I tried not to think about either one of them. I attempted to clean my room, but that didn’t last long. I kept seeing things Luke had touched—my record player, the blanket, me. There were dark places in Luke, holes that I couldn’t fill and that he seemed determined to fall into. But for some reason, I couldn’t walk away.
Ian was the safe choice—sweet, considerate, motivated. He was going to be an architect. He was a good student and an athlete. He was interesting. Ian was everything everyone expected me to date. My friends liked him. I was comfortable when I was with him. Responsible Jenna would choose Ian.
Luke brought out my darker side, the part I wasn’t sure I wanted people to see. He challenged me, made me angry and giddy all at the same time. Luke had secrets, and when I was with him, it was harder to forget mine. If I chose Luke, I felt I would be choosing the me that was unstable, the one who thought dark and scary things, who wondered what it would be like to stop playing it safe all the time. Luke was dangerous because he made me want to find out who I really was instead of molding myself into the person I should be. Choosing him would be a bad idea. But not choosing him felt like betrayal.
Responsible Jenna drew me toward Ian, who was solid and balanced and everything I might have needed and should have wanted. And sometimes did. But irresponsible Jenna, irreverent and unthinking Jenna, wanted to push against boundaries and see what was over the fence. That Jenna was attracted to Luke, who hinted at something wonderful but guaranteed trouble and was everything I wanted but didn’t need.
I gave up trying to clean my room and went to work. July was just a few days away, and it felt it. The thermometer at the bank was already close to ninety degrees. Nobody came in all morning, and Mops put out the lunch sign early.
I climbed the twisted metal staircase and stepped into her small apartment. It was lived-in, which was the way I liked things. I hated how neat Mom kept our house, like some kind of dysfunctional dollhouse. I didn’t exactly fit in with Mom’s flower-print sofa and frilly chairs. My room and the kitchen were the only two places in my house where I was really comfortable.
But every room in Mops’s house was comfortable.
Her tiny apartment smelled like pinto beans, which were in the Crock-Pot next to the stove. “You’re in charge of cornbread,” she told me. I pulled most of the stuff out of the fridge and went to work while Mops washed the squash she grew in a tiny patch behind the store. I loved cooking with Mops. She’d taught me how to fry chicken, chop an onion, knead dough. It was also when we had our best talks. It was easier to open up when my hands were busy.
“Your mother tells me you have a boyfriend,” Mops said.
The metal bowl clanged loudly as I dropped it on the linoleum. I scooped it up and set it on the counter before turning to look at Mops. “When did you talk to Mom?” They were mostly avoiding each other these days.
“I saw her this morning at the Shell station. I was out of milk and she was getting gas.” That made sense. Mom was very into appearances and probably went out of her way to make the conversation look good, since Walt Labatut, who ran the Shell station, gossiped worse than an old woman.
“He’s not my boyfriend.” I wasn’t sure which one I was talking about.
“Touchy,” Mops said.
“Can we talk about something else?”
Anything else, please
.
“I was about your age when I started dating your Pops.” Mops’s voice had a lilt to it, almost as if she were singing a song and longing was the melody. “He sat next to me in English and kept trying to copy.”
“Did you let him?” I took the preheated cast-iron skillet out of the oven and filled it with the batter. The hot grease in the bottom of the skillet popped and sizzled.
Mops smiled slyly at me. “What do you think?”
I slid the skillet into the oven and closed the door, setting the timer. I stood up and surveyed Mops. If she was this feisty when she was old, I couldn’t imagine what she’d been like in high school. But I also knew how persuasive Pops could be.
“Yes,” I decided.
“Well, you’re wrong.” She dipped the squash in egg and rolled in it cornmeal before tossing it into the hot grease on the stove. “And he failed the first semester.” Mops poured us both glasses of iced tea and we sat down at the small kitchen table. Purple marker covered the right side of the table where I’d colored outside of the lines.
“I let him sweat it out a bit, then told him I’d tutor him. We were going steady less than a month later.” Mops’s face was a mosaic of joy and regret when she talked about Pops.
“But how did you know?” I asked.
