Tears flooded my eyes as I saw myself, my life, from the outside in. In a sense, James and Chris were both right. I’d let them both down. Because I hadn’t been able to love either one of them as I’d loved Tim.
I’d given them everything I had. But it hadn’t been enough because I hadn’t been able to give them my whole heart.
I wondered if either one of them had ever known that.
Maybe, if James hadn’t done what he’d done . . .
No. Closing my mind to all thoughts of James—as I’d been doing since that last night I’d seen him—I reached the house Chris and I shared, forgoing the front door for the side gate and out to the separately keyed office that had been our deciding factor on purchasing the house several years before.
And thoughts of James protruded again. Had his actions that night on the country road ruined me for everyone who would come after, just as he’d said? But not in the way he’d said? Not morally, but emotionally? And physically?
Just as I was incapable of feeling sexual desire, was I also incapable of loving completely?
Unlocking the door, I stepped inside, taking in the solid oak desk, the love seat with Raggedy Ann quilts and pillows and dolls that faced me every day as I wrote, to the wall of shelves and drawers that held my supplies. In the back, through another door, was a very small but perfectly fine lavatory.
The office was exactly the same as I’d left it the day before. Papers strewn across my desk. The chair pushed back.
It seemed more open. Like there was more air in the room.
My marriage had ended years before. I knew that. I didn’t want to let go, to admit defeat. I didn’t want to be a failure.
I didn’t want to be someone who let my husband down.
I didn’t want to believe that trying hard, giving everything I had, just wasn’t enough.
And I didn’t want to waste another minute trying to be something I was not. Trying to compensate for my past. I’d spent twenty-seven years of my life trying to be enough, and here I was, forty-seven years old and all alone. And what I suddenly understood was that I was enough. Why a prostitute in my ex-husband’s bed had brought it all home to me I didn’t know, but I didn’t really care, either. I was who I was. And that was okay.
What wasn’t okay was being dead alive.
Eighteen
TIM GOT UP AT HIS NORMAL TIME, MADE COFFEE, grabbed a bowl of cereal, and turned on the TV for some sitcom rerun company before hitting the shower. It was another cold January day. Monday. A good day because it was a new one. He’d made it through a not-good Sunday. One of those rare days in a guy’s life that asked more questions than it answered. Questions for which there were no answers.
He was ready to tackle the world by the time he was in his truck and heading out to the plant. If life was missing something, he’d find it. He was a wild spirit. A man who had to be able to get up and go. Before long he was going to quit his job and head out to see what the world had to offer. Maybe he’d drive a semi.
Or get his real estate license, buy cheap homes, fix them up, and sell them for a profit.
There was only opportunity ahead.
A brief thought of the night before intruded. Would the message he’d left on Classmates.com ever find Tara, or would it be lost in cyberspace forever? She was someone he’d known and loved. Sad to think that he might never hear from or see her again.
Still, life was changing and he was going to change right along with it. That decision made, he sipped from his coffee, upped the volume on the radio, turned at the next corner, and took a different route to work.
I sat in my chair just like I did every morning. I clicked on my media player, choosing Grady Soine’s Beautiful album, with which I started every single workday.
And I opened my e-mail program. I’d go through the messages so they wouldn’t be calling out to me, and then close the program and give myself over to writing for the rest of the day. I had a system. It worked for me.
I saw the name and thought it was one of those eye tricks. The kind that showed you a puddle of water ahead when you were lost in the desert. My stomach was tumbling, my heart pounding, and I looked again.
Tim Barney.
In the subject column. Couldn’t be the same Tim Barney. I took myself in hand as I stared at the name. Tim was a common name. Barney probably was, too, though I hadn’t personally run across it ever again in my life.
What had it been? Twenty-seven years? I was forty-seven. Tim would be, too.
Tim Barney.
It wasn’t him. Glancing over the other e-mails awaiting my attention, I kept seeing that name.
I was going to open it, of course. I had to. Just in case. But I’d clear out my inbox first. I’d be practical and take care of business. Then, just before I started work, I’d bother to look at the e-mail just to make sure it was someone trying to sell me something.
Maybe a top spot on search engines for the TTQ website.
Or maybe it was one of those Dearly Beloveds, as I called them. The ones where someone had left me a fortune and I just had to give up all my personal information to collect my funds. Or someone was dying and wanted to send me their money for safekeeping.
Maybe it was . . .
I clicked. Before I’d looked at a single other e-mail.
And I came up blank. The message was from Classmates.com. It told me that someone I knew, someone from my past, a Tim Barney, had sent me a message.
Tim Barney had sent me a message, but it wasn’t there for me to see it? Was this some kind of joke?
A really sick one?
And then I remembered registering Tara Gumser at Classmates. com just the month before. I’d listed my e-mail address for Classmates. com to send me private messages but not to share with anyone else.
They’d just sent me a message.
I had to retrieve it. It had to be my Tim. What other Tim Barney would have sent Tara Gumser a message?
