“How’s the boo-boo, Pat?” Jennifer asked from behind the camera.
He flipped her the bird, causing the ice pack on the back of his head to spill open and dribble ice down the back of his Madras shirt. The camera followed his hasty retreat to the bathroom.
Jennifer guffawed. “This just isn’t your day, is it, Patty boy?”
He flipped her off again and slammed the door.
“Oh, you two,” my mother said when Jennifer returned to the living room. “You know you have feelings for each other. Why don’t you just admit it?”
“Yeah, Jen,” the younger me said, stifling a giggle. “Why don’t you?”
My smile intimated that Jennifer and I had discussed the subject in great detail. I couldn’t remember the outcome of those conversations. Did she have a crush on my brother or he on her?
Whatever the outcome of those conversations had been, it didn’t matter anyway. Patrick was married to the former Kristin Connelly from St. Louis. I liked her—even though she was a Cardinals fan—and I adored their two beautiful boys, my nephews Kris, nine, and Kevin, four.
It was funny. Funny strange, not funny ha ha. I was starting to remember everyone in my life except for the two that meant the most to me—my husband and my best friend. My memories of my family were crystal clear, but the ones of Jack and Jennifer were fuzzy at best.
On the tape, the doorbell rang, extricating Jennifer from an awkward situation and sending my mother into a tizzy. After glancing in the mirror to see how her hair looked, my mother rushed around the room straightening this and tidying that. She took the camera from Jennifer and handed it to my father. “Sid, take this.” She knocked on the bathroom door. “Patrick, come out of there. It’s time.”
My father reluctantly gave up his basketball game. Just as reluctantly, my brother came out of the bathroom. My mother, acting as movie director, positioned me and Jennifer by the stairs and stopped to check on her hair again. I half-expected her to yell “Action!” before she opened the door.
Two teenage boys—one white, one black, both nervous—stood on the porch.
“David, Marcus,” my mother said, greeting them effusively. “It’s so good to see you. Come in! Come in!”
David was David DiNunzio, the captain of the swim team and the first boy I ever slept with. We dated for a year and a half. We broke up a couple of weeks before graduation. He wanted to be free when he got to college because, as he put it, “The poon there was growing on trees.”
It looked like Jennifer and her high school sweetheart had remained an item—unless she had (has) a thing for guys named Marcus. The high school version had been quite a catch. Smart, funny, and male model–gorgeous, all the girls had lusted after him. In 1996, though, interracial dating wasn’t as accepted as it would come to be. Most parents in my peer group had gently discouraged their kids from crossing the color line. None of them wanted to be the ones other families whispered about in church or gossiped about on the street.
Someone apparently forgot to tell Jennifer—and Marcus. Locking eyes, they smiled at each other as if they were the only two people in the room.
I watched the pinning of corsages and the mandatory photo session. There were a few shots of the game, too, as Dad, distracted by crowd noise coming from the TV, turned to see what the Bulls were up to. The video ended after David, Jennifer, Marcus, and I climbed into the back of our rented limo and rode away.
As I (vaguely) remembered it, the prom had been just okay. Nothing to write home about. After making the rounds and having our pictures taken for our parents’ sake, if not our own, David and I had ditched it for the main event—the senior party in Bryan Woods. That had been something just short of a Roman orgy. The next day, empty beer bottles and filled condoms had littered the ground.
I didn’t remember Jennifer and Marcus being there, but that didn’t mean anything. They could have been there and I’d forgotten that, too. With no videotape evidence to prompt me, I couldn’t be certain.
I rewound the tape, put it back in its box, and returned it to the shelf.
The next video was “Sydney’s High School Graduation.” Not in the mood for pomp and circumstance, I watched it on fast forward. I slowed only to watch my fellow graduates and me toss our mortarboards in the air and promise to remain best friends for life. (That sounded familiar.) Some of us had kept that promise. Most, including me, had not. I didn’t know where half those people were—or who they had become. I had lost track of them years before I had lost track of myself.
There were many more tapes to choose from—videos chronicling every major moment in my life over the past twenty-five years. My college years were next. With my brain on overload, I didn’t think I could handle another blast from the past. Besides, I already remembered college’s high points—attending my first keg party, pledging a sorority—and a few of the low ones—tossing my cookies at that keg party and walking in on one of my sorority sisters blowing the guy that I’d told her I had a crush on.
If sleep were the poor man’s medicine, perhaps all I needed was an eight-hour dose to cure my malady. My heart, filled with trepidation, wouldn’t allow me to be that optimistic. Something told me that I’d be back in front of the TV screen in a few hours analyzing more stolen moments from my past.
I wanted to skip straight to my wedding video, but I was afraid to. Afraid not that I would derail the recovery process by proceeding out of chronological order, but afraid that I wouldn’t be able to connect to those memories as easily as I had the others—and afraid that I would. After all, there had to be a reason why I was subconsciously blocking Jack and Jennifer out of my mind—and that reason couldn’t be good.
Had they betrayed me by sleeping together? Or had I betrayed them?
I wasn’t in a rush to find out.
The alarm clock woke me out of a sound sleep.
Disoriented, I hit the snooze button and tried to get my bearings. Nothing looked right. Blue walls? The walls in my apartment were— Shit, what color
were
the walls in my apartment?
Pulling the covers up to my chin, I let out a whimper of fear.
The sound of roosters crowing in the distance brought me back. Key West was overrun by stray chickens. A volunteer group, The Rooster Rescue Team, had been formed to take in the birds that had been orphaned or injured. City officials had hired a chicken catcher to round up the rest, but he had quickly left his post when he realized the job was too big for one person to handle.
