Page 46 of Mangled Memory
“You and me talk, Li. Just you and me… I’m missing more than just two years. There are things from before the blacked-out window that are gone.” I don’t mention last night. That’s not a memory thing. That’s a mind-fuck thing that I don’t know how to think about.
“What does your doctor say?”
“I haven’t reached out to him.”
“Well, that would be a good place to start. I’m no expert, but it seems your brain has some pockets of… gaps. I’m guessing that it’s not uncommon with brain trauma.”
He’s being reasonable.
“You don’t think—” I pause and drag in as much air as possible. “I’m not losing it, though. It’s just memory. It’s not… I’m not…”
“Ayla, girl. You are nuts. I knew that from the moment they brought you home from the hospital. Feisty, fiery, crazy. But you’re not clinical. Your brain is sorting or shifting things into different spaces, but you’re not certifiable. At least, not any more than you were a month ago or a year before that, according to your non-doctor brother.”
A bark escapes me. “Great. At least there’s that.”
“Mrs. Barone, Dr. Lightfoot is looking for you,” a nurse says from her place above me.
“Who’s that?” Liam’s gravelly voice slides across the line.
“I’ll be right there,” I offer to the nurse, but to Liam I say, “Long story short, Christian was shot at the house last night and?—”
“What the fuck!” If whispers could yell, that would be my brother’s tone.
“We’re at Porter.”
“I’m on my way.”
Dead air is all that’s left after he bites out the last line. I turn my head up to the woman still hovering above me. “Dr. Lightfoot is?”
“Mr. Barone’s surgeon, and he’s in the room.”
Here we go again.
14
traitorous panties
Ayla
I am not a good patient. My husband is a miserable one.
We’ve been home for three days and if the faces he’s making are any indication, he’s in agony. Trying to out-stubborn pain is foolish. But Christian is obstinate and is determined to be stronger than the asshole who did this to him.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t hear his groans or see his hand reflexively reach for his shoulder.
While the blood was removed from the garage, the bandages across Christian’s chest are evidence that the incident happened. As is the heightened security.
Liam was at the hospital and gone again within an hour. Our state-of-the-art cameras and monitoring were his doing, apparently, and while it was the Cadillac of systems, we now own the Lamborghini version. Now, if only I could convince myself those black-masked figures weren’t real.
The hole in Christian’s chest is real. The room. The system. The gun. That horrid below-average coffee maker was too. So where did my mind spin to create that fragment of fiction in the world of fact? And how?
“You’re pacing again, wife.”
“You’re stating the obvious again, husband.” But I sit abruptly, as if pacing the sitting room were the problem and not the why behind it.
His chuckle melts quickly into a cough that drags a groan from him.
It doesn’t matter that our relationship is tenuous. The sounds he makes showing just how much he hurts are enough to turn my head.
