Ten Below Zero(69)

“I liked your mom.”

“Who doesn’t? She’s the most self-sacrificing person in the world. She’s given so much of herself and still has so much to give. There aren’t many people like that. In fact, there are more people who abuse that, who take from those kinds of people. My dad included.”

I didn’t know how to reply so I kept my mouth shut, chewing on my lip.

“What happened?” he asked.

I sucked in a breath when he dug a pebble out of my skin. “I couldn’t breathe,” I said. “I went outside for air and my ankle hurt, so I decided to change into flip flops before going back inside.”

“Did you black out?”

“No,” I frowned. “I had just reached the Jeep when I turned around and saw someone watching me from a shadowed area of the parking lot. I touched the door of the Jeep and then the memory came rushing to the surface.”

“Did the man come any closer?”

I shook my head. “I honestly think he was harmless. But the memory was coming so fast that I panicked.” I looked down at my knees. “I must have fallen.”

“It’s these damn shoes,” he growled, pulling them off and tossing them out of the bathroom.

“I thought men liked women in heels.”

Everett looked at me impatiently. “I like women – or more specifically, one woman – just the way she is. I don’t need you to wear makeup or fancy clothes. It’s not going to change how I see you.” He stood up, satisfied with the state of my knees, and helped me down from the counter. “This,” he said, running his fingers down my dress, “is perception. It’s what my eyes see. But this,” he pressed his hand to the center of my chest, just above the bust line of the dress, “is reality. I much prefer this. This,” he said, pushing again, “this is what my soul sees.”

I couldn’t move my eyes away from him. My heart, the thing that I hadn’t acknowledged all this time, swelled. It was my heart that was feeling all the things he did to me. The crack, the swell, it was my heart.

“Those things I said in the restaurant, what I said about you, it’s all true. I can’t lie. Sure, you’re ornery and sometimes a brat. But you’re good. You don’t want to be, but you are. You’re brave, and you stand up for yourself, even when you’re wrong.” He grinned. I narrowed my eyes. “But you stand by your opinion. You don’t bend for anyone, not even me.” His hands reached for my head, cradling it in his hands. He kissed me. And then he pulled away. “I do have a question though.”

My head was tilted back, my eyes closed. I swallowed to relieve my suddenly dry throat. “What’s that?”

“If fear triggered your memory, why hasn’t it happened before?”

“I don’t put myself in scary situations, I guess.” I opened my eyes.

“But what about the ranch? Why didn’t your memory come back then?”

I thought about that moment, when they man with the black eyes had chased me across the grass. “Because the moment I felt fear, I remembered. I knew you were there, watching. I wasn’t afraid, because I wasn’t alone.”

Everett’s eyes were sad. I didn’t like his sad eyes, I was realizing. I hadn’t cared, not truly. And now I did. “What’s wrong?”

I watched the muscles in his throat move as he swallowed. “I won’t always be there.”

“But you can try,” I said. “You can try to fight it. You could have a long life.”

Everett sighed and pulled me by the hand out of the bathroom, to the bed. He sat on the end and patted the spot next to him. “Sit by me.”

I sat by him and watched him form his thoughts. “Have you ever seen ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’, the movie with Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet?” he asked.

“I’ve heard of it, but I haven’t seen it.”

Everett pulled my hand onto his lap and held it between both of his. “Do you know what title means, where it comes from?”

I shook my head.

“There’s this poem by Alexander Pope called ‘Eloisa to Abelard’ and it’s based off the story of a woman named Heloise and her illicit love affair with her teacher, Abelard. Heloise/Eloisa and Abelard were doomed from the start. Her family believed he had bad intentions and they castrated him. The lovers were separated and Heloise was in such grief from it, from knowing that Abelard could no longer feel the same for her as she did for him. Alexander Pope described it in his this poem. I have it in my journal.” He reached under his pillow and pulled out the journal. He flipped to the back of it, to the words he wrote on the back cover and handed it to me.

I read it aloud.

HOW HAPPY IS THE BLAMELESS VESTAL’S LOT!

THE WORLD FORGETTING, BY THE WORLD FORGOT.

ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND!

EACH PRAY’R ACCEPTED, AND EACH WISH RESIGN’D;

I looked at Everett, confused. “I don’t know what this means.”

Everett took his journal back from me. “It’s told from Heloise, or Eloisa’s, point of view. She begged, she prayed for forgetfulness. She was in anguish. She would rather forget than feel the pain. So in this section of the poem, she is happy because she’s prayed for and received the gift of forgetting. The movie took the line from this poem, and it’s about a couple who meet after having their memories erased of one another. They choose this willingly, to have their memories of each other erased.” He set the journal by his pillow and stood up, pacing. “I’ve lost memories. I lost the good and the bad.” He stopped pacing to look at me. “I lost memories of the trip I took with my family, the trip where everything was fine, right before it wasn’t. I lost the memories from when we came home and my sister found out she was pregnant and my dad started sleeping on my grandfather’s basement couch. I lost all of it.” He sat back down next to me, grabbed my hand again and squeezed. “I planned this trip based on the spots I visited before, hoping it would trigger a memory and it would all come back to me, like it did for you, tonight.”