Pinch Me

  “Forever, sweetheart. I promise.”

  “I want you.”

  His jaw worked, as if he had to swallow. “I want you, too. More than anything.”

  “I don’t know how long…until…I can…”

  He kissed her hand again. “It doesn’t matter. You’re in no condition to even think about that, anyway. And if it takes weeks or months or even years for you to get to that point, then that’s how long it takes.”

  “Did we…on our first date?”

  He actually laughed. “No. For starters, I’m not like that, and neither are you. Secondly…” He let out another laugh and shook his head. “If I had time, I’d tell you the story. Let’s say our first date was a true disaster. Fortunately, we kept trying until we got it right.”

  After one more kiss, he stood and carefully freed his hands from hers. “Do you need Bill to show you how to work your phone?”

  She felt her face heat. “Yeah. I think so.” She’d barely looked at it, overwhelmed. Frustrated that she knew she’d easily worked it before…

  Before.

  Everything before.

  “I’ll put that in the note, too. I walked Doogie already.” The dog was curled up on the bed on her other side, in the space Rob had occupied. The Lab looked from him to her and back again.

  “Love you,” he told her.

  She let out a deep breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. “I love you, too.” That much she knew. She’d take it on faith despite whatever rumbles tried to traipse through her mind.

  Deep in her heart, she knew she loved him.

  She closed her eyes and let the pain pill kick in.

  * * * *

  Her stomach was growling when she pulled herself out of bed close to ten o’clock that morning. Bill was sitting in the living room and working on his laptop.

  “There she is. How you feeling?”

  She made her way over to the couch and eased herself down onto it before leaning over to rest her head against his shoulder.

  “That bad, huh?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Please don’t ask me to take another pain pill. I want to go to the shop today.”

  “Your presence there is not requested. Steve and Carol said they’d both help load you back in the truck so I could haul you home.”

  She didn’t want to cry. She’d done enough of that. She also didn’t want to stay cooped up at the condo. Frustration set in.

  “When do I get to decide what I do with my life? Or is this who I was before, just letting everyone tell me what to do?” Despite the pain it caused her, she stood and headed for the kitchen. “I’m sick and tired of everyone else telling me what to do. And worse, I’ve got a psycho who wanted me dead keeping me in fear for a life I can’t even fucking remember!”

  He followed her to the kitchen but she turned and pushed him out. “Go. Just…go sit down and leave me alone. I’ll make my own breakfast. I’m not helpless.”

  She couldn’t exactly storm, but she plodded over to the fridge and yanked it open, ignoring the pain in her side as she did.

  Then she…stood there, staring at what was eye level.

  Bill, who hadn’t moved from the kitchen doorway, watched her without speaking.

  She let the refrigerator door swing shut and rested her head against the cool surface as tears rolled down her cheeks. On the upper freezer door, there were several magnets. One from Yellowstone.

  A magnet she’d bought on her trip out there after their parents died.

  She remembered stopping in the visitor center by Old Faithful and buying it, one just like it for the fridge at the house, and several others for Shayla and…people she couldn’t even remember. Maybe Sully and Clarisse had one on their fridge, too.

  But she knew the one on Rob’s fridge sat just a little lower than eye level, toward the right. The door handle, opposite of this one, was on the left, and it opened to the right. This one swung open to the left.

  His fridge was stainless steel, and matched the stove and dishwasher. He’d taken her with him to pick them out when he bought them several months earlier.

  “Laur?” Bill softly asked.

  His voice shook her out of her thoughts and the remaining pieces swirled out of reach, once again, into the abyss.

  “Take me to Rob’s,” she said.

  “I can’t. The alarm company will be here any minute. We have to wait until they leave.”

  She nodded as her eyes once again settled on the magnet. “I’m sorry.”

  He took a step into the kitchen. “It’s okay,” he said, his voice still low and gentle. “No one blames you for feeling out of whack. I’m surprised you’re handling it as well as you are.”

  She reached up and touched the surface of the magnet, tracing its embossed image. “You took the time off then, too.”

  “Yeah.” He edged closer, so he could drape his arm around her shoulders.

  “Do you still have the horses?”

  “You remember that?”

  “I remember something about riding.”

  He smiled. “Yep. Those two big mooches are still hanging around.”

  She looked up into his eyes. “Will this get any easier?”

  “I wish I could tell you that.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The alarm company was able to work fast and get everything installed in less than two hours. Her condo was much smaller and easier to equip than the house.

  They went over everything with her, showed her how to program it, how to add additional users, and how to check trouble codes.

  She stared at the keypad as she and Bill prepared to leave.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Do you need help with it?”

  She slowly shook her head. “I never needed one of these before, did I?”

  “Well, you’ve had one at the shop for years.”

  “I mean here.” Rob had arranged for the system and apparently paid for it out of his own pocket. He’d also instructed them to install a panic button in the master bedroom, and included not one, but two key fobs that also had panic button switches on them.

  “No, you didn’t. But this is different.”

  She picked up her purse, which she really hadn’t looked through other than to study the contents of her wallet, and trailed a finger over the keypad. “I guess everything’s different now.”

