If I Could Turn Back Time

by Beth Harbison

  * * *

  “I’M GROUNDED,” I had to announce to Tanya two hours later. It was time to be getting ready for the party and I’d done my hair and picked out a perfect walking-the-dog outfit, but my mother had been unmoved by my argument. I’d already called Brendan and left a message that I was in trouble and things were iffy for tonight.

  I didn’t know what to do.

  “What do you mean, you’re grounded?”

  “I mean I can’t go tonight.”

  “What? That is not possible. You have to go!” She sounded like I was the mother and she was the one being grounded.

  “I know! I’m trying!” I knew the truth was I was going to have to go no matter what. I just really hoped I didn’t have to sneak out, because I had no idea what the ramifications for that would end up being.

  “Well, try harder!”

  “I will! It’s just that I don’t know if I can go when you’re ready to.”

  “It’s graduation night. We have, like, no parties, no high school fun left. This is the end of everything, and—”

  Call waiting beeped in.

  “—you will be there.”

  It didn’t take a lot of imagination to realize she was talking yet again about her one perceived last chance at marital bliss with a guy who, as of yet—and as of our adult lives—had still not noticed her.

  “Okay, Tanya.”

  “So, seriously, you have got to work on your parents because—”

  Call waiting beeped again. I wanted to answer it, even though we didn’t have caller ID yet.

  I knew it was Brendan.

  “Tanya, I have to go,” I said, knowing there was little time after the second beep. The call would be dismissed—we didn’t have voice mail yet—and he would be gone for now. I couldn’t afford to lose any time. “I’ll do my best and call you back to let you know.”

  “But—”

  I didn’t wait for her reply. I knew what it would be. She wanted me to do whatever I had to do to go; it was no different from any other time I’d been in trouble and unable to go out with her on a planned evening. I was always the letdown, the buzz kill who ruined everything because of my stupid strict parents (whom I appreciated now more than ever).

  But this time, I really did want to get out of my punishment.

  I clicked the receiver over.

  “Hello?”

  “Are you the girl in the iron mask?” Brendan asked, a smile in his voice.

  I’d always liked that about him, how he got nearly every reference I could throw at him and how he threw some unexpected ones back. The girl in the iron mask. Trapped in my prison, unable to go out, much as I wanted to. My face … not my own.

  That was good. Even today, that was pretty good. Better than he could have known.

  “So far,” I said, thinking about how alien I felt when I looked in the mirror now. “It’s not looking good.” Except it was. I never would have said I was the prettiest thing on earth, or even in the top 20 percent, but compared to the older, somewhat stressed face I’d left behind, I was definitely looking pretty good.

  “This stupid party doesn’t matter.” Brendan’s reaction was a stark contrast to Tanya’s. “I can meet you out back later if you want. Or climb the magnolia tree and come in your window.”

  “I hate that.”

  “I know.”

  The stupid scrapy tree against my window was bad enough without a teenage guy climbing up it and making it scream against the siding like a demon. Sometimes at night it was really scary, even if the scraping was because of a regular old summer thunderstorm meandering through the lazy, soft suburbs of Washington, D.C.

  “So, no. I mean, I could sneak out back if it came to that, but let me talk to my parents first. Try and do this right.” The truth was, everything had to go as close to “normal” as it could. If Brendan skipped the party and came to my house instead—even if I told him not to—it would inevitably shift the sequence of events, and I didn’t want that.

  “Okay, so you do that.” His voice was so nice. Even by my thirty-eight-year-old standards, it was a good voice, low and masculine, with a really subtle hint of rasp. Not enough that an impressionist could make him hilarious, or even mildly funny, but enough to make me tingly. “All right, Raim?”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said, mentally reciting the phone number I’d never forgotten. “Either way, I’ll let you know.” I paused and then asked, “Brendan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want you to go, even if I can’t.”

  “Mm.” I could visualize him shrugging. “We’ll see.”

