Page 60 of Help Me Remember

Resisting the urge to disturb him further by bending down to kiss his brow, I left him to sleep a little longer. I stopped by the bathroom long enough to take care of business and wash my face. There was no need for candles since the sunlight leaked through the bathroom curtain. Without a phone or clock, I had no idea what time it was and briefly wondered how long I’d slept.

Shrugging, I walked into the hallway and through the open archway that led into what looked like a living room. Like the bedroom, there wasn’t much personalization, only a few plain pieces of furniture. There was a vase filled with fake plants and a painting of a house on a prairie over the TV. However, nothing explained why just looking around the room left me with such a powerful sense of unease.

Moving carefully, I checked the room to ensure nothing could threaten me before pulling aside the curtain at the front window. The sense of unease grew as I peered out onto what appeared to be a trimmed lawn, a quiet neighborhood, and a front flower garden in desperate need of flowers.

There wasn’t the slightest sign of anything wrong, and I twitched the curtain back into place, frowning as I backed up. It was only as I turned to face the nearby doorway and spotted a set of stairs near the front door that I stopped. Moving slowly, I walked into the entranceway, facing the front door. The half-moon window at the top allowed sunlight to spill in on me, and I turned back to face the house again.

“Mom? Dad?” I called softly, the words leaving my lips before I could think about what I was saying.

Of course, they didn’t answer. According to Eric, they’d been dead for years. Yet, for a few pounding heartbeats, I found myself stuck with an old and familiar mixture of anticipation and expected disappointment.

“This is my house,” I muttered, turning on the spot to look around.

This was the exact entryway I’d seen in my flashback, calling into a house that was better decorated than it was now but just as sterile. My gaze traveled up the stairs, and I remembered another couple of bedrooms and a bathroom on the second floor. My room had been at the top of the stairs, while my parents’ had been at the back of the house. There had once been a giant rug on the entryway floor that Eric had accidentally ruined by spilling a bright red drink, but I had taken the fall for it. My parents had been annoyed but had replaced it after lecturing me to keep anything messy in the kitchen.

“Dyl?” I heard from the other room, and although I could tell it was the Eric I knew now, I half expected the teenage version to come around the corner. Instead of a gangly kid with big eyes and a broad smile, there was only the adult, fully grown, more filled-out Eric, looking concerned and sleepy as he rubbed at his face. “Hey…Jesus, are you okay?”

“This is my house…was my house,” I said, correcting myself quickly. “This was my parents’ house.”

“It went to you after they died, along with pretty much everything they owned. You didn’t use it, though, even the few times you came back. Just rented it out and left it up to a company to play landlord on your behalf,” he said with a shrug. “I didn’t even know you’d put it up for sale, but it’s been that way for a couple of years now.”

“That’s a…weirdly long time to have a house on sale,” I said and then shook my head. “Wait, you knew this was my house.”

“Well, yeah, I came here often enough. By the time I got you into a different car and took off in a random direction, I realized I was mindlessly driving in this direction. Let me tell you how fun it was to try to Google real estate information while you’re bleeding in the backseat, and I’m freaking out that you might have a serious concussion.”

I cocked my head. “Why…didn’t you tell me? You just said it was a house you’d found.”

Eric gently pulled at the loose skin on his elbow, and I vaguely remembered he’d always done that when he was nervous and sometimes a little guilty. “I just…I didn’t want to tell you last night because I didn’t want you to worry about it right away. You want to get your memory back, which I understand! I really do. Of course you do. But last night, I…wanted to make sure you were healthy and not going to hurt yourself trying to dig around for scraps of your lost memory.”

“God,” I said, looking past him and somehow seeing both the plain leather couch that sat in front of the TV and the prissy flower-patterned one my mother had insisted on buying when I was fifteen. “It’s like standing in two different parts of time.”

“Is that…a good thing?” Eric asked me slowly. I wondered if perhaps, on some level, whether conscious or not, he’d been hoping that being back in my old house might shake something loose.

“I don’t know,” I admitted with a shake of my head. “It’s just weird at the moment.”

“Anything coming back to you?”

“Nope, just a surreal sense of being both where I’m supposed to be and a stranger at the same time,” I said, finally having to close my eyes as a wave of dizziness washed through me. “I mean, I remember that ugly rug my mom had that you ruined with a drink.”

Eric let out a laugh. “Oh God, I forgot about that. I was so confused when you wouldn’t let me own up to it, even though your parents weren’t all that mad.”

“Because if you took the blame, you would have sworn up and down that you’d find a way to pay them back. That rug was as expensive as it was ugly, and I knew you’d end up finding out how much it cost and get embarrassed because there was no way you or your dad could get that much money together,” I told him, only to open my eyes in surprise. “Okay, maybe I remember more than I thought. What the fuck was that?”

“Exactly what you said, you remembering something,” Eric said, peering up at me with a slight smile. “Anything else?”

“I…used this house,” I told him, turning around to look at the mostly bare walls and lackluster furniture. “I remember getting rid of everything my parents left behind and selling it all or donating it. I remember…having all the money thrown into some private account I didn’t tell anyone about and living off…my job’s income.”

“And, uh, what job was that?” Eric asked cautiously.

I knew what he was wondering, but I could only shake my head. “I don’t know. It’s like, some of the stuff I remember is crystal clear, while the rest is still either just an empty space or so murky I can only make sense of a few little things.”

I could remember no longer wanting to rent out the house because I had another use for it…though I couldn’t remember what that use was. I could remember the name of a cat my parents had taken in once at my insistence, only to give it away a year later because the hair was unmanageable. I had cried over losing Mr. Moo Moo, but I couldn’t remember what the cat looked like.

Something had been shaken loose in my head, but I couldn’t make heads or tails of what everything was. “I don’t know, Eric. I don’t know what’s going on…but at least there’s no pain with these.”

Eric arched his brow. “You got headaches?”

“Before. Whenever I remembered something vividly, my head ached like it did when I was in the clinic,” I said, rubbing my brow in frustration. “I remember I had a cat, not what it looked like, and that ugly rug, but I can’t remember what the fuck I’ve been doing for the past couple of years.”

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