CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Gabe
“Tis in…memory….”
I watch the little girl with the blond curls pat her young mother’s cheeks, then kiss her nose. The mother laughs, the smile on her face so warm and full of love seeing it makes my heart feel like it’s going to rip free from my chest.
For the first time since the surgery, I experience a pain worse than the pain in my head. For the first time in weeks, the fog that has clouded my every thought lifts and I experience a moment of clarity—sharp and brutal, like a knife slipped between my ribs.
I want that. I want to treasure someone that much. I want someone to look at me the way that mother and daughter are looking at each other. They are both so beautiful, feeling so much, holding nothing back. It’s painful to watch them embrace, the little girl hugging her mom’s neck so tight, the mom kissing her daughter’s curls with a tenderness that makes it clear they are everything to each other. They’re too far away for me to hear what they’re saying, but I imagine that it’s something sweet.
“Are you ready to go, Gabe?” Olia, my private nurse, returns from the bathroom, taking her position at the back of my wheelchair.
I shake my head. “One…minute.”
I don’t want to go yet. I want the little girl to look at me again. I want her mother to turn my way and see me, even if I am a wasted, faded version of myself. Even if I am in this chair with a nurse escorting me home, a woman who, until a week ago, had to help me wipe my ass. Olia still has to help me onto the toilet, and pull up my pants when I’m finished like I’m no bigger than the toddler in the young woman’s arms.
I know I’m no prize, and that the woman is probably married, anyway, but I still want the blonde to look at me. I want to see her eyes. Somehow, I know they will be green. They will be the pale green of that milky green stone…
What’s the name? The one they used to carve figurines and chess pieces a long time ago…
I curse beneath my breath and give up searching for the missing word. I can’t remember the damned stone’s name.
There are so many things I can’t remember, words and phrases and months of my life lost along with the tumor they whittled free. The surgeon said I might never see those memories again, but Bea, the nurse who watched over me before Olia, promised there was hope.
In the early days, when no one was sure if I would pull through, Bea would talk to me while she changed my various tubes and checked my beeping machines. She said that brain surgery is like an earthquake. It shakes things loose, transforming the landscape of the mind, but not destroying as much as it might seem at first. The missing pieces are still there, buried beneath the rubble, or exiled on the other side of the chasm surgery leaves behind. She said there could come a day when I’d find a way to those memories, and reclaim the things that I’ve lost.
But it will take time. At least a year. Maybe more. Endless days I will spend lost in a fog of pain, struggling to reconcile who my parents insist I was before the surgery with who I am now.
Sometimes, listening to them talk, I think the doctor may have cut away more of me than Aaron and Deborah can imagine. I don’t feel like the happy, well-adjusted, driven pre-law major they insist I was before. There is darkness inside of me, a rage and sadness that is bigger than post-surgical depression. Sometimes I get so angry it frightens me.
The things I want to do, the things I imagine…
They aren’t pretty. They aren’t sane or healthy, and, until this morning, I was beginning to think that my soul was a broken, twisted thing. Whether the surgery was to blame, or I was always a monster hiding behind a handsome face, I didn’t know. I only knew that I was full of hate and misery and there was no room for anything else. I felt no gratitude to the doctor who saved my life against all odds; I felt no affection for my parents. I haven’t even been happy to be alive, because what good is life without something to live for, something other than this emptiness that has threatened to swallow me whole?
But now, looking at this woman, this girl—she can’t be much older than I am, even if she is a mother—I feel something. There is a softening inside me, a bruised place on my heart that makes my ribs ache and my throat tight. A wave of longing sweeps through me, making me shake with the force of how much I want.
I want to love someone. I need to love someone. I need to love someone the way I loved…
I close my eyes, chest lurching as a ghost of a memory dances through my head. It’s a wispy, transparent memory, with graceful arms, a wicked smile, and perfect, moon-shaped toes. I see chipped nail polish and bare feet against concrete steps. I hear a throaty laugh in the darkness and feel hot breath on my lips as arms pull me down onto a lumpy bed. My head spins with the sense memories of nails digging into my shoulders, the tang of sweet, salty sweat in my mouth.
For a moment the pieces of the mystery struggle to come together, but then they’re gone. The memory slips through my fingers, turning to smoke in my hands.
By the time I open my eyes, the beautiful woman and her daughter are walking away, moving toward the security line, a redheaded woman now by their side. I watch them go with a ridiculous sense of loss, hating myself for not calling out, even if the blonde is a stranger. I should have said something. I should have told her thank you for giving me hope that I am more than a monster, that there may still be good left inside of me.
But I didn’t, and the moment is gone.
Now, it’s time for Olia to push me outside to the curb, where my mother is waiting in the new van, the one specially equipped to fit my chair. The doctors don’t know how long it will be before I recover the ability to walk. It could be weeks, months, years.
Or never. Some people never rebuild the bridges their tumors ate away. Some people stay lost in the wilderness without ever finding their way home.
Home. Staring at the blonde’s retreating form, I realize it isn’t a place. It is a touch, a gentle word, a tender look. It is knowing that there is someone out there who knows all your secrets, has looked into all your dark corners, and loves you anyway. It is realizing that you are not alone.
I am not alone. Someone—that ghost with the moon-shaped toes—loved me, once. And I loved her, with all the ferocity I’ve done my best to keep hidden from my parents since the moment I opened my eyes after the surgery. I loved a girl who cherished my rough edges and dark corners, who took me as I am, who kissed me in the shadows and taught me that even the most jagged puzzle pieces have a place where they will fit. Just right. Flush and snug and suddenly whole.
I can’t remember her name, or her face. I can’t remember when we met, or how long we loved, or why she isn’t here with me now, but the fact that she existed is enough to steady my hands and calm my racing heart. I found her once. I can find her again. I can search for her in the jungles of my mind until I find a clue, a trail of breadcrumbs, something that will lead me back to what I’ve lost.
Back to her.