His Forbidden Bride: 50 Loving States, West Virginia (12 page)

“
I
’m coming home
!” my brother hollers on the other side of phone. “I’m coming home right now!!!”

“No, Curt!” I insist on a whisper in the bathroom of our Las Vegas hotel room.

“So you call a sister up, tell her you pregnant, and you about to break the news to Daddy tomorrow, but no, you don’t want Cee-Cee to come home. Bitch, you is out your monkey-ass mind if you think that is even a request I’m capable of granting!”

“Curt, please don’t make me regret calling you instead of Sola,” I whisper into the phone.

“Why you whispering?” Curt demands. Then before I can answer, “I wish you would call that Guatemalan bitch first. I wish I could flash forward in that alternative timeline just to see how far up your ass my heel would be if you called all the way over to fucking Russia before you called me in Chicago.”

“Seriously, Curt, please talk to me like a regular human being. I really need my brother right now. Not Cee-Cee…”

He must hear the real desperation in my tone because his voice drops a dramatic octave, and the next voice I hear is the one of the man who told me he would always be my brother, right before he left for a tour to perform as Glammette Jackson in his first headliner drag show.

“Okay, Nitra, I’m here for you, baby girl. I’m listening,” he says, just as C-Mello’s heavily gangsterized version of “We Are Family” starts playing in the background of our call.

“Isn’t that your cue?”

“Them bitches can wait. Talk to me.”

“It’s nothing. I just need your blessing.”

“My blessing for what?”

I bite my lip and look down at the thin wedding band on my hand, thinking back to earlier in the day.

* * *

“
I
s
it okay if I use some of your money to buy something?” John asked as we crossed into the Eastside Las Vegas city limits.

“It’s not my money, it’s yours,” I repeated for like the umpteenth time on our multi-day trip across America.

“So that’s a yes?”

“It’s a ‘do whatever you want with it,’” I answered, unable to keep the irritation out of my voice. Seriously, the closer we got to California, the bitchier I felt.

The prospect of having to introduce John to Dad. And even worse, having to confess everything about my past. My stomach was rolling for reasons that had nothing to do with my first trimester.

“Woods,” John said, tearing me away from my thoughts.

“What?” I asked, coming back to the boiling hot Las Vegas afternoon. We planned to stop here for the night after four days on the road. A long trip by anyone’s standards, but not nearly long enough as far as I was concerned. There were less than twenty-four hours between now and when John discovered who I really was.

“You said I needed to pick out a new name, and I like being out in the woods. So I decided that’s going to be my new name.”

“Woods,” I repeated with a little smile. “I like that.”

He grinned over at me. “For real, Doc? You could see yourself being with a man named Woods for the rest of your life?”

“Sure,” I answered, my mood much lighter because he smiled at me. “At least until you remember your real name.”

The smile faded then. And I was struck once more by how little concern he seemed to have about his focal amnesia.

“Woods,” I started to say, a soft introduction to a heavy song. “That’s something we’re going to have to deal with when we get to Seattle. Remember what I said last week about seeing somebody?”

He nodded. “Yeah, I do, Doc. And I’ll do it. I’ll do anything you want me to do. You know that, right?”

This love of his...like ten different red flags from my psych classes go off in my brain, even as my heart melts.

“I know,” I answered, giving him the simplest reply I can, because everything in our lives will be so much more complicated after he meets my dad. And Sandy. Oh God, Sandy…

The only thing that kept me from having a low grade panic attack at just the thought of how tomorrow will go down is the man across from me declaring, “All right, my name’s Woods from now on. That’s settled. On to the next topic. You know you’ve got to become my wife before the baby’s born, right? This ain’t something we’re going to have to discuss tonight in bed, is it?”

Discuss tonight
. His version of a threat…and of settling seemingly every argument.

But then he sobered and said, “Seriously, Doc. I want this settled before I meet your daddy. Say you’ll marry me.”

My breath hitched as I realized this is it. He’s asking me to marry him. For real. Like, this is a real life proposal happening right now as we drive through Las Vegas.

“Technically, you’re not allowed to drive this car,” I answered on my choked breath. “Much less marry me without any kind of ID.”

“So if I had some ID you’d marry me?” he asked.

“If you had some ID, you’d remember who you are and then maybe you wouldn’t want to marry me. Especially if you already have someone waiting for you back home,” I answered.

He lifted my knuckles to his lips. “There ain’t nobody but you, Doc.”

I shook my head. Looked north, even though my mind is casting south. In the direction of wherever he got his accent from, and the possible real girlfriend who has no clue where he is.

As if reading my mind, he said, “You keep wondering if I have a girl out there, scared I forgot somebody important. But you’re new to me, Doc. And these feelings I got for you, they’re new, too. It ain’t just that I can’t remember, it’s that I can’t fucking imagine feeling about somebody else the way I feel about you. So stop feeling guilty about a woman who don’t exist. There’s only you, Doc. I know in my soul there ain’t nobody else.”

His words sped up my heart. How could they not? But…

“Getting a new ID won’t be easy. Remember our conversation about the lawyer? And even with a lawyer, Seattle’s going to want you to at least do due diligence. Your patient file is pretty inconclusive as far as your mental health is concerned.”

