She would not approve of these baggy blue sweats. They hang loosely on my body, but they’re comfortable. The act of putting them on requires concentration. When I get dressed, my fingers still fumble with strings, buttons, and zippers.
I take the business card from my pajama pocket, run my finger along the embossed letters. Sylvia LaCrosse, Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Her address is 11 Waterfront Road, Suite B. Five miles south of here. I could ride my bicycle.
I tuck her card under a T-shirt in my top drawer, and I go out to the living room, which opens into a dining room and kitchen. Everything is made of salvaged wood and river rock, from the floors to the ceiling beams. Bay windows offer panoramic views of the sea. I imagine Jacob as a child, laughing by the woodstove with his parents, when the house looked radically different inside, bare bones and furnished for the late 1970s. He was probably handsome even as a child, charming the socks off the grown-ups. Maybe he already had plans to become rich like his father, but not from an inheritance. He prides himself on being a self-made man.
He’s in the living room making a fire. We rely on the woodstove for heat. He has put on socks and slippers, and his T-shirt is no longer inside out. He’s carefully choosing firewood from the bin and making a perfect triangle of cut logs.
In the kitchen, I open the cabinet and choose a multicolored ceramic mug, squished on one side, as if it got skewed on the pottery wheel. Jacob says I chose the mugs at the Fremont Sunday Market in Seattle. I wish I could remember strolling the aisles with him, buying produce, ceramics, and locally made honey. He adds three tablespoons of honey to his coffee every morning, the only vice of an otherwise health-obsessed man.
I pour myself coffee and sit cross-legged on the couch, savoring the robust flavor of freshly ground beans. The pungent aroma fills me with nostalgia, for . . . what? The answer eludes me.
“What were you and Nancy talking about?” he says, fitting kindling into the stove.
“She said I taught the kids at her school.”
“You did, for an hour here and there.”
“I’d like to try it again.”
“You have to be careful with her,” he says.
“Why? She seems nice. Although, I think she may have had a crush on you when you were kids.”
For a split second, his shoulders stiffen. “I’ve known her a long time. She can be a little strange . . .”
“What do you mean, strange?”
“Obsessive. She was into the Rubik’s Cube for a long time, always playing with the thing. Then it was the Cabbage Patch dolls. When she hit puberty, she traded in the dolls for a Walkman. Then all she did was listen to that thing, all the time.”
“Did you two have a thing? You and Nancy?” I sip the coffee, savoring the slightly bitter flavor.
“We were friends. I think she may have wanted more at some point, but nothing ever came of it.”
“What about you? Did you have a crush on her?”
He looks up for a moment, out at the shifting clouds. “She’s a nice person. But no, I did not have a crush on her. It was a long time ago. A lot of years have passed. We’re all grown-ups now. We’ve matured.”
“Except me,” I say. “I’ve regressed.”
“You’re recovering well,” he says.
“But I can’t believe this is all I am. This lost woman without her memory. I need to do something with my life.”
“You are doing something. You’re regaining your strength.”
“And relying too much on you.”
“Never too much.” He jumps up and grabs his Nikon camera from the windowsill. “I almost forgot our picture for today.”
“What was yesterday’s again?”
His expression registers deep disappointment. “You don’t remember, really?”
I press my fingertips to my temples. “Yesterday morning, you took a photograph of the sliced boiled egg on my plate. With all the salt and pepper on it.”
He breaks into a bright smile of relief. “I printed it.”
I pull the memory book from beneath the coffee table, a handmade, linen-bound photo album among the many others he created for me. But this album is special, a scrapbook to recreate our previous trip to the island. On the front, he pasted a photograph of the two of us sitting on the beach above the words, Live, Laugh, Love.