If I Could Turn Back Time

by Beth Harbison

  “When in Rome.”

  We laughed.

  “But it absolutely makes sense to check in and make sure that at most times you’re more happy than sad.”

  I had never done such a thing. Never evaluated my emotional state at all. I had always done what needed to be done, whatever it was. It had worked for me, for the most part, but was I happy? Not entertained now and then, not just tipsy on good champagne now and then, but did I smile like a Disney princess when I woke in the morning, and have a nice big stretch, smiling at the world for the chance to do another day?

  No, I woke up too late every day, charged around getting ready, chastised myself for never taking the time to put on more than a little mascara and lipstick, and hurried off to work, mentally building a to-do list every step there, to go with the to-do list I had left over from the evening before.

  “Are you happy?” I asked him.

  He smiled so genuinely that I couldn’t help but believe his answer. “I am so happy. Every single day. You and your mother mean the world to me, and that is what I live for.”

  There was an awkward moment, when I imagined us both thinking of his impending death, but I knew it was just my thoughts coming in so strongly that I was afraid they might penetrate into his consciousness somehow.

  So I cast the thought from my mind. “I’m glad,” I told him. “You are an inspiration. I will never forget that. I will never forget this conversation.” And I wouldn’t.

  Emotion took hold of my throat and suddenly I was having trouble swallowing the lump there. It was so damn unfair that he was going to go. It was so damn unfair that he was going to leave my mother right as their child went off on her own and they could finally start living their golden years together.

  Maybe it was fate, maybe there would be some big answer when I got to the Great Beyond, and I’d understand that everything needed to be the way it was, but I sure didn’t get it now. And it didn’t look promising that I ever would.

  “Dad.”

  “Mm?”

  “Would you see the doctor and get a thorough checkup? Just, you know, to make sure everything’s all right?”

  He stubbed out his cigarette and blew the last of the smoke into the air, watched it for a moment, probably aware of the irony, then looked at me. “What makes you say that?”

  “Nothing in particular,” I said quickly. The last thing I wanted to do was intimate that he looked sick or that he needed to spend his endgame worrying. “I’m just thinking that because my friend…” I tried to think of a name. “Debbie Soldour, remember her?”

  He shook his head, of course, because I’d just made her up.

  “Anyway, her dad is, like, a tennis pro and a runner and never smoked or anything”—my eyes traveled to the full ashtray—“and he just had a heart attack. He’s fine, thank goodness, but he had a heart attack and no one saw it coming. It just made me feel worried.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that. But there’s nothing for you to worry about, I have been checked thoroughly. There is nothing going on in me that the doctors don’t know about.” He met my eyes for a second, and in that instant I knew—I just knew—that he did know the state of his health. And he knew it was too late.

  Grief so huge came over me that I couldn’t stop the rush of tears that fell from my eyes.

  “Hey there.” He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me in for a hug. I cried against the crisp cotton of his J.C. Penney button-down shirt and wondered if this was the last time I would feel and hear his reassurances. Even though they were empty, I didn’t want this comfort and feeling of safety to end.

  “Sorry,” I snuffled against his shirt. “I don’t want to wake Mom up with my crying.”

  “It’s all right,” he said, and gave me an extra squeeze. “Neither of us is ever going to feel put out if you need us. You know that.”

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  Then, of all times, that stupid alarm started going off upstairs. The shrill beep beep beep seemingly getting louder and faster. “I better go shut that thing off,” I said, and drew away from him.

  He looked puzzled.

  I gestured vaguely toward the stairs. “Stupid clock-radio thing. It keeps going off at weird times and I can’t figure out how to turn it off. Anyway, thanks, Dad. I really appreciate … well, everything. I love you, Daddy.”

  “I love you too, chicken.”

  I gave him one more hug and said, “Good night.”

  This was how I had to remember him.

  I went upstairs into my room, but the beeping had stopped. Aggravating. For some reason it smelled funny in my room. Like Vicks VapoRub or something. Maybe some kind of new antibacterial cleaning fluid. I don’t know, but it was so strong that I went to open the window before brushing my teeth and climbing into bed.

  Once there in the soft cotton cloud, I thought about the clock again. If it went off and woke me up in the middle of the night, I was going to go insane. I needed some sleep. All of this was taking a huge toll on me. So I forced myself to haul my butt out of bed, feel my way to the little red numbers that provided the only light in the room, then I reached for the wall behind it, where I knew the outlet to be, and yanked the electrical cord.

  The lights went out, mercifully.

  I got back into bed and drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep almost immediately.

  Because I’d unplugged the clock, I don’t know what time it was when I heard the noise. At first my mind registered it as the clock, which didn’t make sense, and I lost all sense of where I was for a moment. That was a seriously disconcerting feeling. Nothing about my situation currently made logical or scientific sense, but at least it was a scenario that was familiar and one that I could maneuver, strange as it was. But to wake up with no sense of time or place was like waking up insane, and it was scary.

  I blinked hard against the blackness and willed my eyes to adjust to the light.

  “Ramie!” I heard the loud whisper somewhere close by. Under the bed? Outside the door? I couldn’t tell.

