But the woman in front of her didn’t pay much attention to her question. Instead she continued with her attack, each word dripping with unexplained anger. “You kept on saying that you would never be interested in Max, that the two of you were just friends. You told me that Max was dating someone else but now I see—”
“Back off, Jennifer,” came Amber’s voice from behind her.
“Screw you, Amber. I’m not done yet.”
Lauren also appeared out of nowhere and took the woman by the arm. “I think we should sit down. This is not the time or the place for this, dear.”
Jennifer yanked her arm out of Lauren’s grip. “You, too, mom? I can understand these bitches lying to me, but you knew about this as well and you didn’t say anything to me.”
“Come on, Danny,” Amber said, grabbing her wrist and leading her back to their table.
Danny’s head was spinning. So many words yet so little information. Everything Jennifer said only caused more questions to swirl around her head. “What the hell is going on, Amber? Who’s Richard? Who was Max dating? What is she talking about?”
Before Amber could answer any of her questions, Lauren caught up to them. “I am really sorry about all that, Danielle. My daughter has a sharp tongue.”
“You said she wasn’t going to be here, Lauren,” Amber snapped.
“She was supposed to be in Arkansas, visiting family, but she came home early and my husband suggested that she come along with us.”
Danny noticed the looks that were exchanged between the other two women, as if there were more secrets and lies that they were trying to keep from her. “What’s going on?” she shouted.
“It’s just Jennifer being Jennifer,” Amber said. “She’s being bitchy because she’s jealous. She wanted Max and now you have him.”
That answered some of the questions but not all. They reached the table and Amber’s eyes locked on Max. “I think you need to take her home.”
Although surprised, Max did not argue and stood up immediately. Danny released a heavy sigh, realizing that no-one was going to answer her questions. Just a short while ago, she had felt like the pieces of her life were finally beginning to fit together. That feeling was long gone now. Everyone knew something she didn’t, holding back information about her life. She left the party feeling as lost as she did the day she woke up with no recollection of the past ten years.
* * *
Danny waited for Max to open the door of their apartment and walked in first.
“Who’s Richard?” she asked before he had even pulled off his jacket.
He froze, his jaw clenching, but he didn’t respond.
“Who’s Richard?” she asked again.
“Richard is just another asshole you dated.”
That made sense. He must have been the man she dated before Max. What didn’t make sense, though, was the timeline. Jennifer would not have been so angry had this not been a recent thing. “When did we break up?”
His jaw tightened again and she could see that she was stirring up the anger that he always tried to keep so well hidden. His guard went up almost immediately.
“Drop it, Danny!”
“Stop doing that to me. Just tell me.”
He took a deep, calming breath before he answered. “You guys broke up right before you and I got together.”
That wasn’t a straight answer. He was keeping something from her. All of them were and she didn’t want to be kept in the dark anymore. He was sidestepping and she decided to change her line of questioning to get more information out of him. “Why did we break up?”
His breathing became unsteady and his fingers balled into tight fists. She could actually see the rage filling up inside him. Whoever Richard was, he had certainly gotten on the wrong side of Max.
“Richard,” Max said, gritting his teeth, “was a low-life cheat who was only after one thing.”
“He cheated on me?”
“Fuck, Danny! Just forget about him, forget you ever heard his name!”
His words ignited her anger. “Don’t you get it, Max? I’ve already forgotten. My whole life is one big, gaping hole and I’m trying so hard to fill it with all this lost information. Everything I know about my past is because of you. I am living vicariously through you. I don’t remember anyone or anything from the last ten years. You don’t know what its like.” Tears filled her eyes. “You don’t know what it feels like to wake up every morning to a life you don’t know. You don’t know what it feels like to not remember the places you’ve been, the people you’ve dated.” She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand as the tears rolled down her cheek. “It’s like someone telling me a story about my life. You don’t know what it’s like to feel…this empty.”
He calmed down almost instantly. “Danny…I’m sorry. That…that was a stupid thing to—”
“Save it,” she cut in, lifting her hand to silence him. “I’m done talking.”
She walked past him, into her bedroom, and shut the door.
It was over an hour later when she heard a light tap on her bedroom door. Max walked in and sat down beside her on the bed. She kept her back to him, not ready to face him just yet.
“I’m sorry about what I said earlier. It was dumb.” He shifted closer but made no attempt to touch her. “When I hear Richard’s name, it gets under my skin and…I guess it makes me a little crazy. I shouldn’t have said that, though. You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like and I’m sorry.”
She turned to face him then. “It makes you a lot crazy,” she said with a small smile.
He returned the smile. “I have something for you. I didn’t even think about it until now, but it’s definitely better than just hearing stories.”
“Okay.”
Max stood up and she followed him back to the living room, where she saw a large box filled with DVDs. He lifted one out of the box entitled First Christmas with Danny. He inserted it into the DVD player and pressed play.
Danny sat quietly on the sofa and watched two teenage boys, shoveling snow in the front yard. “That’s my brother, Kevin, and his best friend, Perry,” Max explained.
He had told her about them before. They wore thick woolen hats and their heavy jackets were zipped up to the top so she still could not see their full faces, but somehow seeing actual people made the stories seem more real.
“Are you going to pay us for this, Mister Shepard?” Perry asked, looking up at the camera.
“He’s a little cheeky,” Max said beside her. “He’s like a younger version of Chris Tucker.”
She simply nodded even though she didn’t know who Chris Tucker was, not wanting to speak because speaking would be an unnecessary distraction. She took in every detail on the screen. The large country-style house in the background. The tree-lined street at the end of the driveway. Her nose tingled, almost like it was trying to remember the rich smell of whitebark pine on a cold day.
Kevin, unlike Max, had two dimples instead of one. Another difference she noticed was that Kevin’s eyes weren’t brown, they were a strange shade of blue. Although he had a boyish face like Max, it was a little more rugged, a little more serious. Perry was much taller than Kevin, with brown eyes that twinkled with mischievousness, and was also incredibly good-looking. Teenage girls probably fell over themselves trying to get these two to notice them, Danny thought.
“Perry,” came a thick voice from behind the camera, “you technically live here for free. I think that’s payment enough.”
“I think your dad is trying to bring back slavery,” Perry murmured to Kevin.
Kevin stopped shoveling and turned to face him. “You can’t play the race card if he’s got both of us doing it.”
Before Perry could respond, Max burst through the front door, running down the stairs towards his father.
Danny shifted on the sofa when she saw a younger version of herself on the screen. It was almost surreal seeing herself in a moment that she had no recollection of. Her long, dark brown hair ended below her shoulders and thick bangs covered her forehead. Same face, different hair. Same person, different life.
She had an overwhelming urge to force her mind out of her current body into the body of the person on screen, to know for just one second what it was like to be her, to know what she knew. She had not noticed she was crying until she felt Max gently rubbing his hand up and down her back.
She watched her younger self pick up a large chunk of snow and roll it into a ball.
“Don’t even think about it, Danny,” Max shouted from the other side, but the camera remained fixed on her, only moving with the snowball as she flung it across the driveway. The camera shifted to Max just in time to see it hit the side of his face, fragments of snowflakes sticking to his hair.
“You don’t speak to me for the next two hours,” younger Danny said before storming back inside.
“What happened?” Max’s dad asked.
Max shrugged. “Scrabble.”
Perry walked up to Max and tapped him on the shoulder. “Damn, Max! That girl is fine as hell.”
“Yeah, easy, Tiger,” he responded playfully. “That one is mine. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s my future wife.”