2: 2
By the time the procedure was over, it was evening.
I pushed open the front door, and laughter spilled out from the living room.
Elijah and Tamara's friends were all in my house.
They'd been middle-school classmates, running around together for more than ten years.
Back when it started, the doctor had suggested he spend more time with familiar friends, that it would help his recovery.
So, all in the name of treatment, they came by every few days like it was nothing, treating the home I'd so carefully put together like a hotel.
At the sound of the door, they all turned to look at me at once.
A few of them traded a knowing glance.
Tamara cleared her throat on purpose and said with a smile,
"Speaking of which, Eli and Paula have been married three years now."
"Somebody's amnesia just never gets better, does it? How about I help the two of you remember a little?"
Elijah pushed an orange segment into her mouth. "Remember what?"
"Remember how good you used to be to her." Tamara laughed behind her hand. "You were so devoted back then. Picked her up from work every single day, waited in line half an hour to buy her chestnut cake."
Elijah looked at Tamara, puzzled. "Hm? What are you talking about?"
The game had started again.
Tamara widened her eyes. "No way. You don't remember any of that?"
He shook his head, baffled. "I don't."
"I did things like that for her? I was that pathetic?"
I stood in the entryway and looked at him,
and my chest just went tight and sore.
So in his heart, all the care and tenderness he'd once shown me
had turned, in his own mouth, into some shameful, groveling thing.
His friends finally finished laughing and called over to me,
"You're finally back, sis. Where's the hot-and-sour noodle soup Eli told you to grab for us?"
"And my skewers!"
"Ten beef sandwiches, you didn't forget, right? The ones from that place in Northport."
I didn't say anything.
I thought back to the beginning, when I'd believed these friends came by every few days for Elijah's sake,
when I'd tried so hard to win them over, doing whatever they asked.
The truth was, I'd noticed it too: Elijah's amnesia only ever seemed to flare up when he was facing me.
Tamara caught a cold once, and a month later he still remembered to tell her to bundle up.
Whatever the guys asked for, he never once forgot.
So how was it that when I was hospitalized with pneumonia, he couldn't even remember my room number?
I'd asked him about it, and he'd only looked at me with that unbearably guilty look and said,
"Paula, I'm sorry. I'll work hard to get better. Please don't give up on me."
Later, as if to prove to me how often his intermittent amnesia struck, he had an episode in front of his friends too.
One day I was in the kitchen cooking,
and I heard the laughter of his friends drift in from outside.
"Man, what kind of taste does Eli have? How'd he end up with a girlfriend like that?"
"Right? Boring and thin-skinned, wears that sour face all day, like some bitter wife."
"No sense of style either. That dress she wore to the last get-together was a total disaster."
But Elijah acted as if he hadn't heard a thing, just sat there smiling along.
It wasn't until he caught the odd way his friends were looking at him that he asked, slow and lazy, "Hm? What were you all just saying?"
Their mockery and slander of me, he couldn't hold onto that either.
It was a game, of all things.
A game they used to shut me out, to laugh at me.
"Sis, we're talking to you. Did you even hear us?"
A guy in the middle named Ervin Lambert started shouting.
"Where's the beer we asked for? How'd you come back empty-handed?"
