Page 34 of Remember Me

“Please forgive my hands when they can't stop finding you. please forgive my lips.”

Tyler Knott Gregson

November 29¦Hayes

ISHOULD’VE SEEN IT COMING.

It was all I could think as I made my way back to campus for my last class of the day. Birdie’s failure to remember the singular event that had driven her to get in her car and drive it into a tree was a disguised blessing, as much as I hated the thought. What she didn’t remember wouldn’t hurt her, right?

It seemed part of her did remember, though — at least on some level. And that part was putting up big old flashing reverse lights.

It was such a stupid non-event. If she hadn’t seen and completely misinterpreted before I could extricate myself gracefully, we’d be planning a nursery right now. And a wedding. The irony of it, the knowledge that we had every happiness a couple could wish for right there within our grasp and then lost it with such an epicfuck my lifemoment...it was brutal.

I made my way through my last lecture by rote, knowing that I was failing at being the exciting, interesting new professor who didn’t bore his classes to death. As an adjunct, I had to be twice as good as the faculty with greater experience if I stood a snowball’s chance of ever getting tenure.

Today, though, it didn’t matter.Today was a lost cause.A romantic relationship right now is too much for me,she’d said. I almost laughed in the middle of my explanation of game theory but managed to turn it into a cough instead. As if we were capable of anything else.

Birdie didn’t get it: together, we were bullets to the chamber. Rogers and Astaire. Left then right…one without the other was just an endless loop.

While on the surface I was engaged in the dynamics of my lesson, on the inside I was a riot of hastily conceived and discarded ideas on fixing things.Ultimately, I figured I was likely going to have to do what I’d told her and earn her once again. Which was fine. I’d never been one of those assholes that quit once he had the girl. The question, though, was how to go about this without pushing her even further away?

I brooded over the quandary as I drove home after my lecture.

It felt like she was already distancing herself from me in every possible way. She’d gotten a job, for God’s sake. Not that she was disabled, but she had amnesia. I snorted. It was actually pretty damn funny, not that I had any plans on telling her any time soon. She’d walked into my aunt Maggie’s shop, the same store she’d been making custom signs for during the past year. I wished I’d seen the look on Maggie’s face when it happened. In fact…

I called Maggie as I drove, placing the phone in the hands-free cradle and putting it on speaker. “Farmer’s Wife, Maggie speaking.”

“Hey, Aunt Mags.”

“Hayes! I was going to call you later. You will never believe what happened today.”

“If it’s Birdie coming in and asking for a job, then yes, I’ll believe it.”

“It was so out of the blue, Hayes. I don’t know how I managed to pretend like I didn’t know that sweet girl.” Her voice is troubled. “I wasn’t sure what to do. If I should tell her she’s worked with me before, that she made those signs…I didn’t want to throw a lot at her when it became obvious that she didn’t know who I was, and had just randomly wandered in.”

“That’s the thing. I don’t know how random it is. I think part of her remembers, but she’s blocked it all out somehow.” I released a heavy breath. “I’m not exactly sure how to handle it. The doctor indicated that it would be best to let her recover things at her own pace, organically, instead of trying to explain everything to her. I’ll call her physician and see if they can give me some guidance, and I’ll call you back.”

I turned into our long driveway, the fence-lined gravel stretching a few tenths of a mile before me, straight and only a little rutted from the recent rains. To my right, the small apple orchard that was part of our land reached spindly bare limbs toward the wintry sky. Birdie had been so excited about our recent fall harvest, teaching herself how to make applesauce and apple bread and apple butter — apple everything, really. The pantry was full of it, canned and neatly labeled.

The house and its assortment of outbuildings — shed, barn, chicken coop — came into view on my left as I crested a slight rise. Birdie had taken one look at the house and refused to look at anything else. This wasit,she’d claimed: our forever home. So it was old, with a roof that needed replacing and windows that could use some updating. So it was a little rough around the edges. It was nothing a little elbow grease, time, and an HGTV subscription couldn’t fix.

I needed to get her out here, I mused, shutting the engine off and climbing out of the truck. I needed her to see this place, fall in love with it all over again.

Maybe fall in love with me all over again.

I walked up the steps to cross the porch, a mix of raw wood and painted boards from my efforts to repair a few places of rot and toed my boots off as I entered the house. There were boxes just inside the door, labeled ‘Christmas’ in my mother’s neat handwriting. I opened the closest one up and peered in at the jumble of lights and ornaments. Birdie had mentioned, weeks ago, that we were going to need to hunt down some decorations for our first Christmas together. Mom had come through, putting together everything we’d need from all the years of my childhood.

There was a familiar, red-clothed elf on the top of the pile of decorations. I reached in and plucked him out, studying him thoughtfully. Mom had used the elf for years with my younger brother and sister, placing it in various locations around our house as a reminder that Santa was watching. It became a game to see who could find the elf first each morning, and laugh over what predicament it had been placed in.

My personal favorite was the sink, alongside a pile of milk duds. Mom had an enviable sense of the absurd.

Maybe I could use the elf to remind Birdie of our life together? Of course, I’d have to figure out how to get her to the house.

Everything was just as she’d left it, a mish mash of hand-me-down and thrifted furniture, most in various stages of being painted or primed or reupholstered or whatever it was she’d decided to do with each specific piece. Birdie was creative like that. I hadn’t seen much she couldn’t do when she put her mind to it.

In the kitchen, I poured myself a drink and looked up the number for Birdie’s doctor. I wasn’t sure how much he’d be able to tell me, but maybe he could give me some hypothetical guidance. I was on her HIPAA. The receptionist that answered the phone was hesitant. “I think he just left,” she said. “I’ll check, though. Your name, please?”

“Hayes Ellison. I’m calling regarding Birdie Grant.”

---