Dear Tori Read online

  We arrive at my place way too soon. I almost want to ask him to keep going, but I don’t really know Buck, even if he knows me. He may not have really known me personally in the first place.

  Everyone around the small town has heard my story. I was the class valedictorian dumb enough to stumble over the edge of the falls. I’m the reason there is a big, obtrusive fence obscuring the natural beauty of the spot, and a bunch of caution signs posted up all over. The last I heard, police patrol the area regularly now. I guess the local high schoolers and recently graduated were forced to find a new spot to drink on the weekends thanks to me.

  Buck rolls to a stop at the top of my driveway. He turns off the bike, and waits for me to get off. I have to hold onto his arm for a second to keep from falling over, then I pull off his helmet and hand it back.

  “What did you think?” he asks.

  I press my lips together to keep from smiling too wide. “That was amazing. It almost makes me wish my balance wasn’t so screwy now ‘cause I might wanna learn how to ride one of these things.”

  “You can always call me if you want to go for a ride.”

  Is he flirting with me? Nah, he’s probably just being nice. I bet he feels sorry for me. “I’m sure you’re busy.”

  “I’m not that busy. I’ll tell you what. I already have your number back at the garage, for when your car is finished. How about you take down mine?”

  I pull out my phone, and attempt to input his number into my list of contacts. He repeats it for me three separate times, slowly. I’m almost on the verge of tears, I’m so embarrassed, and when I read it back to him, it’s all wrong again. “Sorry. I have dyscalculia. It’s like dyslexia with numbers. Maybe you can put it in for me. Otherwise you’ll be sitting here all day.”

  “I’ve got nowhere better to be.” He gives me an easy smile and reaches for my phone, but there’s a hint of sadness around his light brown eyes, probably a touch of pity too. I hate it. I already know before he hands me my phone back, I’m never calling him, and I doubt he’s going to call me either except to tell me when my car is done.

  “Thanks for the ride,” I mutter, and turn to go.

  “Hey.”

  Glancing back over my shoulder, I see him shoving the helmet down over his thick, black hair. He smiles, and despite the scruffy beard, and oil stained clothes, the sight of him makes my breath catch. Maybe I really didn’t know Buck before, because I would have to remember a guy like this, right?

  “Nice meeting you, Tori.”

  “It was nice meeting you too.”

  I can feel his eyes on me the whole walk up to the porch, and out of the blue, I’m confronted with a missing memory. The roar of a loud engine fading behind me, and my dad standing at the top of the steps, his arms folded over his chest and his face pinched in anger.

  A week after his death, any new memory of him is welcome, but I wish it wasn’t one where he looked so pissed off. Had he been mad at me for some reason? It’s already fading, and I guess I’ll never know now. I think about rushing inside to jot it down in my notebook, but I don’t bother. What good has writing all that stuff down ever done me?

  Maggie is gone somewhere with Brandon, and the house is eerily quiet. I go upstairs to my room and dig those notebooks out after all, but not to record this new memory. I flip through, looking for mention of Buck. That name doesn’t sound familiar to me at all. I don’t ever remember writing it down before.

  There’s a ton of stuff about someone named Noah, who I guess was my boyfriend. Rachel, who was supposedly my best friend. Esther, my gymnastics coach. Ginger, a horse I used to have that dad sold after my accident. Chris, someone else on student council. Maggie, altering my prom dress. Buster, a dog we had for two years that got hit by a car. Dad, handing me the keys to a used, but brand-new-to-me car.

  It’s my handwriting, but these words mean nothing to me. Names, vague descriptions. Why do I persist in doing this? It’s a pointless waste of my time.

  I have the sudden and violent urge to tear all the notebooks to shreds. I want to smash all those framed certificates on the wall too. Those accomplishments were earned by someone else that isn’t me anymore. That’s what it feels like. For the past five days I’ve woken up to the sight of my doppelganger’s awards.

