My fingers moved reflexively on my stomach. A baby. Had I even known? He said it was early days yet, maybe five weeks.
I couldn’t tell someone my phone number, but I was going to have a baby. Unbidden, the lines of a song pop into my head.
Every little thing gonna be alright.
Singing don’t worry, don’t worry bout a thing...
Marley. I liked Bob Marley. I couldn’t be all bad if I liked Marley, right? A smile bloomed on my face and I closed my eyes. I had remembered something.
Tomorrow, I promised myself. Tomorrow I would call him, and I would talk to the one person who could tell me what the hell had happened. Until then I would sleep, the lilting melody in my mind singing me to slumber.
“I love you,
in ways
you’ve never been
loved,
for reasons you’ve never been
told.”
Tyler Knott Gregson
November 16│Hayes
I ROSE EARLY TO MAKE THE HALF-HOUR DRIVE FROM THE FARM TO BIRDIE’S MOM’S HOUSE. We’d picked this place together just two months ago for our first and hopefully forever home, a fixer-upper that was just far enough away from everything to be private, but close enough to suit our need for convenience.
Just out of Tennessee’s grad program last May, and working on my doctorate, I’d lucked out with an adjunct professorship that paid decently and provided the basis of hope for my career. This kind of position wasn’t tenured, but it also wasn’t easy to come by, and I’d snagged one before even completing my doctorate. It was a good sign.
Of course, I had little doubt that the biggest reason I’d gotten the position was because I’d also agreed to serve as the university’s pitching coach.
I hadn’t wasted any time proposing to Birdie. We’d known each other since January, but I’d never understood until now, how sometimes you just knew. Birdie was my lightning strike, as my parents would say. I knew it the moment I saw her.
Now I gritted my molars as I crunched down the gravel driveway, wondering if everything we’d planned for would ever come to be. Fate was throwing some fickle freaking curveballs our way.
I was still having trouble figuring out how it had all gone to hell so swiftly. One minute Birdie had been leaving paint and wallpaper swatches scattered in every room for me to help her choose; the next, she’d been in a medically induced coma for four days in nearby Knoxville’s trauma center.
Now, she was Birdie but not. She had watched me with wary eyes when I stayed with her in the hospital, trusting I was who her mother had told her but with half-hearted conviction. I could tell she understood the theory of being mine but repelled the truth in action. Until she reclaimed her memories, she belonged to no one but herself.
Which is why I was headed toward her mom’s house now with a bag of her personal items in the backseat of my truck. Her laptop, her shea butter lotion and vitamin E night cream. Her favorite fuzzy crocs and the book she’d left on the nightstand. Packing them up for her had been a Herculean task, sapping every molecule of strength I had. It felt final, like I was giving up.
I was doing anything but.
When she had fled my office the week before, her face a mask of fury and hurt, I’d felt a moment of blind terror. The possibility of losing her...losing everything we’d built over the past year...well, it just wasn’t going to happen.
I wasn’t completely certain where to go from this point, though. Did I tell her what she’d walked in on, take the risk that she’d react the same way she initially had? She didn’t trust me to begin with — which hurt, but I understood. For all intents and purposes, she didn’t know me. What would happen if I came out and said, “yeah, it’s kind of my fault you’re in this fix. You walked in on a student making a move, assumed the worst, and sped away in horrible weather with me chasing after you.”
And then you crashed.
Call me crazy, but I didn’t think that would go over too well.
But what if she regained her memory before I found a good time to tell her? I would look guilty as sin. And there was a baby to think of…
No. I needed to find absolution before then. And I needed to bind her to me once again, make her love me so completely that she wouldn’t consider leaving.
And if I couldn’t? My fingers clenched around the steering wheel. I guess I’d just cross that bridge when I got there.
│Birdie
FROM WHERE I SAT ON MY BED, I HEARD THE KNOCK FALL UPON THE FRONT DOOR, BRISK AND NO-NONSENSE. Mom’s voice followed, floating up the steps as she greeted the visitor, and then his deeper, low-pitched reply.
It sent shivers down my spine, made my girl parts sit up and take notice. I’d noticed that the first time he spoke to me in the hospital. I’d been in a fog, and then his voice pierced right through, an anchor devouring the depths I was sinking in. He’d said my name, his slight southern accent doing things to the simple word that instinctively —
“Birdie.”
With a start, I realized he was in the doorway of my bedroom, all six feet plus of his wide frame filling the narrow space. My eyes drank him in, unable to fathom how it was possible this fine man was mine, if everyone was to be believed. It didn’t make sense.
Hayes was that guy, the one even the teachers probably lusted after in high school. During my stay in the hospital, he’d told me that he was formerly a pitcher for our university’s baseball team and was now their pitching coach and a math professor. He was tall and solid, with perpetual stubble covering his jaw and hazel eyes that dipped the tiniest bit at the corners. Sleepy eyes, my father used to call them.
When the silence between us had stretched to awkward proportions, I spoke. “Hayes. Come in, sit.” I patted the bed beside me, aware it was the only place in my small room to sit.
Hayes set a duffel bag down just inside the door and, huffing out a strained chuckle when his weight made the mattress dip, sending me sprawling against him. He righted me quickly, and if his hands lingered on my rib cage a skosh longer than was necessary, well...I pretended not to notice.
“How’re you feeling?” he asked in that low rumble. “I brought some of your things over. Thought they might help you feel more at home.”
“Thank you.” I lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “And I’m as well as can be expected, I guess.” His eyes studied me, asking without words for more, and I struggled to explain the mess of confusion everything was. How my head hurt constantly and how isolated I felt. “It’s just weird. I have a constant headache. And there’s this feeling like there’s something I need to do. Somewhere I need to go. But ...”
“I wish I could help you, baby.” I startled at the endearment, but then realized it was likely habitual.
I tried to decide if I liked it. I didn’t dislike it. There was just… nothing. No emotional attachment to it, no expectation of anything to go with it, no immediate response to return it.
I picked at a string on my quilt. “It’ll get better. It has to, right? In the meantime, I guess there’s not but so much we can do, other than follow doctor’s orders.”
Dr. Chen had advised Hayes and others around me to refrain from trying to tell me everything about myself, and to instead allow my memory to return organically. If it was going to return, I guess that would work. A constant low buzz of anxiety nagged at me, though, with the thought that it might not return. What then? When should I start asking for answers, pieces of the puzzle that was previous me?