Chapter 70
70
Drew
When I summon the courage to enter the house, Evie and Bree are trawling through her god-awful wedding reception. Obviously, I wasn’t invited. Just seeing footage of my father and the way he idolized my brother sends blood pumping erratically through my veins. Oliver was always glued to that pedestal.
Strangely enough, this video is the first time I’ve watched Evie with Oliver without that familiar, gut-punching envy that’s haunted me since we were at school. She does not look at him the way a bride should look at a groom. I’m fascinated. Behind the poise and the immaculate hair and makeup and that perfect dress, she’s clearly as empty and miserable as I was that day. Just for a different reason.
“On behalf of my wife and I …” Oliver begins, and everyone groans at the well-worn speech opener.
“Not like you to allow a man to speak for you,” Bree observes.
Evie squirms. “None of this is anything like me, obviously. What was I thinking ?”
The sensible perspective she seems to have now is so at odds with the way she was then. Everything I knew leading up to this, from the moment she first met him, never made any sense to me. Her prickliness whenever I floated the idea that perhaps the relationship wasn’t brilliant for her. The jumpiness whenever we were hanging out and her phone would ring. It was clear from the start how wrong the dynamic was, but the more any of us criticized it, the harder she defended it.
Now it’s my father’s turn to bore everyone senseless with his gushing, Oliver-centric monologue. “There are few things in life that have brought me more pride over the years than my blond-haired, young, clever boy.”
“As distinct from his dark-haired son?” I say under my breath, unable to disguise the bitterness.
Evie pauses the video. Rewinds. And repeats that section. “‘My blond-haired, young, clever boy.’ That’s very odd,” she says.
“Not really. He’s always simpered over the Golden Child.”
“No, that speech pattern,” she says, hitting the mute button. “The adjectives are out of whack.”
“Is this one of your weird forensic linguistics things?” Bree ribs her. She’s not actually mocking Evie’s degree. We both always found her thoughts on this stuff fascinating.
“There’s a natural pattern to adjectives in the English language,” she tells us. “We don’t learn it at school, we just know it instinctively. It’s ‘big red ball,’ not ‘red big ball.’”
She doesn’t seem to have noticed that this knowledge is spurting effortlessly out of her mouth as if she’s recalling it from university. Perhaps it’s her memory starting to surface.
“Anderson is saying, ‘blond-haired, young, clever boy.’ That’s wrong.”
“You were always such a geek for this stuff,” Bree says. “Do you think your memory is coming back?”
“Nobody speaks like this,” she repeats. She doesn’t seem to care about her amnesia right now.
“Yeah, but it’s not a federal offense,” I argue. “Are you going to turn that up?”
She just lets it run, muted while she paces the room, whispering the phrase under her breath, over and over. It’s an extreme reaction to incorrect sentence structure and I’m starting to worry she’s snapped.
“‘Blond-haired, young, clever boy. Blond-haired, young, clever boy.’ Where have I heard this before?” she asks herself.
“At the wedding,” I remind her. “You were there.”
That said, at the wedding she looked like she was a million miles away. I doubt she took in a single word. She looked like she’d disassociated from her own fairy tale.
“‘Blond-haired, young, clever boy …’”
She stops pacing. Bree and I are both staring at her, probably both wondering the same thing. Should we call the psych team?
“‘I love you, my brown-eyed, creative, tall boy.’” She says the line and stares at me. Suddenly, this is far more than a memory fragment. Her fascination and all the pacing and racking of her brain makes sense as everything inside me drops through the floor in realization. I feel like all the water from the ocean has suddenly been drawn away, revealing the entire seabed, just as we’re about to be hit by an incoming tsunami.
She may not remember yet, but I know exactly where she read that line.