Both Sides Now

by Shawn Inmon

  “Never you mind. Just go get dressed and get something to eat. Then come in and sit down.”

  My life had become a never-ending carousel of strange events. I couldn’t quite get adjusted to one bombshell before the next one blew me off my feet again. Half an hour later I had eaten breakfast and gotten cleaned up. I was sitting on the couch with nothing to do. Mom didn’t even want the television on. I walked over to the front door and saw the Vega sitting in its normal spot. I went to my bedroom and looked across the yard at his house, but I couldn’t see much of anything. Shawn’s stepdad had built a tall cedar fence down the property line when Mom and Dad had banned us from seeing each other the summer before.

  I was standing by our woodstove, trying to get my hands to warm up, when I heard a knock on the door. As usual, Mom seemed to be in charge of everything. She looked at me, checked everything in the living room like we were staging a play, and then nodded at Dad to open the door.

  Shawn and Mr. Bartee, the English teacher and guidance counselor from school, walked in. Mom asked them to sit down in the chairs at the far end of the living room. I had no idea why Mr. Bartee would be in our house. He and Shawn had been friends when Shawn was still in school, but I didn’t think he usually made house calls.

  Shawn looked terrible. I hadn’t noticed in the darkness of the night before, but he had been letting his hair grow out even more since I had seen him in December. It was long and wild. He was pale and had bags under his eyes. He looked like he was ready to cry. Mom was sitting forward in her chair and her back was very straight. I could tell she was angry, but she was speaking calmly.

  “Shawn, thank you for coming today, but this will be the last time you are ever in this house and I hope that is understood. Mr. Bartee, it’s very nice of you to give up part of your weekend to come today.”

  Shawn just looked miserable and didn’t say anything, but Mr. Bartee and Mom started talking about psychology and a lot of stuff that I didn’t understand at all, so I tuned them out.

  I kept watching Shawn. He looked like he had been knocked out and was just sitting up and looking around to see what had hit him. When he first came in, he had been staring at me with a pleading look in his eyes like he was hoping I would get some secret message, but he had given up on that now and he was just staring off into space. I saw that tears had started to run down his face.

  Mom said, “I don’t know how much Shawn has told you, Mr. Bartee…”

  “He’s told me enough. I know why we are here.”

  “Well.” Mom paused. “Shawn, you haven’t said anything yet. What do you have to say for yourself?”

  Shawn jerked a little bit. He started to say something, but stopped, like his throat was too thick to be able to speak. I left the woodstove and walked across the room, ignoring the look I was surely getting from Mom. I went behind Shawn and laid my hand on his shoulder. No matter how he felt about me and no matter how much he may have regretted us sleeping together, I wanted him to know that I still cared for him, still loved him.

  When I reached out and touched his shoulder, his head dropped and he broke down completely. The tears that had been leaking out quietly came in a racking sob. He leaned his head back just a little to rest it against my arm. He took a deep breath and held it for a few seconds like he was gathering his strength.

  “Colleen, you’ve told me I can never see Dawn again. I can’t agree to that. In three years, she’ll be eighteen and she can see whoever she wants.”

  Mom shrugged and said, “Fine.”

  I felt his shoulder sag under my hand. He said something else, but it was so quiet I couldn’t hear what it was. He stood up, reached into his pocket, and took out a big wad of bills. He laid the money on the table that was set up in front of Mom. “I’d like to be able to say goodbye to Dawn,” he said.

  Mom shrugged again, dismissively. I got the idea that she didn’t care what Shawn did from that point on.

  Shawn walked toward me and reached out his hand. He glanced around the room, but there was no place we could have any privacy. He pulled me back over to the woodstove. We stood close together, but Mom was only a few feet away. She was talking to Mr. Bartee again, but I knew she was keeping one eye on us.

  Fresh tears were running down his face. I could tell he was having a difficult time talking.

  “Dawn Adele, I love you with all my heart. The day you turn eighteen, I will feel exactly the same as I do now. If you still love me then, I’ll be here for you.”

