Remembering Us (2 page)

“Okay.” I shrug and shift my weight to my good foot. I got a walking cast put on my left foot earlier this week and it’s easier to move around now, but still uncomfortable by the end of the day.

“And I want you to believe his answer.”

I make a face. How am I supposed to believe someone I don’t know? Believing and trusting doesn’t happen just because you say so, it happens over the course of a relationship. And from what I’ve dreamed, if we did have a relationship, it was at best, dysfunctional.

“Fine.” I turn to leave and Adam meets me at the office door, holding it open for me as I hobble through. His hand touches my lower back as I pass by and I flinch out of his way. He lets go as soon as I do but sighs again. If I were to turn around and look at him, he’d be shaking his head. I know this because I’ve seen him do it a lot in the last three weeks.

I walk straight outside, leaving him to schedule our Thursday appointment. The air outside is fresh. It smells like summer is about to hit, and it makes me smile thinking of all the hours that I’ve spent in the woods, hiking on trails, rock climbing, and white water rafting through the mountains just outside Denver. I’ve lived my entire life in a suburb outside Denver and I’ve always thought it was the best place in the whole world to live.

A dull pain vibrates through my arm and I close my eyes. I rest my head against the side of Adam’s black Highlander and remind myself that I won’t be doing any of those things this summer. At least not until the casts come off and my wounds heal.

My booted cast scrapes across the pavement. My ankle hurts and my arm is itchy from my cast. The eight staples in the back of my head were removed last week. In their place, I have a small, square patch of hair that is just beginning to grow back. Fortunately, when the rest of my hair is down, it’s easy to keep it hidden. I have a gash on my right side that runs from my hip bone almost to my breast. It looks like someone tried to slash me open with a jagged-edged knife. The skin is healing, the stitches are innumerable, and every time I turn my torso it feels like someone is trying to rip my kidney out with their bare hands.

There was a hiking accident. That’s all I know. The rest is being left up to my memory, which my doctors have assured me will return. How in the hell do they know? What if I never remember?

It’s been weeks since I woke up from my coma, and I don’t remember anything more than the fact that I live with a stranger and I don’t like him when I dream.

I’m still resting against the side of Adam’s SUV, fingering the back of my scalp, when he comes outside. He stands next to me, crossing his feet at the ankles. We don’t touch. That small whisper of a touch he gave me in the doorway is the first time his hands have touched me since the day I tripped in our kitchen. His arms reached out and caught me. I froze, paralyzed by having his hands on me.

He shook his head, sighed, grabbed his keys, left the apartment, and didn’t come back for two hours. When he did, the scent of beer laced his breath.

“I’m sorry I keep getting frustrated with you, Ames.” His head falls against the side of his SUV and he runs a hand down the front of his face. “I just miss you.”

His voice trembles a little bit and he sounds sad. He looks sad. I wonder what it would feel like to see him smile again like he did the night in my dream. Until the blonde girl, Tina, jumped into his arms, he seemed happy to see me. Was he? Was I a game? If so, why am I still here? I press my fingers to my temples, hoping to stave off the beginning thumps of another headache.

“Who’s Tina?”

“She was a friend, I swear.” He turns to me and leans his hip against his car. “She dated my best friend, Mike, in high school and she was excited to see me. It was an innocent thing.”

“So that was real?”

Not everything I dream about is real. One night, I dreamed my parents gave me a horse for my seventh birthday. I know for a fact that didn’t happen. Not because we didn’t have the money for one, but because there’s no way my parents would have given me something I so desperately wanted. They gave me what they thought I should have. Mother knows best and all that.

He nods. “We had our second date the night before and I remember being excited to see because you had told me you weren’t coming. After I let Tina go you threw a beer in my face.”

I laugh. It sounds like something I would do. It wouldn’t have been the first beer I’ve thrown in an asshole’s face at a frat party. He laughs and I finally see something similar to the smile he gave me in my dream.

He really is handsome and I can see why I would find him attractive. He’s tall and my head barely reaches his shoulders. His black hair is shaggy, but I don’t know if it’s always this long or if it needs a trim. His body is lean, but toned, and I know from the pictures in the apartment we share that he used to play a lot of soccer.

He’s handsome. A soccer player. He has a nice laugh. These are the only things I know about him.

His kisses remind me of dark chocolate, full of all those feel-good hormones.

My stomach flip-flops and I stop laughing, sobered by the memory.

“I want to go home. My parent’s home,” I clarify, when I remember that I live with him now and not in the apartment my best friend, Kelsey and I shared our sophomore year of college.

My therapy sessions leave me on edge and hearing his answers inside and outside of them don’t help me. Everything is different and I wonder if things will ever be simple.

He sighs and his head drops. I see that happen a lot. It makes me wonder if Adam has always been this frustrated with me or if it’s a new thing.

“Amy,” he starts, with a defeated tone in his voice, but then stops and shakes his head. “Fine.”

He opens the door to my side and then closes it harder than necessary once I’ve sat down. I watch his mouth move, speaking curse words I can’t hear, as he walks around the front of the car, roughly running his hand through his jet black hair. Again.