Mops looked at me. “He made me laugh. He made me smile, made me want to be a better person. Sometimes I would look at him and my heart would literally hurt because I loved him so much and I didn’t know how to contain it, what to do with it. I wanted to protect him and scream at him all at the same time. And he put up with me, which helped.” She winked at me.
“What happened?” I asked. They’d stopped living together when I was seven. And while there had been love, there’d also been a whole lot of anger.
There was a lifetime in her sigh. “We stopped being good for each other. Life tore us down, and we couldn’t even put ourselves back together, much less each other. It was nobody’s fault, but we were both to blame. I never stopped loving him, but I pulled myself out of that hole we’d climbed into, and he wouldn’t even try.” She got up to flip the squash and spoke with her back to me. “Pops wouldn’t let me help him. I couldn’t live with him. I refused to watch him destroy himself and take me down in the process.”
Exactly. I loved my mother, but if her drinking kept getting worse, she was going to ruin both our relationship and our futures.
“Your mother never forgave me for moving out. My heart wanted to stay with him, but my head wanted to stay sober. I knew I couldn’t have both.”
“Your head is always right?” I asked.
Mops turned down the burner and came back to the table. “No. There’s no
always
in life.”
“Sometimes I wish I were seven years old again,” I admitted.
“Why?”
Because back then Pops was still alive and my mom still climbed into my quilt tents. Because my biggest worry had been whether or not Santa knew about my latest crime. Because I’d still believed in magic. “Because life wasn’t so complicated then,” I said.
Mops reached over and patted my hand. “It sure doesn’t get any easier, either.”
Great.
“What happened the night your dad and Luke got into the fight?” Dr. Benson was supposed to be helping me recover my memories and figure out my headaches. He wasn’t doing either. He made me talk about what I did remember to see if it sparked what I didn’t. I spent half the time desperately shifting through the maze in my mind and the other half wishing I were anywhere else.
“You need to talk to Luke about that,” I said for the second time. We’d spent most of the session talking about how I felt about the move and the divorce. I felt they were both Luke’s fault. Exploring that any further was just going to lead to a dead end.
Dr. Benson nodded and leaned back in his chair. “You’re right. But I can’t make him attend his appointments, and I can’t make him talk to me even if he does.”
No one could make Luke do anything he didn’t want to. It was probably one of the reasons Dad always lost his temper with Luke. Luke couldn’t be ordered around like the rest of us. Dad commanded, both at work and at home, and he’d grown used to having things his way. He issued the orders. He wasn’t questioned. Mom had done what he said mainly to keep life peaceful. But Luke was the one person Dad couldn’t really boss around, and Dad hated that. Funny, considering those two were so alike. Dad didn’t take shit from anyone, and neither did Luke. I was like my mom. But the peace was becoming impossible to keep.
“You don’t think it would be easier if you just told me what happened?” I asked.
Dr. Benson’s face tightened. “No, I don’t. Sometimes forgetting is your brain’s way of healing. When you’re ready to remember, you will.”
“Are you sure?” I needed to know that I could reach this goal.
Dr. Benson frowned. “No. The brain is a complicated system.”
“And doctors don’t know as much as they pretend to.” They guessed. Sometimes they groped in the dark. It didn’t matter how many degrees he had hanging on his wall. I had to figure out a way to get better on my own. And I would.
“We don’t know everything, no,” Dr. Benson admitted.
“I’m sorry.” I smoothed over the tension out of habit. That had always been my job. “Do you remember high school?” I asked.
Dr. Benson looked surprised. He paused, and I wasn’t sure he was going to answer the question. “Parts of it,” he said finally.
“Why is that?” Why did some things disappear while others remained burned into our brains?
“Not all parts are worth remembering, I guess,” he said.
That was what I was afraid of. Maybe my missing months weren’t worth it either.
“Who did you take to prom?” I asked him. I thought back to the picture I had seen, the one of the blonde girl laughing. Happy. Why couldn’t I remember her?
“Mary Beth Anderson,” he said.
“Why do you think you remember that so easily but not other parts?”
“Because Mary Beth Anderson is now living in my old house and getting a sizeable portion of my income.” Dr. Benson smiled at me. “Why are you asking me this?”
