His Forbidden Bride: 50 Loving States, West Virginia

by Theodora Taylor

  “Ain’t good-bye yet,” he informs me, standing up and blocking my path to door. “Not ‘til we get to Seattle.”

  I shake my head. “I can get my own self to Seattle.”

  “Probably,” Mason agrees. “But D. told me to take you, so that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “Seriously, I’d rather drive myself. And no offense, but the thought of spending a day-and-a-half in a car with a virulent racist murderer really doesn’t appeal to me.”

  “No offense back, I don’t give two fucks how you feel about being in a car with me. D. said I was taking you, so that’s what I’m going to do. Now, you can stand here and flap your mouth some more or hand over your keys, unless you want to do this the hard way.”

  Against my better judgment I ask, “And the hard way is?”

  His mouth hitches into a lazy smile, just the same as Dixon’s. “I don’t know for sure how you’re going to like spending a day and a half on the back of my bike with your arms handcuffed around my waist, but I suspect it ain’t going to appeal to you. Plus, we’d have to leave your suitcase behind. But if that’s how you want to do it…”

  So that’s how I end up spending the next several hours in the passenger seat of my own car. Arms crossed in grudging silence, until we get to San Francisco.

  Mason scans the horizon, his light blue eyes taking in the city. “Guess we’ll stop here for the night,” he doesn’t sound at all happy about the prospect. “Have to check in with Dixon and tell him we got here safe.”

  “Are you afraid your gang will come after us in San Francisco?” I ask him.

  “No, the board hasn’t been missing long enough for them to worry yet. And they don’t have the resources. D. emptied the accounts, and most of them don’t have two nickels to rub together without the club. I just hate cities, that’s all.”

  “I think Dixon hates them, too,” I say, thinking back to how he spent his time during the month he lived with me. “He really likes being outside.”

  “Yeah, his old man was a piece of work, and he only got worse after D’s mom died. Drank a bunch. Me and D. would meet up and camp out for days. A lot of times, outside was the safest place to be.”

  “Did his father smoke,” I ask, remembering the episode with the neuro res and the cane.

  “Three packs a day and sometimes he used D. to put them out. D. sure wasn’t crying at the funeral after the bastard’s liver finally gave out.”

  “And you?” I find myself asking.

  “And me what?”

  “Was your dad a piece of work, too?” The memory of Dixon’s uncle, dead on the deck floats into my mind. Of hearing Mason say at one point during the clean-up, “Well, my old man was right about this being a good place to dump a body.” With no emotion whatsoever.

  “I ain’t sad D. killed him if that’s what you’re asking.”

  I think back to Dixon’s response to my similar feint yesterday. No, Doc, that ain’t what I’m asking.

  And I wonder how many old broken bones an x-ray scan would find under Mason’s otherwise massive body.

  “Is that why you’re going against everything you know to help Dixon?” I ask him. “Because your father was abusive?”

  “Yeah, sure, I guess. Let’s go with that and stop talking about it,” Mason answers in a way that tells me that’s all I’m going to get from him on the subject. Then he pulls into the garage of the first hotel he sees.

  I think about running away in the night. But Mason still has my keys and I’m not even sure the hotel will let me have my own car back since Mason checked us in with the valet.

  So instead, I end up sharing continental breakfast with a much less chatty Fairgood. One who answers every question I have with little more than monosyllabic words and grunts.

  I’m almost happy when we get back on the road, because it means I’m that much closer to not having to spend any more time with Mason.

  Still, I find myself peeping over at him. Unable to resist the temptation to diagnose his behavior despite how very little he’s given me to go on.

  “So you just do whatever Dixon tells you?” I ask, trying a different tact. “Up to and including driving his black baby mama to Seattle?”

  Mason grips and ungrips the steering wheel. “You’re more to him than that,” he eventually answers. “Maybe you ain’t as smart as he says you are, because you ought to have figured that much out after seeing all them dead bodies on the boat.”

  I shift in my seat, not wanting to believe, but having to ask. “So you’re saying he still has feelings for me. Even though I’m black?”

  “Yeah, even though. Or maybe because of it. Hell, I don’t know.” He grunts and refocuses on the road. “You grow up all your life being told you can’t have a thing, it’s going to make you wonder. Then you take a bad hit to the head? I dunno, shit happens, I guess.”

  I can tell he more than wants to be done with this conversation. But my now inherent sixth sense for latent drama detection won’t let me let it be.

  “This isn’t about Dixon and me, is it?” I guess out loud.

  Now he looks over at me like I’m an idiot. “Of course it’s about you and Dixon. Who else would it be about? You think I’d be driving you around in this fucking golf cart disguised as a real car if it wasn’t about you and him?”

  He’s trying to make me feel dumb, intimidate me into shutting up. But at the end of the day, he’s unwittingly made an appearance on exactly one episode of a drama-filled reality show, while I’ve been contracted for over one hundred—not including reunion specials. I’m just plain old better at uncovering drama than he is at keeping it hidden.

