He parks around back in front of another large warehouse structure.
“Why are we here?” I ask.
With a mischievous smile reaching his eyes, he says, “You’ll see. Come on.”
We exit the truck, and I follow him to the warehouse where he slides open a heavy metal door. My eyes go wide the second I see the car. It’s identical to the profile picture on Trevor Criss’s Instagram account.
I step forward and run my hand along the side of the hood. Then I stand back and take her in. “Sixty-eight Dodge Charger RT. High performance, front-engine, rear-wheel drive sports sedan with a 426 cubic inch Hemi V8 engine and 425 horsepower.”
“Holy shit,” Carter says. “How in the hell do you know all that?”
I touch my head. “The brain is an amazing yet totally fucked up thing.” I proceed to tell him about episodic versus semantic memory and how I’ve retained a shit ton of knowledge, just not experiences.
“I’ll say it again. Holy shit. No wonder the reporters want a piece of you. You must be some kind of medical miracle.”
“The reporters don’t know about my amnesia. That’s classified information.” I give him a hard stare. “And I’d like it to remain that way.”
“Hey, these lips are sealed, man. No worries there.”
I touch the car again. “How do I know so much about this particular car? Did I used to moonlight here or something?”
“It’s yours.”
My eyebrows touch my hairline. “This car is mine?” I ask with a sudden twinge of excitement.
He laughs. “Has been for almost fifteen years. You bought it from a scrapyard when you were in college. You’ve been fixing it up ever since. Whenever you come home on leave, you spend hours here tinkering with it. Your plan was to restore it to the original condition, but it’s proven tricky to find the parts. Which reminds me…” He walks over to a cabinet and opens it, pulls out a package, and hands it to me. “The steering wheel finally came in. We’d been searching for it for the past year.”
“Does it run?”
“Nah. But it will. Someday, it will.”
“And I know how to make it run?”
“You know enough. I help out where I can. It’s kind of our thing. Male bonding and all that.” He opens another cabinet and pulls out a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. “We usually save this for after hours, but I figure this is a special occasion. How about it?”
I shrug, because this is the most normal I’ve felt since waking up in Germany last week.
He pours us each a small shot. We clink our glasses, down it, then he gestures to a large toolbox. “How about we install the steering wheel?”
“I think I’d like that,” I say with a slight nod and a smile. “I think I’d like that a lot.”
Several hours later, the steering wheel having long been installed, I sit in the back seat with another shot of whiskey. Carter has come and gone several times—he still has a business to run—and by the time he returns again, it’s after four o’clock.
Pouring himself a drink, he climbs into the back with me and holds up his glass. “May this shot be like your favorite ride… smooth and powerful.”
“Why do I get the feeling this isn’t the first time you’ve made that toast?”
“It’s what we’d say at the end of a long day of working on her.”
I glance around. “Would we always sit in here?”
“Nah. This is the first time.” His phone buzzes and he glances at it. “Your wife has been texting me. She’s worried about you.”
“My wife.” I shake my head. “It still seems surreal that I have a wife. An entire life I can’t even remember. I’m thirty-five fucking years old, yet my life can be categorized in days. It’s as if I was born the moment I woke up at the hospital in Germany. All my memories are of that place, the plane ride across the Atlantic, and my hospital room in Bethesda. Ava, Dawn, and Chuck are like my tour guides, my memory proxies. But the more they try and tell me about my past, the more frustrated I become.” I lean back against the seat. “I know they mean well. And I suppose I was a dick for running out like that.”
“I get it. Everyone was throwing shit at you. It was too much too soon.”
I nod, grateful for his understanding.
