Page 49 of Remember Me

Me:Eating

Hayes:Great, me too. Meet me at the caf?

Me:Big, I’m not going to date you.

Hayes:No problem, we can skip straight to the wedding. See you at noon mini

This must have been shortly after the baseball house party.

In the weeks since the accident, everyone had been telling me how good Hayes and I were together. Our own text messages with each other told me the same story, one of laughter and a connection that I couldn’t ignore. There was nothing that accounted for my hesitation with him, this weird feeling I had that something wasn’t right. And damnit, I needed to know. More and more, I was feeling like I needed to resolve things one way or the other. It was probably just the pregnancy, but the more I was around him the… lustier… I was getting. Regardless of whether my brain thought I was a virgin; my body knew it wasn’t and it wanted sex.

That kiss yesterday… I kept thinking about it. Thinking about other things. But I needed to be secure in what we had before we went any further than a kiss.

Puffing out my cheeks in indecision, I carried my tea into the den and sat down on the couch. I was propping my feet up on the coffee table when I noticed it: a mischievous-looking stuffed elf sitting atop a Scrabble board, ostensibly studying his rack of letters. The board was partially in play already, and I set my tea down and knelt beside it for a better look.

MORNING.And MINI, leading off of the M.

Huh. I guess it was my turn, now that he’d cherry-picked half the letters. I studied the letters in my rack thoughtfully. I had an odd assortment, an E, B, S, blank, Y, X, and an M. The word ‘sex’ jumped out at me, but I didn’t quite feel like going there this morning. I could do ‘boxes”... “moxie”...His word meant something, though. It was agood morning, I’m thinking about youword. I wanted mine to do the same.

I pulled my tea closer to me and sat, sipping and pondering until inspiration hit. I’d have to cheat, but he’d clearly already done so. Dumping out the little bag of letters, I rooted around until I found what I was looking for. Carefully, I added the letters, LOST IRLFRIEND to the final G in MORNING.

Lost Girlfriend.I smiled at the memory, smiled at even having a memory. I added the word MAYBE to the E.MaybeI could try.MaybeI could work my way back to previous me, the me who was in love and engaged, and invested in this next stage of her life.MaybeI could forget what I had forgotten, not worry so much about reclaiming it before moving forward.

Because let’s face it — I might not ever reclaim it.

I stared at the Scrabble board. Hayes was trying. He was being so patient with me, hiding his hurt and frustration and fear so completely — and yet I felt it, every bit, as surely as if they were my own emotions. What was that other than his heart reaching out to mine, and mine answering its call?

I started to leave the room to get ready for work at the shop but paused at the threshold. The elf. I needed to do something with the elf.

I left him in the center of the couch, a bag of microwave popcorn beside him and the remote tucked into his arms. Maybe Hayes would be interested in a movie later this evening, and I could ask him about the note.

It felt nice to try.

“Birdie, I wasn’t sure you were going to keep working!” Maggie greeted me with a hug the minute I walked through the door, holding me at arm’s length when she finished squeezing me. “I’m so sorry I misled you.”

I waved it off and pulled away, unwinding the brightly colored scarf from around my neck. “Don’t worry about it, Maggie. I understand.” I hung the scarf and my coat on a hook in the back room.

“No, you don’t understand. If your doctor hadn’t told everyone to let things happen —”

“ — organically. I know.” I met her eyes. “I was hurt at first, but it was more on an intellectual level, if that makes sense.” I bit my lip as I contemplated how to explain. “Like, I’m missing the connection that tells me I should be hurt emotionally, because I don’t remember you. Does that make sense? It just bothered me that I didn’t know the truth. But I understood after thinking about it — If I have a chance of regaining my memory, this is just the way it needs to be.” She nodded, eyes brimming with tears, and I squeezed her hand. “And it’s working. I remembered something.”

“You did? What?”

I felt my cheeks heat. “Just an early memory of knowing Hayes.”

“Oh, I am so glad. That boy has been all kinds of torn up.”

“It was… nice.” I shook it away, placed my hands in the pockets of the apron I wore while working. “I need to be honest with you. Now that I’m learning things about myself, starting to remember things, I’m not one hundred percent certain I want to keep working in the shop, or go back to making the signs for you. I haven’t tried to work with them since I got to Hayes.” I paused before I verbalized one of my fears. “I’m not sure if that’s still who I am, you know? Maybe I lost the ability to do that sort of thing.”

“That’s pure foolishness. Artistry like that isn’t a memory or even a learned skill, although people can always be taught the technical side of things. It’s something you either have or you don’t. And you have it.”

I firmed my lips. “I hope you’re right.”

Maggie put me to work rearranging a display table of Christmas knickknacks. A Celine Dion holiday album played softly in the background, and it wasn’t long before my mind was wandering at will. My head throbbed, and I wondered if it was a side effect of the memory return, or just the head injury in general. Dr. Chen had warned me that I’d suffer from headaches for an indeterminate period of time.

This one, though…it wasn’t diminishing. Rather, it was intensifying with each minute that passed. I held my palms to my forehead, hoping the coolness of my skin would help.

“Maggie?”

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