you started to be able to lay down new memories suggests the brain healing itself over time.”
“If I was healing myself, why didn’t I remember my wife and kid before now?”
“Because of the tumour. One the size of yours would have been growing for quite a while. That you remember now suggests its removal, or maybe the surgery I did to correct a small bleed, was the trigger for your memories coming back.”
“So why can’t I remember what I’ve done for the past few years?”
“You’ve just undergone a serious operation on your head. There will be some swelling which will gradually go down. Common side effects include loss of concentration and trouble remembering things. There are definitely physical reasons. I wouldn’t have expected you to wake and be cured immediately. PTSD could be playing a part. You’ve moved on, made a new life, left the old one behind. You feel guilty, so instead of trying to assimilate your fresh memories of your life before, you’re believing you’re back twelve years ago. Sometimes our thoughts take the easiest path.”
“My brain’s fucked.” I take it he’s suggesting that my way of coping is pretending it never happened, instead of admitting what an asshole I’ve been to Vanna and Cas by denying them all these years.
He chuckles. “That’s not a medical term I’d use. Don’t push y
ourself too hard. I’ll set you up with a therapist, and we’ll work on getting your memories back. You’ll also need to have some physical therapy to help you recover your strength on your right-hand side.”
After giving me a bit of medical jargon about the operation itself, and what I can expect during my recovery, he gets up to leave.
“How soon can I get out of here, Doc?”
“I would hope by the weekend. It depends on how you do.” He opens the door. “Ah, Mrs James. Your husband needs rest. Please don’t stay too long.”
Vanna comes in. “You sure you’re up to this, Lizard?”
“Is he here?” I ask fast. At her nod, I swallow a couple of times. “I want to see my son.”
A boy, no, a young man enters. Well I’ll be fucked. He’s as tall as me. Last time I saw him, he’d barely come up to my knee.
“You’ve grown,” I squeak, then cough to clear my throat, having to ignore the blast of pain which goes through me. Still, I refuse to use the morphine pump that’s beside me.
“You’re hurting,” Vanna accuses. “Liz, this is too much for you, too soon.”
I hold out my hand, curling my finger toward Cas. “Come closer. Let me get a good look at you.”
I’m meeting a stranger. Someone who carries my blood, someone who even looks like me, despite the colouring he got from his mom. I have no fucking idea what to say to him.
“How are you feeling, Dad?”
“Like a mule kicked me in the head,” I reply, startling at the word he called me. How can I equate this with the child who last called me ‘Daddy’?
Vanna looks from me to Cas, then back to me again. “What did the doctor say?”
I know she’s asked to distract us from this awkward moment, when neither of her men seem to know what to do or find words to come out of their mouths.
“He said my retrograde amnesia over the past twelve years could have been caused by physical damage to the brain, compounded by the growth of the tumour.”
“Why have you forgotten again, Dad?” Cas asks. “Why don’t you remember the club or your friends?”
I stare at him, then at Vanna. “Could be the swelling that’s yet to go down, could be PTSD, my brain shutting out the pain of how I’ve mistreated you both.”
“You coming home, Dad?”
What a fucking question to ask. I have no idea of the answer. I swallow back the yes as I realise, I don’t even know where home is now. I presume we’re still in San Diego? Does Vanna live in the same house? Will she want me back after all this time? When I glance at my wife, I notice a strained expression on her face. I’d married a young girl and did my best to look after her. Even when I was overseas, I’d checked in regularly with her, paid all the bills and provided for them both. For twelve years now she’d been on her own, raising a son with no one beside her. Already I can see changes, and not just the physical signs of a woman who’s grown older. There’s a new maturity about her. A confidence in the way she holds herself. She might still love me, but does she want me back in her life? Does she want a man who hadn’t been there for her?
How much have the years changed me? I’m apparently a biker, for fuck’s sake. I’d been in the Marines, and that’s all I can remember. What made me enter the outlaw lifestyle, I’ve no fucking idea. I can’t remember myself ever thinking of bikers as anything other than adrenaline junkies with scant regard for anyone else, or even as criminals. If I really joined that type of gang, am I still the man I was? Has my thinking and outlook been altered forever?
I could answer Cas’s question with a simple yes, as that’s what he’s obviously expecting, but it’s far more complicated than that. I’ll have to learn who Vanna is all over again and reprove I’m the man for her. As for Cas himself, how’s he going to react with me stepping into the role of being a father?
Then there’s the little fact that I’ve apparently been with whores. That doesn’t bear thinking about. I just hope I gloved up and didn’t catch anything.
“You don’t want to come back.” Cas supplies the answer when I take too long to reply.
“Cas, Son. No, it’s not that.” I try to put my thoughts into words. “You’ve been without me for twelve years. I’d love to say I’ll step back in and pick up where we left off, but I’ll be stuck in the past, and you’ve moved on. Gonna take a moment to get used to that. Your mom might not want me back, or not straightaway.” The last sentence was hard to get out of my mouth. Vanna not want me? I can’t bear to think about that. She’s my wife for fuck’s sake. Or was, twelve years back.
