New chapter time! Sorry I haven't updated Fire of Unknown Origin in a few days; that will be coming soon!
And again, I still don't own anything.
Teresa reached the river and looked upstream. A couple of kids were playing, tossing rocks in the flowing water and pointing out the ripples. That's what it looked like they were doing anyway, it was rather hard to see.
She looked across the river, where the water led to land, and then back into darkness, with just the stars above. There wasn't even much of a moon, which made seeing incredibly difficult. Teresa tucked her hair behind her ear. "Jane?" she called out. No answer. Of course. She headed downriver, becoming more conscious than usual that she was barefoot.
It really was hard to see. She could barely make out the stray trees, coming up out of the ground like arms trying to claw their way from the earth. Or the…Teresa stopped, feeling an unpleasant chill come over her as she saw the form at the edge of the river. "Jane," she said meaning it to come out much louder than it did. She picked up her skirt to move faster, hoping that she was just hallucinating the shape of her husband with the top half of his body in the river. "Jane!"
She fell down next to him and grabbed his shirt, hauling him out of the water and pulling him into her lap. His eyes were closed, his face seemed too pale in the dim moonlight, and he was limp. "No," she said to him loudly, as if she was lecturing him on his current state. She let out a sound that she was sure would attract some sort of prairie animal, standing and pulling him up by the under arms. "Jane, wake up!" she shouted, shaking him. His head flopped around, his limbs hung down, and she was strong, but not strong enough to keep him up like this. She dragged his body a few more feet before lowering him to the ground, glad that the slight incline going down to the river left his feet higher than his head. "Help!" She shouted, her lungs already hurting from the force. "Help!"
She slapped Jane across the face. His head lolled over to one side. She slapped it back the other way. Nothing. She looked up and saw some people running toward her. She wiped a tear from her eye and pushed down on Jane's stomach with both of her hands. "Jane!" she shouted again, leaning over to slam her head against his chest while she continued to press down on his stomach, desperate to get him to expel water.
The first one to reach her was Minelli, Luther not far behind. "How long has he been like that?" The former demanded, dropping down next to her. "How long?"
"I don't know," she said, continuing to beat his chest and stomach.
"Stop it, stop it!" Minelli said, pushing her back as gently as he could. "That's not helping." He rolled Jane over and motioned for Teresa to grab his feet. "Hold them up," the cattle man demanded. "Stand up, and hold them up."
She obliged, watching while Minelli turned Jane's head to the side. "Luther, you worthless Mama's boy, stop standing there and put your hand on his head," Minelli demanded. The younger man, who did appear scared stiff, dropped to his knees and obliged. Minelli began pounding Jane on the back, shouting at Teresa to keep holding his feet up.
For a few moments, it looked like it was going to be all for nothing. Teresa bit her lip. Then, the wonderful sound of choking filled the night air, and she saw, in the dim moon light, her husband coughing up the river water.
Teresa dropped to the ground near him and grabbed his hand. "Jane! Jane!"
Her husband's eyes were still closed, but he was no longer spitting up water, and she could hear him begin to breathe normally again. She rolled him over and pulled him into her lap again, his shoulders against the bottom of her rib cage, and hugged him tightly.
"Ma?"
She turned to see Kimball and Grace run up to her, looking horrified. "Oh my God," her son said, falling to his knees next to his mother and putting an arm around her. "Is he okay?"
"He's breathing," she said, letting out a relieved sigh and becoming aware of just how sore her eyes were. "He's going to be okay." She felt her son squeeze her shoulder reassuringly.
"Jane," she said, looking down at him. His eyes opened and they fixated on her.
And he spoke.
And his words hurt a million times more than her eyes.
She didn't know what to do. She didn't know what to say or what to feel. All she knew was that the empty, lonely, terrifying feeling that had come over her when she saw him by the river had returned. And this time it was almost worse.
Hello. Who are you?
Who was she? She was his wife. She was the woman who had brought him back to Earth after years of spending his days in nothing but a severely depressed state. She was the one who was packing up everything and going out into the great unknown for him to avenge the murders of his old family. She was the one who had saved him.