With shaking fingers I clicked on the URL in the message, which took me to the Classmates.com website. I quickly filled in my username and password. My stomach was in knots.
My Tim was only seconds away. He’d contacted me. He remembered me.
The screen changed and . . .
The message wasn’t there. Another one was, from Classmates. com. I’d only completed their free registration. If I wanted to receive messages through them I had to join their club. I had to pay $15. But more than that, I had to share more personal information than I could share.
“Damn.” I said aloud. And right clicked on Tim’s name. I searched for him on Classmates.com. I went out on the Internet and ran a search for him. I was pretty computer savvy. I’d find him. One way or another.
Or not.
Two hours later, writing time passed with zero pages to show for it, I was back on the Classmates.com website, typing in my personal information. I paid my fifteen dollars. With shaking hands, and a stomach that was now doing flip-flops, I waited.
The screen changed.
And . . .
WOW! I can’t believe that I actually found you. I was going thru some of my old stuff today and ran across some of your letters and started wondering how you were doing. I’m still in the Dayton area and doing pretty good. I would love to hear from you and hear about your life. Are you a famous reporter yet??
Please feel free to e-mail me. If I don’t hear from you, I understand. Talk soon.
P.S. I guess I just assume that you remember who I am. I was that crazy long-haired guy from Eaton that went to Wright State with you back in 1970 something. You broke my heart and ran away to Alabama to go to college to be a famous newspaper writer (haha). Seriously, it would be nice to hear from you if that’s okay.
Tim Barney
If I remembered him?
It was Tim Barney. My Tim Barney.
I sat. I stared. I turned up the music. Turned it off. I couldn’t believe it.
I had to move. To work off excess energy. I must have had too much
diet cola. I had to use the restroom. Urgently.
I had to call someone.
Who would I call?
For so long the only person I reported to, good or bad, had been Chris. He didn’t like to spread our information around. He said people judged. And didn’t forget.
Back in front of my computer screen, I read the note again. I had to answer Tim. I had to tell him I hadn’t broken his heart. He’d broken mine. More than once.
I hit reply.
No, that didn’t work. It was going back to Classmates.com.
I read again what he’d written.
He’d given me his private e-mail address.
I had a book due. Two of them. I had hundreds of pages to write in a matter of weeks.
I had business e-mail to tend to.
I copied that e-mail address, opened another post window, and pasted. I addressed an e-mail to Tim Barney.
Sitting back, I couldn’t quit grinning. At that moment, I didn’t care that I was forty-seven years old. I didn’t feel forty-seven. I felt like I was eighteen again. And fully alive.
Really, truly alive.
Like I hadn’t been since that night on the country road with James.
The memory might have stopped me, before. It had stopped me the last time I’d seen Tim, that day in the summer of 1980 when he’d come to see me.
But I was Tara Taylor Quinn now. A woman who’d learned that she could take care of herself just fine. A woman with friends who cared about her. A woman of worth.
Old history was just that—old. I’d left it behind. As of this morning. I’d heard from Tim the very same day I’d broken from my old life and was finally seeing myself honestly. The timing was not a mistake. It urged me on.
Tim wasn’t in the past. He was saying hello now. And I wanted to answer him.
I had to answer him.
I scrolled down and started typing.
Coming in from the factory floor where he’d been supervising the trial of a machine he’d designed to mold plastic to go around a windshield, Tim stopped at his desk in the engineering office to check his e-mail and see what fires he had to put out there before he could start on the design waiting for him.
The engineering portion of his job he enjoyed. The managerial bull was usually a huge time waste.
Tara Taylor Quinn.
Who in the hell was that? Some toolmaker trolling for business? Didn’t sound like a toolmaker. Probably just junk mail.
He clicked.
And skimmed what was there. Wait. Was this his Tara?
Skipping down to the bottom of the e-mail, Tim read the signature. Sure enough. It was Tara.
His heart was racing, and he could feel the grin stretching across his face. Sounds around him faded. Everything faded. He was in another world as he kept reading.
Tim,
I finally got in to get the message. It kept sending me to different places.
Of course I remember you! You were my first love—my first boyfriend. My mother and I were talking about you not long ago.
I was just in Ohio in October on book tour and drove by the Eaton exit and was telling my traveling companion about you.
No, not a famous reporter, but I’m a USA Today bestselling author, believe it or not!
There was more. Her mother was widowed and in Arizona. Tara was living in Albuquerque. Chum was dead.
And, about breaking your heart, I hope not. I was a kid breaking free of the binds my chauvinist father put on me, and you got caught in the backlash. I always cared about you, and the way I remember feeling, I would have come back in the end—I just didn’t know how to communicate that. I also wasn’t ever confident that you really loved me. My issue, not yours.
I’m looking forward to hearing from you.
Tara
Of course I remember you, she’d written. Deep down he’d known she would. She wouldn’t forget him. How could she after all the things they’d done together?
