The tears came faster as he reached over and mussed my hair. “I will always be proud of you, Ramie.” I thought I felt his hand tremble for a moment. “To the day I die, and beyond. I know that to be a fact, and you must believe it too.”
That was hard to hear. I couldn’t speak. And it didn’t matter because I wouldn’t have known what to say even if I could.
He got up, apparently feeling everything had returned to normal. No one truly has not a care in the world, but he was about as close as he could get to that. “Mom and I are going out for dinner tonight. Why don’t you go on to that party? I’ll talk to her about it.”
The party. That didn’t feel like it mattered as much after this talk. But, of course, it might. Anything in this weird vortex might matter. Even though I wasn’t positive Brendan was the key to the rest of my life, I knew that this night in particular had been a left turn for me and if it wasn’t the relationship, maybe something else had changed along with that and that was why I was back. To fix something else. Who knew?
I was pretty sure the only thing that didn’t hold at least a chance of getting me back where I came from was sitting alone in my room. So the party was important.
Then again, nothing I thought mattered or resonated for the future so far, so I wasn’t good at identifying the things that mattered versus the things that didn’t. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t feeling like a super-huge success in any way, given this apparent opportunity and my sheer failure in terms of changing anything, most importantly my dad’s smoking habits.
It was beginning to feel an awful lot like I was back here as a witness, nothing more. An observer to my life, for better or worse, without power. Sure, maybe I was supposed to turn this around into something new. Maybe I was supposed to gather all these lemons and make them into lemonade: determinedly suicidal father, weak mother who didn’t exert any change through her own actions, a self who couldn’t do anything that was actually meaningful.
Speaking of which, I told myself, switching gears into business mode. It’s time to start looking at Costco.
“Thanks, Dad.” I got up and went over to hug him. Who knew if I’d ever get another chance? That’s how every moment of this felt. “I love you.”
He patted my back. He smelled lightly of Aqua Velva and smoke, a scent I remembered well now but could never replicate, though I did have a small plastic bottle of the aftershave in my bathroom drawer that I sometimes smelled just to try and bring back the memory. “I love you too,” he said. “Forever. Remember that. I’m always on your side. Just try to make better choices, eh?”
“Oh, I’m going to make a lot of bad choices,” I said with a dry laugh. “I’m certain of it. But I try to get it right.”
“I’d never ask more of you than that. I want you to have a happy life, Ramie. Make every moment count.”
I smiled. “When in Rome…”
“Better to have a bird in the hand than two in the bush.” He laughed. “Sometimes clichés become clichés because they’re good advice.”
I nodded. “I promise you I’ll always do my best.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I didn’t ride with Tanya to the party after all. She was eager to get there as soon as it began, and I had to take some time to calm down and get myself together. Besides, I still had all the time I wanted with grown-up Tanya, assuming I got back where I’d come from, but there was very little time left with Brendan at all.
I touched up my makeup and hair, and spritzed on the Obsession cologne I hadn’t thought about in years but found on the bathroom shelf and remembered had been a favorite of Brendan’s. Tonight I felt compelled to wow him. I still felt vaguely weird about it, but I reminded myself he wasn’t some kid I’d just encountered and was inappropriately older than. This Brendan was the only Brendan I’d ever known and he’d never left my memory, so in that sense he’d kind of “grown” with me over the years.
If nothing else, I wanted to have a little more time with this sweet memory of mine.
Actually, that’s a bit disingenuous. I didn’t just want to enjoy living in the live photo album this had become—the part of me that wondered how things would be different if Brendan and I had never broken up was getting louder and more insistent. I needed to know, one way or the other, if my life would have gone in a different direction if we hadn’t ended our relationship.
So was this my chance to undo that ending? Or even to mix it up so we had at least a little more time together? It wasn’t something I’d thought much about over the years; I was so determined in my career that I couldn’t afford to look back. But that day on the yacht had certainly made me question my ever-diminishing choices, and that had clearly taken me back to the beginning of my adult life’s path: the end of high school.