  “No,” I answer after carefully considering his words. “I really don’t. It’s taken me seven years to outgrow my reality show values, and I didn’t even start off on Rap Star Wives. You and Dixon were born into this. So no, I don’t think you’d let him kill your father and explode your legacy just because he asked you to…not unless there was something else in it for you. Or…”

  My drama sensor finally goes off like it’s hit pay dirt as I realize out loud, “Or someone else.”

  Mason doesn’t answer, but his hands are gripping my Prius’s steering wheel so tight, I can tell I hit a nerve. And that sends my mind down all sorts of different paths. Wondering what girl could have caused Mason to reconsider his value system after all this time. Who is she? And perhaps more importantly, what will he do now that he’s no longer a Southern Freedom Knight?

  But then Mason explodes. “You know what? Me and Dixon have been through a lot together! We were born the same exact week, so we’re more like brothers than cousins. So if he says it’s time to dismantle the SFK, I do it. If he says he needs me to drive his big-mouthed girl to Seattle, I do it. That’s the whole story. The end of the story. Now shut the fuck up!”

  Oooh, I’ve made someone very mad! I waggle my eyebrows, Nitra Mello on total fleek, even as I agree with an easy going tone, “Okay, I’ll be quiet, but if you ever want to talk about this girl with somebody…”

  “I swear to fucking God, I will put you in the trunk of this car and duct tape your mouth shut,” he threatens. “D. just said I had to drive you. He didn’t say how.”

  I don’t think Mason would really do it. But there’s a rather thin line between think and know. So I clamp my mouth shut on a smile, and settle for silently knowing what I’m pretty sure I now know.

  This goes on for a few minutes before Mason cuts into my thoughts with a growled, “Fuck, we need gas.”

  He pulls into the first gas station he sees. “Fucking take a piss now, because I ain’t stopping again until we get to Seattle.”

  Again I decide to err on the side of preventative belief.

  “May I give you money for gas?” I ask when I come back from the bathroom and find him at the pump.

  His eyes narrow. “Funny, you don’t sound anything like you did on TV.”

  I look at him, thinking that’s why I liked his cousin. He’s the only rea
l life love interest I’ve ever had who hasn’t expressed surprise that I don’t actually sound like a reality show stereotype in real life.

  “I’m not Nitra Mello anymore. I’m Dr. Anitra Dunhill full time from now on,” I tell Mason.

  “Well, I don’t need your money, Dr. Dunhill,” Mason informs me. “But as long as you’re on this side of the car…”

  He opens the Prius’s back door and half his body disappears inside.

  When he re-emerges, he has a manila envelope in his hand. “Here, read this instead of bothering me for the rest of the trip.”

  “What is this—?” I start to ask.

  But he turns away, walking toward the station’s restrooms before I can finish my question. “Gonna take a piss,” he calls back to me as if I need to know that.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Back inside the car, I open the envelope and find…

  A brown craft paper journal, with the words UWV/Mercy Mental Health Services emblazoned across the front. I pull it out along with several pages that have obviously been torn out of an indexed notebook. A letter, I realize when I see the words written at the top of the first page.

  Dear Doc,

  I’m known in my circles to be eloquent with my words. But I guess that’s a lie, because standing outside that van with you, I still didn’t have the words to explain who I used to be. So I’m doing what the head doctor said I should back when I was a patient at your hospital. I’m writing everything down in the hopes I can make sense of it.

  I could tell you I was born into this. As was my father, and his father before him. My father was an angry drunk who beat on anything stupid enough to love him, including my mom, but they agreed on one thing: that the races should stay separate. That we were superior. But I guess you already know that.

  I grew up on a compound with people who believed the same as my parents did. In my whole life, I’d never said more than five or ten words to someone who didn’t have the same skin color as me. We weren’t allowed to watch TV. We weren’t allowed to listen to anything but white country and Christian music. I play the guitar, but country and Christian is all I play. I also know a few things about doctoring, because my mother was the club’s nurse. As the daughter of the Prez, part of her job was to patch up our club members, and sometimes I helped with that. I think that’s part of the reason I was attracted to you in the first place. Because you remind me of the better aspects of her. The best ones.

  I know that’s a strange thing to say with you being black and all. But you have to understand, without these memories, without this carefully cultivated hate inside of me, black ain’t what I saw when I first laid eyes on you.

  I saw you. The real you. Not that girl on TV. But the doctor I had mistaken for a nurse, teaching dying kids to sing. I can’t begin to explain how beautiful I found you from the first moment I laid eyes on you. Skin color didn’t have nothing to do with it.

  As for the things I said. I can remember saying them now. And even worse, I can remember believing those words. But now…now I know you. Now you’re carrying my baby. A little life we made together with love, not hate.

  And when I watch myself saying those words I had memorized by heart, even though I remember giving those speeches, it feels like I’m watching someone else. Somebody young and ignorant, even though that was me just a few months ago.

  So now I’m doing what needs to be done to keep you safe. To keep what we made together safe. I’m disbanding Southern Freedom Knights, and doing a few other things to ensure they never ride again. The Feds approached me and Mason a couple of times before my accident, and I turned them down. A few weeks ago, Mason and me had a long discussion, and we decided to approach them this time.