“These things will just take time.” My mom, Carol, pats the top of my head like I’m her lap dog and takes her seat at the dinner table. They don’t always like me being here, saying they think it’s better for me if I spend as much time as possible with Adam. But sometimes after a therapy session I need to get away from him, and the apartment that we share feels more like a cage than a home.

You would think my parents would want their daughter, who apparently almost died from a hiking accident, around all the time. But not mine. This is only my third time visiting them since I got out of the hospital, and every time I’m around them our conversations are uncomfortable - more strained than I remember.

I want to ask them what happened to make them treat me more distant than normal. I have so many questions to ask my parents, but I know better. I will not get answers from them. The Thompson’s do not discuss uncomfortable topics. Never have, never will.

My dad, Don, frowns at my mom and shakes his head, silently telling her to drop it. He used to be a partner at a corporate law firm before he ran for Senate when I was thirteen. He’s been in office ever since. I know he loves me, but his ability to show any type of affection for his youngest of two daughters is about as dry as the stack of tax codes that he used to memorize for fun.

Some people spend their lives trying to keep up with the Jones’s. From my parent’s perspective, they
are
the Jones’s and have always reveled in the fact that people try to keep up with them. To my parents - my mom in particular - image and appearance is everything.

I frown, thinking about this while I ladle some sort of strange looking grain soup into my bowl. Quinoa something or other. It looks like white eyelashes, but it’s supposed to be healthy.

Why do my parents like Adam then? Is he rich? When I was sixteen, I wasn’t allowed to go out on a date with Jackson Latner. He was the quarterback on our high school’s state championship winning football team and a straight-A student. He was a gentleman and polite and one of the few guys at my school that treated girls with respect. His downfall? He was also a scholarship student at our private school and his parents lived in a fifteen year old three-bedroom duplex. He simply wasn’t rich enough for me to date. He didn’t come from the right kind of pedigree my mom wanted for me.

Pedigree. She actually used the word as if Jackson and I were show dogs in heat.

“Mom, why do you like Adam?” I finally ask, taking a risk and interrupting their conversation about someone who embarrassed themselves at the Country Club where my mom spends her morning sipping mimosas and gossiping about all the “lesser” members.

She licks her lips and takes a sip of her wine. “What’s not to like about Adam?”

I turn to my dad. He’s not as pretentious as my mom, but his standards for his daughters are high. “He loves you.” His eyebrows turn in and he frowns, almost as if he doesn’t understand my question. “Isn’t that enough?”

For most people, yes. For my parents, it doesn’t fit. Does Adam have money I don’t know about? We live in a small, older two-bedroom apartment. Our furniture looks like the kind you would expect two, twenty-two-year olds and recent college graduates to own. It’s mismatched and worn down. Our tables have water rings from glasses that didn’t sit on a coaster. There is nothing about the apartment I live in with Adam that should have my parent’s approval.

“And he’s nice to me? You like him, really?”

My dad’s knife scratches across his plate, sending his half-buttered roll skittering to the floor. My mom’s eyelids flicker in rapid succession a half dozen times before she glances to my dad and then back to her wine.

“Of course, honey.” This time, there’s a slight tightening around her eyes that tells me she’s lying.

With a fluidity that comes from decades of avoiding uncomfortable conversations, my mother begins talking about my sister, Ann, and her happily married life. She’s been married for five years and is seven years older than me. We have nothing in common and never have. But she seems to be happily married to an Air Force Pilot. She stays home with her three year old son, Cooper, and my newborn niece, Tilly, who I have yet to meet because my sister hasn’t bothered to visit or call me. Where I was always uncomfortable with my parent’s display of their wealth and preferred to live more “normally,” my sister has always thrived on the money and glamour and attention it brings. I’m a wallflower where my parents are concerned, and my sister is the beautiful social butterfly.

I don’t bother asking any more questions for the rest of dinner, knowing the answers they gave me were the only ones I’d hear.

I hate getting dressed in the mornings. Not like I have a lot of my options right now with my booted foot and casted arm, but every morning I stare at my clothes wondering who in the hell am I?

Nothing makes sense. My Jimmy Choo shoes and UGG Boots have been replaced with sparkling red Doc Marten boots and flip-flops. My designer dresses are gone and now I’m left staring at stacks of denim and basic t-shirts. Even if I rejected the elite lifestyle of my parents, I’ve always worn dresses and leggings – even in the middle of the harsh Denver winters.

My stomach churns as I stare at the boots like they’re going to jump out and bite me. I’m not a Doc Marten shit-kicking boot kind of girl. This isn’t me. None of it is … except it is. I feel tears bubbling in my eyes all over again. I bite them back, hating that after three weeks it’s a pair of shiny, red rocker-type boots that finally have my walls crumbling.

And I hate the damn tears. I don’t want to be weak. I never cry. At least I don’t remember being such a cry-baby. But every day that I’m stuck in this apartment with nothing but black holes for memories, the questions assault me.

Why is all our furniture mismatched?

Why do our dressers look like they came from a garage sale?

Who am I?

What happened to me?

How did I get here?

I hate that I don’t know my best friend’s boyfriend, Zander. I’ve met him once or twice now, but apparently Kelsey is dating and also living with one of Adam’s best friends from college, Zander. I was told they moved they started dating shortly after Adam and I did. When Adam and I moved in together, Kelsey moved in with Zander.