Say You'll Remember Me(39)

“I think we did…”

A male voice went into the Miranda rights directly on the other side of our door.

With the mood officially deflated, she grabbed a towel.

“I’m going to go take a shower,” she said. “How was the water pressure?”

“Terrible.”

“Perfect.”

I was dressed by the time she came out. She got ready and I took her to eat breakfast at a diner. We’d just ordered. Her cell phone pinged and she checked it. She looked perturbed.

“What?”

“Jeneva,” she said, putting her phone away. “She said Dad came in a little after we left.”

“Where was he?”

She shrugged. “She said she saw his car in the driveway, he snuck back in, she didn’t talk to him.”

She poured creamer into her coffee. She liked the blue vanilla ones. I made a mental note.

“How long have your parents been together?” I asked.

“Thirty-three years. She is the love of his life.”

She looked away from me when she said this, like she needed a moment to recover from it. She peered out the window, watching the traffic on Colorado Street.

“I thought dementia was something that happened to old people,” she said. “There was a laundry list of things that I worried about for my mom. Breast cancer. Arthritis. Really shitty menopause. At no point was dementia on my radar.”

“What’s the prognosis?”

She gave me a one-shoulder shrug. “She can live with it for years. Decades even. It’s not the dementia that kills you—it’s the falls, the infections, the malnutrition. She’s young and her body is strong, so that’s good. She doesn’t have any other health conditions. She wanted to stay at home. That was really important to her.” She paused. “You know what I realized through all this?”

“What?”

She gazed at me. “That there is nothing more beautiful than being a witness to someone’s life. To know them inside and out and be with them through everything, share the same memories. Memories are everything. I want that.”

“A witness to your life?”

“Yeah. I want someone who knows everything there is to know about me, and I want to know everything about them. I want to be able to say one out-of-context comment to someone and they get what it means and they laugh and it’s just some stupid joke from like eleven years ago that means nothing to anyone else.”

The corner of my lip twitched up. “Like, ‘Come On Eileen’?”

“Yes!” She jabbed a finger at me. “‘Come On Eileen’ is exactly it. I want a lifetime of that. I want to be able to talk about my family and they know what I mean without me having to go into the backstory. To just say ‘Tristan’ and they nod and roll their eyes. I want someone who knows all my petty vendettas and they honor them no matter how out of pocket they are.”

“So, mustard stuff.”

She laughed. Then her smile fell a little.

“You can’t fake that kind of thing,” she said, softly. “It’s the result of a parallel life. A shared collection of experiences, like a snowball rolling downhill, getting bigger as it goes. And then you get to a point where you’re so far in, you can never replace that person. Not really. No one else can ever be the same kind of witness because you’ve lived through so much. It really is a once in a lifetime thing.” Her eyes went a little sad. “Can you imagine losing that? One memory at a time?”

I peered at her quietly. “No. I can’t.”

But also, I could. Because I’d lost both my parents, even though they were still here.

There was no one who would witness my life from my start to the finish of theirs. And no one to witness my parents’ lives either—except each other, which felt more like a punishment than something poetic.

And the sad thing was, it didn’t have to be this way. They were already feeling my absence. They needed me now, like Samantha’s mom needed her, and I would never answer that call.

Somehow, not having me witness their life felt like a fitting consequence for their actions. Because Samantha was right. There was nothing more precious.

When we got out of breakfast, it was almost eleven. We were driving back to the house to pick up the boys for the zoo. Her car was sweltering.

We had the top up because it was too hot to be in direct sunlight. The V-8 engine was like a space heater, radiating hot air on our legs under the dash. The vinyl seats were scorching and the whole thing smelled like oil.

“How do you deal without AC?” I asked.

She pulled her hair into a ponytail at the red light. “It’s bad, huh? Grandma said there’s a vent under the dash. It lets air in while you drive?”

I found the vent on the passenger side and opened it up. It was a rudimentary four-inch-by-four-inch square metal box with a metal latch.

“Got it,” I said.

“Ugh, hopefully that helps.” She fanned herself with her hand.

People were staring at the vehicle on both sides of us as we sat at the light, baking in the car’s fumes. The Dart drew a lot of attention. It was a great-looking car, just… impractical.

The light turned green and she pulled forward.

I could feel the air from the vent immediately. It was warm air, but at least it was circulation.