I had the notebook with my memory list on the table, a slew of highlighters fanned out on the coffee table. The pink highlighter (the color I’d chosen to signify fabricated memories) was uncapped, the nonmarker end in my mouth as I scanned the list.
“Did we watch Forks and Knives?” I asked Matt, who was sitting on one of the living room chairs, catching up on work. It was Saturday morning, and almost three weeks since I’d come home from the hospital. My parents were back sleeping at their own place, my mother finally convinced I wasn’t on the verge of a breakdown and could cook for myself. And while things with Matt weren’t as awkward now, they were far from back on track. Most days it felt like we were merely roommates.
It didn’t help that I would twirl my wedding ring that wasn’t there, particularly when I was nervous or anxious—a gesture Matt caught more than once, looking wounded when he did. I had also made his coffee wrong twice since that first day, but he claimed he didn’t mind the sugar so much.
Sometimes I imagined I was living parallel lives, the knock on my head making it possible to see both timelines simultaneously. Or perhaps it was an elaborate setup, coordinated for reasons too fantastical to believe. I had mentioned as much to Dr. Kay at my appointment the day before, trying to lighten the mood. She had smiled when I’d said, “Maybe I’m a CIA operative who had memories implanted during a mission gone wrong?” before replying, “Well, that would make things easier to accept, wouldn’t it? So how are things going at home this week, Lucy?”
Damn, she was skilled at not allowing me to dodge my complicated feelings, to avoid talking about the things that kept me up at night and preoccupied during the day. I would much rather have discussed the theory, however implausible, that I was a rogue special agent versus accepting all this happened because a store didn’t throw salt on the ice outside their front door, and I had made a poor footwear choice—heeled booties versus sensible winter boots. All of which led to me slipping—so dramatically both my feet left the ground before I landed, hard, on the back of my head and knocked myself out.
“Forks Over Knives?” Matt asked, eyes still on his laptop as he finished typing. He was back from his dentist appointment—the one I’d noticed on the calendar that first morning I was home—and his mouth was frozen from having a cavity filled, so he sounded like he had a lisp. “The documentary? On Netflix?”
“Yes,” I replied, nibbling on the end of the highlighter. “Did we watch it?”
He nodded. “We did.”
I drew a thick pink line over Forks and Knives on my list with the highlighter, crossing out the and, writing over in its place with pen. “Did I mention wanting to become a vegetarian after that?”
Matt smiled, but his frozen mouth only half rose with the movement on the left side, making him look like he was smirking. “You did.”
“So what happened? How did I go from that place to two servings of pot roast at Christmas dinner?” It was so bizarre, not remembering such basic details of my life. Relying on someone else to fill in the blanks, trusting him to give me the truth. Because of course he could have told me anything and I’d have to believe him, which was unsettling at best and terrifying at worst. But as my anxiety intensified I reminded myself to take a deep breath and to remember Matt loved me. He didn’t want to hurt me and certainly wouldn’t lie to me.
“You declared yourself on a ‘meat break’ and then two days later you told me you missed bacon too much.”
“I missed bacon? That was all it took?” I shook my head. “Wow, I’m glad to hear I stand by my convictions.”
Matt laughed and then winced as he put his hand to his cheek. “You love bacon, Lucy.”
I did love bacon. Even as I thought it, I knew it was true, despite the memory of my turn to vegetarianism still feeling real. I could as easily be convinced my diet was meat free.
“Definitely not a vegetarian,” I murmured, highlighting the word vegetarian in pink. The whole vegetarian thing wasn’t new information, but I put it on the list for the satisfaction of crossing it off, even though seeing yet another pink line made me uneasy. “But at least I know I didn’t make the whole thing up. I mean, I did try not to eat meat and we did watch the documentary.”
Matt nodded, still amused. “Do you want to watch it again?”
“Definitely not,” I said. Matt smiled and then went back to his laptop. He squinted at the screen in concentration. “Hey, where are your glasses?” Matt always wore glasses to work, but it had only just occurred to me I hadn’t seen him wear them since I’d been home.
“Contacts,” he replied. “I hate them, but they’re better than always losing my glasses.”
“Oh,” I said, wondering when he had made the switch. Missing the way he looked in his glasses—handsomely bookish.
He closed his laptop, gestured to the notepad. “So what else is on today’s list?”
I had divided up the main list in chunks of five or so memories, which had been an exhausting task. My brain bruise had fully healed, but my mind was still “lethargic,” according to my doctors, and would be for a while. They had suggested not pushing things too much, offered gentle warnings that my “softer” memories could potentially lose some of their defined edges if I did.
I read the items in my head, touched one with my finger. “Your parents.”
“My parents? What about them?”
“They live in California, right?” Matt nodded. “I remember meeting them once. When they came to visit the office and took us out for lunch. We went to that Korean barbecue place, remember?” Again, Matt nodded. Of course he remembered. “It was fun. Your dad is supertall, and your mom hugged me after lunch.”
