I hope your father is okay. (Is it too macabre to say that I have been reading the Boston obituaries and have been relieved not to see his name?) I’m including the phone number of my father’s apartment, and I hope you’ll call and let me know how he’s doing.
I came back to New York after I finished my exams because I’ve decided to start grad school in journalism at Columbia this spring semester. It was kind of sudden—classes start January 7—but I think it will be good.
I wanted to thank you for everything you’ve done for me (well, except maybe for that first ticket). You really looked out for me over the years. And when I was reeling after Julianne’s death, you kept me sane. And everything else…well, thank you. You’re a good cop, and an even better man.
Sincerely,
Dawn
Arturo
Sincerely? What the fuck?
I didn’t usually have much of a temper. I wasn’t Fuller, busting into parties gunning for conflict. But when, a week after I’d dropped Dawn off at her apartment and hightailed it to my father’s bedside, I returned to my house to find her letter in my mailbox, I punched through the drywall in my foyer. My family had thought I was insane to be running back to campus when I was planning to be in Boston for the holidays anyway. What was so important in Allenhurst that it couldn’t wait until the new year?
A Dear John letter, apparently.
“Goddamn it!” I deserved the burst of pain that exploded through my hand. I’d been cursing myself the past several days for not having had the wherewithal to get Dawn’s phone number before I’d left. She had mine all these years, since I’d given her that business card, but I didn’t have hers, preferring instead to intercept her in person when I needed to see her.
So the moment the doctors pronounced that Dad was going to be okay, I’d come rushing back to Allenhurst. I felt awful about how abruptly we’d ended our time together the other morning, and I didn’t want to leave things a moment longer than necessary without telling her…everything. There was so much to say.
And now she was in fucking journalism school? I wanted to punch the wall with my other hand, but I was smart enough to realize that I would need it to dial the phone number she’d left me.
“Hathaway residence,” said a woman’s voice, its formality suggesting it belonged to a housekeeper or servant of some sort.
I cleared my throat. “May I speak to Dawn please?”
“May I ask who’s calling, please?”
“Arturo Perez.”
“Just a moment, sir, I’ll see if Miss Hathaway is available.”
Miss Hathaway. My heart clenched to hear her name the way I used to say it. I started shaking as I listened to the rustling sound of a phone being put down. I took a deep breath. It would be okay. We would sort things out.
“Hello? Art? How is your dad?”
“What are you doing in New York, Dawn?” Shit. That had come out wrong. I was confused, but I wasn’t angry. At least not at her.
There was a long pause. I’d hurt her by speaking so sharply, so I sighed and said, “My dad is out of surgery. The extent of his recovery remains to be seen.”
“I thought you’d still be in Boston, but it sounds like you…got my letter.”
“I did, and I call bullshit. You don’t want to do journalism.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to so much as—”
“What happened to ‘it’s okay to want what you want’? What happened to ‘don’t let other people live your life for you’?” I still hadn’t managed to temper my angry tone, but I was beginning not to care. I needed to jolt her back to her senses. “You told me those things. And you know what? I told them to my family. When my father woke up, he started right in on me, and I just looked at him and told him I wasn’t leaving Allenhurst.”
“I’m so glad. I—”
“And you know why I did that, Dawn?” I was rudely interrupting, but I didn’t care. I had to finish. “Why, after years of hemming and hawing because I didn’t want to disappoint him, did I man the fuck up and tell him the truth? Because of you, Dawn. Because your bravery this past semester has been a goddamned inspiration.” I almost chickened out about saying the rest, but I figured a guy couldn’t make a speech on the merits of bravery and then not go all the way. “And because I wanted to be the sort of man who was worthy of you.”
There was a long silence, then her voice, a shaky, tentative whisper. “I’m not as brave as you think I am.”
“If you want to go to grad school, great. If you want to go to Columbia, great.” It wasn’t, but that wasn’t the point. “But psychology, not journalism. Learn from me. Don’t invest years trying to please your father.”
“You think the situations are the same,” Dawn said, her voice gathering strength, even beginning to sound a bit annoyed. “You think we have these mirror-image disapproving fathers. But they’re not the same. Underneath everything, your father has always loved you.”
I was tempted to insist that the same was true about her father, but I actually didn’t think it was. I had never lied to Dawn, and I wasn’t going to start now.
“Anyway,” she went on, “it’s not about my father—or at least not only about him.”
“What is it about then?”
“Julianne.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’ve been thinking… I know this sounds lame. But I’ve been thinking that if I could do it over again—”
“You can’t. She’s dead.” It was harsh, but she needed to be reminded.
“I know. But if I could learn the proper way of doing things, maybe next time I could write a story that would serve justice but also…not hurt people.”
“Or you could be a psychologist. Or a counselor. Or a social worker. Or a cop. There are so many ways to help people, Dawn, if that’s your aim.”