Now he had to come up with some witty response. Could he keep her attention? He had to know details. Like, was she married? Did she have kids? Was she married? When was she traveling to his part of the country again? Was she married?
Was she happy without him?
He was going through a rough time. But just because he’d realized that most of his life’s unhappiness was tied up in his loss of her didn’t mean that she’d suffered similarly. She could be happily married.
But she’d said, I look forward to hearing from you. He read the words again.
I look forward to hearing from you. She must want him to write her back.
He hit reply and typed. There was so much to tell her. So much he had to say.
Whether she was happily married or not.
I didn’t close my e-mail program.
I grabbed up the three-hundred-page line-edited manuscript I had to make it through that day. I stared at all the scrawled handwriting, the changes my editor had made. And the notes she’d made in the margins—all issues I had to tend to. And I watched the e-mail icon in the bar at the bottom of my computer screen. Was a message coming in?
He could have had my message in seconds. And have had it read in another minute or two. Could be typing a reply . . .
Or he could be away from his desk.
I got up. Went into the bathroom. Came back out. Stepped outside the office for some warm desert sunshine on the cool January day.
I was forty-seven, not eighteen. I had a life. Had to think about where I wanted to live for the next month or so—I already knew where I going to settle. I was going to move to Phoenix where my mother was.
I visited her several times a year and loved it there. Even more than I loved Albuquerque.
I just had to figure out logistics. And I’d been away from my computer long enough.
Still nothing.
He might have read my reply and moved on. His having searched for me didn’t have to mean anything. With all of the social media available these days, people were commonly looking up old acquaintances, saying hi for old times’ sake, and moving on.
Just because they could.
Tim had been that once-in-a-lifetime spark for me. That didn’t mean I’d been that for him.
Or that it mattered, now. I was a very different woman from the girl he’d known.
I’d walked through hell and come out on the other side.
I’d found and accessed my inner strength.
And I had no interest in sex.
I sat. Clicked on the album for the current work in progress and forced myself to sink into the world that I’d created.
Until 12:57 PM. 2:57 PM his time. My icon popped up, followed by a flash of the message that had just come in.
It was dated January 22, 2007.
Tara: I can tell you’re a writer (haha). Your life sounds great, I’m very proud of you. I’m at work right now. I will send you an e-mail later tonight to catch you up. Note my cell #. I would love to hear your voice.
Talk later, Tim
I stared at the number at the bottom of the page. He told me to note it. So I did. I memorized it. But I wasn’t calling him.
I had no idea what he wanted from me. Or what I could give him. But my heart was pounding. What would his letter say? How much of himself was he going to share with me?
I wanted to know it all.
Twenty-seven years had passed since I’d heard from him, and with one e-mail I was right back where I’d been at twenty.
Aching for him.
Chapter Nineteen
THE AFTERNOON WAS LONG. I DIDN’T HEAR FROM CHRIS, but I hadn’t expected to. He was done with me. I understood that. I got through about 100 pages of changes. And when 3:00 PM arrived, 5:00 PM for Tim in Ohio, quitting time I surmised, I started to watch the computer again. Each time a new e-mail popped up my stomach jumped.
His name popped up at 3:46 PM my time. Forty-six minutes after he’d gotten off work.
I clicked on the post. And stopped once again. There was
no letter. Just a note saying the letter was coming. But he’d attached a song. He asked me to listen to it.
“Hot August Night.”
I clicked to play the song and closed my eyes, as I always did when I listened to Neil Diamond sing, and heard my big brother’s voice.
And I knew that him sending me that song was a sign to me, from my brother, or from the universe, that talking to Tim was the right thing to do.
There was something else, too, which I told Tim in the e-mail I quickly sent back to him.
I know every word of the song—as well as every other song Neil Diamond sings. I’ve seen him live more times than I can count.
And how ironic is this? I spent the day doing line edits on a book that I wrote several months ago. It takes place in Ohio—with the whole catalyst of the mystery revolving around something that happened at Wright State University twenty-one years ago.
Tim and I had happened there, too, more than twenty years before.
I knew that the cascading events—me signing up for Classmates. com, the events the day before with Chris, the Neil Diamond song, and the book connection—were more than coincidence. I was being hit over the head with signs that what was happening was meant to be for some reason.
I couldn’t have stayed away from Tim if I’d had to—not even to save my life.
I couldn’t leave the office, either. Not until I’d read the letter he was sending. It came in a long hour later. I looked at the signature first, and froze. He’d signed Lots of Love, Tim.
Oh my God. I read those words. I read them again. My insides danced. And then clenched with fear. I ordered myself to calm down. And I just kept looking at those words.
Lots of Love. My signature from so many years ago.
We weren’t kids anymore.
I wasn’t Tara Gumser anymore. I couldn’t feel attraction or desire. Tara Taylor Quinn didn’t need them. She was a writer, and the only sex in her life was in her books. My books. Tara Taylor Quinn had writer friends and professional associations. She did not have sex.
It Happened on Maple Street Page 18