  “Do you remember I Will Still Love You?” I asked.

  “The song? The one by Stonebolt?”

  I had heard that song on the radio a lot lately. It was about love and how it can last forever, even when you are apart. I wanted to tell him that, but now the lump was in my throat and I was crying too. I knew this was the last time I was ever going to see Shawn and I didn’t want to let him go. I nodded, but couldn’t say anything else.

  Shawn leaned down and kissed me gently on the cheek just like he had so many times before. He hugged me to him, but only for a second. Then he looked away.

  “Jim? Are you ready to go?”

  Those were the last words I heard from Shawn for a long time. Mr. Bartee said goodbye and Mom thanked him again for coming. They walked out the front door and closed it quietly behind them.

  Wish You Were Here

  Two weeks after Shawn left me for good, Mom and Dad drove me to clinic in Olympia. Sitting in the sterile waiting room, I heard the nurse call my name.

  “Dawn? Dawn Welch?

  I stood up and looked at Mom. She reached out to try and squeeze my hand, but I pulled it away.

  “I’ll be right here when you’re done.”

  I nodded and followed the nurse down the long hall. The whole building seemed quiet. My shoes made too much noise as I walked. We turned into a small room with an examining table. The nurse handed me a hospital gown and said, “We’ll need you to get changed into this. You can leave your bra on underneath.”

  Her voice was kind and gentle. If she had said something harsh to me, I think I would have broken down, and I was doing everything I could to not cry today.

  I slipped off my shoes and set them in the corner. I got undressed except for my bra and put on the white hospital gown. It tied in the back, but no matter how I arranged it, it never felt like I had it on right. I sat down on the examining table and waited.

  Two months ago, as I was turning fifteen, everything in my life had felt good. I had lots of friends and I was with Shawn, my first love. I wasn’t the town’s hot gossip topic. Now I was sitting on a cold examining table in a poorly-secured hospital gown, waiting for a doctor to perform an abortion I didn’t know if I wanted or not. Whether I was unsure or not didn’t matter. I felt like I didn’t have any choice.

  The nurse came back in and handed me a pill and a glass of water. “This will help with your nerves. It will make you feel better.”

  I was all for that, so I took the pill without asking what it was.

  “The doctor will be along in just a couple of minutes.” She laid a hand on my shoulder and gave me a gentle smile. “Everything will be all right.”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t help but wonder if anything would ever be all right again.

  Comfortably Numb

  Now that Shawn was gone, I would have thought he wouldn’t be the subject of conversation any more, but I was wrong. Every few days, Mom would bring him up in some new way. The summer before, Shawn had given Mom a ride to the doctor out town because Dad had been working. At the time, she had told me that she was proud of Shawn because he drove like a perfect gentleman and that she would always feel safe with me in the car with him. Now, almost a year later, the story changed. She told me that Shawn had driven “like a maniac” that day and that she had thought he was trying to kill her. I put the discrepancy down to the fact that she had been trying to spare my feelings the year before.

  Every time Shawn’s name came up, she attached something negative to
it. He had used me. I had been his puppet. He had gotten what he wanted and then left me all alone to deal with the consequences. Over time, I came to see Shawn differently than I had before. I realized that when I was with him, I hadn’t been able to see things clearly. The love I once felt for him turned sour. I still thought about him, but those thoughts were never good ones. And yet….

  No matter what happened, I still felt drawn to Shawn. No matter how many times he was portrayed as the villain, and even after I came to accept that, I could never deny that I felt a pull and attraction to him that would never go away.

  The other thing was that I was in mourning, but everyone around me went on with their lives as if nothing had ever happened. Now that Shawn was gone and the abortion was over, it was as if we could all act like it never happened. I couldn’t do that. I had lost everything that was important in my life. Losing the baby was the worst part. It was a pain that would never go away. I had also lost the most important person in my life, my Shawn. I didn’t know if my heart would ever heal enough from that to really love someone again.