  * * * *

  Bill went first out of caution, leaving Laura and Doogie in the truck while he got the front door unlocked and disarmed the alarm.

  He had to help her out, the ibuprofen she’d taken not helping to kill the pain so much as strangle it a little.

  Kind of like me.

  She suppressed a snort.

  “What’s so funny?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” She looked around the yard. “Can we walk around?”

  “Sure.” He kept his arm out for her and she didn’t argue with him. She held on for support, following him and Doogie as the dog sniffed every blade of grass and watered quite a few of them.

  The back side of the property bordered a protected wetland area. With the exception of a two-foot swath outside the fence that Rob took care of with a weed trimmer, there was a ten-yard-wide section of overgrown grass and weeds leading to a thick area of pine trees mixed in with palms, palmettos, Brazilian peppers, melaleucas, and mangroves. The area was several hundred acres large. With the exception of the few homes on Rob’s street there was no public access to the wildlife area except by boat from the water.

  She stared out at the woodlands area and listened to the sounds of birds, insects, and the wind.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time here, huh?”

  “That’s what Rob and you’ve both said.”

  “It’s quiet here.”

  “Peaceful. That’s one of the reasons you love it.”

  She closed her eyes and tried to remember something tickling at her thoughts. When she had it, she turned and looked at the back side of the house, where a screened-in lanai opened
onto a wooden deck.

  “He bought it from a bank. It was a foreclosure,” she softly said. “I came to look at it with him. He built the lanai and deck.”

  Bill nodded, but didn’t speak.

  She stared, trying to pull images from the past, to merge and reconcile them with the present. “The yard was a mess. The kitchen had been gutted.” She looked up at the new roof, variegated tan shingles. “The barrel tile roof was cracked and leaking.”

  Releasing Bill’s arm, she walked over to the deck and stepped onto it. “We got a lot of stuff, including the kitchen cabinets, from IKEA.”

  She closed her eyes, teasing the last bit from her reluctant brain. “Seth was a contractor,” she whispered, not understanding why Bill shouldn’t hear that. “And Tony, Cris, Landry, Ross, Mac, they all came over and helped one weekend.”

  She opened her eyes again and, without waiting for Bill, headed around to the front of the house.

  The laundry room. She had to see it.

  With her heart pounding and Bill and Doogie on her heels, she pushed through the front door and trusted her feet. They unerringly carried her past the kitchen to a closed door.

  Her fingers trembled as she reached out and twisted the knob, a sob falling from her as she recognized the laundry room. And on a low shelf over the washer sat a yellow jug of laundry detergent.

  Ignoring the pain, she hurried over to it and yanked it from the shelf. Twisting the top off she held it up to her nose and took a deep breath.

  Laughter flowed through her tears as she stood there, hugging the bottle to her chest and taking long, deep breaths.

  Bill stood in the doorway, watching her. “You all right?”

  “It’s yellow,” she said, eyes closed, the happiest she’d felt since the nightmare started. “I remembered. It’s yellow. It’s the detergent I use.”

  “Um, yeah. I think you have the same bottle at the condo.”

  She shook her head and kept her eyes closed in case more memories wanted to return. “No, you don’t understand. I saw this laundry room. While I was still in the hospital. This room.” Eventually, she opened her eyes and screwed the cap back on before returning the jug to its shelf.

  “This room was in my thoughts. Meaning other stuff is still there. In my brain. It’s just…locked up still.”

  “Sweetie, I thought we already established you remembered some stuff.”

  “I know. But this was one of the first things I remembered.” She trailed a hand over the washing machine’s lid. “If I can remember something as stupid and trivial as this, doesn’t it mean I’ll remember all the important stuff eventually?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a doctor.”

  He stepped out of the way as she walked past him and to the kitchen.

  A sense of peace settled over her. There on the fridge, exactly where she’d pictured it in her mind, was the other Yellowstone magnet.

  * * * *

  Friday morning, Bill drove Laura to the shop. Rob had come in a little after seven that morning, exhausted from working a serious early morning accident, and went to bed.

  She’d spent the better part of a half hour before they left in the bathroom in front of the mirror, trying to mask the worst of the still-visible bruises with makeup. Fortunately, the swelling in her lip had completely gone down.

  Another oddity. Bill told Laura she rarely wore makeup, due to the nature of her job. Unless she was going out somewhere with Rob.

  She refused to take a pain pill that morning, the pain more tolerable and preferable to the fuzzy, groggy blanket that settled over her brain with the prescription drugs.

  And work seemed to greatly help her state of mind. The more she dug into the paperwork and chores at the shop, with a little help from Steve and Carol, the more that came rushing back to her in terms of what to do.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t translate into a lot of personal memories. It also didn’t help her with her writing. She’d forced herself to weed through her email again and found a note from an editor looking for a progress report on an article due to a magazine.

  Feeling defeated, she asked Bill to call the editor at the number in the email while she retreated to the bathroom to have a cry in private.

  Two steps forward, eight steps back.

