Forget You(15)
Author: Jennifer Echols

He stared blankly at me with those beautiful eyes for a moment more. Then he said, "If I weren’t still high from the drugs the hospital gave me intravenously, I think I would be very angry with you right now."

"What’s new?" Saying it made me realize what was new. This misunderstanding with Doug might do more than make our relations worse. It might ruin what I had with Brandon too. "Oh God. Y didn’t tell anybody about last night, did you?"

"I haven’t had time."

"Well, don’t!" I shrieked. "Doug, you can’t say anything to Brandon. Promise me you’ll tell Mike and your brother not to say anything to anybody." Brandon was laid back, but I couldn’t expect him to understand my behavior with Doug in the grass last night when I didn’t understand it myself. I couldn’t lose him just because Doug had dragged me from the wreck!

"Fine." Doug heaved himself across the porch and down the first step. Tall though he was, he was one of the most agile boys I’d ever seen. It was bizarre to watch him miss the next step with his crutch and stumble forward.

I leaped to catch him.

He caught himself with the crutch in time. My hand on his elbow was unnecessary. He was so much heavier than me, I wouldn’t have been able to prevent him from tumbling into the sea oats anyway. In full sunlight now, he moved out from under my fingers, across the stone courtyard, without looking back.

I almost ran forward to help again as he struggled to open the truck door while balancing on one leg and one crutch. The bare feet disappeared from the window, and Officer Fox leaned across the seat to open the door. Doug tossed his crutches into the payload, hopped a few times, and dove into the truck, wincing as he dragged his broken leg after him. He never looked up at me. Officer Fox shook his head. He glanced behind him to back the truck in a turn, then drove forward and made a fast, sharp, un-policeman-like turn onto the road.

As soon as the gate folded shut behind the truck, I dashed back inside and ran through the house to my bathroom to double-check the counter and drawers for a prescription painkiller bottle. Nothing. And there was no way something like that would have gotten lost under the surface. I’d just moved back in, after all, and I kept my room and my bathroom neat so I never misplaced anything.

I sank onto my bed, reached for my cell phone on my bedside table, and held it facedown in my lap for a few seconds, wishing. I needed my mother right now. If I hadn’t checked my phone since the football game last night, this was the longest I’d gone without making sure there was no message from her. I actually crossed my fingers and turned the phone over.

Nothing. I was still alone.

So I headed out back to the pool on a fact-finding mission. When my parents built this house a few years ago, I’d said, and my mom had agreed, that it was silly to build a pool overlooking an ocean. Wasn’t the ocean good enough for us? Wasn’t that why people vacationed in Florida in the first place? Building a pool at your oceanside house was like the theme restaurants in town–Jamaica Joe’s, Tahiti Cuisine, California Eatin’–all evoking a different place on the ocean as if the place we already had on the ocean was somehow inferior. Jamaica and Tahiti and California probably had restaurants named Florida Foodie. It was like my dad and Ashley living in a beach house on the Emerald Coast and flying to Hawaii to get married.

But my mom had said people who’d grown up with money, like her, and me, didn’t care about showing off that they had it, whereas people who’d grown up without it, like my dad, cared very much. All the other houses in the neighborhood had a pool overlooking the ocean, so my dad needed one too. He also needed a Benz, a Rolex, a flat-screen TV that took up his entire bedroom wall, a mistress, a love child, and a divorce. And now, with a wedding in Hawaii, a trophy wife.

"Good morning!" Ashley called brightly as I dragged myself out the back door. She and my dad, wearing matching robes, lay in cushioned teak lounge chairs in the shade of a potted palm. The roar of the ocean, which my dad had moved here to be near, could hardly be heard over the wall protecting the pool. My dad stubbed out his cigarette.

"Good morning!" I replied even more brightly. Normally I tried to stay out of Ashley’s face. I didn’t want to be the spoiled brat my dad expected me to be. However, a post�car crash greeting as enthusiastic as hers begged for such a response. Doug was right: I’d become sarcastic overnight. Or maybe it was just the headache. I sat down on the foot of the chair next to my dad’s.

Still grinning at me, she reached for my dad’s hand. He did her one better and massaged between her fingers with his thumb. Like I was a threat to their relationship and they needed to show solidarity.

I didn’t care. My head was about to fall off. "Where are my pain pills?"

They looked at each other. At least, they turned toward each other, but I couldn’t see their eyes behind their his-and-hers designer sunglasses. They turned back to me. My dad said, "The hospital didn’t give you anything. Y ou’re not supposed to take anything stronger than Tylenol because it might mask symptoms if there were something really wrong with your head. They told you this four times last night!" He sounded angry with me, and then I understood why. He spat toward Ashley, "There goes Hawaii. We have to take her back to the hospital. And another hurricane’s forming in the Gulf. God knows how long we’ll be grounded if we miss this flight."

I found myself concentrating on how handsome he was, how manly and tall and tan, as he said to me, "Y ou’d better be damn sure you have amnesia."

I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. The pain in my head brought tears to my eyes, but through the throbbing I was beginning to realize I was in big trouble with my dad. "What?"

He let go of Ashley’s hand, leaned forward with a creak of the lounge chair, and counted off the offenses to him on long, shaking fingers. "Ashley and I plan this trip," first finger, "and your mother picks that very week to crack up," second finger, "you total your car the day before we leave," third finger, "and now you have amnesia ?" He moved his extended pinky finger close to my face. "If that’s your story, I will take you back to the hospital." He made a fist. "But by God, I will make sure they lock you up in the loony bin with your mother." 5 In my mind I was back in my mother’s bedroom, trying to fix everything, but I just sat there, helpless, with one hand pressed to the throbbing in my head, watching my mother die quietly.

Ashley shook her head at me and rolled her eyes as if my dad was being silly. As if what he had just said to me could be considered a silly, impatient thing to say to his daughter when he was under a lot of stress with a Hawaiian vacation planned.