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Diana tried, in those weeks.
She didn’t remember this boy that was her son, but she tried to learn everything over again. She asked how his days had gone and listened closely to hear the quiet sounds of his guitar through the walls and made family dinners and read chapters of the psychology book Gabe accidentally left in the living room one night, all with the uncomfortable feeling that something was missing. She wanted to learn about what she considered one of the biggest aspects of her life that she’d forgotten—her son—and leave behind the missing feeling entirely.
She found him one morning at the kitchen counter, sitting on the island like he’d been there for a while. Maybe he had been. It was late morning, but that wasn’t what she meant. There were dark circles under his eyes. And on the nights where Diana couldn’t get to sleep, she thought she’d hear someone moving, stirring the air in the house. Near-indecipherable from the silence, because it turned out that Gabriel was scarily quiet on his feet, but the sound was there if she was paying attention.
She was always paying attention now. She felt like she couldn’t afford not to.
So she had a feeling that Gabe had been sitting on that counter for hours, long before anyone else in the house was close to being awake.
“Sleep well?” she asked anyway, knowing he hadn’t.
Gabriel didn’t so much as flinch. Even running on fumes, he was always hyper-aware of what was going on around him. He’d known Diana was going to enter the kitchen when she was still in the hallway. “Yeah,” he lied.
He was a good liar. Diana probably wouldn’t have picked up on the fact that he was lying, if she hadn’t seen him doing it so much and figured out how to make the distinction. If she hadn’t been paying attention.
From the way Gabe looked at her then, Diana wondered if she’d done that before the treatments—looked closely enough at him to notice.
“You want anything?” Diana asked while she looked through the pantry and set a kettle on the stove. They had a coffee machine, but she’d found the kettle in the back of a cabinet when she needed to do something to distract herself and was cleaning things out. She liked the feeling of using it more than the machine, doing things by hand. She wondered why she’d ever stopped in the first place. If she’d eventually gotten too busy or too tired to do anything but let the coffee machine go through the motions for her.
“...I’m good,” said Gabe after a moment. Diana looked back at him, turning with her back to the stove. He was stiffer than she’d first thought, hunched slightly. Refusing to move. He looked uncomfortable having her eyes on him.
“Are you okay, Gabriel?”
His head tilted, almost in confusion if Diana was judging correctly. He examined her, and this time it was her turn to feel uncomfortable. His eyes were wide and round, and intense enough that it hurt to look at them.
“Cramping a bit,” he admitted, voice sounding odd.
“Do you need—”
“I’m fine.” The words came out harsh, defensive. Diana flinched. “I’ve got it.”
The kettle began to whistle. Diana frowned, trying to figure out what she’d done wrong.
That had happened before, when she’d spoken to Gabe. She never really thought she said something to warrant him shutting down like that. She wondered if that was something else related to what things had been like before the treatments. If the flash of surprise, then relief, then panic in her son’s eyes was due to something from the nineteen years she’d forgotten.
Diana turned back to the kettle and took it off the stove. She pulled down one mug, deliberated, grabbed another. She rummaged through the pantry again, found what she was looking for, and dropped a tea bag in one of the mugs before pouring hot water from the kettle into both.
She set them down on the island, then hopped up so she was sitting next to Gabe, their shoulders just barely brushing. He made a small noise when she picked up the mug with tea and held it out to him. He flinched at the warmth of the ceramic and stared down at it for a while as Diana sipped her coffee next to him.
Gabe finally looked up at her questioningly, when he could parse out nothing from the tea.
“You like it,” Diana said simply, shrugging.
She’d learned that from Dan, when she was reorganizing the pantry one day and came across the box of tea bags. She’d asked if they were hers—another thing she’d forgotten, though that felt like an odd thing to forget—and Dan had answered with fondness in his voice that they were Gabe’s. Her son despised coffee. She’d made herself remember that, placing it carefully on a mental shelf along with everything else related to Gabriel. Dan sometimes struggled to keep up with Gabe’s jazz performance dates or his classes at school or his friends, but he got a box of Gabe’s favorite kind of tea without fail whenever he was on grocery duty. (Although recently, Dan had noted, Gabe had been running on Red Bulls more often than tea.)
Gabe looked back down at the mug, brow furrowed. “...Yeah,” he agreed, soft and almost hesitant.
They sat on the counter in silence for several minutes, Diana occasionally lifting her mug to take a drink and Gabe pointedly watching the morning sunlight filtering in through the windows.
“Your piece is coming along well,” Diana told him.
She didn’t expect a full-body recoil. Gabe leaned away from her, shoulders rising and eyes snapping back to her face. “What?”
