Me Again by Keith Cronin Page A

more vulnerable, although I wasn’t sure just how. So once again, I let the falsehoods fly, marveling at how easily they flowed from my lips.
    “I remember the basic stuff,” I began. “Who I am, my family, my girlfriend. Well, my ex-girlfriend.”
    Brandon cringed. “Yeah, I wondered about that – that’s gotta be awkward as hell.”
    “You knew Victoria left me?”
    Brandon gave me an odd look and tugged uncomfortably at his collar. “Yeah,” he said, “I think maybe Teddy mentioned something about that to me.”
    “She moved on,” I said. “And I really can’t blame her. I guess she has some new boyfriend now.”
    “Yeah, that’s what I hear.” He was still staring at me. “You seem to be taking it well.”
    Again I shrugged. “What can I do?”
    Brandon stared at me a moment longer, then sank heavily into the chair. “How about work? What do you remember from Fisk and Tucker?”
    “That part’s really foggy.”
    His eyes narrowed. “You said that already. How foggy are we talking?”
    I tried to lighten things up a bit. “Let’s just say O’Hare is still totally fogged in,” I said, pulling a phrase out of God knows where. I’d probably heard it on a TV weather report. Slang, cliché, metaphor – all of it was right there, as long as I was lying. But trying to say something halfway intelligent to Rebecca in words that contained more than a syllable was still a major effort. The way my brain worked really worried me.
    “But the fog is going to clear up, right?” Brandon said, again leaning forward.
    “It’s clearing,” I said, “slowly but surely.” Well, the slowly part was accurate, at least. “But there are still a lot of patches of fog.” At this point I reflected that I had probably wrung as much mileage as I could from my fog metaphor.
    Brandon said, “Speaking of O’Hare, is all your stuff still up in Chicago?”
    “What stuff?”
    “The stuff you owned when you lived there. Your car, your clothes, your furniture.”
    “Oh. My mother said it’s all in storage. I haven’t seen any of it yet.”
    “Down here or up there?”
    “I don’t understand.”
    “Your stuff – is it down here in Springfield, or up in Chicago?”
    “Chicago,” I said. A month or so into my coma – back when there was still some hope that I would recover – my parents had decided to pack up and store all my belongings in Chicago, thinking it would make it easier for me to get back to my life up there. So much for that plan.
    Brandon’s face brightened. “Well, maybe I could look through your stuff when I go back home. You know, to see if there’s any sign of where you put the money. Maybe you wrote something down. I mean, you probably stuck the money in a safe deposit box or something, right?”
    I didn’t know. But what I did know was that there was no way I’d let this guy look through my belongings unsupervised.
    “Actually,” I said, “the first thing I’m going to do when they let me out of here is go check on my storage space. If you want, I can let you know, and we can go there together.” This was not going to happen, at least not on my first trip to the warehouse. But it seemed to placate him.
    “Yeah, well, I guess that would be okay,” Brandon allowed. “Any idea how soon that will happen?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know yet. I’m hoping to get out of here in a few weeks, but it may be a while before I’m ready to make the trip to Chicago.”
    “But you’ll let me know when you do, right?”
    “Definitely,” I lied. “Make sure you give me your number before you go.”
    * * * * *
    After Brandon left, I closed the door and sat back down on my bed, replaying the conversation. His visit had chipped away more of the stone in which my past life was encased. But the fossil that was being unearthed was beginning to frighten me.
    I’d had my suspicions, to be sure. But now I was finding out that not only was I a jerk; I was a thief. A crook. Some kind of