He sifted through my words and came back with, “You’re trying to say you think I’m crazy. Crazy for feeling the way I do about you. Crazy for wanting to marry you.”

“No, I’m not saying that,” I answered, though obviously I’d been thinking it. “What I am saying is TBIs change people, and we should get you more tests when we get to Seattle since they did such a half-ass job back in West Virginia because you weren’t covered by…”

I stopped, suddenly realizing, “Yes, we should get married! That’s exactly what we should do. As soon as we can get you a new social security number. That way you’ll have excellent health insurance and access to the best doctors.”

“Doc, I only got about four months of real memories, but I’m going to tell you right now: that is the least romantic marriage proposal acceptance there ever was.”

“Sorry,” I said, seeing why he might feel that way. “But I’m a doctor. Hospital shows notwithstanding, a lot of us can be, um, weirdly analytical. To us, solving the problem is often more romantic than planning the wedding.”

He considered me for a long hard moment, then let me off with a lazy grin. “That’s all right. I’ll take it.”

Then he made a sharp right.

“Where are we going,” I asked as Waze busily recalculated the route on his smartphone screen.

“You’ll see,” he answered as he made another sharp right into a strip mall parking lot.

He quickly found a spot, and when I looked up, there was a jewelry store looming over our little car, our little relationship, so big it blocked out the sun.

* * *

A
nd a few hours later
, I’m on the phone with my brother, asking for his blessing while looking down at my brand new wedding band.

“Here’s my promise to you, Dr. Anitra Dunhill,” Woods said, as he slipped the simple silver band I picked out onto my finger, right there in front of the sales person standing behind the glass counter.

Then he turned to the seller who’d rung up our humble purchase, all while peering at me in a suspicious manner.

“Know what? I’ll take this same one in a men’s size for me too.”

Woods may very well be crazy. He insisted on wearing his own wedding ring, even after I told him most men don’t wear a ring before they’re officially married. At least, not unless they’re Irish.

“Then I guess I must be Irish,” Woods answered as we made our way to the cheap hotel room I’d booked for us on Priceline. “Because that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I don’t want any confusion about my intentions when I meet your daddy…”

“That is fucked up romantic, sis,” my brother declares on the other end of the line, after I finish telling him the story. “And you say he good in bed, too? I don’t care if he crazy. You got big brother’s blessing, and a ‘go head with your bad self, Miss Nitra!’”

A host of annoyed deep voices sound in the background, and I can hear the crowd chanting angrily.

“Thank you, Curt. You better get to your show,” I say.

“Either that or go troll the local ERs for an amnesia victim. You got me wondering now. Though I am sad I won’t be there when you introduce him to Daddy.”

I groan at the mention of the meeting. “Please don’t call him and tell him about this,” I say, knowing how those two love to gossip. “I really don’t want to give him time to formulate a reaction to the news.”

“Yeah, you probably right about that. Sandy said she made sure there weren’t no more real guns in the house when we moved, but you never know with him.”

“Okay, bye Cee-Cee…” I say with a real chill going down my back. “Love you.”

“Mwah, love you too, Nee-Nee. Now let me stuff this dick back into my hot pants and go wave these fake titties!”

I laugh, amused as always by my brother’s refusal to take anything in life that isn’t death seriously. “Break both them legs,” I tell him, before getting off the phone, already knowing he will.

Then I go back out to the hotel room. To the real life scenario that’s even crazier than anything my brother could possibly come up with for his show.

I find Woods already in bed. In typical fashion, he’s found an old movie for us to watch.

“
West Side Story
,” I say, recognizing it with a fond grin.

“Is that what it’s called?” he answers, holding out his now cast-free arm so I can get in bed with him.

“Who were you talking to in the bathroom?” he asks after I curl up beside him.

So he’d heard. Or guessed.

“My brother,” I answer.

“You tell him about us?”

“Yeah, everything.”

“And what’d he say?”

“Basically, go’on girl. But he’s a drag queen so, you know, his response to this is going to be different from most.”

“A drag queen…”

“A man who dresses and performs as a woman. He also dates other men, but never when he’s dressed as a woman. It’s kind of complicated, but he’s one of the best friends I have in the world, other than Sola,” I explain. And then I wait. For him to say something bad about my brother. For him to give me an excuse to stop being crazy about him.

But after a moment he says, “I do recall seeing somebody like that on one of them reality shows when I was in the hospital. I remember thinking, that it was definitely new.”

“New good? Or new bad?”

“He’s your brother and you love him, so he’s got to be new good, unless something he’s doing is hurting you in some way,” he answers, as if feelings of sexual orientation are a simple matter of family loyalty.

Maybe on a base level they are to him. But I have to admit, “You’re taking this way better than my mother did. She’s an evangelical pastor. Is that concept old or new?”

“Old,” he answers after a moment of thought. And strangely, this is when he chooses to tense up. Then he says, “We got a long drive tomorrow. Mind if we just watch the movie?”

No, I don’t. But there’s one more thing I’ve got to deal with before we get to L.A.

“Ah, John—I mean Woods. How would you feel about me introducing you as my husband tomorrow? It will, ah…” I struggle to come up with a good excuse, and end up settling for, “…be easier if everyone thinks we’re already married.”