“Charlie,” she says, setting down her slice. “Will you come play with me?”
I smile. “Yeah, of course.”
She beams at me and my heart suddenly feels so big and full. When I look over at Silas, he’s staring at me, glassy eyed. The corner of his mouth lifts in a small smile.
It’s dark when we pull into Charlie and Janette’s driveway. There’s an awkward moment where I should probably walk Charlie to the door, but based on the way Landon and Janette have been flirting in the back seat, I don’t know how all four of us are supposed to do this at the same time.
Janette opens her door, and then Landon opens his, so Charlie and I wait in the car.
“They’re exchanging numbers,” she says, watching them. “How cute.”
We sit in silence watching them flirt until Janette disappears inside the house.
“Our turn,” Charlie says, opening her door.
I walk slowly with her up the sidewalk, hoping her mother doesn’t see me here. I don’t have the energy to deal with that woman tonight. I feel bad that Charlie’s about to have to do just that.
She’s wringing her hands together nervously. I know she’s stalling because she doesn’t want me to leave her alone tonight. Every single memory she has consists of me and her. “What time is it?” she asks.
I pull my phone out of my pocket to check. “It’s after ten.”
She nods and then glances behind her at the house. “I hope my mother is asleep,” she says. And then, “Silas…”
I interrupt whatever she’s about to say. “Charlie, I don’t think we should split up tonight.”
Her eyes meet mine again. She looks relieved. I’m the only person she knows, after all. The last thing we probably need right now is to be distracted by people we don’t know. “Good. I was just about to suggest that.”
I nudge my head to the door behind her. “We need to make it look like you’re home, though. Go inside. Make like you’re going to bed. I’ll go drop Landon off at my house and then come back to get you in an hour.”
She nods. “I’ll meet you at the end of the road,” she says. “Where do you think we should stay tonight?”
I think about that. It’s probably best if we stay at my house, so we can see if there’s anything we missed in my room that might help us. “I’ll sneak you upstairs to my bedroom. We have a lot to go over tonight.”
Charlie’s eyes drop to the ground. “Upstairs?” she says curiously. She inhales a slow breath, and I can hear the air sliding through her clenched teeth. “Silas?” She lifts her eyes to mine, and they’re narrowed. She has an accusatory look about her and I have no idea what I’ve done to provoke this look. “You wouldn’t lie to me, would you?”
I tilt my head, not sure if I heard her right. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been noticing things. Little things,” she says.
I can feel the descent of my heart. What did I say? “Charlie…I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
She takes a step back. Her hand covers her mouth for a moment, and then she points at me. “How do you know your bedroom is upstairs when you haven’t even been to your house yet?”
Shit. I did say upstairs.
Shaking her head, she adds, “And you made a comment earlier at the prison. About how you’ve prayed a lot in the last few days, but we’re both only supposed to remember today. And this morning…when I told you my name was Delilah? I could see you trying not to smile. Because you knew I was lying.” Her voice begins to falter between suspicious and scared. I hold up a reassuring palm, but she backs another step closer to the house.
This is a problem. I’m not sure I know how to respond to her. I don’t like knowing that she would rather run inside a house that terrified her five minutes ago than be standing near me. Why did I lie to her this morning?
“Charlie. Please don’t be scared of me.” I can tell it’s already too late.
She darts for her front door, so I lunge forward and wrap my arms around her, pulling her against my chest. She starts to scream, so I cover her mouth with my hand. “Calm down,” I say against her ear. “I won’t hurt you.” The last thing I need is for her not to trust me. She grabs my arm with both hands, trying to free herself from my grasp. “You’re right. Charlie, you’re right. I lied to you. But if you’ll calm down for two seconds, I’ll explain why.”
She lifts a leg while I’m still holding on to her from behind. She presses her foot against the house and kicks as hard as she can, sending both of us tumbling backward. I lose my grip on her and she begins to crawl away from me, but I’m able to grab her again and push her onto her back. She’s looking up at me wide-eyed, but she isn’t screaming this time. My hands are pressing her arms against the ground.
“Stop it,” I tell her.
“Why did you lie?” she cries. “Why are you pretending this happened to you too?” She struggles some more, so I tighten my hold.
“I’m not pretending, Charlie! I’ve been forgetting, just like you have. But it didn’t happen to me today. I don’t know why. But I can only remember the last two days, that’s it. I swear.” I look her in the eyes and she holds my stare. She’s still mildly struggling, but I can tell she also wants to hear my explanation. “I didn’t want you to be afraid of me this morning, so I pretended it happened again. But I swear, up until this morning, it’s been happening to both of us.”
She stops struggling and just lets her head fall to the side. She closes her eyes, completely exhausted. Emotionally and physically. “Why is this happening,” she whispers in defeat.
“I don’t know, Charlie,” I say, releasing one of her arms. “I don’t know.” I brush her hair out of her face. “I’m about to let go of you. I’m going to stand up and get in my car. After I drop Landon off, I’ll come back for you, okay?”
She nods her head but doesn’t open her eyes. I release her other arm and slowly stand up. When I’m no longer pinning her to the ground, she quickly sits up and scoots away from me before standing up.
