Pinch Me

Chapter Twenty-Five

Thursday morning dawned grey and cloudy, perfectly matching Laura’s mood. She didn’t bother making coffee, instead getting one at a gas station on the way to the shop.

She was alone, so why make a full pot?

It was a bittersweet thought.

She missed having Rob at the condo. It felt wrong without him there.

Maybe I made the wrong decision.

She brought Doogie to work with her and took some comfort in his quiet presence.

Steve arrived at the dive shop at seven, marveling in her early arrival. “Two days in a row. Are we working on a record?”

“What?”

“You are not a morning person.”

“I’m not the girl I used to be.”

Steve grimaced. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I know, but I’m getting tired of people telling me how I was and wasn’t, how I should and shouldn’t, and you know what? I’m beginning to wonder if this wasn’t such a bad thing that happened to me after all.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Maybe I do.” She defiantly glared at him until he shook his head.

“Oh, yeah, that’s real smart, Laur. You used to be pretty bright, but now you’re saying getting beaten to a bloody pulp and left for dead on your living room floor was manna from heaven? Screw your head on straight. And in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ve known you long enough that I have the right to tell you when you’ve got your head stuck so far and firmly up your ass that you need a pry bar to remove it.”

He stormed out the back door, slamming it so hard the glass rattled. She reddened, feeling stupid and chastised. Ten minutes later she gathered enough guts to follow him.

“I’m sorry.”

He didn’t look up from the bait tank where he was fishing dead shrimp out with a net and tossing them to waiting pelicans in the water.

“Yeah, well I’m sorry this happened to you, but we’re all doing the best we can. We didn’t take the physical beating you did, but it hurt us like hell seeing you like that and then having to get used to this new you.”

He returned the net to its hook. “I’m not trying to say we’re suffering more than you. That’s not what I mean. You have got to be the bravest person I know, and I respect you for it. You just can’t take your fear out on us because you’ve changed and we haven’t. I know you don’t know what we used to be like. We only want what’s best for you, and we wouldn’t lie to you.”

She broke down as he held her, letting her cry on his shoulder as if she was ten years old again. After a few minutes she stepped away and wiped her face with her hands. “I’m sorry, Steve. It’s just that I’m so scared.”

“We all are, honey. It’s not just your life that’s lost. We’re all kind of adrift here, too. You are a big part of all of our lives, and it hurts us to see you like this.” He kissed her on the forehead and walked inside to ring up a customer.

She stood on the dock for a few more minutes, watching boats in the Intracoastal heading toward the Boca causeway bridge. This was one of the few things that felt familiar. She must have spent hours in this very place doing the same thing. The phone rang and after a moment, Steve opened the door and called her in.

“Who is it?”

He shrugged and she picked the receiver up. “Hello?”

“Hi, is this Laura?” The man’s voice sounded vaguely familiar.

“Yes? Who’s speaking please?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. This is Don Kern. I was in yesterday.”

She thought back and it clicked. Those green eyes. “Oh, yes. Hi.”

He cleared his throat. “Listen, I feel kind of stupid asking this, and you’re probably going to say no, but before I totally lose my nerve would you mind having lunch with me today?”

It caught her totally unprepared.

So did her answer. “Sure.”

They agreed on a restaurant in town and she said she’d meet him there at one. She hung up the phone before Steve returned, and when he asked who it was she said it was just a question about Saturday’s class. He returned to the workroom and didn’t notice how preoccupied she was.

She didn’t know why she lied. And while it probably wasn’t the wisest thing to do, having lunch with a stranger, it was in a public place.

There was something about Don Kern. Like her mind was working on a puzzle and didn’t want to let go. She hadn’t felt this way about anyone since the attack, and instinctively she felt she had to meet him, talk with him.

If it wasn’t for customers she wouldn’t have got any work done. The mysterious Don Kern clouded her mind. She didn’t know if the troubling aspect was because she knew him or because she didn’t.

He hadn’t acted like he knew her, but she couldn’t be sure. Her story was well-known around town. People came up to her in public and introduced themselves. Some of them people she’d known for years or went to school with, or who were friends of her parents, or customers. From their reaction, she guessed her shop was a fixture in the area.

