Chapter 6
Tucker
My life had taken an unexpected turn for the best. After group, my feet scarcely touched the ground as I walked Ava back to her room with the nurses, our hands joined.
Everything was happening fast, but my friend Bill said it was the same with his girlfriend.
One minute he was sure nobody would take a second look at him, and the next, he was buying flowers for Valentine’s Day.
Sleep deprivation was ordered, but it didn’t matter. I couldn’t have come down from this high if I wanted to. I rode the stationary bike every few hours. Watched movies. Texted Bill my latest thoughts about Ava.
Gram stayed up with me through the power of coffee. Around six a.m., the nurse came in and said I was allowed to sleep a few hours, and we both finally crashed.
I woke to Gram shaking my shoulder. “Tucker, you need to get up.”
It took me a moment to remember where I was, but the wires and gauze were quick to remind me.
I sat up. “Is the nuclear med guy here?”
“No, he’s delayed his visit,” she said. “Apparently, you got signed up for an art therapy class.”
I dropped my head onto the pillow. “Really? Do I have to?”
“The counselor felt it would be good for you and your girlfriend to explore your feelings.”
I sat up. “Ava’s going to be there?”
“It seems so. She’s your girlfriend already?”
“Maybe. How long do I have until this art therapy thing?”
Gram glanced at the clock. “Fifteen minutes. I let you sleep as long as possible since you were up all night.”
“Oh man, oh man.” I jumped up. “I can’t shower. What do I do?”
“Get a washcloth and wipe yourself down,” she said with a laugh. She pushed me toward the bathroom, holding out the backpack. The tech must have transferred my wires while I slept. “Go on.”
After the best sort of wash-down I could manage, I changed into my father’s other bowling shirt, a green and blue one.
It hadn’t been worn in years. Most of my family’s things were in storage. Gram had the idea that we’d go back and sort through them one day, but we never felt up to the task.
But I’d kept the bowling shirts with me, part of the stash I took from my old house before it was packed away.
They were part of my best history. Mom used to host these girls’ nights where she would play some dice game with her friends. Dad would take me and my brother Stephen bowling to get us out of her hair.
Stephen was only nine and pretty terrible. But I had good aim for a kid. Dad admired my ability to outscore him. That final year, Mom got us all matching bowling shirts. After the accident, I wore mine every time it was clean until I finally grew enough that I couldn’t button it anymore.
Only when we were packing to come to the hospital did I dig out the two that were Dad’s. I never wore button-down shirts, but I needed some due to the wires.
They fit perfectly, and I was positive they would bring me luck in the hospital. I examined myself in the mirror. I looked like hell. Dark circles under my eyes. Random tufts of hair sticking out from beneath the gauze.
Ava would look at me today and wonder what she was thinking. I smashed my hair the best I could and headed back into the room.
Nurse DeShawn waited for me at the door.
“Are you always here?” I asked.
He clapped me on the back. “I’m going to pretend you’re asking that because you’re glad to see me every day.”
“I thought nurses only worked two days a week or something.”
“I’m four on and three off,” DeShawn said. “So you’ve got me today and tomorrow.”
“Cool.”
He grinned. “Come on. Let’s go see that so-called girlfriend of yours.” He shook his head. “Can’t believe that stunt you pulled actually worked.”
“When it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.”
The art room was farther afield, in the main part of the hospital away from the epilepsy unit. Apparently, I would not be live monitored, but the cameras in the room would record my activity so it could be played back should something happen.
At this point, I didn’t expect it. My seizures came in clusters, sometimes a few days apart, sometimes weeks or even months. Catching them while we were at the hospital was like throwing a dart at the moon.
Ava was already there when we walked in. She had changed into a soft green button-up sweater that looked far too large. Probably her mother’s. Gram often wore something similar.
That didn’t matter. Her expression lit up when she saw me, and that was the best thing.
I sat next to her. The table must have been intended for preschoolers because when I squatted on the little chair, my knees bumped the edge.
Ava laughed. “We are giants.”
“From the land of the Lilliputians,” I said.
She looked at me quizzically. “What does that mean?”
“From Gulliver’s Travels. It’s a book about a giant and a bunch of very tiny people.”
“I’ve probably never read it. I’m homeschooled.”
“You seem very well-adjusted for someone who lost her memory,” I said.
