“Can I help you?” It was meant as a question, but he was already nudging me out of the way as he pried the knife from my fingers and went to work on the mushrooms. I pause on my way to the stove and watch him slice the vegetables.
“So…did you remember anything this week?” I pull my staged casserole dish from the oven and set it on the stove.
“I did.”
My body becomes rigid and blood rushes to my head.
“I was paging through a magazine, one of those travel publications, and there was a picture of a campsite in Georgia. I don‘t know if I ever camped there. For all I know, I could be making it up in my head, but I felt something when I was looking at the pictures.”
I look away before my eyes can tell on me. He camped there all right, with a snake named Olivia.
“You should camp there. Maybe it will jog specific memories for you.” I realize my foolishness after the words are already out of my mouth. I am on team ‘amnesia’. His remembering would be the end of my foolish game.
He opens his mouth to say something but my doorbell cuts him off. Caleb looks at me in surprise, his hand suspended over a bell pepper.
“Are you expecting company?” he asks.
“Not unless you invited your amnesia anonymous group.” I dry my hands, dodging a mushroom he tosses at me and head over to the door. Whoever rang the doorbell was now resorting to pounding with what sounded like both of their fists.
I unlatch my bolt without bothering to look through the peephole and swing it open. A woman is standing in front of me, her fist poised midair.
“Can I help you?”
I rule out Jehovah’s Witnesses because they always come in twos and her makeup is too smudgy to be a salesperson. She is looking at me with a mixture of fear and anxiety. As I am about to say “no thank you” and close the door in her face, I notice a neat row of tears streaking down her cheeks. We stare at each other and then in a moment of horror I know.
Leah.
“Leah?” I hear Caleb’s voice behind me as I cringe. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” her voice trembles as she studies each of our faces.
“I’m having dinner with a friend. How did you—?”
“I followed you,” she says quickly, you haven’t been taking my calls and I wanted to see why.” She whispers this last part, squeezing her eyes closed as if to shut me out.
“How could you do this, Caleb?”
As if on cue, she drops her head and begins sobbing into her hands. I eye her dribbling nose and turn away disgusted. I have the worst luck in the world.
“Leah,” Caleb pushes past me and wraps his arms around her.
I watch from the outside, fear twisting in my stomach like a fist.
“Come on, I’ll take you home,” he turns back to mouth a hasty ‘I’m sorry’ to me as he steers her out the door. I watch them go. She looks childlike next to him. He never made me look that small and fragile. I swing my door closed and curse. It feels as if I am a thousand years old.
The following evening I am curled up on my sofa, getting ready for an exciting night with my law school applications, when my doorbell rings.
I groan and smother my face in a pillow. Rosebud.
I open the door without bothering to look through the peephole.
Not Rosebud. Caleb. I eye him warily.
“Well, well, well,” I say, “look what the red-headed girlfriend dragged in.”
He smiles at me sheepishly and runs a hand through his hair.
“I’m sorry, Olivia, I guess she’s having a harder time than I thought.”
“Listen, I really don’t want to get involved in your girlfriend drama…”
I hit some kind of emotional nerve because he blinks like a bug just flew into his eye.
“I understand that,” he says. “She wants me to have friends. It just came as a shock.”
“She doesn’t want you to have a friend like me, Caleb, and if she told you she was okay with it, she was lying.”
“Friends like you?” he says smiling. “Are you insinuating that you’re attractive?”
I roll my eyes. Totally off topic.
“Okay, okay,” he says holding up his hands, “but, I want you as a friend, regardless of what anyone else thinks. Does that count?”
I make him wait. I pretend to be thinking about it. I bite my lip and frown. Then I stand aside and let him back into my house. He looks pretty damn smug.
We decide that we want cake. I pull out mixing bowls and ingredients and Caleb fashions chef hats for us out of paper towels. I marvel at the fact that a few weeks ago I thought I would never see him again and here he is in my kitchen. We laugh a lot and when the batter is ready to be poured into the cake pan, Caleb sours the mood.
“Leah makes the best red velvet cake.”
I glare at him because I don’t want to think about his fancy pants girlfriend just now AND I’ve never even eaten red velvet cake.
When he goes on and on about it, I pick up a handful of batter and fling it toward his face.
I miss of course, and it lands on the wall behind his head. Caleb turns to look at it.
“You know,” he says with surprising calm, “you really need to work on your aim.”
Before I know what is happening, he turns his entire bowl upside-down over my head.
I am dripping brown batter all over the floor, laughing so hard I can barely stand. I reach for the counter to steady myself and feel my feet slip out from underneath me. Caleb reaches out a hand to grab me, and instead of accepting his help, I try to smear batter on him. I smash it into his face. He yelps, and in seconds, my tiny kitchen is a war zone. We throw eggs, flour and oil, and when those run out—we launch handfuls of chocolate chips at each other. At some point, I tackle him, and we go sliding to the floor. We are laughing so hard, tears start leaking from my batter encrusted eyes. I am leaning over him, as he lays sprawled on his back. There is egg on his nose, and both of his eyebrows are caked in flour. I can’t imagine what I must look like. The laughter is suddenly sucked from our throats as we realize the awkwardness of our position. We could kiss. Like in the movies.
I hover above him for a second waiting to see if he will make a move. His eyes are undoubtedly on my mouth and I am breathless in anticipation. My heart is pressed somewhere against his ribcage and I wonder if he could feel it beating around bombastically.
“Olivia,” he whispers.
I swallow.
“We still have a cake to bake.”
Baking? I look around at the mess and groan. How can he think about baking?
Two hours later we are sitting on the floor of my tiny balcony, still covered in batter, eating Caleb’s cake. I pull a chunk of goop from my hair and toss it over the railing. Caleb drops another slice in my hand.