I was facing a similarly monumental task.
I had gone to sleep hoping everything would be fine when I woke up. It wasn’t. I could remember the night before but not the week before. I could remember twenty years before but not two years before. Then again, that wasn’t entirely true. I could remember some recent events in my life and most of the old ones.
What I couldn’t remember was anything that had to do with Jack or Jennifer, lending credence to my theory that whatever was wrong with me had to do with one—or both—of them. Since they took up so much of my life, that explained why so much of my life was missing.
I covered my face with my hands and took a deep breath, the no-frills version of breathing into a paper bag. The anxiety soon passed. Frustration took its place. I’d thought that I’d had a breakthrough the night before, only to wake up the next day to more of the same—and the fear that it would always be that way.
I pounded the bed with my fists.
“What did I do to deserve this? Why is this happening to me?” I cried, doing a fairly good impersonation of a petulant child.
It took me nearly twenty minutes to drag myself out of the pool of self-pity I was drowning in. When Marcy rang the doorbell, I was still in my robe and my eyes were puffy from crying.
Marcy’s welcoming smile quickly deteriorated into a frown. She was probably wondering what she had gotten herself into. I couldn’t blame her if she were also trying to figure a way to get herself out of it.
“Is this a bad time?” she asked.
“Yes, but come in anyway.”
She came inside and closed the door behind her. “What’s wrong?” she asked, touching my arm.
I pulled away from her. “If I get into it, I’ll go off again.”
My emotions were all over the place. Her obvious concern for me nearly reduced me to grateful tears.
She looked at me hard, examining my face. “It’s probably none of my business,” she said, “but are you and your husband having problems?”
Were we?
“We’re—
I’m
taking a break right now,” I replied as honestly as I could.
She hitched up her shorts—low-slung khaki Dickies with frayed hems. Her white baby doll tee stopped just shy of her navel. “Do you want to reschedule? We can do this another day if you want. I can give you a rain check if you need one.”
“I don’t need a rain check,” I insisted. “I need
this
.”
I needed
her
.
She probably would have been as shocked to hear it as I was to hear myself think it. But it was true. Even though I had just met her, she was the only certainty in my life. The only thing I could take at face value. The rest was smoke and mirrors, dependent upon the validity of the memories slowly trickling back into my faulty brain. The brief time I’d spent with Marcy had helped me forget about my problems. She had helped me to feel less alone during my self-imposed exile. Less like a freak who could barely remember her own name. On a day when I felt dead inside, her energy and good humor were two things I desperately needed.
“Give me five minutes,” I said.
“Sure thing.”
In the bedroom, I crammed sunscreen, a hat, and a couple of towels into my backpack, then tossed my robe on the bed and put on a black two-piece bathing suit. A T-shirt and a pair of shorts covered the swimsuit. I slid my feet slid into a pair of sports sandals. My reflection in the mirror over the dresser confirmed my suspicions: I looked awful. With no time to dab Preparation H on the bags under my eyes, I hid them behind a pair of Ray-Bans.
Marcy was sitting on the couch. When she saw me approach, she leaped to her feet. She was as anxious as I was.
I tried to ease the tension with a smile. “Ready to go?” I asked. I slid my arms through the backpack’s straps.
“You bet.”
Marcy’s scooter was waiting by the curb. “What, no pedi-cab?” I teased her, trying to get back to where we’d left off the night before when my situation had felt less dire.
“Maybe later.” She tried not to smile but failed. “The Seaport’s only a couple of blocks from Duval. Do you want to walk or ride?”
“We’re going to get enough exercise at the reef,” I said. It was already hot and humid and it wasn’t even eight o’clock yet. “Let’s ride.”
She fired up the engine. I slid in behind her. Unsure of the proper etiquette, I didn’t know where to put my hands. Was I supposed to grip the seat, her shirt, or her? The basket behind me was also an option, but—depending on the length of the ride—I didn’t feel like dislocating my shoulders just to maintain a sense of propriety.
“Hold on!” she said as we pulled away from the curb.
To keep from falling over backward, I gripped Marcy’s sides with both hands. Just like the night before, she turned to check on me.
“Okay back there?”
I nodded. “Go faster,” I said, sliding my hands to her waist. “I want to feel the wind in my face.”
She gunned the accelerator and the scooter shot forward. Closing my eyes, I held on tight.
“It’s down there,” Marcy said, pointing to a sign advertising catamaran charters. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Ahoy!”
At the pier, a woman with a tan even deeper and darker than Marcy’s returned her greeting. She wore a Florida Marlins baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. Her shiny black hair fell past her shoulders, protecting the back of her neck from the brutal sun.
“That’s Ana,” Marcy said. “She’ll be our captain today.
The Painted Lady
seats eight, but Ana said she’d take us out on our own. It’ll be just the three of us. I kind of owe you after the trick I played on you last night, so this is on me, okay?”
I doubted the fifteen dollars she’d bilked me out of for the off-duty pedi-cab ride would even put a dent in the fee for the boat rental. If she and Ana were friends, though, perhaps they had worked something out.
“You won’t get any arguments from me.”
When we made it down to the dock, Marcy provided introductions.
At five foot three, Ana was all lean muscle and sinew. She wore a sleeveless shirt that showed off her burnished brown arms. A tattoo of the Puerto Rican flag waved proudly on her right bicep. She covered her dark green eyes with the mirrored sunglasses that rested on the bill of her cap.
“Hola,”
she said as we shook hands.
I’d barely said hello before Ana and Marcy began an extended conversation in Spanish. The only words I managed to catch were
magnifica
and
amigas
.