“I’ll take that one too.” Roxanne snatched it from me. “I’m always losing things and I want to make sure I can call you. Is your cell number on here?” She scanned it quickly. “Good.”
“Good,” I echoed. “So we’ll talk.”
“Fine.”
This was going to be a long, long month.
* * *
Cam and I lived in a condo in McLean Gardens in Northwest D.C. Her father, Jake, had lived in Friendship Heights, about a mile away, which had made for easy handoffs between him and me when Cam was little, but Jake had been killed in a motorcycle accident when Cam was three.
She didn’t even remember him now.
It broke my heart because he had loved her so much and would have gotten so much out of seeing her grow up, and she would have gotten so much from having a dad like him. He’d been handsome, quick-witted, fearless, and, unfortunately, reckless. The very thing that had attracted me to him in the first place—me, the typical goody-goody—had ended up killing him and depriving Cam of a father.
So it had just been the two of us for twelve years now. We’d done everything together. To tell the truth, I’d gotten quite used to having her as my constant companion and the adjustment when she’d gotten old enough to want her own social life had been embarrassingly difficult for me.
Of course, I did have a tendency toward the maudlin. On more than one occasion when she was in elementary school, I had found myself in her bedroom, holding her increasingly threadbare teddy bear and sobbing at the prospect of her getting older and going away to college and then on to her own life.
This, like many things, was a problem I had bought for myself unnecessarily. As it turned out, as Cam had grown up, so had I, albeit on a slightly slower curve. I’d learned to let go more and more with every passing year, to be flexible as her social life expanded into sleepovers at other houses, overnight camp, and so on.
Tonight Cam was staying at her grandmother’s (Jake’s mom’s) and I had plans with Rick Samuels, a guy I’d been seeing for about a year now. Rick was a widower with a fifteen-year-old daughter named Amy, who went to Camilla’s school. They were friends even before Rick and I met, but now they were as close as sisters. The whole situation was very comfortable.
I’d always worried that Camilla’s untraditional upbringing had come at a cost to her. Yes, she knew she was loved—she would remember and understand that her mother had worked very hard to raise her and be an active part of her life. My jobs in her youngest years had included working as a housecleaner—so Cam could come with me—and as a private cook, which took me away from her only two or three hours five nights a week since I did all the prep work at home. But those jobs didn’t pay much and eventually I’d had to bite the bullet and put her into a day-care center near our house and go to work full-time. Still, I was glad to have at least spent so much of her first three years with her almost constantly, glad I was the one to nurse her through the madness of chicken pox and to sleep with her burning, fevered body during a particularly frightening bout with strep when she was only two and a half.
So I knew I had done the best I could, and I was fairly confident that Cam knew that too. But knowing your frenzied mother tried isn’t the same as growing up in a security blanket composed of two stable parents and maybe even a sibling or two. An ideal that few people achieve? Maybe. But I’d had it and I wanted no less for my own child.
But we don’t always get what we want.
As I got into the car after spending the afternoon dealing with Roxanne, I pushed her number on speed dial.
“Thank you,” I said to her as soon as she answered.
“What for?” she asked.
“For being the perfect daughter.” I didn’t know how Roxanne’s parents could stand dealing with her all the time. They must have wanted to tear their hair out.
Camilla didn’t even ask for an explanation. “Sure! Now can I get an iPhone?”
“No.”
“Mom—”
“No.”
“It was worth a shot,” she said on a sigh.
I had to laugh. “Hey, I wouldn’t respect you if you didn’t at least try. Twenty times a day.”
“You got my texts, then.”
“Yup.” I smiled thinking about them. It was always nice to check my phone and see the light blinking with a little message from her. Today she’d listed ten reasons she needed an iPhone. These included, You will never need to feed it or clean up after it and I need to be able to access my Facebook and texts in case of an epidemic.
“Seriously, Mom, it’s like Edison’s invented the lightbulb and we’re insisting on using candles.”
