“How about late spring or early summer—of next year,” she said.
“Summer.”
“Summer it is. All right, so what kind of wedding should we have?”
“Like I said, whatever you want, Scotty. I only have two requests.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Our first dance has to be to ‘I Like It’—”
“Ah—how did I know?”
“Hey, come on now. You don’t mess with the old school.”
“Okay, I’ll give you that one,” Natalie said. “And your second request?”
“That we get married at The Spencer, ’cause, you know, that’s where it all started.”
“Well,” she said, a knowing look in her eye as she slid underneath the covers. “I guess I can grant you those two wishes.”
“Looks like I’m about to get my third wish right now,” he murmured as they began to make love.
Chapter 25
SHE
“Get the fuck out!” Dina screamed on the other end of the phone from New York.
Natalie giggled as she watched the diamond of her engagement ring sparkle under the rush of water she was running for Jason’s weekly post-basketball bath. “Can you believe it?”
“Hell, no. Details, girl. How did he propose?”
Natalie relayed the story of Jason’s proposal to Dina, who hung on every word. She’d been engaged all of a week, and was still floating.
“Well, shit, aren’t we a pair. Me, knocked up and you about to take a long walk off a short pier.”
“Dina, you are so full of it,” Natalie said as she adjusted her glasses. “You love being married to Alex, and you can’t wait to be a mom. Now, stop it.”
“Did I tell you it’s a girl?”
“Oh! Congratulations! When are you due again?”
“Never. No, seriously, late June. So . . . when’s your big day?”
“We’re thinking next summer, so . . . plenty of time for you to get your act together and get out here to be my matron of honor.”
“Can’t I be a maid of honor? My mother’s a matron. I’ve still got a hot ass. Granted, these days it’s spreading across my chair like Velveeta, but it’s still hot.”
“All right, for you, you can be a maid of honor. I’ll even be nice and say maiden.”
“Love it. Well, anyway, congratulations, girl. I’m glad you found the one. I was starting to worry about you.”
“Oh, Lord. You sound like Brandy and Christine.”
“You know, I’ve always liked those girls. God that was a fun night we had when I was there, what was it, two years ago?”
“That’s right.”
“Anyway, whatever they said to you about being all screwed up was right. Know that. I’m happy to hear you’ve broken the curse.”
“Oh, now you think I was cursed?”
“Okay, maybe ‘cursed’ isn’t the right word,” Dina said. “Um, martyr, maybe? I mean, when you weren’t going out with one dipshit after another, you were turning down guys like they had a disease or something. I thought, okay maybe she’s trying to punish herself because of what happened.”
Natalie sighed and picked up the carton of Epsom salts, measuring out two cups and dumping them into the hot water. “Jason’s just so different. He just . . . he gets me.”
“Well, damn. Good for you. Whenever you find a guy who gets you, lock that shit up but good. Most importantly, he gets my seal of approval, which—”
“You don’t hand out lightly,” Natalie laughed, having heard this refrain from Dina so many times over the years, it had become a rubber stamp.
“It was fun when you guys were out here last month. I had a feeling, the way he was looking at you. Damn. You know, besides being a really great guy and all that shit, he is hot as hell. I’m jealous.”
“Oh, please. You have a gorgeous husband who adores you, a baby on the way—who will also be gorgeous—and are an attorney with one of the country’s most prestigious law firms. I’m the one who should be jealous.”
“Well, hell, now that you put it that way . . . you’re damn straight you should be,” Dina said.
Both women burst out laughing until Dina gasped.
“All right, lady, I gotta go. Alex is cooking dinner. Something about spoiling me by making all my favorite foods or some bullshit.”
“Dina, you kill me.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, call me soon.”
“I will. Love you.”
“Ditto, baby. Ditto.”
Natalie was still smiling when she hung up the phone. Talking to Dina always made her laugh, even after all these years and not having lived in the same city after she’d fled Brown at the end of her freshman year. If it hadn’t been for Dina and her family sheltering her for holidays and summers during her college years, Natalie wasn’t sure what she would have done, since going back to Braxton wasn’t an option.
As she shut off the water, Natalie heard the jingle of keys from Jason’s living room, announcing his arrival home. She rushed out to throw her arms around him, drowning him in kisses.
“You act like you haven’t seen me all day or something,” he laughed, the heated musk of two hours of playing ball rising from his skin.
She squeezed him closer to her, reveling in the salty dampness of his neck against her lips. “Or something.”
He chuckled. “Once June gets here, no more early morning meetings on Saturday for a while. Promise.”
She tugged on his hand as she led him to the bathroom. “Good. Now come on and get in the bathtub, but don’t take too long. I want to show you just how much I’ve missed you.”
“Could she see him right now?”
April twelfth.
He put the truck keys under the floor mat. There was a simple note for his parents propped up on the kitchen counter for when they got home from church: “It’s better this way. Truck is at the bus depot.”
He knew this would be the last contact he ever had with his parents. They wouldn’t send out the search dogs or throw up any desperate flags to find him. He knew deep down they would shut their eyes to him, happy to be blind to the burden of being responsible for him. They would accept his departure as they’d accepted so much else about him—with weary resignation.