  Shortly after recovering from that coma and returning home, I tore up my room in a juvenile fit of rage. I ripped up pictures and smashed a lamp. I made a huge mess that didn’t do a thing to fix my screwed up brain.

  Apparently my dad salvaged what he could and put it back up again after I left. Maybe those things were important to him, but they’re not important to me. All they do is remind me of who I’m not anymore.

  I swallow back my rage, and take those pictures and certificates down off the wall. I store them in an empty box and shove it all the way to the back of my closet.

  Maggie wants me to stay. She needs help with the farm and my brother Brandon. Right now I’m seriously considering it.

  I’m reluctant to return to Miami, and starting over somewhere brand new again feels daunting. No matter where I run away to, it’s still just me and all my missing parts.

  But if I do stay here, I’ve got to treat this as a fresh start. Those missing years are gone. The girl who gave that valedictorian speech, and could do a front handspring is never coming back. My dream of becoming a veterinarian is never going to happen either. I’ve just got to face it. Capturing all those snippets of memories won’t bring back what I lost.

  I gather up those notebooks, and put them in the box at the bottom of my closet too. For whatever reason, I can’t force myself to part with them permanently. Even if they don’t seem like my memories, they still happened. It doesn’t feel right to throw them in the trash.

  My phone buzzes, and I lunge across the bed for it. For some reason I hope it’s Buck. When I see it’s only Christian again, I decline the call.

  Why is he being so persistent about fixing us now? He didn’t seem to give a crap about me one way or the other while we lived under the same roof.

  Truthfully, I don’t think Christian is accustomed to not getting his way, and he’s kind of petty about things. He probably wants me to come crawling back so he can be the one to dump me. In either case, I’m not too worried about it. With slightly over a thousand miles between us, he’s the furthest thing from my mind.

  I hear a noise downstairs, and go to greet Maggie and Brandon. My six year old brother proudly holds up a plastic container with a sandy coloured gecko resting at the bottom. “Look what I got.”

  “Cool, what’s its name?”

  “Charmander.”

  Maggie rolls her tired and puffy eyes at the Pokemon mention. She looks exhausted. Her shoulder length auburn hair is limp and unwashed. Her oversized T-shirt is wrinkled, like maybe she slept in it the night before, if she slept at all.

  “Maggie, why don’t you go take a nap,” I say. “I’ll help Brandon get Charmander set up in his new home.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I nod quickly. She comes over to give me a hug, which I return after a slight pause. Thanks to my accident, I don’t remember meeting Maggie, or the day she married my Dad. When I came to from that coma, she was a total stranger to me. She still feels a bit like a stranger, and so does my six year old half brother.

  Maggie gives Brandon a kiss, and drags herself upstairs. I take the plastic carrying container from my brother, and pretend to blow the gecko a kiss, which makes him laugh.

  That’s been the name of the game this last week for my stepmom and I, taking Brandon’s mind off things.

  “You may have to cool it on adding any more,” I tell him. “If you put too many in the terrarium, they won’t be happy.” I take the top off the glass enclosure, then open the gecko’s clear, plastic transport container. I let Charmander skitter up my arm briefly, then hand him off to Brandon to place in his new home.

  Maggie keeps asking me if it’s normal that he seems so unaffected. Brandon cried the
day of the funeral, but beyond that he’s been behaving like any other little kid.

  I’m not sure why she thinks I would know what’s normal and what’s not. I wasn’t much older than him when my mom died though, but that was a different situation. Her death wasn’t sudden or unexpected.

  Brandon rests his chin on his forearms, and presses his nose against the glass of the terrarium. “I wish I could tell Dad about Charmander.”

  “You still can.”

  “How?” Brandon raises his clear, green eyes in my direction.

  “You can just talk to him if you want. He can hear you.” I don’t really believe that stuff anymore, but I believed it when I was Brandon’s age. “You can write him a letter. I used to write my mom letters in heaven all the time.”