At twelve thirty she hollered she was going out and left before Steve could question her. She made it to the restaurant with a few minutes to spare and grabbed a table. Don Kern showed up on time. He spotted her and smiled, and she watched him as he walked over.

She didn’t feel the same emotions she had when she first met Rob in the hospital. And now she regretted this meeting.

Just…something she couldn’t put her finger on.

“Hi.” He sat at the table. “I can’t believe you said yes.”

His green eyes transfixed her. They were a supernatural intensity. She wondered if the color was natural or contacts. Regardless, there was something there, some feeling.

She couldn’t say it was bad, but the longer she sat in his presence, she definitely wouldn’t label it good.

“Well, I figured no harm, no foul,” Laura lied. The waitress came and took their order and brought them water. “Dutch okay?”

“I asked you,” he said, “so it’s my treat.”

“No offense, but I feel better paying my share.”

He didn’t argue the point and they spent the next few minutes chatting.

“Listen, I have to tell you something,” Laura said. “I get the feeling that I know you, but to be quite honest, you’re not going to believe this.”

“What’s that?”

She related an abbreviated version of the story, and he looked shocked in the appropriate places. So far, so good. His hands didn’t appear to be scarred, but this many weeks after the attack, that was a useless barometer.

“That’s horrible. God, you’re lucky to be alive.”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

He looked sheepish. “Okay, I have to admit, I do know you.”

She tensed, feeling the comforting weight of the gun pressing into the small of her back against the chair. “Aha.”

“We took a class together in college. USF, in Tampa.”

She relaxed a little. “Go on.”

“You sat in front of me in the lecture hall, three rows down, and I spent the entire semester looking at the back of your neck and too scared to ask you for your phone number.”

Her tension levels dropped a little. “Why’s that?”

“You were dating my Psych professor. I was afraid I’d get flunked if I hit on you. When I walked into the shop yesterday, I wasn’t sure it was you. Then I realized it was, and it’s been eating at me ever since. I figured I wasn’t in college anymore and it was time to grow a set, you know?”

Whew. That explained a lot and made sense. She remembered reading something in the journals, reminiscing about dating a guy in college. “So tell me about yourself.”

He expounded on the divorce story. He was a pharmaceutical company rep, based in Pt. Charlotte. Travelled on the road a lot, but the pay was good. He came home early one day and caught his ex in bed with someone else. When he asked for a divorce, she took all of his stuff and sold it or gave it away while he was out of town on business.

“So now I’m starting out all over again.” He looked at her. “Well, okay, not in the same way you are. I guess I shouldn’t feel sorry for myself, should I?”

“Actually, I don’t feel too sorry for myself. I’m alive. I have people in my life who love me very much. I have a good job and financial security. I just have to create a new identity for myself if my old one doesn’t return.”

“What did the doctors say about that anyway?” He seemed hesitant to ask, but then again, so did most people who asked her that. “Will you get your memory back?”

“They say that the longer it takes the less likely it is it will.”

“That sucks.”

They finished about an hour later. When he asked her if he could take her out to dinner the next night, she fibbed and told him she already had plans, but they could talk after Saturday’s class. He wrote his private cell number on his business card and handed it to her.

“Needless to say, you’d probably never catch me at home. You can always call me on my cell.”

They settled the bill and he walked her to her car. “So, I guess I’ll see you at class?”

She nodded. “Yep.”

He extended his hand and she took it, briefly. His grip felt delicate, dry and soft, like shaking hands with a mannequin with balsa wood fingers. “Thanks for a wonderful lunch, Laura.”

He closed her door for her. She drove back to the shop feeling strange, like a play had occurred in front of her and she had a central role in it but didn’t know a single one of her lines.

And no one had cared.

She felt out of control. Nothing was going the way she thought it should, and why in heck was she even having lunch with this guy when she already told Rob she’d date him exclusively? Not to mention Kern was a total stranger to her.

It wasn’t a date though. Just lunch.

Yes, just lunch. So why had she hid it from Steve? Did she used to cheat on Rob?

That scared her. She pulled over before getting to the shop and sat tightly gripping the steering wheel. Maybe there was a good reason why her memory wouldn’t come back. Maybe there were parts of her life she didn’t want to recall. Stuff she never even told Shayla.

Maybe there were parts of her personality best left undisturbed in the dark abyss of her missing mind.