  My heart pounded with strange anxiety and I almost imagined I could hear that damn alarm beeping along to the frantic tempo.

  “Ramie!”

  Wait. I knew that voice. And it wasn’t floating disembodied from somewhere in my room; it was … outside. I strained to see the outline of the window, the narrow gap between the shade and the sill where the meager light of night shone through. I got out of bed and headed toward it, stubbing my toe on the bedpost and swallowing a curse.

  When I got to the window, I touched the shade and felt my way down to the bottom, I gave it a tug, and the spring released, so it rolled up fast and loud, scaring me half to death. It had been a long time since I’d had window shades like this.

  “About time!” I heard out there.

  I touched my forehead to the screen and looked out. There, on the grass beneath the window, next to the magnolia tree, was the outline of Brendan. “What are you doing?” I rasped.

  “I had to see you.”

  “Why?” But my heart did a little flip. He wanted to see me. He was making a romantic gesture, however lame. Man, it had been a long time since anything like this had happened.

  I saw him shrug. “I missed you.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Late.”

  “Hang on,” I said. Surely dad would have gone to sleep by now. “I’ll be right down.”

  I was wearing only a long T-shirt, but I knew no one in the neighborhood would be up at this hour. They never were. It was a sleepy little enclave, reliably so.

  I hurried down the stairs and carefully opened the front door. It creaked—it always creaked—but I stopped it and stood still, listening for any sound of movement upstairs. There was none, so I slipped through and out the screen door.

  Brendan was standing just outside the light on the front lawn and I ran to him and jumped into his arms and wrapped my legs around him, holding on for dear life. “I’m so glad to see you!” I said. And I was. Goo
d lord, my heart was positively pounding. Teenage hormones really were a whole different thing.

  “Good thing I came over,” he said, between kisses.

  “No kidding.”

  We kept kissing and he eased me back down onto my feet and around the corner of the house into the dark privacy by the magnolia. Even someone inside the house couldn’t have seen us from the windows and there were no houses facing us.

  We were completely free.

  And I was going half crazy on him. I mean, I was on fire. Once again I was reminded how long it had been since I’d had an impulse like this and been able to follow it through.

  We did.

  I leaned against the brick siding and pulled him against me. He was young and instantly hard and hungry. I felt like he was devouring me. Every touch of his tongue, his fingers, everywhere his skin touched mine sent shock waves of pleasure and urgency through me.

  It went quickly; the need was too great to take our time. And I didn’t want to. I wanted it hard and rough. I needed to feel the brick against my back and him thrusting so hard it was almost painful. I needed that like I needed air.

  When it was over, we slipped our clothes back into place and sank to the ground to lie in the grass on our backs, side by side, looking up at the stars and the silver linen clouds drifting past them and in front of the full moon.

  “What made you come over tonight?” I asked, reaching for his hand in the darkness.

  “I just thought we didn’t get enough time together tonight. Something’s been feeling different. Distant.”

  That was undeniable. I didn’t know what to say.

  “I was sure you were going to break up with me.”

  “Brendan…” What? I did. Once upon a time, I did. Had that fact bled through to him the way my eighteen-year-old thoughts were bleeding through to me? Did we have paths in our lives that were so firm that even deviating from them didn’t erase their shadows?

  I resisted that idea. We had free will. At any given time we could change our path. I refused to believe that every change, every act of spontaneity we thought we had engaged in, had actually been planned out for us before we were ever born. What would be the point of life, then? To show we could ride on a roller coaster on its set path? There was no doubt where you’d be at the end of your two minutes on Space Mountain, but I had to believe that life was more fluid than that.

  “I didn’t” was all I could say. “Did you want to?” The thought came to me, sudden and unwelcome, that maybe we were so destined to part ways that if one didn’t do it, the other would.

  But he said, “No. It’s going to be hard enough with us going to different schools next year.”

  I nodded, though he didn’t see me.

  We lay there for a long time in the darkness.

  “Brendan?”

  “Ramie.”

  I loved the way he said my name. Wow. Sometimes it really was the simple things. “How do you want to feel in five years?”

  He turned to face me. “Huh?”

  “You know, kind of where do you think you’ll be, but more how do you want to feel?”

  “Happy? Happy, I guess.”

  His answer fell a little short. Somehow in the haze of sexual bliss and the beautiful night, I had hoped he’d understand the question and have some great answer that told me, definitively, that I had fixed whatever was wrong in my life and could make it back to reality now.

  “You guess?”

  “Well, yeah. That’s a weird question. I want to feel warm if it’s cold outside, and cool if it’s hot outside, and satisfied if it’s time to eat, and, whatever. Happy.”

  I sighed.

  He gave a dry laugh. “What was the answer?”

  “What?”

  “I obviously got it wrong. What was the right answer?”

  “There is no right answer.” I felt a little snappish and hoped I’d hidden that in my voice. “Your answer was fine.”

  “All right.” His tone was long-suffering.

  A few more minutes passed and I began to feel cold. And the grass was making me itch. And I kind of wanted to break up with Brendan. Something inside of me told me that we hadn’t broken up all those years ago just because of a little misunderstanding that could have been avoided by a hair more patience from me, and five more minutes’ time. It was a convenient excuse to hang my hat on, but it wasn’t really the issue.