“They just celebrated their thirtieth wedding anniversary,” Matt added. Then he paused, and I said, “What?” and he finally added, “We threw them a big party. Do you remember?”
I didn’t, so I shook my head, feeling frustrated—as well as mildly irritated with Matt because he obviously knew I didn’t remember the party. I had just finished saying I met his parents only one time, at the office, so why bring it up?
“You and my sister, Evelyn—you remember Eve, right?” Again, reluctantly, I shook my head and the frustration swelled. “Anyway, doesn’t matter.” But his face certainly looked like it mattered a lot, that I didn’t remember his sister. I wondered where she lived, if we were close. “The two of you organized everything. I was on a case in Montreal and had barely been home in weeks, so you took over.” I wished I could crawl into his head so I could see it, too. “Eve lives in San Diego. She’s a marine biologist. Here, I have a few photos on my phone.” He clicked through the photo icon until he found what he was looking for and sat beside me at the table.
In the first photo we stood between his mom and dad and a tall, tanned woman with a blond bob who looked like Matt and whom I guessed was his sister. The five of us wore beaming smiles, and I was in a canary yellow A-line dress. I could tell I felt good in that dress by the way I held myself, and I wondered if it still hung in my closet, when I might have another occasion to wear it. There were flutes of champagne, which we reached out in cheers toward whoever had taken the picture. A dark sadness filled me and I tried to stay engaged as he flipped through a few more photos, but I was fading.
“Eve looks like you,” I said, because I couldn’t think of what else to say. Nothing about the photos felt familiar, which was surreal because if I had organized the party, if we had flown five hours for it, and had, as Matt was telling me now, taken a week’s holiday to do some skiing at California’s Heavenly Mountain Resort before coming home, why couldn’t I remember any of it? Not a single thing tickled my memory.
Until I saw the photo of us dressed head to toe in ski garb, standing at the top of a mountain with the blue sky behind us and our poles raised in the air, grins from ear to ear on our cold-red faces, sparkling snow diamonds everywhere.
With a rush I remembered that photo being taken.
But...it was Daniel, not Matt, I remembered standing beside me. His newly grown beard keeping the bottom half of his face toasty warm, though I had complained about how much the coarse hairs prickled my chin. In my memory it was Daniel with the one arm around me, the other jutting his pole up to the bluebird sky. Daniel, who, after the ski patrol took this photo for us, turned his phone around and kissed me deeply while snapping a selfie. And as that memory landed into my mind, Matt flipped to the next photo and there it was. The kissing selfie. Except it was Matt kissing me in the picture, not Daniel. Matt’s beard, which he no longer had, tickling my chin while we pressed our lips together.
Matt watched me carefully, kept the kissing selfie on his screen, waited for my reaction. An icy feeling filled me and the mild headache I’d been dealing with all day pounded with insistence. I pushed back from the table quickly, and the chair legs screeched as I did. Matt, clearly startled, stood up as well, his phone clattering to the tabletop. I stared at the photo and in a strange detached way noted how happy we looked. How right we seemed together, our lips fitting together so perfectly despite the bulkiness of our goggles and helmets and the inches he had on me. Then the screen faded, the picture gone.
“My head is killing me,” I said, looking away from Matt’s phone and glancing toward the bedroom. “I think I’m going to lie down for a bit.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, his face a mix of concern and confusion at my abruptness. “Do you need anything? Can I grab your pills for you? A glass of water?”
I shook my head, which made the pounding worse. “I think it’s going to ease up. I just need some rest.”
“Okay.” Matt let out a breath, his hands jiggling on his hips in that nervous-energy way I recognized. It occurred to me I hadn’t seen him take his bike out yet this week. I remembered he normally rode daily, always to and from work, and was usually training for some kind of race.
“Why don’t you go for a ride?” I said. It was chilly outside, but the snow had melted and the slush had evaporated to only small puddles here and there.
“Maybe later,” he said, but I knew that meant he wouldn’t go. “I probably shouldn’t have made you look at the photos. They said no screens for a while. Sorry, Lucy. I didn’t... Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “You didn’t make me look at anything. I wanted to. And I don’t think a couple of minutes is going to do much damage.”
He nodded but didn’t look convinced.
“I’m okay, Matt. Honestly. An hour or so to shut my eyes. Seriously, go for a ride. I bet you’ll feel better, too.”
With a glance at his bike, which hung from a hook on the brick wall in our entryway, he seemed to consider this. “Maybe I will. But I’ll be here when you get up.” He gave me his lopsided smile and for the first time since coming home I felt a rush of something more intimate toward him. It was a whisper of something, but it was there. Maybe it was the selfie, after all. Even if I remembered standing beside a different man, I couldn’t ignore the evidence: at some point, in my not-so-distant past, I had been in love with Matt Newman.