Page 11 of This Love
“Don’t let her dress get caught,” one of them said.
The chair moved.
I scrunched my eyes to see us rolling toward the sliding door.
We bumped up a short ramp with ridges that made my head ache. Suddenly, my feet felt different. One was not like the other.
I looked down but couldn’t see anything under all the dress.
I pulled and pulled on the skirt to find my feet. Had one of them been injured?
When I revealed them, one was bare, and the other was encased in a white shoe.
I glanced behind me.
The other shoe sat on the ramp, fallen on its side, sharp and bright against the brown sidewalk.
It was as alone and lost as I was.
Chapter 5
Tucker
Gram clasped her hand over mine in the center console as I drove her old Buick to the hospital. It was well out of the way of the route between our house and the country club, but Marcus would have wanted to go there to access Ava’s records.
We hadn’t been in this awful position for years. Not since we’d struggled to find a new med for her after the one that was preventing her seizures ended up causing liver damage.
Three memory resets in a row were impossibly hard. Each time it happened, I had to win her over all over again. She always wanted me to move out and give her space.
Gram knew the direction of my thoughts. “You’ve done it before. You can do it again.”
I realized I didn’t have the laptop with the videos we’d prepared back when we were going through this before. Even so, they weren’t up to date. Nothing in there explained we lived together and were getting married. We’d been complacent, lulled into how easy life had been the last few years.
Still, it was something. In the sequence, Ava explains to herself who she is, who I am, her father, Gram, Maya, Big Harry. All the important players. She also warns herself about her mother.
Shortly after the last reset three years ago, we went to all the places that jogged sensory memories, the parts of her brain that could connect feelings to location, which she insisted helped her reorient herself. The children’s hospital, Big Harry’s Diner, Maya’s flower-covered front porch.
Visiting them in person was best because a creaky door or the smell of fried food or the roughness of the terrain were the best ways to help her brain find safety in the terrifying nothingness she described as having her memories erased. But that took convincing her to go.
Not always easy when survival Ava arrived.
“I should go get the sequence videos,” I told Gram. “Without them, there’s no telling what direction she might go.”
“But we’re almost to the hospital,” she said. “Let’s see how she is and go from there.”
She was right. Besides, almost half an hour had passed. The version of Ava that was going to present itself would already be established.
She’d never woken up with her father, not since she was a little girl. Normally, I was there.
Maybe that would make the difference.
Maybe I was the problem.
We pulled up to the emergency room doors. “I’ll drop you off and catch up after I’ve parked,” I told Gram.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Text me if you find them.”