“I’m good at faking it,” she said. “My mother told me that this morning.”
“You really don’t remember anything from before the disco room?”
“No. Thank God I found my hidden notes.”
“You write everything down?”
“Always. But Mother destroys anything she doesn’t want me to remember. Pretty much the very first letter I discovered was a warning to myself about her. By the way, thank you for telling me about social workers. The old Ava didn’t have a word for that.”
“The old Ava?”
“Yeah, I start over every year or two. The only reason I know anything is my system of notes.”
“You’re organized.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
A lady in a red smock passed out large sheets of heavy white paper and spread tubs of paint and small brushes out on the tables. “Just paint whatever comes from your heart,” she said before moving on to the other tables.
Ava and I looked at each other and busted out laughing.
“I might have a black, black heart,” Ava said.
“Then it will be a perfect match for mine.”
Ava shook her head. “No way. I may only have two days of memories and fifty-three TV shows under my belt, but I can already tell you’re the cowboy with the white hat on.
” She leaned closer to me, and my head spun for a moment with the memory of kissing her.
“Speaking of that, where are all the cowboys? This is Texas, right? Shouldn’t there be cowboys everywhere? ”
I laughed so loud the other kids turned to stare. We were alone at our table, thankfully, since we were the oldest by a long shot.
When I finally reined it in, I told her, “You can’t believe everything you see on television.”
“Bummer,” she said. “Cowboys are wild. They shoot first and ask questions later.”
“That’s one way to live,” I said. “But most of us ask plenty of questions.”
“Right. Like about this.” She lifted the bottom of her sweater.
My face heated as I saw the skin of her belly. I didn’t want to stare at it too hard, but there were lines of blurry ink. “What’s that?”
“I wrote it with a marker. It says to trust only this handwriting. It’s how I knew to read the shower curtain.”
“Shower curtain?”
“I have to leave notes where my mother can’t steal them.”
“Why would she do that?”
Ava picked up a brush and started painting a tree. It exactly matched the sample set out on the table. “As far as I can tell, my mother has been controlling my life by what she allows me to relearn after each seizure.”
“That’s terrible.”
She shrugged. “It’s her messed up way of protecting me. I have to check the handwriting of my old notes because sometimes she adds her own words to them. I love my mom and stuff like that.”
“But you do love her, right? Or is that hard with your memory?” That was probably too much to ask, but the whole situation seemed so screwed up. I’d seen Ava’s mother overreact. And the way Ava instinctively knew to be afraid. Something wasn’t right.
Ava concentrated a moment on a red tulip, its jagged top and round bottom copied from the example.
I thought she wasn’t going to answer, but finally she stopped painting and said, “I’ve seen the mothers on the shows.
Some of them are obviously supposed to be bad, making fun of their kids or hitting them.
Others, the good ones, I guess, hug them and pack their lunches.
The worst thing they do is make them eat their vegetables.
” She dunked her brush in the water. “But mine is different.”
“Different how?”
She dried the brush on a paper towel. “When she talks, the words don’t match the look in her eyes. Her words are fine. But her eyes are not.”
“And it scares you?”
Ava dipped a brush in the white paint and gave the red tulip big white eyes. Then she went back to the red and rubbed them out. “I feel scared about most things. So I don’t know. But I don’t trust her, and apparently I never have. The memory problem means I have to always warn myself.”
“Do I scare you?”
“You’re the only thing that doesn’t.” The way her gaze met mine as she said it made my heart thunder.
She trusted me. I would never, ever betray that trust.
The art teacher approached our table and tapped Ava’s painting. “Nice work.” She looked at my blank page meaningfully. I stuck a brush in a pot of green and made a random swirl on my page.
When she moved on, I asked Ava, “Do you know how many times you’ve lost your memory?”
“I’m not totally sure. I don’t get to see my medical records. But the notes say I had two seizures between eight and twelve, and several since I’ve been a teen. I don’t know why they got worse. And I don’t know if I’ve found all the notes.”
“Are they in your hospital room?”
“They’re taped inside that giant history textbook I was holding when you came in yesterday.”
“You’re clever.”
She shrugged and returned to her painting with its yellow sun, green grass, and bright flowers. She examined it for a moment, then stuck her brush in the black pot and began obliterating it.
A protective urge rose in me. “What are you going to do when you get out of the hospital?”