  * * * *

  Bill sadly watched her exit the office before making the call and explaining the situation to the editor. The woman sounded sympathetic and told Bill she’d kill the article, but that if Laura regained her memory and wanted to submit it, she’d still take it.

  Before, Laura was proud of her writing, of the freelance career she’d built up in addition to running the shop. She’d journaled every day as a teenager.

  He wondered if that was a part of her life that would ever fully return, or if it was lost in the abyss forever.

  In quiet tones throughout the morning, Bill, Steve, Carol, and the rest all talked out in the shop while they kept an eye on Laura. The Laura Bill grew up with was self-assured and confident. This Laura acted timid, reluctant to joke around. He wondered if that was due to the attack or loss of memory.

  The Laura he knew smiled all the time, enjoyed life to the fullest.

  This woman jumped at her own shadow.

  Just after lunch, Sarah pulled Steve and Bill aside out on the dock, where Laura couldn’t hear them talk. “It’s not just her memories,” Sarah said. “She’s different.”

  Bill nodded. “I know.”

  “This has got to be killing Rob,” Sarah said. “She’s like a little mouse. I actually heard her apologize to a telemarketer before saying good-bye and hanging up.”

  “What?” Steve asked, incredulous.

  Sarah nodded. “Exactly. And Cody was teasing her before lunch about putting a margarita machine on the big boat. She said she’d look into it.”

  Bill shook his head. Even he knew that was a long-running joke between Cody, their captain and die-hard Parrothead, and Laura. Old Laura would have tossed a funny comeback at him.

  “How’d Cody take it?” Steve asked.

  “I thought he was going to cry when he told me. First time I ever saw him that upset. He explained to her it was a joke, and she apologized for not remembering.” She looked down at the dock. “He left a little bit after that. Said he had to get out of here before he lost it in front of her. He’s really tore up about this. He’s known her almost as long as Steve.”

  Steve glanced at his watch. “Take her home, Bill. She looks like she’s in a lot of pain.”

  “I might need you all to help me. She’s determined to figure things out.”

  Steve scrubbed his face with his hand. “She needs to go home. She needs to spend time with Rob. He’ll probably be getting up soon if he’s not up already. And honestly? I can understand why Cody left. I want to cry every time I look at her, too.”

  Sarah and Carol nodded their agreement, looking like they were pretty close to it themselves.

  Bill took a deep breath. “Right. Someone wrangle Doogie for me. I’m going to need to move fast or she’ll dig her heels in.”

  They trailed behind him as he headed for the office. Laura sat in front of the computer, staring at the screen.

  “Well, I think it’s time for you to call it a day.”

  She didn’t turn from the screen. “Okay,” she softly said.

  He exchanged a worried look with Steve and walked over to her. Tears had left tracks on her cheeks, which she’d scrubbed free of the makeup after lunch, opting instead to stay hidden in the office, away from the prying view of customers.

  “What’s wrong?”

  She pointed at the screen, which was opened to a sportsfishing magazine’s website. The magazine whose editor he’d talked to earlier that morning.

  One of Laura’s articles, from three years ago, was up on the screen. It talked about grouper fishing and related a fishing trip she’d taken.

  She shook her head. “I don’t remember any of it,” she said. “I read it several time
s, and I don’t remember any of it. I don’t remember doing the stuff in the article, and I don’t remember writing it.”

  “Sweetie, you won’t get everything back right away.”

  “Shouldn’t I have gotten a hint?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe it’s like some of the other memories. Maybe you need to find something that triggers a chain reaction.”

  “Like what?”

  He felt backed into a corner. “I don’t know. Maybe your old journals.”

  She frowned. “What old journals?”

  Bill looked for Steve and spotted him trying to step away from the office. “Steve. Do you know where Laura’s old journals are?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. I think her newer ones are on her laptop.”

  “What journals?” she asked again, frustration creeping into her voice.

  “You used to keep a journal,” Bill said. “Started when you were a kid.”

  “Call Rob,” Carol suggested. Bill thought he heard her mutter, “Duh,” under her breath.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sarah helped Laura go through the shop computer, but there was nothing on it resembling a journal. Then Laura called Rob.

  “Sweetheart, I don’t know where your newer journals are. I went through your laptop looking for them after…” She heard him take a deep breath. “Even Det. Thomas had someone go through your laptop looking for clues. They’re not there.”

  She rubbed at her forehead. “Steve and Bill said I had old handwritten journals.”

  “They might be in some of the boxes in the garage at the house. If they’re not there, then they’re probably at the storage unit.”

  “Storage unit?”

  “Yeah, but that place is packed to the rafters. You can’t go crawling around in there until your ribs are better.” From his tone of voice she knew she couldn’t argue with him.

  Hell, she didn’t want to argue with him.

  Did I always let him dictate things to me?

  How much of her life didn’t she know about? At least she’d been able to sit down with Carol at the shop that morning. She’d gone through all the finances with Laura. She wasn’t rich, but she had some savings and retirement accounts, and the shop paid her a salary every week. She also had a small joint account with Rob they’d recently opened, but it didn’t have much money in it.