Page 19 of Everlasting

The other odd thing was that I didn’t know exactly how long I’d been here anymore. Durbin used to tell me. He counted down the days with me at first to teach me that one day at a time worked. If I could get through this one day, I would be okay. “Make each day count, because it’s always going to be a fight from here on out.” That’s what he used to tell me. While the rest of the place didn’t have any visible signs of time passing, some things, you just couldn’t help noticing. One of them was the fact that summer had almost burned itself away at this point. The leaves were beginning to change over again, signaling that fall was upon us.

The building I was in wasn’t a lonely place. Isolation hadn’t been intended here and while I sometimes felt like a prisoner, it didn’t feel as though anyone was worried I would just up and leave. Truth be told, that was probably because I couldn’t. Where the fuck would I go? Who would I call? Was there someone to call? I had no fucking clue. The woman and little girls from dreams popped in my head any time my thoughts strayed toward leaving, but I had no idea who they were or how to find them just yet. Hell, for that matter, they could be nothing more than a vivid recurring dream I’d been having. Psychologically speaking, it was probably just me craving some sort of normal relationship.

A knock on my door startled me out of my wayward thoughts. I didn’t get the chance to invite whoever it was in because they just barged in. That was when my gut clenched and a light sweat broke out over my forehead. “Oh my goodness! Baby! I can’t believe I finally found you!” The woman patted her obviously pregnant belly and smiled down at me where I was seated. “Not a moment too soon too. I can’t believe you’ve been here all this time!”

I narrowed my eyes on her. While the cadence of her voice seemed enthusiastic enough, something in her whole demeanor rang false. “Who are you exactly?”

“Declan? Seriously? You don’t recognize your own wife?” She chastised me as if I didn’t have a head injury I had been recovering from, as well a whole hoard of other issues. Not the least of which had been a serious drug addiction. I knew, no matter how weird my dreams were or how much I wanted to believe that I had come from a beautiful life with a wife and daughters somewhere, that my reality didn’t support that.

“I had a trauma,” I explained.

“A trauma?” She questioned again. Then she took in everything around us. “No bars,” she mentioned out loud, although I don’t think she realized it. “You can’t remember?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “You want to fill me in?” I asked the woman even though an inexplicable queasiness was eating at my insides.

“I’m your wife,” she stated. My eyes immediately drifted to her left hand in search of a ring. She noticed. “Don’t be silly, I’m pregnant. My fingers swell all the time. It makes it impossible to wear my rings right now.”

I knew I wasn’t wearing a ring and there had been no evidence of tan lines or anything else to indicate I had been wearing one in the time since I came into Durbin’s care. I just cocked my head and continued to study the woman. There was something familiar about her, but I was having a hard time focusing on that fact because my body was bubbling up inside with uneasiness. Something Durbin once said to me came back. “You might not remember things right now but trust your body’s responses to your surroundings. Even when you might not remember up here,” he told me as he tapped my head, “Your body still remembers and responds accordingly.” My body was telling me that I wasn’t comfortable with this woman. There was no denying that fact.

“You don’t believe me?” Her words came out as a whine as her bottom lip poked out in a pout that just seemed put-on. She then looked down and dug into a purse she had hanging on her arm. The damn thing matched her posh outfit a bit too well too. I continued to watch her as she pulled a cell phone out of the bag, but the entire time I took in her appearance, all I could think was that this woman did not feel like someone I would be at home with. Granted, I had a failing memory, but she didn’t feel right. Her clothes didn’t seem right. The things I tended to identify with were the things I saw my old physical therapist came in wearing. He always had on denim pants, leather boots and jacket, and he smelled like freedom. Okay, freedom didn’t really have a scent, I guess, but he smelled like fresh air, leather, and motor oil even after he changed his clothes to work out with me. I asked once why he wore that stuff and he told me he would rather be safe and avoid road rash if he ever laid his motorcycle down.

I understood that sentiment on a level that didn’t register the way it should. I snapped out of the thought once a phone was shoved in my face though. “See?” The woman questioned me snidely as she thrust the thing at me. “This is us.”

“Shit! I look half dead there,” I answered. It was true. She’d shown me a picture of her lying naked next to me in bed, but my eyes appeared to be closed or rolled back and I was incredibly thin. I tried to look closer because I thought I saw bruising on my body too, but she yanked the phone away.

“Whatever, you were sick for a while,” was her answer.

“I’ll say. I was a fucking junkie when I was brought here.”

She waved away my statement. “Pssh, you weren’t a junkie, baby. You just enjoyed having a good time,” she countered.

I narrowed my eyes on her once again and glanced between the phone in her hands and the rounded belly she was sporting. “That’s the kind of man you want to be the father of your baby?” I asked her, not understanding why a woman who was about to be a mother would blow off that type of behavior from the man she claimed was hers.

“Well, you’re all better now, aren’t you?”

“Which begs the question, where were you all this time, and how did you find me?”

“I knew who you were with, just not where.”

I cocked a brow up at her in question. “My brother has kept you here, away from me. He told me you were no good for me, or the baby,” she added, almost as an afterthought. “So, he wouldn’t allow me to know where you were until you were healthy enough.” She wouldn’t look at me as she explained, and the rolling in my gut suggested that she might be lying.

“We’re supposed to be married and you only have one picture of us?”

“Don’t be silly, of course there are more.”

“Show me,” I demanded when she didn’t seem inclined to do so.

“Fine!” She did something on her phone and continued to swipe her fingers across it. “See,” she offered again. This time when she showed me a picture it was of a much younger couple. It could definitely be the two of us, many years ago. “We’ve been together a long time. We met when you were still in the Army.”

“I was in the Army?” I asked, but the minute the word left my mouth, several flashes of memory hit all at once. None of them had the woman in question, but they definitely supported the idea that I had, indeed, been in the Army. I could have fucking shot myself in the foot for all the clues that had been around me all this time. I glanced down at the tattoo on my arm and traced the image there for the longest time. There were others all over my body, but this was the only one anywhere near that part of my arm. Why the hell hadn’t I bothered to look closer at the images I wore on my skin? It was a question that didn’t need an answer because I already knew why. Fear. The way I had been found and picked up and put back together made me fear the story that my ink would tell. As I traced a finger around the ink on my arm though, all I felt was warmth and a tingle of a memory that involved a letter, a sketch, and coming home.

“Are you even listening?” The woman shrieked at me as she smacked at the finger that was still tracing over the tattoo. “What the hell, Declan?”

“Zoned out for a minute,” I admitted.

“You zoned out?” Her voice had taken on the edge I’d only think to associate with a harpy. Maybe a banshee. They were the ones that shrieked until your ears bled, right? I shrugged my shoulders in response to my thought, but the woman just hissed out a long, exaggerated breath before smacking at my head. I ducked out of the way and she nearly stumbled over from the momentum. Suddenly, me having a head injury didn’t seem so far-fetched if this woman had really been in my life. Hell, if it weren’t her smacking me, I had probably attempted to do myself in. Fit with the fact that I’d been drugged out of my mind for an ungodly amount of time.

“That’s it! We’re going home. I’m taking you out of here. Obviously, these quacks don’t know what the hell they’re doing if you can’t even focus long enough to have a conversation.”

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