  The issue, it felt at this moment, was that something here just wasn’t right.

  I recalled what my father had said just a little while earlier.

  It absolutely makes sense to check in and make sure that at most times you’re more happy than sad.

  At this moment, I wasn’t. But what had I felt like over the past few months? I couldn’t really remember. I had to rely on that voice inside of me, the one I’d been thinking of as her. She was me, and she knew best.

  I needed to think about this, because at the moment I wasn’t sure which, if any, of these feelings to take the most seriously, so instead I just sat up, brushed myself off, and said, “I need to go in. My parents are going to be up soon.”

  He stood up, and reached a hand down for me, to help me up. As soon as I was standing, we both let go.

  “Good night,” I said, and leaned in to give him a kiss on the cheek.

  He touched my shoulder. “Night.”

  “I’m glad you came,” I added, hoping to obscure, if not erase, the weird turn our mood had taken.

  “Me too.” He laughed, and I didn’t know whether he was talking about the sex or making the trip over.

  Didn’t matter. Either way, I was glad he came.

  I just didn’t know if it was going to happen again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The night my father died I was home visiting from college. My mom had taken a trip with her sister to visit an elderly aunt who seemed on the edge.

  Nothing unique happened that week, nothing to give me the sense of foreboding I later realized I’d had. Dad had gone about his business as usual: he went to work on time, came home on time, cleaned out the garage, and fixed the long-broken porch door as a surprise for my mom.

  But a couple of times I’d heard him up in the wee hours of the morning, walking around. I’d call and ask if he was okay and he would say yes. Another time he took a late shower. I still don’t know why he did; it didn’t seem like something I should ask about later, but it was a detail that afterward wouldn’t fall into place.

  One that almost did fall into place was a toothache he had that wouldn’t go away. Dad was not a fan of going to the doctor or dentist, so the fact that his tooth hurt enough to go was telling. Perhaps it was even more telling that they didn’t find anything wrong. No cavity, no abscess, none of the usual suspects. The dentist just told him to get some Sensodyne and not to worry about it.

  I’d like to get mad about that, but he couldn’t have known what was going to happen.

  So on the night in question, I went down River Road with Tanya to a party at someone’s parents’ giant house. We got bored early on, no one interesting there at all, and decided to go down to one of the old locks and have some wine. We took the remains of a bottle she was able to grab from the kitchen, and drove down one of the side roads to its dirt ending along the Potomac River. It was cold outside, but we had warm coats and the sky and stars and water were all so beautiful they were irresistible.

  I think that, up to that point, it was one of the most beautiful nights of my life. We had a really good talk. We laughed about the antics we’d shared since meeting at thirteen, and cried about a few heartbreaks along the way (Brendan being one of them), and we talked about our futures and what we wanted. What we really wanted. We even went so far as to write our intentions down on a slip of paper—actually a duplicate check from my wallet—then crumpled them up, say a prayer, and toss them in the water to be carried off to their fruition.

  Which, now that I think about it, they did. For the most part.

  On the
way back, I suggested she come to my house and we sleep over. I had a copy of Grease on VHS and we could go down to the rec room and watch it, singing along as loud as we wanted to because my dad, I told her, slept like the dead.

  I said that.

  We went to her house so she could pick up a few things, and I used the phone to try and call my dad. It was about eleven-thirty P.M. and I figured he’d be up watching reruns of M*A*S*H, as usual. He didn’t answer, and that was the last time in my life that I would get no answer on the phone from someone who should have been there and not feel a stab of worry. Or full-on dread.

  Instead, Tanya and I ate a few Oreos and joked about the old pictures on her fridge, and then I tried him again.

  This time when he didn’t answer, I was … not worried, but curious. “That’s weird,” I said, wondering uneasily if he was having another late-night shower and what that could possibly mean. Fever? He felt cold so he needed to warm up? I didn’t know.

  “I’m sure everything’s fine,” Tanya said. “Look, why don’t I meet you there so I can take my car home in the morning and you won’t have to drive me? I’ll be like twenty minutes or so.”

  “Perfect.” I went back out to my car, excited about the fun ahead. I wondered if we had Jiffy Pop. My mind really stuck on that. Jiffy Pop. An absolute necessity for a sleepover.

  When I pulled into the driveway, I noticed that the light was flickering weirdly in the window, the way it did in the days before cable when the networks signed off for the night and the screen got fuzzy. Someone I knew used to call that “the ant races.” But why would the ant races be on in this day and age?

  I went inside, and the minute I was in the front door, I saw it was the ant races. Everything seemed to go quiet. I knew something was wrong. I couldn’t have guessed what, and if pressed to try I wouldn’t have gotten it right, but I crept into the room and saw him.

  He’d been on the sofa, sitting up, so he’d fallen over face forward. Later, I’d remember that and realize that it meant he’d had no pain. He hadn’t tried to stand up, it seemed, or go to the phone to call for help. He’d just been watching TV, a movie on the VCR (which had since ended, thus explaining the fuzz), and at some point something had happened and he’d just—gone.