  A few months later, I went to my first high school party. For the first time in months, I felt almost normal. I got home late that night, but Mom didn’t say anything about it. After that, I got invited to more parties. I pushed my limits pretty fast—I got home a little later and a little drunker after each party. When I did, Mom would say something, but she never did anything about it. She didn’t even threaten to ground me anymore. If she had been a little overprotective before, she had gone the other way now and it felt like I could do anything I wanted.

  I didn’t have anything like a serious boyfriend during that time. After what I had been through, I wasn’t ready for that.

  The summer between my sophomore and junior years, I met a boy named Lon Miller. He was the same age as Shawn and would have graduated with the class of ’79, but he had dropped out of school. When I first met him, he seemed shy and nervous around me. He wasn’t the cutest boy in the world, but he did have a few things in his favor. He had a car and he liked to drink. That fit the new lifestyle I had fallen into. I never felt a lot of emotional involvement with Lon, but over time we became a couple. It wasn’t even a conscious decision, but I think that after all the intensity and pain of what had happened with Shawn, I wanted to find a relationship where I couldn’t be hurt, no matter what.

  One night, after we’d been seeing each other just a few months, we got home late from a party. As we pulled into the driveway, I started to get out of the car. We’d both been drinking and I was way past ready to go in and go to bed. When I reached to open the door, Lon leaned across the seat and stopped me.

  “I think we should get married.”

  I sighed. He was so drunk I wasn’t sure he would remember asking me the next morning. I was so drunk that I wasn’t sure I would remember. I had absolutely no intention of ever marrying Lon Miller, but in my slightly addled state, I couldn’t find a nice way to say “no.”

  I was engaged for a second time before my 17th birthday. I recognized that my life wasn’t heading in the right direction.

  The odd thing was, even though Lon was the same age as Shawn, and even though he had dropped out of high school and liked to take me to parties and get me drunk, Mom loved him. When I told her I was going to break up with him, she always encouraged me to stick with it and give him another chance. I don’t know if she thought that Lon would be easier for her to control or if she could tell I wasn’t emotionally invested in him or what, but she never seemed to get tired of him no matter what he did.

  At the beginning of my senior year, I couldn’t take it anymore and broke up with him. And broke up with him, and broke up with him. He never believed me when I told him I was ending it. Finally, I had enough and I picked a horrible fight with him in the high school parking lot. I threw the engagement ring at him, got out of his car and walked home. By the time I got there, Mom was furious with me. Lon had gotten there first and told on me.

  I finally stood my ground with Mom and told her the truth: I had never cared about Lon and by then I was so sick of him I was done with him no matter what.

  All during that time, I led a fractured life. At school, I still hung out with the friends I’d had since eighth grade. They didn’t go to parties much though, so I ran with a whole different crowd on weekends. I had quit thinking so much about Shawn. We didn’t talk. The only reason I ever saw him was when he came home to visit his parents for Christmas or Easter. I knew he had moved on with his life just like Mom had said he wanted to, because every time he came home, he had a different, skanky looking girl with him. I figured he had gotten what he wanted.

  A month or so after I broke up with Lon, I started going out with Rick Johnson. He liked to drink and party just like Lon did. Life went on. Mom didn’t like Rick as much, but that didn’t matter. I wasn’t listening to her like I had before. Rick and I stayed together through my senior year and beyond, but it was a hard and violent relationship almost from the start. Life was not getting any better.

  After I graduated from Mossyrock High School, I still lived at home with Mom and Dad. I worked at a few different jobs—back at DeGoede’s bulb farm, waiting tables at The Wheel Café in Morton, or as a nurse’s aide at a nursing home in Centralia. Rick and I still went to parties every weekend, but I had mostly stopped drinking. Rick drank enough that I felt like I needed to be sober enough to take care of him. By Christmas 1981, I had settled into a routine. I worked all week, then sort of partied on the weekends. I wasn’t living the life I had dreamed about, but I didn’t know how to go about changing it.