  “You can always come here tomorrow.”

  “Whatever you want.”

  I had no idea what I wanted.

  Apart from him, that is. At this moment, I wanted him. And who knew how long I’d be here to have him? But back then? I was not in touch with what I’d wanted at all. A beer? To party and dance? To forget? To remember? Was this a last hurrah for me or a first blowout? I couldn’t say, because it held the potential for so much.

  And yet, I knew now, with the advantage of age, it also held the potential for so little.

  So little.

  Meanwhile, I had to let his life play out the way it was supposed to. It wasn’t all about me.

  “I’ll call you back,” I said. “As soon as I know what we’re doing. But, Brendan…”

  “Ramie.”

  “Be happy, okay? Do what you need to.”

  He laughed. “I’ll give that a try.”

  We hung up, but while I knew that once I would have felt confident, even with his answer, this time I wondered exactly what he meant.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I decided to ask my father.

  When I was growing up, I’d actually felt closer to my mother, but now that I was in this weird vortex of return, and I knew he was actually gone from my time, I think my concentration on his aliveness made him feel more approachable to me.

  Which may seem crazy, now that I think about it. I mean, the very fact that he was actually gone presumably could and should have made him less approachable to me. Nevertheless, I thought I’d have better luck getting out of my grounding with him.

  When I heard him come in the front door at 5:23 (like clockwork, it was always between 5:20 and 5:25, though usually—I had noticed—5:23), I hurried down to meet him and ask if he could come talk to me in my room when he was settled.

  Settled usually meant he’d had a bourbon on the rocks. A small one; if I were measuring, I’d say no more than two fingers with ice, but he had it every evening. I’d like to say it added to his longevity, since we all want to say alcohol consumption leads to longevity, but his early demise would suggest otherwise, though I’m sure it didn’t contribute in any way to his death.

  “Have a seat and let’s talk now,” he said, easy, completely unself-conscious of my mother’s overhearing ears.

  “I’m grounded,” I stage-whispered, half hoping my mom could actually hear, wherever she was. “And it’s totally unfair.”

  “Ah.” He laughed. Laughed! “Then you’d better get back to Elba, huh?”

  Another good reference. Napoleon. I had to appreciate it. “Very funny, Dad. Can you just hurry? It’s important.”

  “Ten-four.” He saluted me. “I’ll come talk to you as soon as I get cleaned up.”

  “Hurry.”

  “You can’t rush genius.” It was his old joke.

  Which led to mine. “So I can rush you?”

  As always, he tilted his head and looked at me as if I’d just said the most insulting thing imaginable. “Yes.” He didn’t smile outwardly, but it was in his voice.

  I went upstairs, vaguely annoyed and thinking maybe I should have just approached my mother with a Clarence Darrow–worthy argument and skipped Dad altogether, since he clearly was going to take the whole thing lightly—that old act all but assured me of that—and undoubtedly side with Mom.

  I waited for what seemed like forever. I spen
t about ten minutes putting makeup on—this young face was so much easier to do than I had thought at the time!—then tidied my room, went through the cedar chest at the foot of my bed (all linens! nothing interesting at all!), and even organized my cheap mall jewelry. Then I sat on the bed, scratching Zuzu’s belly for what seemed like forever, although it was strangely meditative.

  Finally Dad came to the door, knocked twice, and came on in.

  “I talked to your mother,” he said without preamble as he sat next to me on the bed. “She said you drank a great deal of vodka.”

  “I told her I used it to rinse my hair,” I said vehemently. Because, yes, I had told her that. Then, with every bit as much sincerity, I added, “I read that it makes your hair shiny.”

  “It also makes school seem a little easier,” he said. “If you have to face a tough day and you’re nervous.”

  I felt my face grow hot. How did he know? Then I remembered: old me had forgotten I was young me and had been very frank with my mom about my need for alcoholic enhancement before going to school.

