When I Knew You (2 page)

It was all still in there,
I
was still in there, in her head. But she couldn't reach me, couldn't remember the time I rode the horse on my fifth birthday or the flowers I'd picked for Mother's Day that had included a big batch of poison ivy, or the day I got seven stitches on my chin because I fell off my bike.

It was all in there, flashing at the shore of her consciousness, these memories. But she was blind to the light, staring through sightless eyes toward a distant shore where all she saw was the crashing surf of now.

Chapter 3
 

"Ms. Perez?"
 

I turned back to Mr. Calderon, looking away from the joyful scene at the bottom of the tower, still feeling stunned.
 

"Please, call me Kati." I emphasized the Spanish lilt to my nickname, the name Abuela had always used and my mother started to use after she'd forgotten that she hated it. I loved the name, it was friendly and fun, but my mother had preferred the royal sound of Katarina. Mr. Calderon, a man I could never imagine using his first name in casual conversation, probably would have preferred sticking with Ms. Perez.

Still, I was feeling off balance and I had a tendency to try to take others with me. I took a deep breath and waved to the other facilitators, Pilar and Mike, who were gathering ropes and watching me. "I'll be back!" I shouted.

Pilar, always suspicious despite years of falling into the arms of strangers on the ropes course, nodded slowly, watching the man at my side as if she planned to describe him later for the police. She was strong, as athletic as a body builder, her dirty blonde hair cut in angles all around her angular face.
 

Mike looked up hopefully. He'd been training for months and was eager to lead his own team through a ropes course, so I gave him the nod. He practically leaped off the belay line and rushed the celebrants like a large, lanky puppy, his curly red hair bouncing with an enthusiasm of its own.

"I was surprised that ...man... that he jumped," said Calderon, looking back at the tall pole as we walked away from the ropes course.

"It's a long process," I answered. "By the time we get to the tower we've gone through quite a bit of work. Almost everybody jumps." My stomach tightened and I resisted the urge to ask a hundred questions. I couldn't get my head around it, couldn't tie two words together.

I led him toward the Jumpers Lodge, an old Texas Hill Country ranch house with a huge back porch and cedar posts. It was a far cry from the other buildings on the property, most of which had been built with spa and corporate clientele in mind. The ceilings and walls had a respectable sag that came from being more than a hundred years old, and the air had the cool smell of earth and water that seemed to seeped out of the limestone. A gorgeous live oak at the front had one long low branch that skimmed the ground while the rest grew far above the roofline of the building. To me, it always looked as if the massive tree was in mid bow.
 

Calderon held the door open so I could walk through ahead of him. Old school. I gestured to the two large leather chairs by the window and sat near the edge of the closest chair, not wanting to be enveloped by its leathery embrace. You had to rock quite a bit to get back out of those chairs if you leaned back, and it was difficult not to look like a duck in the process.
 

He sat down gingerly as if fighting the urge to brush off the seat first. This man had issues. He leaned in toward me, his face intense, eyes bright. "She's back, Ms. Perez. Antonia is back."

I was Ms. Perez and my mother was Antonia? Who the hell was this man? "Kati, please, Mr. Calderon."
 

I paused, but he didn't offer his first name as you'd expect when you insist someone use yours. Perhaps he'd forgotten it with disuse. "What do you mean 'she's back'?"

"Yes, yes. Kati. Yes, of course." A wide smile spread across his face, perfectly straight white teeth gleamed. His hands reached toward mine, stopping short of making contact. "Kati. She's back to the way she was before the accident."

"You mean she ..."

"She remembers everything." He leaned back, his hands sweeping the air before us in wide arcs. "She knows the periodic table. She can recite the Preamble to the Constitution. She can read the newspaper. She can do calculus. It's a miracle. It's a damn miracle!"

My mind scrambled, trying to follow what he was telling me. Mom was doing calculus? A rush of memories overwhelmed me. Antonia had to do exercises in her workbook every day just so she could manage simple subtraction, otherwise she'd forget everything in a week, and we'd be back to explaining how to borrow when taking away nine from twenty-seven.
 