  I know your father has a helluva lot of things to say about snitches, but in this case, I think he’ll forgive me for working with the authorities to make sure our club never hurts an innocent again.

  I signed our land over to the state, suggested they do something good with it.

  And as for that money I was walking around with? Well, technically I got that and a motorcycle in exchange for a conversion van full of guns I drove up from Tennessee. That’s why I wasn’t carrying ID on me. It would have been too dangerous for the club if I’d gotten caught. So yeah, that money’s plenty dirty, but I made it clean. It belongs to UWV/Mercy’s Pediatrics Department now. An anonymous gift.

  Why am I doing this? Why am I so determined to protect you and our baby given how I was brought up? That’s what I’m going to try to make you understand now, Doc.

  I was broken way before I ever landed in your hospital, and crazy as it sounds, I truly believe that TBI saved me. I truly believe your love healed all the things that were wrong with me. Doc, you’re the one who fixed me.

  I know it’s impossible to believe feelings like the ones I used to have about race-mixing could go away overnight. That all these memories could come back to me and look like nothing but a bad TV show I don’t want to be on no more. But that’s the truth of it. The truth as I know it. Fuck everything I’ve been taught, I only want to be with you.

  I love you, Doc. I still love you with everything inside me. I didn’t want to scare you with it back in West Virginia. Didn’t want you to think I was both brain-damaged and crazy. But I’m enclosing something that will hopefully explain the way I feel about you, how I felt about you from the start, in a way I can’t with this one letter.

  It’s the journal my hospital head doctor told me to start keeping to help me with my memory recovery. He told me to do that two weeks before I met you. But I didn’t pay attention. Not until I saw you.

  I hope this helps you understand, Doc.

  Yours forever,

  Woods

  Forget my training. With shaking hands, I put aside the letter and open the journal. Inside I find an unexpected bounty of words that begin with, “Today I saw my future wife for the first time…”

  Unable to stop myself, I read a side of this tale that I’d never heard. About a thirty-something amnesia patient who didn’t know anything of his past. Only what was in doctor’s reports. He’s miserable and confused and weak, which he hates. His misery makes him belligerent, and half his PT sessions end with him limping out in a snit. That is until his physical therapist takes him down to the chemo lounge, during one of his mandated walks. He hangs back on the wall, only watching for the excuse to not have to walk for a while. But then she comes into the lounge with her guitar. A nurse with the prettiest hair and eyes he’s ever seen. He loves her the moment he sees her singing with those kids. But he’s feeble at this point, “not half a man,” so he watches from afar. Works harder at the PT. Biding his time for now, but knowing she’s his.

  Then one day he calls out to her, and what follows is pages and pages of every word I ever spoke to him. Of how he tries not to stare at my beautiful brown skin or fall into my dark eyes, but how he can’t help himself. In this version of his story, every single thing I say and do means volumes to him. From bringing him lunch to telling him I’ll be the family who can’t be here for him.

  “When I hear the word ‘family,’ I don’t get the sense of it as a good thing. But when she says the word, it’s all I can do not to grab her and kiss her the way I been wanting to all along.”

  He goes on and on like this. And yes, there’s the map he drew for me that one day when we were doing cognitive exercises, with the label “Drew this for her because she asked me to.” Then comes a dark moment with the cane and the smoking resident. He thinks he’s scared me away forever, that I’ll never come see him again. He’s pondering how to find me downstairs now that his walking around privileges have been revoked. Trying to figure out how to convince me to come back to him when the journal entry abruptly cuts short. Only to pick up at the next entry proclaiming that I miraculously showed up in his room, “more worried than scared.” And though I didn’t come back after he kissed me, he knows. He just knows. “If we could make it through that, we can make it through an
ything.”

  My heart clenches reading the words, so indicative of the John Doe I knew. So sure of himself. But so naïve when it came to matters of love.

  The journal ends the Monday after I take him home. “I’m outside now. Not in the hospital’s outside, but in her outside and down to my last page. She’s brought me home. Maybe because she’s a very good person. At least that’s what she’s probably telling herself. But I think she’s feeling it, just like me. That we belong together. That now we’ve found each other, we ain’t got no business ever being apart. She ain’t my wife yet, but I know it’s just a matter of time. We’re going to be something to each other. She’s going to agree she loves me, too, and at the end of this story, she will be mine. All I gotta do now is wait.”

  By the time I’m done reading, the diary pages are damp with my tears. And the car, I realize, is still parked.

  I look over at Mason. “Why are we still at the…”

  I trail off before I can finish because I see we aren’t still at the gas station. I was so absorbed in reading, I didn’t notice that not only had we left the gas station, we’ve driven about forty miles. And now we are sitting outside of a building I’d only seen before in online images. A spaceship-like structure constructed of brushed aluminum and glass that looked as far from my little brick two-story apartment building in West Virginia as you could get.

  Yet, on the steps sits a long, lean figure I still associate with West Virginia. Except he’s not dressed in sweats now, nor leather. Today he’s wearing a simple Henley with jeans and he has a piece of paper in his hand.

  He stands as soon as I get out of the car.