Dear Tori

by Renee Fowler

  Maggie shrugs her shoulders. “It might. Or maybe you’ll just make a new friend.”

  It’s hard for me to imagine, and it’s almost impossible to believe I had friends in high school. Since my accident I’ve had the worst time connecting with people. Brand new people, and those that knew me from before. I didn’t just lose memories, the ability to make sense of numbers, and my balance. Sometimes I think I lost my personality too.

  The carriage house is a two car garage with a second story apartment on top. It’s located just out of sight of the farmhouse, hidden behind an outcropping of pines. Maggie rented this place from my dad years ago, shortly after her divorce. That’s how they met, or so I hear.

  There’s a small riding lawn mower and some other junk stored in the garage portion. Upstairs it’s dusty and dark, with sheets covering a lot of the furniture. Maggie flips the switch for the light. It sparks to life, then burns out with a loud pop. She feels through the dark, making her way over to the window to throw open the curtains and let in some light.

  “Were you thinking about renting this place out again?” I peer around the familiar surroundings. It’s exactly as I remember it from when I was a kid, dark wood paneling and outdated, shag carpet.

  “I wasn’t planning on it. It’s hard to find someone to rent all the way out here, and the last tenant we had was a pain in the ass.” Maggie says, tugging the sheet off a floral loveseat. We both sneeze at the dust cloud thrown up into the air. “I thought maybe you could stay here if you wanted.”

  I laugh under my breath. “Are you kicking me out?”

  “No, of course not. But you’re grown, and I figured you might want some privacy. We’d have to fix it up a bit first, if you’re going to stick around that is.”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing yet.”

  “Do you miss Miami?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well, where are you going to go instead?”

  Shrugging, I straighten a framed print that hangs on the wall. “I have no idea. Last time I got in my car and started driving south until I found a place that looked interesting. Maybe next time I’ll head north, or out west.”

  Maggie tilts her head to the side and gives me a warm smile. “You were always like that.”

  “What?”

  “Brave. Adventurous. I could never imagine doing something like that. Not in a million years.”

  I quirk my eyebrows up at her. I’m not sure if those are words I’d use to describe myself. I didn’t embark on some grand adventure that eventually ended in Miami. I was running away from a life that didn’t make sense to me anymore. If I was brave, I would’ve stayed and faced it. What I did seems more cowardly in my mind.

  “I think I want to stay,” I say. “But… Was I always this indecisive?”

  “A little, I guess. You kept changing your mind on what college you were going to, but I think your dad had a lot to do with that.”

  “Did he want me to stay close to home?”

  Maggie shakes her head.

  “He wanted to get rid of me?” I ask in disbelief.

  “No. Absolutely not, but he figured some time away from… certain people might be good for you. He thought it would give you a fresh perspective.”

  “He wanted to get me away from Noah?”

  “Yup. Pretty much.”

  “I’m starting to think this guy is bad news.”

  “He got in a little bit of trouble, but nothing too awful.” Maggie shoves one of the windows open to let in some fresh air, then pokes her head out to check on Brandon. “I think he was just afraid of history repeating itself, ya know?”

  I nod and fold up the dusty sheet, then go to uncover the couch. No one ever had to spell it out for me. My parents were eighteen when they got married, and I came along six months after the wedding.

  Staring at Maggie out of the corner of my eye, I clear my throat quietly. “Since we’re being all open and honest, I might as well ask. Is that why you and Dad had Brandon?”

  A deep valley forms between her eyebrows. “Huh?”

  “I mean, after my accident, I screwed up any chance of me doing anything with myself.”

  “Honey, no. Believe it or not, Brandon was kind of a shock for both of us. I didn’t think I could have a baby.” Maggie’s face softened. “And your Dad was really proud of you. We both were. The way you started over again… Obviously we would’ve rather you’d stayed closer to home, but you made a whole new life for yourself.”

  I’m not sure if I believe her or not. I don’t really know what to believe sometimes. “I guess there’s no point in worrying about it now,” I say, taking a look around the drab, dusty room. “The past is the past.”

  And someone from my past was due to pick me up in just a couple of hours so we could relive some forgotten piece of my history.

  God, I really am indecisive. One moment I want to leave the past alone. The next I think it might be worth another try to recover what was lost. The only thing I’m sure of right now is, I want to see Noah again.

  Chapter Nine

  Noah

  I idle to a stop near the end of Tori’s driveway when I spot her striding along with a little, brown haired boy at her side. She opens the mailbox for him, and I cut my engine, watching him shove a letter inside. Tori gives me a small smile, and the boy runs over to me.

  After telling him to be careful of the exhaust pipes which are still hot, I ask him his name, and tell him mine. “Are you helping your sister mail a letter, Brandon?”

  “I don’t need help, but I’m not allowed to walk to the road by myself. I’m sending a letter to my dad in heaven.”

  Damn. Poor kid. “I hear you don’t need a stamp to mail a letter to heaven. Just a kiss.”

  Brandon nods his head, and Tori looks uncomfortable. Obviously she doesn’t remember telling me about that, but there was a time she told me everything.

  I knew all her secrets, and she knew all of mine.