Something like that, she couldn’t imagine she’d even confide in Shayla about it had it happened.

What if her mind refused to release her past because it wasn’t a very good past? What if she’d led some sort of dark double life?

Do I even deserve Rob’s love?

If only she could find those journals.

Then again, maybe she was better off if she didn’t.

Laura continued on to the shop and managed to make it through the rest of the day despite her knotted stomach. Then she had a thought.

She’d forgotten about going to the warehouse. Forgot since Rob told her about it, that was.

She went to Steve. “Do you have a key or whatever to get into the warehouse?”

“No, but you have it on your key ring.” She brought it to him and he showed her which ones. “You feeling up to doing it?”

“Yeah. My ribs are fine. I need to find those journals.”

“You want me to take you over there?”

“Please.”

They left Sarah to close up the shop. Laura followed Steve in her truck. The warehouse complex was buried on a side street near Rotonda, a huge wagon wheel-shaped subdivision that looked deceptively easy to maneuver through on a map until you were actually inside it. He drove to the last building where the largest storage units were and took her key ring from her.

“Rob’s got a set, too, and there’s a spare set somewhere at your place. I don’t know where you keep them, though.”

He tried several padlock keys until he found the right ones. There were three units altogether, right next to each other, and she matched up her keys to the ones on his ring.

He opened all three doors for her. The units were jammed full with hundreds of boxes wedged in with walls of furniture. No wonder Rob hadn’t wanted her coming here before.

Laura’s breath left her. “Oh. My. Fucking. God. How am I supposed to sort through all of this?”

“Don’t worry, sweetheart, you knew all this stuff when you put it in here. You numbered all the boxes and made a list with the contents so you could find stuff. If you’ll look, you’ll see they’re stacked in numerical order.”

They were. “I did?”

“Yep.”

She breathed a sigh of relief. “Oh, good. Where’s the list?”

“I don’t know. Probably in your office at home.”

She felt her spirits sink again. There would be no quick search with a successful outcome. She wondered if she was impatient in her former life.

“No idea for sure, huh?”

“You were pretty methodical with things like this. You have a file somewhere with all your stuff in it like your will, business and insurance paperwork, things like that.”

As Laura thought about it, a light switched on in her brain. “You’re right, I do. I remember seeing it. It’s a red folder, the only red one. I didn’t go through it because it was in the front of the ‘morgue’ drawer. I guess I considered all my clippings important, too.”

“Every hurricane threat, that’s one of the first things you packed. It makes sense you’d put that folder in with them. To you, those clippings were important.”

Were. It almost sounded like she was dead and had just forgot to stop breathing. She’d even noticed more people taking about her in the past tense from before.

She mentally shook that thought off. “Okay, I’ll have to find it and come back and look later.”

“No problem.” He locked the doors and she followed him out to Placida Road before going their separate ways. Doogie had been very patient while they were at the warehouse, sitting quietly in the passenger seat.

She looked over at him. “Feel like coming back here tonight and helping me search?”

Just the tip of his tail wagged. Anything his mistress wanted, he wanted. Labs were willing to follow.

She dug her phone out, which was still on silent from lunch. She’d missed several calls from Rob throughout the day and he’d left her two voice mails.

In one way it comforted her. On the other hand it annoyed her for some reason. She wasn’t sure why.

Then she felt guilty. And that definitely annoyed her.

Was Rob controlling? Did he used to keep tabs on her every move?

Then again, he had good reason to be worried about her without Bill to keep an eye on her. Except she had the comforting weight of the 9mm in the holster against her back.

She couldn’t spend her life waiting for people to babysit her.

And if that’s what she needed to use to rebuild her life from the ground up, carrying a concealed weapon so she didn’t spend every spare moment focused on what might happen, she’d do it.

But first, she wanted to find that list before she did anything else. Back at the condo, she found it in the red folder in her desk. Also her will, business papers, insurance policies, and other important documents. She changed into jeans and an old T-shirt and called Rob.

“Hi. I was afraid you’d forgot me.”

She felt another twinge of guilt over lunch with Don Kern, and then anger and resentment for feeling guilty, and right on top of that guilt for feeling angry and resentful.

She suppressed a nervous laugh. “No, just had a busy day, that’s all.”