  “Okay,” I told my father. “Though it’s true, I did read that a vodka rinse makes your hair shiny. Beer too. Remember that beer shampoo I used to have?” I probably had it in the shower right now, but he probably hadn’t ever noticed it. For some reason I just felt compelled to defend the idea that alcohol = beauty when utilized in a nonconsumptive way.

  Which was, we all knew, not the way I’d used it.

  And his raised eyebrows made clear that he knew that wasn’t the way I’d used it. So rather than fighting the foolish fight, I went on, “So it’s not like that idea was out of the question; it’s just that, yes, yesterday I was particularly nervous about school.” I thought about it and, before he could answer, added, “More nervous than I have ever been in my life. For that one day. So, yes, I used a crutch. But that doesn’t mean I have a problem or that I’m bad or anything negative like that. It was just a tough day. And it’s going to be a tough night, but I just hope you will agree to let me have the tough night I need, rather than the one you punish me into.”

  He leaned back, though there was nothing to lean back on, sitting on the soft mattress of my bed, and let out a long sigh. “You know this is hard for me.”

  “Actually, Dad”—I gave a semi-involuntary but humorless laugh—“I have no idea what this is like for you. None at all. But I know it’s hard as hell for me.”

  He was unfazed by my uncharacteristically harsh language. “We’re in similar boats, you and I.”

  I frowned. “How so?” Mom was no tyrant to him. He had always had the final say in everything. Even though I was nearly twenty years outside of his rule, I was all but begging for his help and he was giving me this nonsense about being in the same boat with me? Like he couldn’t help, we both just had to hope Mom would be benevolent?

  I was all ready to go off on him, attacking him for that and for his retro-misogynistic comment, when he said, softly, “We don’t know how to help each other. We want to do the right thing, but even with an elevated vantage point, neither of us knows what the right thing really is to say or do.”

  That gave me pause. Elevated vantage point seemed a bit grandiose for his parental role—good lord, he had no idea what I was really going through (if I didn’t myself, how could he?)—yet of course he still had to take the high road to my low.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, figuring that was the easiest out in a case like this. They had me nailed, as far as they were concerned. I was smart enough, in retrospect, to work from my disadvantage, rather than cover my eyes and ears and pretend something other than the truth. “Okay, yes, I drank some vodka before school because I was so nervous that I figured if I didn’t have that, I’d probably end up puking right in the hall in front of everyone. Just imagine that!”

  “Vodka can do that too.”

  Sigh. “Well, yes, but this was a major panic attack. Not a psychological I-don’t-think-I-can, but a physiological freak-out. So”—I shrugged, I couldn’t even help it—“I did what made the most sense, given that I had two and a half minutes to think.”

  There was a long pause as he surveyed me. “Alcohol is never the answer. You know that.”

  “It was yesterday.”

  “Why? Because you thought you couldn’t handle it on your own? Of course you can. Why can’t you be the mature person you’re supposed to be and just take a deep breath and move forward unaided?”

  “Maybe because life is a little hard to go through unaided?” I answered sarcastically, then realized how bad that sounded. Particularly given the case I was trying to plead. “Though usually I do. It’s better than smoking all those cigarettes, right?” It was kind of a low blow, but he didn’t know it was as much as I did.

  He looked down, though. “Touché.”

  I’d taken a few pre-law classes in school, when I thought I was going to move into that field, but I’d stopped and switched to finance after my father died; still, I tried to pull out the would-be lawyer in me. “So I was nervous about school ending. It was a big challenge, more than you could ever know or believe, and I had only a few minutes to make the decision that was fastest and easiest and safest for me, so I did. I had a couple of shots of vodka. I watched you drink six Irish coffees at Normandie Farm one night, so don’t tell me I’m in some kind of danger zone.”

  He laughed. Heartily. “That was an unusual night for me,” he said, more to whatever small, imaginary audience might have been in his lap, where he was looking down and smiling while shaking his head, than to me. Was he trying to explain to my mother? Himself? “A fun night. A sleepless night. But a good one, and definitely unusual.”