  The night between Christmas and my eighteenth birthday was a Saturday, which usually meant that we would have gone to a party. It being the day after Christmas, however, nothing was happening. Rick, Mom, Dad and I had been just sitting around the house on Damron Road watching television. Rick had run home for just a minute when the phone rang.

  Dad got up out of his chair and said, “Hello?” The funniest look crossed his face. He actually looked scared, and I couldn’t figure out who could get that reaction from him. He didn’t say a word, but just set the receiver down, turned to me and said, “It’s for you. It’s Shawn.”

  My stomach dropped. I couldn’t imagine why he would be calling me after three years. What could he possibly want to say? Rick would be back in a minute. If he found me talking to Shawn, there would be hell to pay. My mouth was so dry all of a sudden that I didn’t know if I would be able to talk.

  “Hello?”

  “Dawn? It’s Shawn.”

  I didn’t say anything. My mind was a complete blank and I didn’t have anything I wanted to say to him.

  “I was wondering if you would like to meet me out in the yard for a minute so we could talk. I’m next door at Mom and Dad’s.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Was he stupid?

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Oh.” He said it quietly, like he was surprised. Why would he think I wanted to talk to him now? He had manipulated me, used me and abandoned me at the worst possible time. Now he was surprised that I didn’t want to get all bundled up and go bouncing outside to talk to him like we were kids again?

  “You don’t think so. OK, then. Bye.” He said that so quietly that I could barely hear him over the TV.

  I hung up without another word, feeling angry and a little scared—and distant stirrings of the old feelings I had for Shawn.

  “What did he want?” Mom demanded.

  “He wanted me to go outside and talk to him.”

  “You said ‘no,’ I hope. What in the world would you have to say to him after all these years?”

  After a moment’s pause, she said, “I know what it is. He knows you have a boyfriend now. He knows you’re happy and he just wants to stir up trouble for you. He thinks that if he waltzes back in here, it will make you and Rick argue.” I didn’t say anything, but that explanation made as much sense as any other.

  I walked back into my bedroo
m without turning my light on and looked across the yard at Shawn’s parents’ house. There were lots of lights on, and I could see people in the living room watching television. Then I saw Shawn step out the door of what used to be his bedroom. He had a backpack over his arm and walked quickly across the snow to a car that was parked right where he used to park the Vega. He got in and started it and sat there waiting for the ice on the windshield to defrost. I guessed he had come down, caused whatever trouble he could, and now he was going back to Seattle and whatever girl he was sleeping with now.

  When Rick got back, I told him that Shawn had called. His reaction was pretty much the same as Mom’s—that Shawn was jealous that I was happy, and trying to stir up trouble. I was just glad that it didn’t lead to a big argument and a fight, like so many other things did with Rick. I also wondered why everyone but me thought I was happy.

  After that, I did my best to put Shawn out of my mind permanently. I was mostly successful. Sometimes, if Stairway to Heaven, Always and Forever, or one of our other songs came on the radio, it would bring back memories for a minute, but over time it got easier and easier to send them away.

  The following summer, things still followed the same routine—work during the week and joyless parties on the weekend. Lather, rinse, repeat, over and over. By then, Rick and I had been together for two years and it was starting to feel long-term. I wasn’t head over heels in love with him, but Mom kept telling me that the kind of feelings that Shawn and I had for each other had not been real, that they were just puppy love. She told me that real, mature love was different than that, and that it always took a lot of hard work and sacrifices to make any relationship work. With Rick, it definitely felt like work for me, but I didn’t see him making a lot of sacrifices or putting in a lot of effort. Still, over time it was harder and harder to break away from it.

  One hot summer day in July of 1982, I had the day off from waitressing at The Wheel. Rick and I were hanging out at my house, not doing much. I heard a knock at the door and answered it. To my great surprise, it was a delivery from Mossyrock Florists. The delivery person handed me a vase with three roses—two red, one white—surrounded by baby’s breath.