He sounded hesitant. “Did you want to have dinner or something tonight? Maybe go see a movie?”

“I’m sorry, but not tonight. I’ve got some boxes of stuff I want to sort through from the warehouse. I want to find the old journals.”

“Do you want any help?”

She gripped the phone tightly. He sounded hopeful, but she wanted to be alone. She didn’t know what she’d find in the journals, and if it wasn’t something good, she didn’t want Rob around.

“I’m not trying to blow you off, but I really want to do it by myself. I need to do it by myself.”

“Are you sure it’s okay to go over there alone?”

“I’m taking Doogie. And the gun. Steve already ran me over there earlier. It’s fine.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I understand.” He sounded like he didn’t understand, but was doing his best to give her the space she asked for.

She didn’t want to leave him sounding hurt. “Listen, tomorrow night, here, I cook dinner for you. It’s time to see if I can make something edible. Okay?”

His voice lightened. “That sounds good. What time?”

They agreed on a time and she hung up. Locating a flashlight, she leashed Doogie and grabbed her list.

The storage yard was open twenty-four hours and the manager lived in an apartment on the second floor of the office. Laura used another key to open the lock on the gate, and she locked it behind her, feeling a little more secure knowing a random stranger couldn’t get in.

Her ribs didn’t protest too much when she opened the door to the third storage unit, where her list indicated the boxes were located. She found a light switch and two sets of fluorescent four-bangers flickered to life. It wasn’t as bright as she would’ve liked, but it was light enough to see. The list indicated boxes seventy-six through seventy-eight were her journals.

She searched through the stacks and realized the boxes she needed were buried in a back corner. It took her nearly an hour to unbury them, and she ripped them open.

Even the journals were numbered. Starting in her junior high years and going all the way until the computer journals started. From the number and the short date range each one contained, she wondered where the newer ones were. Based on everything she’d seen, she journaled nearly every day, even if it was only a couple of sentences about the weather or what she ate. It had been an ingrained habit for years.

It didn’t make sense she would stop.

But where did I put the damn things? She didn’t have time to think about it. It was almost dark and she wanted to get home. The three large boxes fit in the backseat of the truck. She locked the unit and loaded Doogie. A quick shower to rinse off the sweat and grime, then she spread out on the living room floor in an oversized T-shirt with a cup of hot tea and Doogie by her side.

Surreal did not begin to describe it. Laura decided the best way was to start at the beginning since she was missing the last few years anyway. The early journals were filled with handwriting that looked vaguely familiar, a narrow script that eventually morphed into the penmanship she now used.

Well, used before. Even her handwriting was different now when compared to notes and signatures on paperwork at the shop from the days before the attack.

She had normal teenage experiences, hated math, loved English. A crush on a boy a year older than herself. Then a month later, he was the anti-Christ. Two months after that, she accepted his invitation to a fall dance.

I don’t understand why boys are soooo childish. They just drive me absolutely nuts. They are immature and absolutely not worth wasting time on. Why are they so cute?

Laura couldn’t help but smile at the words. They brought back ghostly images—memories or fantasies, she wasn’t sure. There was an easy feel, a flow to the rhythm of the narrative that entranced her and gripped her. Steve was right—she was a good writer. Even in junior high.

There was no school today, teacher work day (hurray!). I took the flats boat out by myself. I didn’t go far, just out to Bull Bay. Didn’t even take a fishing pole with me. I had my notebook and a pen. I wanted to write, work on my poetry and get a few ideas for my stories. I was the only one there, no one looking for snook, no one trolling for tarpon.

The air was heavy, sweet with the fecund smell of the mangrove roots and mud and salt. I watched a school of baitfish come in, followed soon after by a school of snook. Wished for a pole then! I watched them dancing on the surface, turning and spinning and ripping across the water. The only sounds the lapping of the water on the fiberglass hull, the fish splashing, the cry of a gull hitting the leftovers on the surface. Far away, the drone of an outboard had no more effect than a mosquito near my ear.

Wait, that was a mosquito near my ear. Remember the deet next time…

Laura made it all the way to her freshman year at Lemon Bay High when she yawned and looked at the clock. It was nearly two in the morning, and she realized she was about to fall asleep where she sat. It didn’t make any sense to force herself through them all in one night.

She went to bed with Doogie on her heels.