  “Did she ever write back?”

  I shake my head quickly. “Nope. It doesn’t work like that.” I wrack my brain, trying to remember the reason Dad gave me all those years ago. “There aren’t any pens or paper in heaven, but he can still read what you write. Or you could draw him a picture of Charmander. He might like that.”

  Brandon rushes over to his desk and starts pulling things out of the drawers. He doesn’t write our dad an actual letter, but he does draw him as detailed of a likeness as he can manage of his new gecko. I draw one too, and it’s not much better than my six year old brother’s attempt. My lack of artistic ability has nothing to do with my accident though. From what I’m told, I’ve never been good at this sort of thing.

  Once he has colored the line drawing with crayons and markers, we take it downstairs and I search around the cluttered kitchen for envelopes.

  I help him fold it over into thirds and stuff it in the envelope, which I address for him. “Doesn’t it need a stamp?” Brandon asks.

  “Nope, but you do have to seal it with a kiss.”

  He kisses the corner of the envelope, and I walk with him out front and down the sloped driveway. Brandon has to stand on tiptoes to stuff the letter inside the dented, metal mailbox.

  “You can write to him whenever you want,” I say, as we head back towards the house. “But you have to ask me or your mom to put it in the mailbox. It’s not safe for you to come this close to the road by yourself.”

  Later that night, after Brandon is asleep, I walk back down to retrieve the letter. I guess this is what my dad did too, when I used to write those letters to my mom, but I’ve never stopped to think about it until now. Eventually I realized writing letters to heaven was a farce, probably around the time I figured out the truth about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and I stopped.

  “What’s that?” Maggie asks when I come back inside with the letter still clutched in my hands.

  “Uh, maybe I should’ve talked to you about this first.” I hand it over for her to see. “I used to do this when I was little. I thought it might help.”

  Maggie gives me a broken smile. “Your dad told me about that. He still has those letters.”

  “He does?” As soon as the question is out of my mouth, I realize it’s a stupid one. He kept everything.

  “They’re put up… somewhere. It’s hard telling.”

  Maggie carries the letter through to the kitchen and opens it up. I almost want to tell her to stop, that the picture wasn’t meant for her, but that’s silly. Brandon is her kid, and it’s only a drawing of his gecko.

  Did my dad read those letters I wrote? I guess he did, and somehow it seems wrong, like an invasion of privacy. I can’t even remember what I wrote to her now, probably nothing too deep or meaningful. I stopped doing that by the time I was eight.

  Maggie folds the drawing up and slides it back into the envelope, then goes over to grab the folding step stool tucked away in the pantry. There’s a whole row of empty, decorative cookie jars she keeps on the top ledge of the kitchen cabinets. She tucks the letter inside the one at the furthest edge. The chipped, ceramic canister is shaped like a basset hound, and has a heart dangling from its painted on dog collar. “That’s a pretty one,” I say about the cookie jar.

  Maggie huffs a tiny laugh. “You bought it for me. I can’t remember if it was for my birthday or Christmas now.”

  “I guess I still have the same taste in cookie jars.”

  She uncorks a new bottle of wine, and I reach up to grab two glasses. I’m not really a big fan of wine, but I slowly sip on a glass while we talk.

  “Christian left a message on the answering machine,” she says. “He wants you to call him.”

  I groan under my breath.

  “You’re really not getting married?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But you two always looked so happy together.”

  I guess we did look pretty happy to everyone else. “It just wasn’t working out.”

  Maggie shrugs, and swirls her already half empty wine glass. “Better to pull the plug now before the wedding then. Getting divorced is the worst. I used to say it was the worst thing I’ve ever been through.” She presses the glass to her lips, and freezes. Then without warning she goes over to dump the remainder down the sink. “Your dad would hate if he saw this, me drinking every night. I can’t do that. I have Brandon to take care of.”