Was that why I was back here again? To take the other road at the fork?
He picked me up at eight. It was still light out and I saw his old station wagon—oh! the embarrassment I’d felt riding around in that back in the day!—pull up in front of my house.
Truth be told, station wagons are some of the best cars out there to drive. Even more unvarnished truth be told, they are just about the best vehicle to have sex in, if you’re going to have sex in a vehicle. I’ve done it on more occasions than I care to admit, and nothing beat the ol’ station wagon for roominess and semi-privacy out in the open.
I shouted good-bye to my parents, and bounded out the door, feeling, for just a moment, exactly as I had at eighteen. There was a lightness to my life. I was young and fit and strong, the world was still somewhat innocent, as I didn’t care about politics and 9/11 was still many years in the future, and I was bounding down the freshly cut green front yard of my childhood home at dusk, going to a party with the only boyfriend who’d ever really made me feel safe and coddled.
The reason for that, of course, was that I grew up and realized that I shouldn’t aspire to have someone else make me feel safe and coddled; I was supposed to take care of myself.
Nevertheless, in these halcyon days when I could still pretend, it felt pretty damn good.
So I was going to let it feel good now too.
“Hey there!” I slid across the seat and kissed him on the cheek.
“Hey, don’t be stingy.” He pulled me toward him and kissed me on the mouth. For a good, long, tantalizing time. If no one had been home, I’d have been sorely tempted to take him back inside and satisfy the longing that was suddenly raging in me.
I guess what they say about women reaching their sexual prime later in life is true. That, combined with a teenage body teeming with hormones, was lethal. Every time I’d seen or talked to or even thought of Brendan in the past couple of days, I’d felt a flush run hot right down my core. That body. That face. That passion.
“So why were you so determined to go to this thing tonight?” he asked me.
I couldn’t tell him the truth—that I thought it was the one chance to change the way things had gone downhill for us—so I just shrugged and parroted Tanya. “It’s the end of school, the last chance…”
“So let’s go someplace more private instead,” he suggested, and gave me a knowing look.
I smiled. It was so tempting. “Let’s just go for a little while at least. Tanya’s expecting me. She’ll be pissed if I bail.”
“Right.” A muscle twitched in his jaw and he put the car in gear and began to drive.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.” He cast a quick glance my way. “I just feel like we do a lot of things because of what Tanya will do if we don’t.”
“Really?” Was that true? I didn’t remember that. Certainly she’d been a huge part of my teen years. There was almost no event I could think of that hadn’t included her. But that was because we were friends. It had never occurred to me that for some reason Brendan might not have liked that, or might not have liked her.
“It doesn’t matter.” He drove on and changed the subject to the fate of next year’s varsity football
team, now that he and his pals were going to be gone. It was funny to hear him speculating about such small pieces of the future as if they mattered, when what I really wanted to know about was how his life had gone.…
Questions I’d never be able to ask him right now.
When he turned into the driveway off Persimmon Tree Road, I recognized it. I remembered the mailbox with cardinals on it and recalled wondering if cardinals were lucky or if that was just bluebirds. Not a significant memory by any means, but it had happened. And when we came to the house, a tall white structure with a long porch, sort of like The Waltons house on steroids, I remembered that too. A pretty place. Probably a very peaceful retreat on a summer’s evening when there weren’t two hundred recently graduated teenagers blasting the Black Crowes and throwing back beers. The pungent, earthy scent of weed also hung in the air, of course. Hell, I’d smelled that outside the school itself, though it wasn’t something I was into.
We followed the cacophony to a huge crowd of people in the backyard, covering a patio and extending into a stretch of grass and dark woods, occasionally lit by random fireflies flickering on and off, making me think of high piano notes with every flash.