  I tried to remember any salient facts from the night that I could, but nothing came to me. The truth was, at the time it had sounded like “coffees” to me, as I had no idea what the “Irish” added, and even so I didn’t know or appreciate the danger of so much caffeine. So all that had remained in my mind, really, was the waitress’s amazement, not my father’s consumption.

  But, of course, now I knew what all that Irish coffee meant. It meant a lot of shots of whiskey and a lot of caffeine. No health benefits whatsoever.

  “No harm done, I suppose,” he said with an offhand shrug.

  “I’m not so sure.”

  He sighed, and I realized, for the first time, this wasn’t really all about me. He was entering the last stretch of his life, and quickly. Now that I really looked at him—instead of marveling at my retro surroundings and friends and so on—I could see he was seriously faded. In my memory, which is quite good, his eyes were not such a pale, watery blue as they were now. His skin had never been this white-crayon pale, though despite the pallor, it did look better than I had remembered as far as scars and age spots went. Then again, he had less than two years to make himself indelible and unchanging in my memory.

  “Listen,” he said, very seriously. “Here is a lesson you need to learn, whenever you take it in, because it speaks to your quality of life, now and always. You need to be able to handle your stresses and moods and fears on your own, without artificial aid, or you will never be as happy and confident as you should be.”

  He was alarming me. It was such a last speech. “Dad—” I started to say.

  But he held up his hand to stop me. “You need to have the tools inside of you to take care of yourself no matter what. Not alcohol, not sedatives—none of that stuff offers anything more than a temporary solution that ricochets back harder later. I spent a good portion of my life dealing with anxiety the wrong way, as you have pointed out. And in the end that resulted in a price I’ve had no choice but to pay. If you take nothing forward from here, take that: You have everything you need inside you. You are Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, you know? You already have everything you need.”

  I sighed, not dramatically but with the exhaustion of bundled emotion. I’d lived long enough now to know that was true in theory but not always in practice. I wanted to believe it—don’t we all? Wouldn�
��t we all want some private stash of harmless and natural Xanax that would flow automatically into our veins the minute life got tough? Of course! But the fact was that life was sometimes far more than any of us bargained for, certainly more than I ever expected it to be and way more than I felt prepared to handle, and on those occasions a crutch was helpful.

  What I was going through was tough! Completely confusing, impossible to comprehend, and even harder to walk through without leaning on the conceit that this was some highly imaginative dream I’d concocted in my subconscious in order to teach my conscious a thing or two before moving forward into my middle age.

  But the truth was, obviously, I didn’t know just what the hell this whole thing was.

  Who wouldn’t want a slug of hard liquor in my place?

  Yet that wasn’t an argument that was going to hold water with my dad. Why should it? This was some form of reality for him and Mom and everyone I knew and was seeing now.

  Including me, I guess.

  There was no point in keeping it up. “Dad,” I said, “you’re right.” Because I knew he was and, more importantly, I knew that was what he needed to hear. “I’m a kid”—lie—“and I don’t have all the faculties you have to deal with nerves. Today was my last day of school. It’s the last time I’m going to see many of these people. Most of these people.” I thought of the deaths coming, the divorces, the messed-up kids, all the weedy screwups that grew from the fertile ground of youthful hope. I got choked up thinking about it, talking about it. Tears flowed from my eyes and I had no ability to stop them; it was like a magic trick. “Please don’t be disappointed in me. Please don’t let this be your lingering impression of me.”

  My father’s expression softened. Soft gray, that’s how it struck me. Aged, more than it should have been for his forties. I’d dated men older than this. Not to be all TMI, but I’d done men older than this. To me they’d seemed vibrant, fun, interesting. Not old. Yet Dad seemed like a sad old soul to me.

  Was that the visage of impending death?