Because collecting other people’s memories was easier than finding my own.
“I keep seeing a blonde girl,” I told him. “Like a hallucination or something.”
Dr. Benson’s face was guarded. “Go on.”
“That’s it. I saw a picture of her at my house, though it’s suddenly disappeared, and twice she’s shown up, standing in front of me.”
Dr. Benson smiled. “See? You’re remembering.”
“But I’m not!” Didn’t he see that? “I have no idea who she is.”
“Don’t force it,” Dr. Benson said. “You’ll remember when you’re ready.”
“But what if I don’t?” I asked.
Dr. Benson shifted in his chair and tilted his head to look at me. “Ian, we’ve only just started. Give yourself time.”
I didn’t know how much longer I could afford to wait. There were so many things I wanted, and most of them started with recovering what I’d lost. Memories. My family. Myself. I was tired of stumbling around in the dark.
The timer went off. “That’s it for today.” Dr. Benson and I both stood up, and he clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I’m proud of you,” he said. “You’re getting there.”
Sometimes it didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere at all.
“I’ll call your mom, see if she can talk Luke into coming.”
I shrugged. “Maybe.” But I wasn’t counting on it.
I hadn’t spoken to Luke since our argument. I hadn’t even seen him. And while he’d promised he would stay away from Jenna, I knew him well enough to know he was lying. I just didn’t know what I was going to do about it yet.
Mom was pulling weeds in the front yard when I got home from my appointment. It was late afternoon, but it was murderously hot and her face was red and streaked with sweat and dirt.
“How’d it go?” she asked, leaning back on her heels.
“Fine.” I always told her it went fine. I wasn’t sure if there were a more accurate response. I was still having headaches. I was still having bad dreams. I still couldn’t find all of my memories. But I hadn’t choked the incompetent doctor, so I guessed that meant things were going fine.
“Your dad called again,” Mom told me.
That was new. We hadn’t heard from him in weeks, then all of a sudden we get two calls in two days. “About?”
“He finally got hold of the superintendent this morning. The state athletic association is going to vote in a couple of weeks on whether or not you’re eligible to play football.”
“Oh.” I should have known. Dad was only interested in how many passes I could complete. Yesterday all he’d wanted to talk about was what I was doing to stay in shape. I figured the vote was probably a technicality at this point; if Dad wanted me to play, he’d make it happen. He could be very persuasive. “You need help?” I asked.
Mom looked surprised. “Sure.”
We knelt in the dirt on either side of the porch steps, pulling the intruding weeds and tossing them into a pile behind us. “I could just mow,” I offered. The weeds were thick and tall. It would have been easier to just chop everything down and start again.
“No, I want the bushes and flowers. I think there was some pretty nice landscaping here, before it all grew up. We have to thin these out to see for sure.”
The yard was wild and unruly, bordered by woods and a broken fence. There was a pond out back. It was nothing like our yard in Massachusetts. The weeds there shriveled up from Dad’s glare alone. Everything had been tidy and orderly. Dad always made sure there was nothing troublesome in our yard. And if anything did show up, he tossed it out.
“Dr. Benson knows what I can’t remember, doesn’t he?”
Mom stared at the pile of weeds in her hand. Just when I thought she wasn’t going to answer, she nodded.
“Why doesn’t he just tell me?” I asked. “Why don’t you?”
When Mom turned to look at me, there was so much heartbreak in her face that I immediately regretted the question.
“It’s that bad?” I whispered. My brain was a maze of twisting corridors separating me from the truth. And since Luke didn’t seem the least bit interested or capable of fixing what was broken, that meant I had to do it. The only way I knew how to repair the cracks was to remember what had shattered us in the first place.
I needed everything to lay flat. I had to replace Kyle Couty as starting quarterback. That was going to be nearly impossible because of small-town politics, but if I succeeded on the field, my family would be less fractured. My parents had spent their lives putting themselves into Luke and me, making sure we were successful in everything, and Luke had thrown that back in their faces. I wouldn’t. I would show them that everything they’d ever done wasn’t a waste. Maybe if I worked hard enough, those skeletons in the basement would finally disintegrate and Mom could stop worrying.