  Brandon wants to know if I can take him for a ride. “If Tori says it’s okay, I can ride you up the driveway to the house.”

  She shrugs, and I plop her helmet over his mop of dark hair, then swing him up to sit astride in front of me.

  “Hop on up, big sister, unless you’re walking,” I say.

  Tori’s smiles a wide, pretty smile that I feel myself returning. It almost doesn’t seem real to be standing this close to her again.

  The two story victorian is situated far off from the road, up a gently sloped, cracked driveway. It’s a little strange to be driving all the way up to the house. Back in high school, I usually dropped Tori off further back towards the road to avoid her father, who hated my guts. I can’t say I really blamed the man. If I ever have a daughter one day, I know damn well I won’t want her anywhere near a punk like the kid I used to be.

  But I’m not that guy anymore, and Tori’s not that same girl.

  Brandon is grinning from ear to ear when I set him back down on solid ground.

  “Whaddya think?” I ask.

  “It was fun, but I want to go for a real ride. I want to go fast.”

  I can’t help but laugh. “Maybe in a few years. You’re a bit young for it still.”

  That answer doesn’t seem to please him much, and he hands the helmet over reluctantly. Tori’s stepmom comes out to collect Brandon. She looks older than I remember, and dead tired, like she hasn’t slept for a week. “Long time no see, Maggie.”

  She smiles, and suddenly she appears a bit more like the woman I remember. “It’s been a while,” she agrees. “You two have fun, but Tori, keep your phone on you, hon. If that heifer calves soon, I might need your help.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask, after Maggie is leading Brandon back inside, and Tori is fitting the helmet over her blonde hair.

  “One of the cows is pregnant. She might be about to go into labor.”

  “What do you have to do when that happens?”

  She laughs at my stricken expression. “Hop
efully nothing. She’ll be the one doing all the work, but we need to be there in case something goes wrong.”

  It’s almost impossible to imagine Tori working around a farm, but I know she grew up doing it. When we met, it shocked me. At first glance she appears almost fragile. Tori is slender and petite, with delicate features and big, pretty eyes, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that looks can be deceiving, especially with her.

  Since we can’t go far, I take her a few miles up the road to a little ice cream place. It’s a Dairy Queen now. It got bought out a few years back and renovated, but it used to be a run down, little mom and pop place called The Dixie Pixie. When I ask Tori if she remembers, she does, but back from when she was a kid. She has no recollection of coming here with me.

  We sit outside at one of the picnic tables out back. “I almost didn’t recognize you when you first pulled up,” Tori says, skimming the pad of her thumb across my freshly shaven jaw. She quickly jerks her hand back, like she hadn’t meant to touch me.

  “I thought maybe you’d remember me like this.”

  She quirks her lips to the side, and shakes her head.

  “I don’t really look much like I used to, beard or not.”

  Tori shrugs. “I dunno. I don’t have any old pictures anymore.”

  “You don’t?” I ask, a little shocked. She used to take tons of pictures.

  “I… uh… I got upset about everything after the accident, when I finally came home from the hospital, and I tore a bunch of that stuff up.” Her cheeks glow pink as she takes a delicate lick of her ice cream cone. “I’ve got a bit of a temper now, which I guess is new.”

  It’s hard to imagine Tori tearing anything up, but maybe not impossible. “I’ve seen you pissed off a few times back in the day.”

  “You did?”

  “Not too often. It took a lot to get under your skin.”

  One corner of her mouth quirks up. “Did you give me a good reason to be pissed off?”

  “A few times,” I admit.

  “What did you do?”

  “Got into a bit of trouble here and there.”

  “What kind of trouble,” she asks suspiciously.

  I laugh under my breath. “It was nothing too terrible. I got in a few fights, stuff like that.”

  “So you really can’t get brain freeze?” Tori takes a big lick of her vanilla cone to keep it from dripping down her hand.

  “You remember that?”

  “You wrote about it in one of your letters.”

  “Hell, I can’t even remember what I wrote in some of those now.”

  “It’s been a long time.”

  “You aren’t going to make me prove it to you again, are you?” I ask. Years ago she wouldn’t take my word for it. Tori had me slurp down a large shake that failed to give me a headache, but made me nauseous and cold from the inside out.

  “Nope. I trust you.” She frowns slightly. “I probably shouldn’t since I don’t really know you.”

  “You can trust me,” I assure her. “And Maggie remembers me. She wouldn’t let you ride off with someone she didn’t trust.”

  “I wonder why some people get brain freeze, and some don’t?”

  “You told me it was genetic, the next day after you found out. I guess you went home and looked it up.”

  Tori smiles. “You just saved me a Google search later tonight. Did we come here a lot?”

  “Sometimes. It was on the way home from school.”

  “We rode together?”

  “Most days. When the weather was nice you rode on the back of that bike right there.”

  “You still have the same motorcycle?”

  “Uh huh. I had to rebuild the engine since then, but it’s the same one. I’ve had it forever. My dad left it to me.”

  Then naturally she asks what happened to him. The first time I told her years ago, talking about it was hard as hell. It was still fresh, and I was still pissed off about being moved a state away to live with family I barely knew.