He boarded the Greyhound bus bound for Chicago, having memorized the address he’d found: 437 East Randolph. 437 East Randolph. 437 East Randolph. He whispered it under his breath like a mantra as he stared out the window at the brown fields dotted with cows and postage-stamp patches of green grass.
Hours and hours later, he arrived, drowning in billows of fatigue, anticipation, and bewilderment. Chicago was cold. Noisy. Dirty. There were screeching taxis and blaring horns. His head hurt. His eyes watered.
But people were nice. There were no sneers or growls at his requests for directions to the glassy blue blocks of windows towering over the city. He wondered which one was hers. Could she see him right now? Would she look down at him looking up at her and think maybe her mind was playing tricks on her?
And then, there she was, sailing through the revolving glass door, the same serious expression stamped onto her face as the first time he’d seen her.
But still so beautiful.
She was engulfed by a swarm of people, blocking him from getting to her. Someone was always in his way.
He trailed behind them, aching from the proximity as they walked a short distance to a swank bar that pumped out Euro disco and featured a cadre of size-2 waitresses clad in black miniskirts that left no mystery as to what was underneath. He slipped into the bar and watched her: the way she laughed, how she sipped her glass of wine, how she engaged in serious conversations with the red-headed girl to her left. How three different dudes walked up on her. How she rebuffed all of them.
She stayed out until the spring evening pushed into an unseasonably humid night, getting into a taxi to go home. He had to fight the urge to jump onto its dusty maroon roof, just so he could stay near
her. Instead, there was a cab right behind it. He yelled out, “Follow that car!” to the driver, just like in the movies. It made him laugh. The swarthy, incense-soaked driver just rolled his eyes.
All weekend, he watched. Jogged after her during her run on the lakefront. Watched from the street through her naked window as she swept her wooden floors, dusted her bookshelves, washed her dishes.
He watched her go out Saturday night for a date. She smiled at this other man. Laughed at his jokes. Touched his elbow. Allowed him to guide her to another bar where they sat tucked in the corner nursing cocktails.
Let him take her home.
He could only cry, knowing the filthy things she was letting him do to her. How she was giving herself to him. He’d followed him the next day to his place and followed him when he went out on Sunday night for a pack of cigarettes from the corner store.
And he jumped him from behind, pummeling that pretty face.
“Leave Natalie alone,” he whispered into his ear. “You leave her alone. You tell anyone about this, including her, I’ll kill you. You don’t call her, you don’t see her, you pretend like she doesn’t even exist. And if you tell her anything, I’ll know. I know where you live. I’ll kill you. I will fucking kill you.”
And that dude spit out a lump of blood as he cowered in the moonlight. “Okay, okay! I mean I like her, but I don’t like her that much. I’ll stay away from her, I won’t say anything, I promise.”
He unleashed him and smiled, because this weak, simpering bastard had just confirmed what he’d always known.
Nobody loved her like he did.
Chapter 26
SHE
April twelfth.
Clad in her running clothes, Natalie stood alone in her kitchen, rubbing her eye to adjust her contact lens. Jason had left a few minutes ago for an early morning breakfast meeting at NoMI across the street. Her BlackBerry was affixed to its usual position in her hand first thing every morning when she got out of bed. She’d often skip going to the bathroom to instead beeline it to her e-mail to see what work crises had occurred overnight.
However, this morning, instead of scrolling through the hundreds of emails that had streamed in from around the country since going to bed at eleven o’clock last night, her eyes were locked on the date, her mind immediately tumbling back to that day ten years ago, as she swabbed the scar with her finger.
April twelfth. An ordinary day, just like the day that preceded it. She’d gotten up, gone jogging, and munched on an apple for breakfast before a morning spent in American Lit, Russian Lit, and Poly Sci. She met Dina for lunch at Faunce House before wrapping up her day in American History and Sociology.
As always, the date snuck up on Natalie. For some reason, she would never look at the calendar on April eleventh and think the next day was April twelfth. Instead, she would always wake up, look at her phone, and get a shock before she would go crashing back to ten years ago—and Dennis.
Dennis. Thoughts of him and that night hovered around the edges of her mind every day but always in some gauzy, floating moment—fleeting, ill-defined. Just as fast as it bubbled to the top, she’d swat it away.
Like most of the people Natalie had encountered at Brown, Dennis Jones was unlike anyone she’d ever met. He’d been a track star at his alma mater in Oakland and predictions of Olympic gold had swirled around his head since he could lace up his cleats. His path seemed all but assured until he woke up one day and realized he just didn’t want to do it anymore. Somewhere along the way, the one thing that had provided him with peace and solace had turned into a chore he despised and one he no longer wanted to do. Unlike most of his teammates, Dennis was an intellectual, placing as much emphasis on academics as athletics, so his collegiate dreams remained intact and he got into Brown, his long-hidden imaginings of being a writer finally emerging from the shadows of track dominance.