As I had in the halls of the school, I recognized many of the faces and knew the sad fates of more than one. But also as I had in school, I felt tight and anxious, like I didn’t belong here—which I didn’t—and like I couldn’t breathe.
“You okay?” Brendan asked, clearly seeing the change of expression on my face.
“It’s hot,” I said. My skin was tingling. I felt flushed. Nauseated. “Is it hot?”
“Hot?”
“Stuffy.”
“We’re outside.”
“Ugh. It feels stuffy to me.” As I said this, though, the feeling began to ebb. As it receded, I recognized it as a premonition. Whether that was significant or not, I couldn’t say. I’d never been a huge fan of crowds, so this might have been the reaction I’d had the first time around as well. Whatever had happened originally, not only had I survived it but it hadn’t mattered enough to register in my memory, so I had to just let this play out the way it needed to.
“Do you want a drink?”
I considered. “Yeah, could you see if there’s a Coke or Pepsi or something?”
“Sure.” He eyed me questioningly for a moment, then headed into the crowd.
For my part, I backed off a little and sat down on a stone garden wall, hoping to recede from the crowd and observe. Maybe pretend I was home, comfortable, watching all of this on TV, rather than standing right here where it was happening, trying to make sense of something that couldn’t be logical.
And all the while, I kept having flashes of recognition. Only brief seconds—probably not even seconds, just fractions of a second—where it felt like déjà vu. But with all of the moments being so small and insignificant, it was hard to hold on to them and examine then. Why would my mind have held on to the fleeting image of Janet Brooks huffing past, looking pale and angry, with her hapless boyfriend, Tom … something … following? I’d seen it before, my subconscious told me that, but that was all. It didn’t matter. It was gone quickly, and left little trace.
Naturally Anna Farrior was here, and, naturally, she was the first to approach me. “Um, I don’t think you were invited to this party.”
“Better call the police.”
She acted as if she didn’t hear me. “Where’s your invitation?”
“My invitation?” I repeated automatically. What a stupid notion, that a teenage keg party would have invites.
She took my question the wrong way, though, and found it tremendously funny. “See? You were so totally not invited that you don’t even realize there are no invitations!”
I looked at her evenly. Had I not realized how very stupid she was back then? I knew she was a nasty bitch, but how could I have let such unimaginative insults bother me, ever? “Why do you feel so bad about yourself?” I asked her.
That threw her. “W-what? I don’t! Why do you?”
“It’s pretty basic psychology. If you’d paid attention in Mrs. Breen’s class, you’d know it, but you were too busy unconsciously demonstrating it to understand and learn about it.”
“Is that supposed to be an insult? That I didn’t pay attention in class?” She looked around to where her entourage would normally be, but she didn’t have them at the moment.
Not that it would have mattered to me if she had. This was a principle all of them should learn. It would serve every one of them later.
“You try to make yourself feel bigger,” I said, “by making others feel smaller. But it doesn’t really work, does it?”
“You’re crazy.” She cranked her finger by her temple. Classic third-grade behavior.
“Everything you attack me for is something that you envy or because you envy me on the whole. It’s really obvious. Like, the makeup thing.”
She unconsciously raised a hand to her cheek. “What makeup thing? The fact that you can’t put it on?”
“The fact that I don’t feel like I need it as much as you do. Because really”—I shrugged—“is that such a biting insult? That I don’t wear as much makeup as you? Ouch?”
“You’re being weird.” She was visibly disconcerted. “What are you on now? Brendan should see this.”
“Brendan brought me here.”
She winced. And there it was. The main, if not the only, thing about me she really hated. I had Brendan. “You’re a pretty girl, Anna,” I gave her, perhaps too generously. “Just because Brendan’s taken doesn’t mean you can’t find another boyfriend.”
She had nothing to say to that. She just looked at me, fuming, then turned on her heel and stalked away.