“I was lying to protect you. Not to hurt you. You believe me, right?”
She rubs the spots on her arms where I was holding her down. She produces a meek, “Yeah.” And then, after clearing her throat, “Be back in an hour. And don’t lie to me ever again.”
I wait for her to walk back inside her house before I head back to the car.
“What the hell was that all about?” Landon asks.
“Nothing,” I reply, staring out the window as we pass her house. “Just telling her goodnight.” I reach into the back seat to grab all of our things. “I’m going back to Jamais Jamais for my Land Rover.”
Landon laughs. “We sort of wrecked it last night. Tearing down a gate?”
I remember. I was there. “It might still drive okay, though. It’s worth a shot, and I can’t keep using...whose car is this, anyway?”
“Mom’s,” he says. “I texted her this morning and told her yours was in the shop and that we needed hers today.”
I knew I liked this kid.
“So…Janette, huh?” I ask him.
He turns toward the window. “Shut up.”
The Land Rover’s front end was a debacle of twisted metal and debris. But apparently the damage was only cosmetic, because it cranked right up.
It took all I had not to go inside the gate again and scream at that psycho woman for leading us in the wrong direction, but I didn’t. Charlie’s dad has caused enough of a shit storm in her world.
I calmly drive my car to Charlie’s house and wait for her at the end of the road like I said I would. I text her to let her know I’m in a different vehicle.
I begin to turn theories over in my mind while I wait for her. It’s hard for me to suspend belief in order to give our circumstances an explanation, but the only things I can come up with are otherworldly.
A curse.
An alien abduction.
Time travel.
Twin brain tumors?
None of it mak
es sense.
I’m making notes when the passenger door opens. A rush of wind follows Charlie inside the car, and I find myself wishing it would push her all the way to my side. Her hair is damp and she’s in different clothes.
“Hey.”
She says, “Hi,” and pulls the seatbelt into place. “What were you writing?”
I hand her the notebook and pen and then back out of the driveway. She begins reading over my summary.
When she’s finished, she says, “None of it makes sense, Silas. We got into a fight and broke up the night before this started. The next day we can’t remember anything other than random stuff, like books and photography. It keeps happening for a week, until you don’t lose your memory and I do.” She pulls her feet up on the seat and taps the pen against the notebook. “What are we missing? There has to be something. I have no memory before this morning, so what happened yesterday that made you stop forgetting? Did anything happen last night?”
I don’t answer her right away. I think about her questions. How all along, we’ve been assuming other people had something to do with this. We thought The Shrimp was involved, we thought her mother was involved. For a while, I wanted to accuse Charlie’s father. But maybe it’s none of that. Maybe it has nothing to do with anyone else and everything to do with us.
We reach my house no closer to the truth than we were this morning. Than we were two days ago. Than we were last week.
“Let’s go through the back door in case my parents are awake.” The last thing we need right now is for them to see me sneaking Charlie into my bedroom to stay the night. The back door won’t take us past my father’s study.
It’s unlocked, so I make my way in first. When all is clear, I grab her hand and rush her through the house, up the stairwell, and to my bedroom. By the time I shut the door behind us and lock it, we’re both breathing heavily. She laughs and falls onto my bed. “That was fun,” she says. “I bet we’ve done that before.”
She sits up and brushes the hair out of her eyes, smiling. She begins to look around my room, through eyes that are seeing it again for the first time. I immediately get that longing in my chest, akin to how I felt last night at the hotel when she fell asleep in my arms. The feeling that I would do absolutely anything to be able to remember what it was like to love her. God, I want that back. Why did we ever break up? Why did we let everything that happened between our families come between us? From the outside looking in, I’d almost believe we were soul mates before we let it all fall apart. Why did we think we could intervene with fate?
I pause.
When she looks at me, she knows something is going on in my head. She scoots to the edge of the bed and tilts her head. “Do you remember something?”
I sit in the desk chair and roll toward her. I take both of her hands in mine and I squeeze them. “No,” I say. “But…I might have a theory.”
She sits up straighter. “What kind of theory?”
I’m sure this is about to sound crazier coming from my mouth than it does swimming around in my head. “Okay, so…this might sound stupid. But last night…when we were at the hotel?”
She nods, encouraging me to continue.
“One of the last thoughts I had before we fell asleep was how—while you were missing—I didn’t feel whole. But when I found you, it was the first time I felt like Silas Nash. Up until that point, I didn’t feel like anyone. And I remember swearing to myself right before I fell asleep that I would never allow us to drift apart again. So I was thinking…” I release her hands and stand up. I pace the room a couple of times until she stands up, too. I shouldn’t be embarrassed to say this next part out loud, but I am. It’s ridiculous. But so is every other thing in the whole world right now.
I rub the nerves out of the back of my neck while I lock eyes with her. “Charlie? What if…when we broke up…we screwed with destiny?”
I wait for her to laugh, but instead, a rush of chills covers her arms. She makes to rub them away as she slowly takes a seat back down on the bed. “That’s ridiculous,” she mutters. But there’s no conviction in her words, which means maybe a part of her thinks this theory is worth exploring.