  Poor Maggie. Her first husband left her out of the blue for another woman, and her second died without warning. Now she’s a forty-two year old widow with a six year old son to raise on her own. “I’m here to help with Brandon and whatever else.”

  “Tori, if you staying here is causing problems between you and Christian—”

  “It’s not,” I promise. “We were having problems way before dad died.” I dump the remainder of my wine away too and give both glasses a quick scrub.

  “Yeah, I guess so, if he didn’t even bother to come to the funeral.”

  “Exactly,” I agree. “I’m better off home anyway, at least for the time being. Hey, do you remember me being friends with a guy named Buck?”

  Maggie shakes her head. “I don’t think so.”

  I thought we were about the same age, but it was hard to tell with that beard. Maybe we went to high school together? I almost want to go back upstairs, dig through my old stuff for my yearbook, then I remember I tore that up years ago during one of my little tantrums. I guess it doesn’t matter. If I’m going to start fresh, how is dredging through old memories supposed to help?

  Chapter Four

  Noah

  On Wednesday afternoon I slap the invoice down on the desk in front of Buck. “I did this job, and we’re doing it for the cost of parts, and you’re taking the cost of those parts out of my check.”

  My uncle snatches up his reading glasses and slides them on his nose. “Victoria Nichols,” he says with a long sigh. “Tori?”

  Nodding, I unbutton my outer work shirt to reveal the plain white T-shirt beneath.

  “Does she remember you yet?” he asks.

  Yet? After this long, I’ve almost given up hope on that. “Nah, and if she mentions it, my name is Buck.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t ask. It’s… complicated.”

  “It always was with her, wasn’t it?” Buck tears up the invoice and drops the pieces in the nearby wastebasket. “I thought she was supposed to be getting married?”

  “I dunno.”

  Buck gives me a sharp look.

  “I’m just helping out an old friend.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so.” I stomp out of the office, and out of the garage.

  I know Buck means well, and I can’t really hide much from him. He’s not just my boss and my uncle. He took me in after my dad died, and he was around when all hell broke loose. It’s his opinion, and pretty much everyone else’s too, that I need to move on and forget about Tori like she forgot about me.

  Logically I know they’re right. It’s what I should do, but there’s a big difference between should and can.

  At Tori’s place she comes out to greet me before I climb off my bike, presumably alerted to my arrival by the
loud engine. Smiling, she saunters down the steps in her usual summer attire, tank top and jean shorts. Tori never was very fussy about her appearance, and she didn’t have to be. She’s head-to-toe pretty, but she is wearing a hint of pink on her rosebud lips today, and when she gets closer, I catch a whiff of a light fragrance, something sweet and sugary.

  I reach back into the saddlebag to retrieve the extra helmet I brought along, her old helmet. As Tori cradles it in her hands, my eyes are locked on her face, searching and praying for any hint of recognition.

  Nada.

  Tori fits the contoured helmet over her head. “Thanks for coming to pick me up. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I don’t mind.” I grit my teeth and try to ignore the feel of her hand curved over my shoulder as she climbs on behind me. Her slender thighs pressed to either side of my hips are even harder to ignore. “If you’re not in a rush, I figured we could take a ride before we go back to grab your car.”

  “Yeah, sure, if you’re not busy,” she says behind me.

  I drive in and around Brockton, rolling by all those spots we used to visit. The reservoir. The mall. Our old school. That place by the river. I blow right past the road that leads up to the falls. I haven’t been back there since her accident, and I’m not sure if I could stomach it, even all these years later.

  The whole time we’re riding, I keep waiting for a little tap on my shoulder, or the warm press of her lips against the side of my neck. My eyes are fixed on the road in front of us, but my thoughts are on how this will play out when she finally remembers.

  If she remembers, I tell myself. After all this time, chances are good she might not.

  After an hour I start to feel like an idiot. No doubt someone in her family thought to show her around town in an attempt to jog her memory. I guess I hoped it might be different with the two of us riding around on my bike like we used to.