I remembered the stacks of pennies and dimes on the table at home Abuela would use to try to tie the concepts together. "Okay, Toni, you need ten of these pennies."

"The brown ones?" Mom would ask, her beautiful brow furrowing in concentration, her voice soft and southern. The accent and the tiny scar on her forehead slipped into her hairline and back to her scalp were both courtesy of the accident.

"Yes, they're the pennies," Abuela would explain, endlessly patient. "You need ten..."
 

 
I'd sit there with my trig homework while Abuela would work through the concept of tens and ones with my mom over and over until it sunk in. Mom had a master's degree but couldn't pass a third grader's mid-term math test. For years when I walked in the kitchen and saw those coins, I headed straight for my room to avoid helping her count pennies again.

And today she knew calculus. Heck, I didn't even know calculus.

"How did this happen?"
 

"They don't know," he said with a shrug. "She just woke up late last night and ..."

"Last night? Why didn't anyone call me?"
 

"They tried, but your mother said she couldn't reach your cell phone and couldn't find the number for this place."
 

Damn. I thought of my cell phone sitting on the passenger seat of my car. The battery was dead, and I didn't have time yesterday to hook it up to the charger. We'd gone out to dinner with the team last night, and since I didn't have a landline in my apartment, there was no other phone to reach me at other than work. I didn't think it mattered; no one called me except on the weekends. It was one of the conditions Abuela had laid down when I moved away.
 

Abuela probably forgot to write down the number to the ranch when I'd given it her a month ago during our weekly update. I was sure she figured that as long as she had my cell phone she could reach me anytime.

Mr. Calderon continued. "By then your mother had called me. Antonia's doctor came by as well. It was midnight before we even realized we hadn't reached you yet. The doctors want to run a few tests." He stopped cold, looking away.

I could feel my heart drop. "What is it?"
 

"Well," he leaned back in the chair. "They, the doctors—a neurologist, Valencia? Do you know him?"
 

I knew who Valencia was. He'd been taking care of my mother for years. Even did a paper on her – A Life Lost in TBI. "Yes."
 

He hurried on. "They don't have any idea how long this will last. It could be another day or a few weeks."
 

"Not..." I couldn't say the word I really wanted to use. I couldn't say forever. "Not longer?"

He closed his eyes as if my words were exactly what he'd been avoiding thinking himself. When he looked at me again, he looked grim.

"I don't want to mislead you," he said. "It's most likely a temporary situation. Valencia said he's only heard of three cases where there was some lingering increase in memory retention. He even did a paper on it."
 

He opened his eyes, meeting mine directly. I noticed they were the exact brown of a tarnished penny.
 

"You need to get back to El Paso right now, Kati. Or you may lose the opportunity to see her, the real Antonia."

"But why didn't you call? Why didn't Abuela call? You could have looked it up; you could have found it on the Internet. We've got a huge web page."

"Because your mother insisted. She was practically hysterical. After the cell phone didn't work she was beside herself. She said no more calls. I was to retrieve you myself, in person." He clapped his hands on his legs and stood up, brushing off non-existent dust. "It's a short flight. I've booked you on the same one I'm taking back to El Paso. It leaves in four hours. We can be there in time for dinner."

Mr. Calderon and I agreed on a time to meet at the airport, and I explained the situation to my boss, Lisa. We agreed that Mike could handle the last few hours of the team, and since there wasn't another group for a few days, they'd manage without me.
 

"We'll need you by Friday, though," she said, looking over her glasses. "Mike is good, but..."
 

"I know, I know," Mike was a good guy, but his relentless enthusiasm chafed the corporate types after a few hours. The next team on the calendar was a group of CPAs. It would be like tossing a cheerleader into a funeral procession.
 

Pilar offered to help me pack and drop me off at the airport in San Antonio, a good forty minutes away; I took her up on it.