I sit down in my chair again and position myself in front of her. “What if we’re supposed to be together? And messing with that caused some sort of…I don’t know…rift.”
She rolls her eyes. “So what you’re implying is, the universe wiped away all of our memories because we broke up? That seems a little narcissistic.”
I shake my head. “I know how it sounds. But yes. Hypothetically speaking…what if soul mates exist? And once they come together, they can’t fall apart?”
She folds her hands together in her lap. “How does that explain why you remembered this time and I didn’t?”
I pace the room some more. “Let me think for a minute,” I say to her.
She waits patiently while I rub the floor raw. I hold up a finger. “Hear me out, okay?”
“I’m listening,” she says.
“We’ve loved each other since we were kids. We obviously had this connection that has lasted our entire lives. Up until external factors started getting in our way. The thing with our fathers, our families hating each other. You holding a grudge against me for believing your father was guilty. There’s a pattern here, Charlie.” I grab the notebook that I wrote in earlier and look at all the things we naturally remember and all the things we don’t. “And our memories…we can remember things that weren’t forced on us. Things we had a passion for all on our own. You remember books. I remember how to work a camera. We remember lyrics to our favorite songs. We remember certain things in history, or random stories. But things that were forced on us by others, we forgot. Like football.”
“What about people?” she asks. “Why did we forget all the people we’ve met?”
“If we remembered people, we’d still have other memories. We’d remember how we met them, the impact they’ve had on our lives.” I scratch at the back of my head. “I don’t know, Charlie. A lot of it doesn’t make sense still. But last night, I felt a connection with you again. Like I had loved you for years. And this morning…I didn’t lose my memories like you did. There has to be significance in that.”
Charlie stands up and begins pacing the room. “Soul mates?” she mutters. “This is almost as ridiculous as a curse.”
“Or two people developing in-sync amnesia?”
She narrows her eyes at me. I can see her mind working as she chews on the pad of her thumb. “Well then, explain how you fell back in love with me in just two days. And if we’re soul mates, why wouldn’t I have fallen back in love with you?” She stops pacing and waits for my answer.
“You spent a lot of your time locked up inside your old house. I spent all that time looking for you. I was reading our love letters, going through your phone, reading your journals. By the time I found you yesterday, I felt like I already knew you. For me, reading everything from our past somehow connected me to you again…like some of my old feelings had come back. But for you...I was barely more than a stranger.”
We’re both sitting again. Thinking. Contemplating the possibility that this might be the closest we’ve come to any sort of pattern.
“So what you’re suggesting is…we were soul mates. But then external influences ruined us as people and we fell out of love?”
“Yeah. Maybe. I think so.”
“And it’ll keep happening until we set things right again?”
I shrug, because I’m not sure. It’s just a theory. But it makes more sense than anything else we’ve come up with.
Five minutes pass while neither of us says a single word. She finally falls back onto the bed with a heavy sigh and says, “You know what this means?”
“No.”
She pulls up onto her elbows and looks at me. “If this is true…you only have thirty-six hours to make me fall in love with you.”
I don’t know if we’re on to something, or if we’re about to spend
the remainder of our time chasing a dead end, but I smile, because I’m willing to sacrifice the next thirty-six hours for this theory. I walk over to the bed and fall onto it beside her. We’re both staring up at the ceiling when I say, “Well, Charlie Baby. We better get started.”
She throws an arm over her eyes and groans. “I don’t know you very well, but I can already tell you’re gonna have fun with this.”
I smile, because she’s right.
“It’s late,” I tell her. “We should try to get some sleep, because your heart is going to get a serious workout tomorrow.”
I set my alarm for 6:00 a.m. so that we can be up and out of the house before anyone else wakes up. Charlie sleeps closest to the wall and is out cold in a matter of minutes. I don’t feel like I’ll be able to fall asleep anytime soon, so I pluck one of her journals from the backpack and decide to read some before I fall asleep.
Silas is crazy.
Like…legit crazy. But my god, I have so much fun with him. He started a game he forces me to play sometimes called Silas Says. It’s exactly the same as Simon Says, but...you know. With his name instead of Simon’s. Whatever. He’s way cooler than Simon.
We were on Bourbon Street today and it was so hot and we were both sweating and miserable. We had no idea where our friends had gone off to and we weren’t supposed to meet them for another hour. When it comes to me and Silas, I’m always the whiney one, but it was so hot this time, even he was whining a little.
Anyway, we walked past this guy who was propped up on a stool and he had painted himself silver, like a robot. There was a sign leaning against his stool that said, “Ask me a question. Get a real answer. Only 25 cents.”
Silas handed me a quarter, so I dropped it in the bucket. “What’s the meaning of life?” I asked the silver man.
He made a stiff turn of his head and looked me square in the eye. In a very impressive robot voice, he said, “That depends on the life of which you search for meaning.”
I rolled my eyes at Silas. Just another hack job scamming the tourists. I clarified my question so that at least the quarter wouldn’t go to complete waste. “Fine,” I said. “What’s the meaning of my life?”
Never Never: The Complete Series Page 26