“I know, but—”
I could feel her slipping away from me. “I’m going to apply for a promotion in the department here,” I said quickly. “Sergeant. The captain wants me to take a couple classes first, but he says he’ll consider me in the spring. So I’m actually going to be an Allenhurst student myself this coming semester. I’m taking a night class. Youth Crime and Justice.” I wanted her to really see that I’d meant what I’d said to my family: my life was in Allenhurst. “It’s part of the master’s in criminology program. If I like it, I might do the degree.”
“Julianne was going to switch to criminology,” Dawn whispered.
“What?” That had caught me off guard.
“She told me that in our interview. She’d flunked out of sociology, and of course she wasn’t keen on going on in communication after what happened. So she was going to do criminology. Third time’s a charm, she’d said. I told her it was a great idea, that maybe she could go on to law school and put away people like Daniels. She told me she appreciated the sentiment, but that she wasn’t smart enough for law school.”
“Dawn. You can’t…” I didn’t know what to say. Well, I did, but I was afraid maybe I’d exhausted my supply of bravery.
“I have to go,” she said.
“I love you,” I said.
But she had already hung up. I was speaking to a dial tone.
Dawn
I knew when I set foot inside the apartment that the party had been a mistake. But as I was swarmed at the door by a trio of girls I’d gone to high school with, I allowed myself to be swept inside as they lobbed New Year’s greetings at me.
“Oh my God, Dawn. I can’t believe what happened!” said one.
“How are you handling things?” said another with what was clearly false concern. I couldn’t even remember her name. We’d been only nodding acquaintances at school.
“Actually, not very well,” I answered, deciding to shock them with an honest answer.
But it made no impact. It was like they didn’t even hear it. They just kept chattering as one of them took my coat and the other handed me a beer and ushered me farther into the apartment.
The swanky penthouse was full of the twentysomething versions of my old friends. I hadn’t seen most of them since high school. They were slightly older, but elementally the same. Everyone was well-dressed in the latest fashions, and they all looked slightly bored in the way that only rich kids can.
Something changed in the air when they noticed me. Conversations stopped, leaving the room silent except for the Eurythmics coming from a set of speakers in the corner.
I made eye contact with a guy sitting on the corner of a sofa. He lifted a beer to me in a toast. It was Nate, one of my old high school boyfriends. With his feathered blond hair and his rugby shirt with upturned collar, he looked so…young. I gave him a wave.
“Well, shit,” he said, breaking the silence, “If I’d known you were going to become famous, Dawn, I never would have broken up with you.”
He meant it as a joke, so I smiled wanly, and others laughed. The girl next to him raised her beer too, and said, “To Dawn, our famous friend. We always knew you had it in you.”
But you didn’t, I wanted to say. None of us have spoken, not really, for four years.
Soon the whole party was toasting me and clapping. I spent the next few minutes…well, receiving people. People lined up to talk to me like they were wedding guests and I was the bride. At first, I tried to make small talk, but I had trouble shaking people, and each conversation seemed longer than the last, no matter what I said. I even started being borderline rude, but it made no difference. It was like they were made of Teflon.
Then the invitations started coming. My old friend Claire wanted to know if I wanted to go shopping tomorrow. A couple girls invited me to spend spring break with them in Florida. There was a New Year’s Day brunch tomorrow at someone else’s parents’ place, a cocktail party next week.
The realization hit me with a thud. Everyone wanted me. I was popular. This was what I had spent all of high school—and college—working for.
And I was as lonely as ever. Lonelier.
“I have to go.”
“You just got here,” Nate protested. “Where are you running off to in such a hurry?”
It was a good question. No one was at Daddy’s. Despite my hope that he and I might spend more time together now that I was home and set to start at Columbia, it hadn’t worked out that way. He had been working as much as ever, and he and my stepmother had left this morning for a long weekend in Vegas. The housekeeper wouldn’t even be home, because I’d told her to take a vacation of her own while Daddy was away.
Still, the empty apartment would be better than here. I started pushing against the crush of people around me, trying to figure out where my coat was. Instead of helping me, the girls who had greeted me at the door tried to prevent me from leaving, loudly protesting that I had to stay. Voices rose. The music got louder. Someone grabbed my arm.
Screw the coat. I didn’t need the coat. The doorman would get me a cab and I’d be home in ten minutes.
And I was. Except it wasn’t really home.
I was shivering when I let myself into the silent, cavernous apartment. I turned on the radio and went rifling through the one suitcase I had yet to unpack, almost frantic. Where was it?
Ah. There. I took a deep, steadying breath.
The countdown started on the radio. I slipped into Art’s jacket and listened to the end of 1983.
