Working Title: Forgetting

Writer’s Message: Hi! Thank you so much for taking the time to read my work. Here’s the scoop: One day, Forgetting will be a full-length novel. It might not have the same title, and I’m not really planning to try to publish it. I’m thinking of modifying the prologue or removing it altogether. There is also a gaping hole in the manuscript-I have not decided how to plausibly kill off Patrick, of if I’ll even let the reader know how it happens. He’s supposed to be healthy- no heart attacks.  I’m currently working on the part where the children are introduced,  but I haven’t decided yet if I might want to do it a bit earlier in the book. Let me know what you think! Honestly, I think it totally sucks. I am good at improving others’ work but it is waaay harder to actually come up with something yourself. Oh, and all character’s names are working names. The heroine is Jean for the moment. If you have better ideas, I’d love to hear them. Finally, I skip back and forth a bit from past to present. I’d love to know if you find that confusing or if it works o.k. Alright, shutting up now. Enjoy! 



Prologue

I still can’t believe this happened in one night. It turns my stomach to remember- bright lights on white tile, making my eyes ache, a piercing siren that jolted me like an electric shock. Pounding rain. My steering wheel slippery with sweat, the sting of antiseptic fumes in my nose. A skinny kid  playing with her hair behind the counter at the video store. Looking bewildered, alarmed. I must have been a sight.

It’s almost funny. I never thought the thing I would do in my life that I would regret more than anything else would take place in Blockbuster.

That single, horrible, never-ending night did end, because how could it not? If there is anything I have learned, it is that everything ends. Everything. But time goes on. You go on. 

The sun set and rose again. And Patrick was dead, when he had been alive.

I didn’t cry. I still haven’t cried. I screamed.



Chapter 1

Once in a while, not often, when I was younger and I thought I was hurt, I would start to scream at the top of my lungs. As loudly as I could, for longer than necessary. It scared everyone around me. Somehow, it seemed like a way to avoid pain. I clearly remember one time when I slipped on a pencil and careened down the stairs, landing on my tailbone. My screams could have brought down the rafters. In a second, my dad was there with his spectacularly smooth voice, his sure hands on my back. My mom would have been exasperated and embarrassed, even if no one was around. She would have told me not to kick up such a fuss. But my dad knew what I needed.

I made one hell of a nuisance of myself outside the ICU that night. I was probably about to get a free shot of Valium when one nurse with a soothing voice and warm hands knelt down and put her arms around me, uncoiling my body and setting me on my feet, gently prying my frozen fingers from the railing on the wall. People stared. Intensive care is right next to the emergency entrance, of course, and there’s a little café there where tons of people milled around. Old people, smock-clad volunteers, girls with toddlers dripping green goo from their noses, all staring at me –some with warm, concerned eyes, but most with the kind of morbid fascination normally reserved for celebrities’ meltdowns. All looking embarrassed. I could practically hear their thoughts, though I was far beyond caring. God, this lady can’t control herself. Can’t somebody get some tranquilizers? 

I locked up the library and headed home just after six that evening.  I’ve always been told not to dawdle in the parking lot- apparently predators like to watch out for women like me. You’re balancing your checkbook or whatever and they get in the passenger door, put a gun to your head and make you drive somewhere. Right.  I sit in my front seat for a few minutes every day after work, with the door unlocked.  That night I actually flipped though a magazine that had gotten too old to keep on the shelves. I flagged some recipes and then checked my cell phone voicemail. One message from an hour before- an unfamiliar number, an unfamiliar voice informing me in a neutral tone that there had been an accident at the CIDA office and Patrick had been taken to St. Joseph’s. Those were his exact words- there was an accident. I panicked, I hyperventilated, but then I forced myself to calm down. Surely it was just a precaution- surely everyone was taken to the hospital. And the robot-man on the phone had not specified the type of accident. Gas leak, I thought. Small fire. Anthrax scare. I decided to go home to check on the kids and reassure them before I went to pick up Patrick. He would be well cared for, if itching to get out of there. Patrick hated for anyone to fuss over him.

I ordered some pizza from my cell on the way home and stopped at the video store. My kids were past needing a babysitter, but I could distract them. Pizza and a movie on school night. Never miss an opportunity to play good cop. I was so worried that they would worry, and so firmly rooted in my belief that bad things happen to other people.

Wrong.

By the time I reached home my carefully disciplined calm started to wear down. I had gotten no more phone calls, and I realized suddenly, as I pulled in the driveway, that Patrick would never, ever, have allowed someone else to call for him without letting me hear his own voice reassuring me that he was OK. It was at that moment, when all four of my children came to meet me in the driveway looking unbearably solemn, that the twisting, pinching mix of fear and regret began to swirl in the pit of my stomach. 

I have never been much of a drinker. Patrick was, when we were in college and used to spend long nights listening to hippie bands play in dingy, smoky bars. After two fruity drinks I would get flighty and wild,  acting like I had to touch him every minute, hanging off his arm, laughing too loudly at his jokes. Dancing as if I knew how, with the canary-cat  grin that I thought was a dead tip-off.  Surely it was plain that this child playing dress-up  was picked up for the night by this pretty guy only because he was too drunk to see straight.  Though dazed and disbelieving of what had transpired, I always skipped to class the next day feeling perfectly fine. Never have I experienced the disconcerting feeling of being not quite sure what happened last night. That’s why it’s baffling that I don’t remember what movie I got for my kids. Not one of them has mentioned my stop at home. Maybe they don’t remember either. Ricky took the movie back. I never asked him what it was. I might cry.