They met in one of Natalie’s second-semester English classes—American Women Novelists—where she was introduced to Wharton, O’Connor, and Jackson, among numerous others. As was her way, she hadn’t noticed the shy, sidelong glances he’d given her those first few sessions, hadn’t paid much attention to the benign questions he managed to ask her about the syllabus after each Tuesday class. She hadn’t been dazzled by his probing questions about the text during class, some genuine and some, he admitted later, designed to catch her attention. It wasn’t until he purposely bumped into her at the library one Saturday afternoon with a calculated “Hey, aren’t you in my English class?” query that their relationship began in earnest. She was attracted to his lean runner’s muscles, the sable hue of his skin, and the skinny gap between his two yellowing front teeth.
She was further enchanted by his quirky yet introspective personality. Admittedly, Dennis was more than a little strange—a fact he owned up to and took great pride in. He liked being different from the crowd and smashing whatever stereotypes people might have about a jock from Oakland. Still, despite how offbeat he was, Natalie loved their deep, inquisitive conversations about all things spiritual and intellectual, never tiring of his endless fount of knowledge. He was enthralled by discussions of art and literature. He read thick tomes on philosophy in his spare time. He liked foreign films, taking her to the Avon for a midnight showing of 8 ½ for their first date. Until then, Natalie never knew movies had subtitles or that you could see them on small, dusty displays, not leviathan screens that bombarded you with every click of the frame. He liked to drink black coffee and think deep thoughts about absolutely everything and occasionally nothing.
Despite how cerebral Dennis was, he did have a lighter side, borne of years riding school buses with his teammates and growing up the middle child of seven brothers and sisters, where pranks were as common as changing underwear. He liked to unwind with reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and long stretches of the Cartoon Network. He still found running therapeutic and would often go for long runs on Saturday mornings. He was prone to downing bowl after bowl of Cap’n Crunch cereal for sustenance. As he put it, it made your breath smell better than steaming Styrofoam cups of Ramen noodles.
Natalie wasn’t sure what she thought about the relationship beyond the fact that she enjoyed spending time with him. She wasn’t sure if he was It, but she liked him, liked how easy it was to be with him. It was just an uncomplicated coupling that demanded nothing more than her presence and willingness to participate. She liked listening to him talk about how writing tapped into something primal for him. She empathized with his stories about a household full of disappointment and how it had fueled his desire for beauty and, in many ways, simplicity. She loved hearing about how, for the first time, he truly felt free to express who he really was and not the façade that his coaches and family had cultivated around him for so much of his life. It was a feeling she could relate to, having felt like a sore thumb among Braxton’s small-town malcontents. She liked the effortless routine they fell into, meeting at the library or an off-campus coffee shop a few nights a week to study or have long philosophical talks.
The late-night study sessions eventually led to moonlit walks and breathy, lingering kisses behind her dorm, which later led to long make-out sessions in his twin bed. Though he never pressured her, Natalie decided life was too short and deemed that losing her virginity to Dennis would be far less complicated than the fantasy of waiting for marriage. After everything she’d been through, she’d come to believe she wouldn’t be walking down any aisles anytime soon. It would be easier—simpler—to just go for it. It wasn’t even a conversation. They were lying in bed for their usual long kissing session when his hand grazed her nipple—on purpose or by accident, she’d never really been sure—and instead of gently guiding him away, she let him continue exploring the firm peaks, surprised by the intensity of his deep sighs as he continued to caress her before finally removing her bra and letting his hands run free. Each subsequent touch elicited whispered requests, wanting to make sure he had clearance to go further and do what he later said
he’d been wanting to do since that first day he’d seen her in class, her face scrunched in concentration as she tried to untangle the meaning behind the complicated dance between The Misfit and the grandmother in A Good Man is Hard to Find.
With nothing whatsoever to go on, it was difficult initially for Natalie to judge whether it was any good or not. It hurt, though eventually it began to feel good, began to be something she looked forward to and hoped would be the capper on all their dates.
She attempted to stop the kaleidoscope of memories, knowing what was coming next. The first tear slid down her face, followed by another then another, and before long there was a flood gushing out of her, slithering down her neck, soaking her gray sports bra. So many wrong turns. So many miscalculations.
She grabbed a paper towel from the roll on her countertop and blew her nose into it, folding it over until she got to a dry part to dab her eyes.
As much as she blamed herself, she knew there wasn’t anything that could have stopped the chain of April twelfth events from unfurling. He’d been determined to extract revenge on her.
And nothing can stand in the way of determination.
Chapter 27
HE
Was she remembering today like he was? Was she thinking about him? Did she look at today’s date and wonder what he was doing?
He sipped his coffee as he stood on the street corner waiting for her. Like clockwork, she emerged from her apartment building at five minutes after eight for her six-block walk to work. He followed close behind, being careful, of course, to keep his distance. As always, she stopped at the coffee shop on the corner and ordered a grande green tea, having already had, he knew, her customary strawberry yogurt after her run on the lake early that morning. She smiled and thanked the barista, dropping the crisp dollar he gave her as change into the plastic tip cup.
Just like clockwork.
He sat in the coffee shop all day, which gave him the best vantage point. He calmly sipped his bottomless cup of coffee and tapped away on his iPad to give the appearance of legitimacy. He had no more need to plan. He’d spent years planning.
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