“Camilla, you are talking to me on a magic radio while I am in my car! It hardly needs four hundred thousand apps and a touch screen to make it a miracle.”
“Yeah, but there’s a flashlight app—can you imagine how handy that could be if there was a zombie invasion?”
“Are you kidding? Zombies go toward the light. Everyone knows that. There would be nothing more foolish in the event of a zombie invasion than for you to use your phone as a flashlight. Thank God you don’t have one!”
She groaned.
“So are you set for the night?” I asked. “Have everything you need?”
“I’ve spent a lot of time with Nan, Mom. I think I can survive here.”
“Well, if you can’t, you can come home,” I said, a little wistfully. “I can tell Rick we’ll go out another time.”
“Um, he’s only been talking about this date of yours for days now,” she said. It was sad when my fifteen-year-old was more mature than I was. “And Amy said he’s totally exited about it. It would crush him if you canceled. Anyway, Nan and I are watching I Am Legend.”
“Ohh.” I sucked the air in through my teeth. “So she doesn’t know about the dog in that.”
She laughed. “No way, she’d never watch it then. I’ve gotta run, Ma. I’m supposed to call Phillip before we put the movie on.”
“Who?”
“I don’t think I’ve told you about him yet. I’ll tell you tomorrow!”
I didn’t have time to say anything else before she clicked off.
Who the hell was Phillip?
So far she’d never been on a one-on-one date, but I knew it was coming and I was dreading it. As long as they stayed in groups—and, hell, even as long as they had to sneak to be alone, thereby preventing them from spending too much time doing so—she probably couldn’t get too serious with a guy before she was ready.
I really didn’t want her to make the same mistake I had.
It’s hard to prevent a whole individual from making her own errors, of course, but it’s not unheard-of for someone to heed good advice now and then.
I hoped Camilla would trust me on that one.
The idea of her grieving away what should be her happy, carefree teenage years—of her living a half-life of faked smiles, secret tears, and a distracted heart and mind—was untenable to me. I remembered beautiful blue-sky summer days when I felt like I was looking at the world from behind thick glass, unable to feel the easy optimism and simple pleasures that my friends did, going to the lake, the pool, the county fair, whatever.
After my breakup with Nate in high school, had my mother had any idea at all how I was crumbling on the inside? How, in that delicate brief place between childhood and adulthood, I had literally wanted to die rather than to surge forward into the rest of my life? Had anyone picked up on the depth of my anguish at all? Maybe not. Maybe not even Theresa and Jordan had realized how desperate the despair had been, how many times I’d stood at the precipice, looking over the edge and thinking how much better it might be to just … not exist anymore.
These were the memories that made me want to lock Camilla away in her room until she was old enough to really handle the fallout from a broken heart.
But when would that be?
We can understand the science of what makes a heart beat, but we can never stop it from breaking.
&nb
sp; And some of us just never stop breaking.
Chapter 3
May 1985
It was the first outdoor party of the year, at Donny Frye’s house on Mary Cassatt Drive. It had been hot for early May all week, and even the night was balmy and summerlike.
Erin, Jordan, and Theresa had walked there from Erin’s house, and Nate was supposed to meet her there later, since he had something else to do first. She couldn’t measure the time between her arrival and his in time, but it was about four beers from the keg and she was feeling tipsy and alive and happy. The music thrummed along and even the din of voices added to her good mood.
“When’s Nate coming?” Theresa yelled over the music.
“Any minute.”
“Lucky bitch,” she joked, tossing her dark, glossy hair out of her face. As if she had anything to worry about, boy-wise. “You don’t know what it’s like for the rest of us, having to face these animals without the perfect boyfriend.”
Erin flushed with pride. “You think Nate is the perfect boyfriend?”
“Duh.” Theresa rolled her pale blue eyes.
“He’s a great guy,” Jordan agreed. She was always the more calm and reasonable one. If Jordan said something, you could believe it was true.