“Your piece,” Diana repeated. “I hear you working on it sometimes, when you’re home. It sounds nice. Are you improvising to find what sounds good, or do you have a certain melody in mind?”
It was mostly guitar she heard, but he’d occasionally switch to piano too, either for variety so he wouldn’t get bored or because he planned to write parts for both. The song was a solemn one, slow and thoughtful. Even mournful, like it was grieving something.
Gabe stared at her for a very long moment, as if he wasn’t sure she meant what she said. When he determined she was truthful, he answered, “A bit of both, I think. I have ideas, sometimes, but others it just sort of…” He trailed off. Every word he said sounded like he was testing the waters. Sharing a little more, but ready to retreat again if he sensed something he didn’t like.
“I don’t know how you can do that,” Diana laughed. “Just…play, I mean. You didn’t get it from your father. You certainly didn’t get it from me.”
Again, that feeling that she was missing something—something important. Triggered by the discussion of music. She pushed the feeling back.
Gabe looked at her with what seemed like surprise, blinking in confusion.
“Never let me near a french horn,” Diana said, trying to make her face as serious as possible. “I’d long since learned that music was far from my strong suit, but I guess I was still holding onto hope in middle school. The director was glad to see me leave. He probably rejoiced when my name wasn’t on the high school band roster.”
It startled a snort out of Gabe. Her son laughed, quiet but real, and Diana realized that was the first time she’d heard a genuine laugh from him since she’d gotten home.
“But you’d sing some when I was a baby,” Gabe said, and the tiny smile on his face froze.
Not left, froze. Stuck there as, for some reason, panic sparked in his eyes.
She sang when he was a baby. For a moment, the missing feeling got so heavy and so insistent that she could barely breathe, as if her lungs were being squeezed by it. Diana spoke around it. “What did I sing?”
Gabe’s voice was suddenly very small, almost regretful. “Lullabies.”
She was close. She could feel it—she was so close to opening that locked door in the back of her mind. But it remained just out of reach. She hadn’t yet found the key.
“Was I good?” she asked.
Gabe swallowed and stared hard at his mug. “I can’t really remember,” he admitted, voice tight. “I mean, I was really little, and it wasn’t a lot. I didn’t hear you sing very much when I got older, so. I couldn’t judge.”
That didn’t sound exactly right to Diana, but it wasn’t like she could argue. There wasn’t anything she could call on to justify why it sounded wrong.
Surely she sang to her son more often than that. When she was rocking him to sleep or feeding him or—
Surely. Surely she’d been around.
Right?
Gabe lifted his mug and took a sip. It probably wasn’t warm enough to taste very good by now, but he was content to pretend otherwise, it seemed. He let out a shaky sigh.
“Do you, uhm…” Diana said, then stopped. She’d had an idea before, one she’d been thinking over constantly for a day or two before she could work up the courage to voice it, but the question stuck in her throat. She wasn’t sure why she was suddenly so nervous. She tried again. “I was going to look through the other photo albums, see if they helped me remember more. Do you want to…look at them with me? Help fill things in, if you want?”
Her son froze, staring straight ahead. The sunlight shifted and caught his eyes, lightening them and making them just a little easier to read.
He looked…scared.
Diana frowned. Wondered why. If that was something else related to what she couldn’t recall.
Then Gabe smiled, sliding down from the counter, but it looked controlled. Performed. Too much so to be natural. He kept one hand on the island, steadying himself subtly enough that he could play it off as just resting it there, if he chose to.
“Sure,” Gabe said, setting his half-empty mug down a bit too harshly on the counter. Perhaps remembering how much he’d helped the first time—the supermarket episode, the fire, the car, the cat.
“Thanks.” Diana got to her feet and put a hand on her son’s shoulder, waiting out the second where he went still. Once he relaxed, she let go of him. Then wordlessly opened a drawer—empty enough that she felt like something more must have been there—and set his medicine on the counter next to his lukewarm tea. “See you then?”
Gabe’s eyes flickered as he watched her get out the pill bottles and registered that they were his. Barely noticeable, but there. He met her gaze, and she realized that he was surprised. A kind of surprised that hurt her. A kind of surprised that suggested she shouldn’t care enough to notice he was still hurting and act on that, even if it was just acknowledging that she knew.
“See you,” Gabriel echoed.
Diana reached up and tapped his cheek lightly, cupping his chin as she smiled at him and walked away. He leaned into her touch, looking lost as he stood there behind the island, framed by sunlight.
Maybe he could help her with this. And maybe she could know him, whether that was all over again, or for the first time.
She wanted to know everything.