“Favorite book?” he asks.
“Madam Bovary.”
He snickers.
“Favorite pastime?”
“Depression.”
“Favorite pastime?” he asks again. We’ve been playing this game for the last hour. It’s very one sided since he can’t remember his favorites.
I scratch my chin. “Eating.”
“Favorite memory?”
I pause at this one. All of my favorite memories include him.
“There was this…guy…he planned out a super-extraordinary date. He sent me on a scavenger hunt and I had to figure out answers to clues like, where our first date was and where the best place to buy a bra was. Each time I went to one of the places in the clues, there would be a gift and another clue waiting for me. It ended with me going to the place where we had our first kiss. He’d set up a table with dinner and music. We danced. It was….” I don’t know how to finish that sentence.
Caleb is quiet. When I turned to look at him, he is staring up the sky.
“What was his name?”
I shake my head.
“No way.”
“Why? Rock my world-tell me….”
“The stars look silver tonight,” I say changing the subject. “Maybe soon you’ll remember your favorites,” I say quietly. He shrugs.
“Or, I’ll just make new favorites. Starting with you.” This should make me excited, but it just reminds me of the ticking time bomb our relationship resembles.
“Can I be your favorite girl?”
“You already are, Duchess.”
My vision blurs and my heart does a little skip. Did I just imagine that?
“What did you just call me?”
Caleb looks embarrassed.
“Duchess, but don’t ask me why, it just popped into my head. Sorry.”
I stare straight ahead and hope he doesn’t notice the horror on my face.
“No, no it’s fine,” I say softly. But it isn’t. Duchess was his nickname for me in college.
“I better get going,” he says, standing up quickly.
I want to ask him if he’s remembered something but I’m too scared.
I walk him to the door and he leans down to peck my cheek.
“Bye,” I say.
“Bye.” And then he walks into the stagnant night air, leaving me alone.
He is going to remember and soon! I have to think of a way to buy myself some more time.
Duchess thinks about getting drunk, but calls Cammie instead.
“Well it’s about time!” her voice sounds far away.
“Sorry, Cam, I’ve been busy.”
“Busy with what? And I thought you gave up eating chips.”
My crunching stops. I hold my half eaten Dorito in my cheek and say nothing.
“You’re up to something,” Cammie says after a minute. “Tell me what it is…”
“Hmmm…uhhh…” I mumble. I can hide nothing from this girl. She has gossip radar.
“I saw Caleb, Cammie,” I blurt out, biting my nail, nervously.
There is silence on the other end of the line. She knows I wouldn’t joke about something like that.
“He has amnesia and doesn’t know who I am.”
I hear her sigh.
“Olivia…..tell me you didn’t.”
“I did.”
“ARE YOU INSANE?” I hold the phone away from my ear.
“Cammie, when I saw him, I felt things just as strongly as I did when we were together. It’s like everything is still the same and the past three years didn’t happen.”
“You have a right to love him, that’s not something you can control. What you do not have the right to do is take advantage of him…. AGAIN!” Where has this mature little monster come from?
“I liked you better as a freshman.”
“Yeah, well, some of us grow up, Olivia, and some of us play the same tired games forever. Have you ever thought that maybe you are not together because you aren’t supposed to be? Let go!”
“I can’t,” I say softly. Cammie’s voice is gentler this time.
“Olivia, you can have any man you want. Why him? Why is it always about Caleb?”
“Because….because I didn’t need anyone until I met him.”
“You know he’s going to find out.”
“I have to go,” I say. I don’t want to think about that. Tears start oozing from my eyes.
“I love you Olivia, be careful.” I hang up feeling like my stomach is full of rocks. He forgot me. I can make him remember not what I did to him, but what he felt for me.
I wander to my closet, reach up to the top shelf and pull down a dusty box. Laying it on the carpet, I gently remove the lid and stare at its contents. There are a couple of envelopes stuffed with letters, some pictures, and a small wooden box with a flower painted on its lid. I reach for the box and open it. My hand sifts through the jumble of memories, a keychain, a CD, and a frayed book of matches. My hand stills when it brushes against the most important keepsake. I jiggle the box until everything moves aside and I can see the shiny oval penny.
“You,” I say accusingly, picking it up and rolling it between my fingers. "This is all your fault."
Chapter Six
The Past
“I’m not getting in the pool! It is freezing!”
“It’s November in Florida, Olivia. It’s seventy degrees out. Besides, it’s a heated pool. Man up.” Caleb was wading around in his boxers in the turquoise water of the campus swimming pool. I was trying to avoid looking at his muscles.
“You can’t manipulate me into the pool by making a sexist comment,” I said, leaning down to splash him in the face. He grabbed my wrist before I had time to withdraw.
Our eyes locked.
“Don’t,” I warned. For second I didn’t think he’d have the guts. Next thing I know I was tumbling headfirst into the freezing water.
I came up gasping for air, my hair wrapped unbecomingly around my face. Caleb peeled it away laughing.
“I can’t believe you did that!” I gasped, shoving him on the chest. It felt like I was pushing on hot rocks.
“You look good wet,” he said. “It would probably be easier to swim if you took off some of your clothes.”
Shooting him a searing look, I started a breaststroke toward the side of the pool.
“Ahh, not one for fun I see.” His voice was light when he said it but there was a definite challenge in his tone.
“Screw it,” I mumbled, stopping a foot away from the ladder. I was the type of girl that would ‘jump off of a bridge’ to spite my friends.
I was wearing my good underwear anyway. I ducked under the water and shed my polyester skin like a snake. I resurfaced seconds later with just my skivvies on.
Caleb unconsciously mouthed “wow.”