I watched her go and for the first time in my life I actually felt sorry for her. Not hugely. She’d been a real jerk to me, over and over, and I resented the unpleasantness she’d brought to my teenage years, but what would have been the point of telling her that I was sure she’d spent an hour covering the one zit she had that would have been far less noticeable with no makeup? That might have given Teenage Me a satisfying moment, and Teenage Me was definitely still inside, but it would have been cruel. One thing I’d learned with age was that an eye for an eye never left anyone at peace.
“Ramie!” I felt, as well as heard, Tanya’s voice as she came toward me from the dark to my left. “There you are! Where the hell have you been all night?”
Clearly she’d been drinking beer. A lot of it. It sloshed over the sides of the red Solo cup she was holding so tightly that it crunched slightly under her grip.
“He’s not here!” she wailed.
No sense in asking who. Kenny Singer. “Looks like you’re having fun anyway.” I nodded at her cup and held out my hand. “Give me your keys.”
“I’m fine!” She laughed and handed over the keys. “I’m so not fine. Either you or Brendan had better be, because I’m pretty sure I’m gonna need a ride home.”
“We’ll give you a ride and you and I can come get your car tomorrow.”
She took another gulp of beer. “Thank god. Because I need to find a boyfriend tonight. This is ridiculous. Do you know how long it’s been since I had a boyfriend?”
“Like, a month?”
“A boyfriend I loved?” She gave an anguished moan. “I’ve never had what stupid you and stupid Brendan have.”
I had to laugh. “Yeah, stupid us.” But I knew she was going to find something even better than what Brendan and I had because she was going to find something warm and happy and lasting and she was going to have two beautiful children to show for it. I couldn’t reassure her any more specifically than I already had; she’d think I was crazy, and maybe that “prediction” would even interrupt her path, I couldn’t know. Everything I knew about this situation came from movies like Back to the Future. Not exactly a clear blueprint.
“You guys are gonna get married,” she said, then took another glug of beer and sniffed, as if the prospect of Brendan
and me getting married caused her great distress. “You’re gonna get married and I’m going to be an old maid forever.”
“I’m pretty sure neither of those things are going to happen,” I told her. “In fact, I’m really sure.”
She looked at me, surprised. Suddenly more sober than I thought she was, and latching on to the one thing I didn’t want to have to dive into. “You don’t think you and Brendan are going to get married? Since when?”
And I remembered that back in those days I did think I’d be with him forever. For a while, anyway. Once upon a time, I had been sure—deep-in-my-soul sure—that Brendan was The One for me. Was that based on something real, or was it just the lies of hormones and teenage attraction?
It made me wish I could have a little sit-down with Teenage Me, instead of Teenage Tanya. Tanya wasn’t the one who turned out to need good advice, once all was said and done. Tanya found her way all by herself into a happily-ever-after anyone could envy.
But Teenage Me, on the other hand—the real teenage me, not this spooky thirty-eight-year-old who was inhabiting my teenage body—that girl could have used some good advice. It was all really excellent to go to school and start a successful career, and there was a whole lot to be said for never being financially dependent on a man.
Yet, at the same time, there was a lot to be said for having a good, solid companion, someone to traverse the difficulties of life with. For better or worse, as they said.
I’d never really had that.
Honestly, I don’t think I ever really believed I’d had that with anyone, though there had been a moment, when I was thirty-six and still saw hope for a family, that I thought maybe I could have it with Jeffrey. I certainly knew now that he hadn’t been solid, but he made sense in more ways than not. Dating him was the correct move at approximately the right time. It was a math calculation, not a warm heart decision.
We’d met at a conference in Reno. At first the one thing we had in common was that we both disliked Reno. As things to bond over go, that wasn’t really all that stellar.
But then we’d learned that we lived in towns that were only about forty-five minutes apart, so I guess that fact and a mutual physical attraction was enough to get us together. But it never drew us closer; we’d stayed forty-five minutes apart.
If I Could Turn Back Time Page 15