But he didn't remember. He didn't remember anything. He didn't remember her, he didn't remember his first wife, and he didn't remember his first daughter. He didn't remember Red John Bandit.
And because he didn't remember all that grief, he couldn't possibly remember how much that Teresa had done for him, given him, and cared about him. And without remembering that, there was no reason to remember her. Because she had helped him deal with grief that he no longer knew existed.
"Is this going to be forever?" Grace asked a doctor in the group.
He shook his head. "I've heard of people who never get their memory back. I've heard of people who have, I…there is no possible way to give a guarantee in this area."
When she relayed that message to her mother, Teresa had nearly broken down again. But this time, she held it together, pitching the tent for the night while Jane sat near the wagon, drawing in the sand with his finger.
She walked over and sat beside him. "What are you doing?"
"See this?" he said to her, pointing. She looked, barely able to see what he had drawn. A house, a square with a triangle roof, and an X making the square into four other triangles. "Yes."
"Drew it with one line," he told her. "Can you do that?"
"Um…" she leaned forward and began to repeat the image. One line short. "Hang on," she said, attempting it again. Same problem. A third try yielded a dissimilar result.
"So," Jane said after a silence. "You're my wife?"
She nodded. "I am."
"Well, I don't know much about your personality, responsibility, loyalty, or affection," he said, "but on looks alone, it would seem that I have a pretty good taste."
She smiled, wondering why in the Hell that line made her blush a little. "Well," she said, "everyone thinks they have good taste."
He smiled. "I suppose so," he conceded. "Here, point your finger," he said, taking her hand and tracing the house in the sand, using only one line. "That's how you do it."
"I see," she said, smiling. She didn't see. She didn't know what the heck he did differently than she had. But she'd take it. Him showing her tricks after giving her an opportunity to figure it out was just like the Patrick Jane that she knew, and it reassured her. He was alive and he might remember everything in the morning. She just needed to give him time.
"Are you tired?" she asked him. "You've had quite the night."
"So I hear," he said. "I am. Is this where we sleep?" he asked, pointing to the tent.
"It's where you will sleep tonight," she said. "You've had a long day, I'm going to sleep over with the kids."
"We have kids!" Jane exclaimed. "How many?"
"My-my kids," she said. "I have…children. You're my second husband."
"Ah," Jane said. He looked over at her, and then back at the tent. "Are you angry with me?" he asked her.
"No!" she protested. "Of course not. Why?"
"Well," he said, "I almost died, and you're spending the night in another tent."
Teresa blinked. "Oh…" she said, struggling for words. She thought that he might want his space, but he sounded hurt that she wanted to be away from him. And really, it wasn't that, it was her thinking that he might want to be away from her. It wasn't like he loved her, she was someone who he was just told was his wife. But at the same time… "I'll sleep in the tent with you," she said, reaching out and taking his hand. He squeezed it, as the real Jane did, but he didn't run his thumb up and down the side of her hand a couple of times. The real Jane always did that.
The crawled into the tent and he settled down on his back, folding his hands over his chest. She lay down next to him, also on her back, wanting to hold him and fall asleep thanking God that he was alive, but at the same time feeling too weird to do it. Because he didn't know her. She'd be holding a man who didn't know how much they'd been through, and that just felt wrong.
"I'm so glad that he's okay," Grace said as she helped Kimball set up the tent.
"Yeah," he said. "That was close." He looked up. "Who do you think did that to him?"
"I don't know," she said, shaking her head and biting her lower lip. "I didn't know anyone here didn't like him that much. People didn't like him back home either, but…you never got anyone attempting to kill him."
"You know what else never would have happened back home?" Kimball said. "Or you know what would never have happened before that guy came into our life?"
Grace looked confused. "What?"
"Ma would notice that Wayne hasn't been home all night either."
"He's just going for a walk with Sarah," she said.
"Yeah," Kimball agreed. "But Ma would have noticed that."