Chapter Twelve
January 1984
Arturo
When I walked into my first class, I almost laughed. It was a grad-level class, but everyone was still at least five years younger than I was. And it was so strange to have the tables turned. I was still a campus cop, of course, but now I was a student, too. The experience would probably make me a better cop, but it was still weird.
I say I “almost” laughed, because I wasn’t sure if I was capable of laughter anymore. I honestly thought it was possible that Dawn had taken that from me when she hung up on me. After our crushing phone call, I’d turned around and gone back to Boston for the holidays. I couldn’t stay in my empty house. I hadn’t backed down on my plan to settle permanently in Allenhurst, though. I didn’t need Dawn for it to be right. I feared, though, that I did need Dawn for…everything else to be right. We’d spent so many years together, and even though we’d only spent a single night really together, now that she was gone, there was a hole in my life. I was walking around in a daze, gutted by the fact that I would never bring her coffee between classes again, that when I drove by her building, the light in her window would belong to someone else.
I’d given some serious thought, when I’d gotten on the highway, to turning the car around and heading down to New York instead of up to Boston. But what would I do? Scale her father’s building and pound on her window? Physically bar her from attending Columbia?
What could I have said that I hadn’t already?
You could have said what you said to the dial tone.
I had this naggy inner voice that wouldn’t shut up, that was telling me there was one more thing I hadn’t said.
Fuck. All this bravery shit was exhausting.
“Is this seat taken?”
I shifted in my too-small desk toward the voice.
And there she was, the bravest of them all.
Black dress, purple-painted raccoon eyes, puffy blond hair. The sight of her should have been a drink of water for a man dying of thirst, but instead she had the opposite effect. All the moisture in my mouth was gone, and though I was moving my mouth and trying to make sound come out of it, nothing was happening.
She plopped a pink Trapper Keeper on the desk next to mine and sat. “It was too late to apply to the grad psych program here.” Then she grinned sheepishly. “Well, too late if you’re not having your rich father bribe them to let you in. But I thought I could audit a couple of classes, maybe get a feel for this whole grad-school thing.”
“Youth Crime and Justice?” I said, when what I really should have been saying—shouting—was something else entirely.
She shrugged. “Hey, you never know. Maybe I’ll go into child psych.”
“Dawn?” I said, getting up.
“Yeah?”
“I love you.” I grabbed her hand, pulled her to her feet, and lowered my head to kiss her.
Just before my lips hit hers, she grinned and said, “Blah, blah, blah.”
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Gwen Hayes, whose mad editing skills greatly improved this book, and to Polly Watson, whose mad copy editing skills did too.
My pals Audra North and Sandra Owens gave great feedback on early drafts. (A particular shout-out to Audra. I was so stuck that the draft I sent her ended about three-quarters of the way through with “…and then they have sex…and then some more stuff happens, the end. HELP.”)
As always, my agent, Courtney Miller-Callihan was full of advice and support and in possession of the enlightened, big-picture view that independent publishing has the potential to float all boats.
Thanks to my friends who answered billions of questions about indie publishing, particularly Zoe York, Melanie Card, and Deborah Cooke.
Dani and Jasmyn at Barclay Publicity did a ton of work on my behalf to make sure this book got into the hands of readers.
I also want to give a shout-out to Elaine Lui, who is Lainey at laineygossip.com. I’ve been reading her column for a decade, and it really does do what Dawn eventually tries to do: speak truth to power. Lainey and her writers are smart and funny and wise. They are my source not only for guilty-pleasure celebrity news but for how to think about power, race, and feminism in our contemporary culture. (And I don’t know them personally, so this is a totally unbiased plug!)
And of course, the song that inspired this book was “Total Eclipse of the Heart” by Bonnie Tyler. (All the books in this series are inspired by a single song from the 1980s). I remember taking “mother-daughter slimnastics” (!) at my local YMCA in the 80s, and this song was our “cool down.” I’d veg out there on my mat (wearing my
black leotard with thin red belt and matching red leg warmers, naturally) next to my mom and absorb what seemed to me then to be its total tragic-ness. I’m glad I could give it a happy ending all these years later.
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About the Author
Jenny Holiday started writing in fourth grade, when her awesome hippie teacher, between sessions of Pete Seeger singing and anti-nuclear power plant letter writing, gave the kids notebooks and told them to write stories. Most of Jenny's featured poltergeist, alien invasions, or serial killers who managed to murder everyone except her and her mom. She showed early promise as a romance writer, though, because nearly every story had a happy ending: fictional Jenny woke up to find that the story had been a dream, and that her best friend, father, and sister had not, in fact, been axe-murdered. From then on, she was always writing, often in her diary, where she liked to decorate her declarations of existential angst with nail polish teardrops. When she grew up, she channeled her penchant for scribbling into a more useful format, spending many years in grad school and as a corporate writer. Eventually, she decided to try her hand again at happy endings—minus the bloodbaths.
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