“At least you won’t need to change diapers.” Vanna smiles. “Of course you can come home with us, you’ll need to convalesce somewhere.”
I’d hate to be a burden on anyone. Perhaps I should go to my own place. If I have one, that is. Do I even have a home? Own, rent? Or had Vanna said something about living at a motorcycle club? Surely not, I like my own space. “Where do I live?”
“You live here, in Pueblo. At the club. We live in Denver.”
I moved? “Why are we not still in California?”
“I don’t know.” Vanna’s biting her lip. “You moved first. When I found where you’d gone, I followed you. I, I thought if I still saw you occasionally, you might remember.”
“You stalked me?” But fuck, I’m glad that she had. “Babe, I’m so grateful you didn’t give up on me.”
Then I catch sight of my son, and I almost feel him wishing that she had. If I’d died, she’d have mourned, moved on, maybe married a good man to be his father. But I’m still alive, not even sure who I am now, or whether I can be the man I once was.
What if I can no longer be the man she remembers, or, would even that be enough for her now?
My head hurts like a bitch. I know I’m overdoing it. My eyes close.
“I’ve had enough of this,” I hear Vanna say. Snapping my eyes open, I see her pressing the button that will send morphine into my veins. “You’re in pain, you need rest.”
The old Vanna wouldn’t have been so presumptuous, but I find I’m admiring the new version.
Already my eyelids feel heavy.
“Cas and I will leave you now. Get some rest, we’ll be back tomorrow.”
My eyes snap open. “Promise?” I ask, sounding like a needy child.
“I promise.”
She leans down, and I feel the brush of her lips against mine.
“Night, Dad.”
“Night, Son.”
Crazy dreams come at me. The loud sound of guns firing, the sharp cracks of sniper rifles, the boom of an explosion. Faces I don’t recognise appearing and melting into faces of men I served with. Hatch. I’ll catch up with Hatch when I get home.
Struggling up through the mire of sleep, I wake. For a moment I have difficulty separating reality from the morphine-induced dreams of the night. Had I dreamed everything? Have twelve years really passed?
What’s real and what’s not?
Hatch? If so much time has gone by, he may not remember me. Or hate that I hadn’t been in touch. How could I have forgotten him? He’s my best bud. He’d been by my side… Fuck. I can’t remember any more.
“Good morning, Mr James.” A too bright male nurse enters my room.
“What year is it?”
When he tells me, despite my initial optimism, my talk with Vanna yesterday hadn’t been a dream.
Lost in my thoughts, I ignore what he’s doing as he takes my blood pressure. He then asks me to move my limbs.
“Do you think you can stand?” When I growl yes, he encourages me. “Slowly does it,” he warns when I sit up too fast.
“Christ, I feel weak,” I complain. My head is spinning and for a moment I don’t think I can stand.
“It’s quite normal to feel worse immediately after an operation like you’ve had. You need to give yourself time.”
“I’m alright.” I wave off his help. When I get to my feet, I stumble as my right leg folds and would have fallen had the nurse not hel
ped me to sit back down.
“You might need crutches for a while,” he offers. “Were you weak in that leg before?”
How the fuck should I know?
“He wasn’t,” a stranger’s voice sounds. “He was fit and strong.”
I may not know him, but it would appear, he knows me. “Who are you?” Still struggling to stand, I eye the man who’s walked into my room as though he’s got every right to be there. He’s dark-haired and has brown eyes which seem to flare. He looks around my age.
“I’m Demon. Your prez.”
Whatever I’ve been doing for the last twelve years, I’m a changed man now. My Vanna would never want a biker as a father for Cas, or a husband associated with criminals. No. If I’m going to regain my wife and son, I’m going to have to alter my life.
“You’re not my anything,” I tell him fast. “I want nothing to do with you or your fuckin’ club. Now get out of my room and don’t bother coming back.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Mace
“Are you alright?”
I glance up at Shayla who’s standing in the entrance to my room and give a quick shake of my head.
“Want to talk about it?”
I examine her face and think how to answer her question. It appears her company is just what I need. “Yes.”
“The women have been talking,” she says as she walks in. She indicates the bed, when I nod, she sits beside me, keeping a safe distance between us. “I’m not sure I understand. Vanna is Lizard’s wife, and Cas is his kid? Am I right, Mace? How does that work? He’s never acknowledged them.”
I know what she’s thinking, so I knock her ill thoughts of my brother on the head. “Lizard wasn’t being a dick, Shay. He’d truthfully forgotten his life before he joined us, or a big fuckin’ part of it.” I put it as simply as I can. “Now he’s remembered his wife and kid, but the joke’s on us. He’s now forgotten all his time with the club. Worse, he told Demon to get lost.”
Satan’s Devils MC -Colorado Box Set: Books 4-6 Page 102