As I walked to my car, I thought of the separation Abuela had insisted on. "You need to have space, Kati," she said. "You need to have time to make friends, meet people. If we're calling you every minute you might as well be here." She shut my door on the car, her old Subaru that she gave me as a going-away present.
 

I rolled down the window and leaned out. "I just don't know, I don't know if I should leave, Abuela. What if you need me? What if something happens?"

She reached through the window, her weathered hand as strong as the cottonwood in the backyard. White seeds from the tree were falling everywhere around us, and I knew I'd find them in the car for days afterward. "Kati. What could happen? Besides, I can always call you."

Mom came out of the house with a lunch bag. She wiped away a tear from my face. "Kati. I love ya, ma little Kati." She held my hand against her cheek, then turned it over, kissing my palm intently. "You might need that later," she said, beaming as she closed my fingers into a gentle fist. I placed my hand on my heart, opening my fist slowly.

"I'll save it right here."

I drove off from them both, watching them getting smaller and smaller as I headed to my first apartment, first new city, first job away from home.
 

"So, who is this guy?" Pilar was facing me in the passenger seat as we drove to the apartment. She had a penetrating, honest gaze, one I wanted to meet even though I was driving. That was the thing with Pilar. Her intensity drew you, compelled you to talk, open up before you even realized it. She already knew everything about me and we'd only worked together for a couple of months. I think I'd managed to keep the name of my first dog to myself, but it was only a matter of time.
 

I chewed my lip. "He says he's mom's lawyer from years ago."

"Really? He looks like a lawyer." She mulled the idea over, her square jaw tightening and loosening. "Have you called home yet?"

I pointed to my phone, plugged into the cigarette lighter, blinking as it charged. "I'm giving it five minutes. Besides I can't get a decent signal on this road. I need to wait till I get to 281." That was the problem with the Hill Country. It was brutal on cell service. I had been here three months and was still identifying all the dead zones.

We drove in silence for a mile, slipping over the rolling waves and curves. Cedar and oaks lined the roadway, scrawny branches poking through barbed wire and cedar post fences. My first week here I'd been horrified. Coming from the desert, the endless stands of twisted trees and scrub felt oppressive as if every branch was grabbing for my legs and arms like a haunted forest. I missed the wide-open space of home, the sparseness and seriousness of the land that carefully measured out its plant life. I longed for the mighty embrace of the mountains that circled El Paso like big brothers protecting their little sister.
 

So far, I was growing to find some comfort in the hills, these very distant cousins to the mountains of my home. My old home.
 

"So," she said quietly. "What do you think she'll be like?"

I felt a cold dread fill my chest and took a deep breath. Who was she now? And how long would it last? I swallowed hard.
No crying, Kati.
"I have no idea."

"Do you even remember? I mean, do you remember what she used to be like? You were like, nine, right?"

"Ten," I said. Memories of the tall, fast-moving woman came to my mind, her eyes burning with intelligence and focus. She walked everywhere with such certainty that when we arrived somewhere early and doors were still closed, I was sure their clocks were wrong. She was strong and relentless, the kind of person you could see crashing through high seas and arriving on the other shore ready to conquer the world.

She had scared the hell out of me.

"I don't remember much," I said, pretending to concentrate on an upcoming curve. After Mom's accident, I stopped being caught up in her wake because suddenly there was no wake. She was stopped dead in the water. The waves smoothed, the roar of her engine was gone and all that was left was a confused silence where our family floated idly and slowly tried to find a new way to be together.
 

Pilar looked at me, her dark eyes seeing right through me, but she didn't say a word. That, I thought, should be the definition of a true friend. Knowing when to let silence fill the air.
 

A minute later, we hit 281 and I reached for the phone to call home. Then everything went black.

Chapter 4

"Right there. See? She moved. Call the doctor."

I could hear her talking, but she must have been in another room or across the hall. I felt a tingle on my hand, fingers slipping into my palm. I instinctively closed my hand around those fingers, tried to hold on.