My knees were scuffed up from falling on the pavement. Everett sat me on the counter in our hotel bathroom and cleaned them. He kept looking at me from beneath his eyebrows, while he was bent over cleaning my knees.
“I’m sorry about dinner,” I said, wincing with each touch to my knees.
Everett gave me his trademark, ‘don’t be stupid’ look. It was a look filled with impatience. “Do you think I really care about dinner? My dad was so drunk that he was out of his mind anyway.”
“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.”
“And did it?”
He shook his head. “No. But something better happened. I created new memories. I danced with you in Las Vegas. I saw you take in the Grand Canyon and try to diminish it with words you didn’t mean. I held you close to me while we stood in four states together, feeling your heart beat against mine. Giving you the hug you should have had years ago. And we sat under an arch and looked out over an area that was named for purgatory.”
My breaths were shallow and I touched the space on my ribcage, where my new ink was.
He continued. “That moment was beautiful. You were beautiful.” I had to turn my face away from him. All my feelings for Everett were materializing, and quickly, becoming solid and easily identifiable. He grabbed my face in his hand and turned me to face him. “It was sweet. It was a sweet moment for me,” he said, staring into my eyes.
My chest hurt, my lips hurt, my eyes and my ears and my head hurt. I couldn’t stop it.
“When you kissed me this morning, you did it with feeling, just like I asked,” he said. His eyes stayed on mine, willing me to listen. “Another sweet moment.”
I bit my lip to keep it from trembling. I opened my mouth but he put a finger up to it, quieting me. “Listen to me. If I had the surgery, there’s a good chance I’d lose my memory forever, just like I did last time. This procedure would be more invasive, so I’d lose those moments. I’d be alive, but I wouldn’t know who you were. I wouldn’t remember how angry you were when I brought you to world’s largest thermometer. I would never remember how it felt to dance with you in my arms. I would forget the moment I watched your eyes close at the Grand Canyon, how the sunlight lit up your features, making the Grand Canyon itself pale in comparison. I’d forget our bantering, and the sound you make when you laugh, even if it’s scary as hell.”
I laughed, a watery laugh, but a laugh nonetheless.
“See?” he said, smiling at me. “It sounds terrible. But look what it does to your face. You glow. I don’t want to forget that. I’d forget the Four Corners, and the side trip to that ranch to help Mira. I’d forget the way the blood rushed to my ears as I ran after that man. The rage that filled me when I saw him knock you down. I don’t want to forget that moment, because that’s the moment I realized that you were important to me.”
The first tear slipped from my eyes and I tried, futilely, to stop the rest.
“When you bandaged my knuckles and then we had sex in front of the mirror. I’ve told you that you look incredible when you come and you do. You’re almost unearthly beautiful.” He used his thumb to brush away the tear that slid down my cheek. “When we went on that tour through the canyon. I watched your face as I told you the history and then again when I told you to seal that view in your memory, so every time you looked at that photo, you’d remember how it felt, how it looked.”
I knew I wouldn’t forget that moment, not for the rest of my life.
“I’m not Eloisa. I don’t want the gift of losing my memory. I want to remember it all, remember you. I would rather die with those memories in my mind, with your name on my lips, than have the surgery and wake up, forgetting the best times of my life, forgetting you. Ignorance isn’t bliss.”
More tears leaked from my eyes. I didn’t know what to say.
“It’s okay Parker. Be happy. You’ve given me happiness.”
But I didn’t want to give him happiness. I wanted to give him life, longer than the one he was on the path to live. I couldn’t stop crying. The tears poured from my eyes and I nearly choked on a sob.
“Can I show you my tattoo now?” I nodded through the tears.
He stood up, pulling off his shirt. My eyes slid up to the bandage just above the words on his ribcage. He slowly removed the bandage. It was my name, in bold block letters above the words, “This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us.”
“You made a liar out of my tattoo, Parker.”
I raised my eyes from my name on his chest to his face. “What do you mean?”
“I didn’t get one sweet moment. I got handfuls of them.”
I bit my lip again. I was still crying, but not as hard. “Do you want to see my tattoo?” I asked, choking on a sob.
“Of course I do.”
“Help me unzip this,” I said, turning around and holding up my hair.
He came up behind me and first placed a hand on the back of my neck. He squeezed gently on my neck before gliding his hand down to the top of the zipper.
When it was completely unzipped, I let my hair fall and turned around. I pulled the top of the dress down, clearing my breasts first. And then, after a deep breath for courage, I pulled it all the way down, pushing it over my hips to pool at my feet.
Everett was staring at the spot just under my left breast, on my ribs. He held a hand out for me and I grabbed it, thankful that he pulled me closer. His hand found the corner of the bandage. He looked at me, placed his other hand on the curve where my neck met my shoulder, and tugged the bandage.
I blew out a breath, from nerves, from the little lingering pain I still felt. He kept his eyes on me and threw the bandage behind us before leading me to sit on the bed. It was as if he knew, knew that the tattoo meant something more than just pretty ink on my skin. And then his eyes moved down and he sucked in a breath.
“Purgatoire,” he breathed. His eyes moved up to mine. “The E is capitalized.”
“The P and the E are both capitalized.”
“Parker,” he started, looking at the tattoo again.
“And Everett,” I finished.
“Purgatoire. Purgatory.”
I licked my lips. “It was the moment I started to feel again. You did that. It was my sweet moment.”
He looked at me with feeling. And now I wasn’t confused at what the feeling was, because I felt it too. It was the most solid feeling I’d ever felt, and the first time I’d ever felt it this deeply.
He stood up and leaned over me, kissing me, with feeling. When he gently laid me back on the bed, it was with feeling. When he kissed down my chest, he kissed me with feeling. Later, when he was inside of me, he stared into my eyes and his ice blue irises were warm, with feeling.
When Everett curled around me afterwards, his arm tight around my waist, he asked the question he asked the day before. But my answer had changed.
“Parker,” he sleepily murmured against my neck. “Are you in love with me yet?”
I waited a minute, until his breaths were even and deep, signaling he’d fallen asleep.
“If I lied to you, I’d be breaking the rules. And if I told you the truth, I’d be breaking the rules.”