Page 126 of The Cost of Forgetting You

“Do I know you?” Dad asks, squinting.

“You do,” Truett says, stepping closer. “We’re friends.”

Dad nods, slowly at first and then so fast I’m afraid he’ll have whiplash. “They took my daughter. I can’t find her anywhere.”

“We’ll find her,” Truett says. He glances back at me as I’m pulled around the corner, his last words echoing in my ears. “I’m sure she’s around here somewhere.”

“Hi, yes, I need an ambulance at 211 Sowell Mill Road.” Roberta glances up at me to confirm, and I nod. “I’m an in-home care provider for a gentleman with dementia. I believe he’s having an episode of delirium and needs medical attention.”

I listen to her rattle off the details. To Truett on the other side of the wall calmly helping my dad search for a baby he’ll never find. I cry, cry, cry for that baby, because all she wants, all she needs in the whole world is her father. And with every moment like this, he slips further away.

How unfair. How unnecessarily cruel.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Henry

March 20th, 2015

It takes a little over a year for me to make it through all five stages of grief.

The denial lasted longer than I expected. I wasted months believing Kimberly would change her mind. Come around. That we could be happy together, the way I always wanted us to be. I couldn’t believe the curious, affectionate girl I met that night on my school’s gymnasium steps was the same woman now telling me our marriage was worth nothing to her, and she’d be discarding it like expired milk as soon as she possibly could.

After she declined couples’ counseling for the third time in as many months, I moved on to anger. Anger that spread my patience so thin I became a version of myself that I hardly recognized. Students complained I was getting my period. Kimberly nearly took my head off for snapping when she made one of her signature biting remarks. Even Delilah, who remained levelheaded as I usually was, asked me if something was wrong after I overdid it when she came home with a less-than-stellar exam grade. That shook me loose from my distemper. I couldn’t let my suffering become hers, too.

Bargaining was brief. Not much to bargain for when you’ve already given up so much, and none of it good enough.

I thought I knew what depression felt like. I remembered the months following my father’s death, and then my mother’s, in which it felt like all the light had been drained from my world. But there was pain in that darkness. Agony in its truest sense. When depression finally arrived, it cast a cloak of numbness over my heart and mind. Left me desolate. Bereft. If grief is feeling everything all at once—anguish over the loss, longing for their return, even joy at the memories you once shared—then depression is the complete lack thereof. There is no pain, no hope, and certainly no happiness. I suddenly understood why people contemplate self-harm, if only to feel something. Anything, rather than nothing at all.

Acceptance arrived out of the blue one day, without much fanfare or even a signaling shift in the air. It was a parcel placed inside my mailbox, one that was lost somewhere along the journey but found its way to me after a few missteps and wrong deliveries. A little rough for wear, and long overdue, but here all the same. The day I woke up and realized that life was handing me a second chance and I better not fuck it up, I shook off the dark cloud that’d plagued me for far too long and finally started looking forward to the future and all the possibilities it could hold.

Which is why I’m sitting at the bench of my classroom piano, bathed in only the dim light coming from my office, dreaming about those possibilities.

Delilah will be off to college in a year. And then what? Kimberly leaves. I’ll be left with a house I inherited, in the town I was born into, with only my former childhood love and a few coworkers for friends. It feels like a recipe challenge on a cooking show. How do you take these ingredients and make a meal worth eating? How do I take these pieces and make a life I could love?

My hands fall roughly on the keys, filling the room with a note so jarring I flinch.

“Yikes, you’ve really gone downhill in recent years.”

The bench groans as I pivot, glancing over my shoulder to find Lucy leaning against the cinder-block wall just inside the doorway, a teasing grin playing on her lips. My thoughts go blissfully blank in her presence. And thank God, because I’m so tired of thinking myself in circles.

“I’m kidding, of course. We both know you’re the next Mozart.” She accompanies her wink with a giggle, so girlish that for a moment I see her as she once was, with fewer curves, no fine lines framing her face, but the same bright sparkle in her gaze.

I sigh heavily, hoping it’ll loosen my suddenly aching chest. “I forgot about that.”

“I did, too, actually.” She produces a small stack of papers from behind her back, all bound together with a rubber band. “Found these the other day when I was cleaning out a closet. I was coming by to drop them off on your desk when I heard the world’s worst piano solo.”

I laugh, but it’s pinched at the edges. My gaze is trained on that small stack, my breath a little sharper as I take it in. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yep, all our notes.” She waves the stack in the air by her head. “Well, the ones where the conversation ended with me, anyway. Obviously.”

I shake my head, my jaw slack with surprise. “I can’t believe you kept those all these years.”

“Technically I didn’t know they were still around until I evicted the dust bunnies from our spare bedroom closet, but yes. I kept them.” She shrugs, her narrow shoulders shifting beneath the loose silk of her pale green blouse. “They meant the world to teenage me.”

A knot forms in my throat. I wring my hands in my lap, because if I don’t, I’ll be tempted to get up from this bench and cross the few feet that separate us. To wrap my arms around her and not let go. I’m starved for affection and far too emotionally raw to allow myself to step into her orbit, even for a second.

She jams a thumb over her shoulder toward the hall. “I caught the tail end of the concert. The kids did great.”

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