Page 20 of Velvet Deception

Fuck, is this getting deep.

“I… I don’t know.” The only heartfelt connections I could think back to led me to Sofia. Hearing her sweet voice when I struggled against the darkness. Vague suggestions of another lurked in the recesses of my locked mind, but it wasn’t her. If I had another woman further in my past, wouldn’t she look for me?

“What if someone is looking for me?” I said aloud, more to myself than him.

“Mama says she hasn’t seen anything yet.” He frowned. “She looks online and sees if anyone has reported a doctor gone missing.”

I shook my head. “But what if I’m not a doctor?”

He frowned more. “Then why would you look like one?”

Again, I didn’t know. The number of things I did know versus what I didn’t pissed me off.

“Do you feel like a doctor?” he asked matter-of-factly.

“How would a doctor feel?”

He tilted his head to the side. “Like it’s something that you would’ve done before.”

I didn’t. And now that he was speaking to me, I realized how much I’d been missing the gift of communication, even with an overly perceptive boy. Talking and having someone listen were helping me. Now that he’d said this, I could think back to when Sofia was checking my vision. “When your mother shone the light in my eyes, checking my vision,” I confided, “she said that I still didn’t show a sign of nystagmus.”

He furrowed his brow. “What’s that?”

Aha.So there was a limit to his braininess. “I don’t know. I didn’t know. I had to ask, and it’s something about involuntary rapid eye movement that can happen after a head injury.”

“Oh. Okay.”

What that term meant wasn’t the point. “I didn’t know what it meant, Ramon.”

“Neither did I.” He smiled, almost cheeky.

“But if I were a doctor, wouldn’t some of that medical or physical knowledge be locked in here too?” I tapped my head. “Like how I could automatically know my age?”

“I don’t know. I think doctors would have to know a lot of things and it could be easy to forget it for a while.”

I supposed that could be true.

“I wish you had a phone,” he said, changing the subject.

“How come?”

“So I could call Mama and tell her that you’re making progress.”

It seemed unsafe for him to be here without a way to contact her, but then again, he was usually at school or with the neighbor and his friend.

“I wonder where it is.” Everyone had phones. I knew that as a basic fact of reality.

“I bet if you had it, it would help us to know who you are.”

“I agree,” I replied, heaving out a sigh.

“Am I tiring you?”

“No.” I disliked that he’d see himself as a problem. “I appreciate your talking to me. Maybe you can help me remember more things.”

“I would love to help you.” He perked up, glancing at the back of the house. “Do you think… you could help me?”

I had no clue what I could offer him. “Sure. What is it?”

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