  “And they never found out who killed him?” Tori asks incredulously.

  “Nah, but he hung out with some shady people. He probably had it coming,” I say, and there is suddenly a huge amount of white around Tori’s green eyes. Maybe I shouldn’t be laying it out there like that, but this is how I did things the first time around. I’ve never really seen much sense in sugar coating the facts.

  “What makes you say he had it coming?” Tori asks.

  “He was a drug dealer hooked on the same shit he was selling, so he didn’t always make the brightest decisions. What happened to your dad?”

  “He had a heart attack.”

  “Damn. He was young for that sort of thing, wasn’t he?”

  Tori shrugs, then she reaches over to flick her finger against the pack of Camels tucked into the breast pocket of my T-shirt. “He smoked too, which probably didn’t help.”

  “Yeah, these things will kill ya. No doubt about that.” I reach for the pack, take out a single cigarette, and tuck it behind my ear. Then I crumple the remainder in my fist and toss them away in the nearby trash can. “One last smoke, then I’m done.”

  “Just like that?” Tori asks.

  “Just like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I know you don’t like it,” I say.

  “And you care what I think?”

  “I’ve always cared what you think.”

  “Why?”

  Because you were one of the few people that cared about me at all. It wasn’t just that Tori cared about me. She believed in me when pretty much everyone else had written me off as a lost cause. “You’re a smart girl. If you read all those letters, I’m sure you can piece it together.”

  “I’m not that smart anymore,” she says.

  “Because you get numbers mixed up sometimes? Who gives a shit.”

  “It matters more than you’d think.”

  Shaking my head, I laugh. “You told me that once, when we first met.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah, you got stuck tutoring me in math, and I asked you why I really needed to know that stuff.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You didn’t say much about it that day, but you asked me what I planned on doing after high school, and I told you I’d probably end up working in my uncle’s garage. Then the next time we saw each other, you gave me this whole speech about all the ways mechanics use math and numbers.” I start to crack up. “You had notecards and everything.”

  Tori grins. “I sounded like a nerd.”

  “You were sort of,” I agree, returning her smile. “But you were cute enough I could see past it.”

  Shaking her head, a slight blush warms her cheeks again. Tori takes one last lick of the ice cream, and hands me the nearly empty cone without a word. When her fingers brush against mine, we both freeze. “You remember that?” I ask.

  She blinks at me a few times. “Yeah. I usually don’t get cones. I don’t like them.”

  “You always got one when we were together because you knew I would eat it.”

  Tori smiles briefly, but it quickly vanishes. “I do remember coming here with you a little, but I’ll probably forget it again soon.”

  “That’s okay. Now you’ll always be able to remember coming here with me today.” I grab her wrist and rub lightly. “Hey, where’s your bracelet?”

  “Sorry. I took it off earlier. I didn’t want it to get messed up while I was working.”

  “That’s okay. You never were really big on jewelry.”

  Tori shakes her head slowly, gazing up into my eyes. God, I want to kiss her, but after the way that played out yesterday, I know better.

  “Now you’ll have a new charm to put on it,” I say.

  “Yep.” Tori extricates her wrist from my hand carefully. “So if you came here to live with your uncle after your dad died, where was your mom?”

  “She died when I was young. I guess we had that in common too.”

 
; Tori rubs her palms against her bare thighs and stares off in the distance. “That’s what makes this so weird. You already know everything about me.”

  “Not everything. Why don’t you tell me something I don’t know yet.”

  “Like what?”

  “What were you doing in Florida all this time?”

  “All kinds of things. Finding a job that doesn’t involve numbers is harder than you’d think, so I tried out a bunch of different ones. I spent a lot of time at the library too, playing catch up, trying to relearn all the stuff I forgot.”

  “You never went to the beach?”

  “Oh, yeah. All the time. Everyday at first.”

  “You always said you wanted to see the ocean.”

  “Did I?” Tori stretches her legs out in front of her, and crosses one ankle over the other. “I suppose I probably did. We never really got to take vacations when I was growing up, with the farm.”

  “I’d never been either. We were going to go together for a few days before you started college.”

  “I guess I screwed that plan up.” Tori laughs bitterly, and the sound dies out to a soft sigh. “Did you see see it happen, when I fell?”

  My stomach somersaults at the memories of that night. I shake my head quickly, and pull that last cigarette from behind my ear. I light it, and take a deep drag. It doesn’t do a thing to calm my suddenly frayed nerves.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking,” Tori says forlornly.

  “It was just an accident.”

  “That’s what I hear.”

  “What else did you do in Florida?” I ask, trying to steer the conversation away from the worst night of my life. “I guess that’s where you met this guy you may or may not be marrying.”

  Tori opens her mouth to speak. At the same moment her phone bleeps, and she pulls it out of her back pocket. “It looks like it’s go time. You wanna see a cow giving birth?”

  “Uh… I dunno. It sounds kind of gruesome.”

  Tori giggles. “You chicken?”

  I drop the rest of my last cigarette on the ground, and stomp it out beneath my boot. Without thinking about it too much, I scoop Tori up from her perch on top of the picnic table, and toss her over my shoulder gently, like I used to do all the time when we were joking around.