The story blurs further at this point. Before my encounter with the saintly nurse, I have only a few vague impressions of that night. Images; some imagined, some real. It was definitely raining. I remember windshield wipers. A million scenarios running through my head in vivid, grisly colors. Big fires, deranged gunmen. No radio. I’m fairly sure I never  turned on the radio. I never once thought that whatever happened at Patrick’s office would have made it onto the news. Not paying for parking. A tall doctor, him I remember clearly. The look on his face set off my first scream.

“Killed instantly”. A reassurance. Fuck you.

**** {insert: more stuff.}

It has been nearly a month. My children go to school. I go to work. The casseroles and condolence cards slowed to a trickle and have stopped now. My mother came for a few nights after the funeral and Maggie stayed with us for a week as soon as she left. She dallied around the house, took the kids to the mall, helped me with housework and wrote out thank you notes to everyone who had sent flowers and cards or made donations in Patrick’s name. She sat up with me and talked late into every night, probing gently into my mind, asking questions, pulling the words out of me. I knew what she was trying to do. Her shoulders were offered up for me to cry on, but my eyes weren’t having it. I suppose she felt useless- not a comfortable sensation for Maggie. She prefers to precisely manage everything in her life, not least the top-of-the-line travel agency she owns and manages .  She was unstoppable as my maid of honor, my partner in crime during our six years as roommates, and my closest friend and confidante through our adult years. I know Maggie as well as I do my own family. Her effervescence and zest for life cannot be concealed, but neither can any of her other feelings- including her utter confusion at my apparent togetherness after Patrick’s death. But then again, she wasn’t at the hospital.

One morning while I was still off work, Maggie decided it was time to clean out Patrick’s closet. I wished that was one of the complementary services provided by the funeral home. They took care of many small things that were too painful for me to contemplate. I sat on our bed, staring listlessly out the window, as Maggie took things off his shelves and out of his drawers. She hummed nervously as she worked, and occasionally she held up articles of clothing- familiar belts and pants and sweaters and ties- and asked what I’d like to do with them. Would Ricky wear anything? Would I? I finally looked at her, attentive, when she picked up my favorite flannel shirt, so old that the fabric was worn paper-thin in places and the color was muted to a watery red from so many washes. Patrick wore it when he went up north to hunt with his friends. I buried my face in it and inhaled deeply, smiling at the comforting Patrick-smell of pine, sweat, wood-smoke and ivory soap. Maggie raised an eyebrow but did not comment. I slipped it on and hugged my arms around me, rocking back and forth with my eyes closed, letting the scent surround me like a warm, soothing blanket.

Maggie’s face relaxed and she sighed, crossing the room and enveloping me in a hug. I snuggled my face into her chest.

“Finally,” she breathed. I slowly came out of my stupor- it was like moving through water- and looked at her quizzically.

“Finally what?”

A little v appeared on Maggie’s forehead as her eyebrows knitted together with worry. She didn’t speak for a moment. Finally, I thought you were crying, her face said.

“Oh, nothing,” she quipped, her voice too bright, too high. “I don’t remember what I mean to say half the time when I open my mouth.”

She resumed her work at her customary frantic pace, efficiently moving from one end of the closet to the other, making piles to keep and give away. I was lost in thought again when she called out, laughing.

“What is this?”

I knew exactly what it was. A shoebox older than my eldest son, filled with paperback Westerns. Hidden at the very back of the closet behind the suit he had worn only a handful of times since I bought it for him on our tenth anniversary.

“His Louis L’Amour collection. He didn’t think I would approve.” Actually, Patrick liked to read “good” books as much as I did. Our house  was brimming with them - award winners and dog-eared classics spilled out of our bookshelves, the towel rack in the bathroom, the coffee table, our headboard, and all four children’s rooms. Since I went to the library every weekday, we always had a huge assortment of books and magazines at varying stages of coming due. I had always told our kids that I didn’t care what they read as long as they were reading. Patrick said the same thing. He bought them graphic novels and other garbage and read them whatever they wanted to hear every night at bedtime, though only Lily still permitted that. So why did he want to hide these from me? Perhaps for the same reason I had never told him about the smutty teenage romance novels I have stuffed behind the box of panty liners in my sock drawer. Had he known about those, as I knew about his ‘secret’ reading material?

It dawned on me, then, that I would never find out. I could never ask Patrick another question . For the first time, I felt the prickly heat of tears forming at the corners of my eyes. In an instant, the feeling passed, and I knew again that I couldn’t cry if I wanted to. Left, as usual, was the pinching, twisting tension in the pit of my stomach that had not let up since I pulled into our driveway that night two weeks before.

It was too much. I pressed my face into the bedspread and screamed into it, pounding my fists, aching to punch something, to knock myself out and end this feeling of waiting, of teetering. I felt sure that I must be about to lose it, must be somehow defective to feel only numb and nauseous when I should be horrified, anguished, angry.

Maggie was there in a flash. She rubbed my back, cooed calming words in my ear.

“Try to talk,” she said. “Try to cry.”

I just laid there with my face in the fabric. If anything, I was going to vomit. Finally I took a deep, steadying breath and sat up. Maggie gave my hand a squeeze.

“Try.”

“I can’t. All I can think of is how I screwed up. How I drove the wrong way. I went home when Patrick was dead.”

“You didn’t know. And it doesn’t make any difference. Patrick would probably be glad that you went home to the kids.”

“I don’t know what Patrick would have wanted.”

Maggie didn’t have an answer for that one. She just cradled me in her arms and patted my hair.

“I’m going to snap one of these days.”

“Probably.” God, Maggie could be infuriatingly cheerful.

“I’m serious.”

“I know. And I’ll be right here when you do.”

Chapter 2

That was two weeks ago. So far, no snap.

I haven’t snapped, but I also haven’t slept. I nap here and there- at work, after dinner, and sometimes during the night, but I do not actually put my pajamas on and sleep in my bed.