Theresa fixed her gaze on Dennis Maloney, who was on the soccer team and was one of the better-looking guys at school. “Though I could settle for that tonight.”
This was why, in private, Nate referred to Theresa as a penis flytrap. She had dalliances with a lot of guys. A lot.
“Go for it,” Jordan said. She’d long since declared to Erin that she wasn’t going to keep worrying about Theresa’s sexual habits, and instead was just going to watch them for the show that they were.
True to form, Theresa said, “I think I will,” then flashed an uncertain look back. “Unless you guys want me to stick with you?”
“We’ll be fine,” Erin said with a laugh.
“Wish me luck!” Theresa sauntered off in Dennis’s direction.
Jordan and Erin looked at each other and laughed.
“Want another beer?” Erin asked Jordan.
“Not right now. I’m going to run in and find the bathroom, actually. It’s that time.”
“Ugh.”
Jordan nodded. “I’ll catch up with you in a while.”
“Okay.” Erin went to the keg and tried to remember how to work it. Jordan was better at it than she was. That was why Jordan’d gotten the first four. After several embarrassing tries, she eked out half a cup of beer.
“She’s Always a Woman” by Billy Joel started playing and couples on the terrace clasped themselves together to dance so slowly and so close that they might as well have gotten hotel rooms.
For some reason, that made Erin feel giggly.
“You look happy,” Rick McClintock commented, coming up to her with a red plastic cup of mostly foam. He was in her history class, but he sat on the other side of the small room and somehow that meant they’d never really said much to each other before. “Drunk?”
“I haven’t eaten anything,” Erin said with a laugh. “Maybe that’s the problem.”
He laughed. “So … check out the real show.” He gestured toward a small group of brave—or completely drunk—souls who were grooving on the patio.
She was about to produce one of the many excuses she had at the ready when it came to not dancing, when, despite the thick crowd, she became hyper-aware of one person out of about fifty in the darkness. “Excuse me. I’m meeting someone,” she tossed distractedly to Rick, and took a couple of barefoot steps onto the slate patio.
She didn’t even see him, there was no sight and recognition, it all moved too fast for that. She just sensed him, went straight to him, and threw herself into his arms, kissing him with a disproportionate hunger, before she was even a hundred percent sure it was him.
Except she was sure it was. She’d know the smell of him, the taste of him, the feel of him anywhere.
It was only later that the potential for humiliation occurred to her. Hurling yourself at a stranger and sticking your tongue down his throat is the kind of thing that can get you a challenging reputation in high school.
In this case, though, she was right and instead it served to deepen her certainty that what they had between them was a lot deeper than what most people had.
“Hey,” he said with a smile when she drew back.
“What took you so long?” She kissed him again. She didn’t know what it was. It was like the sight of him made her hungry for more.
She didn’t bother to wait for an answer. After about five solid minutes of kissing, she wordlessly led him to a private spot on the grass at the far end of the yard, and they lay down and spent the next three hours or so making out under the stars.
* * *
“How much longer is this going to take?” Erin asked, watching Nate on a ladder, carefully painting around the door of her family’s house.
“Hours,” he said, giving her a quick glance.
“Hours?” She adjusted her sunglasses and leaned back in the lawn chair she’d dragged around to the front of the house so she could sit with him. “I’m just sitting here doing nothing.”
“You could grab a brush and help.”
She shook her head. “I’m not allowed. My mother says I’m too sloppy. Even when I try really hard to be neat.”
He laughed. “I believe that.”
She made an exasperated noise.
“You don’t have to hang out here, you know. You can do something else.”
“I know. I’m being supportive. Do you want a sandwich?” she asked, suddenly inspired to do something other than sit there like a lump.
“Yes,” he said, focusing intently on the edging. He didn’t get even a spot of paint on the brick. But what she really liked was the way his muscles flexed in his arm and back as he moved the paintbrush. “That would be great. Thanks.”
“I’ll get it.” She got up and put her magazine down on the chair. “You want iced tea?”
“Sure.”
“Okay.” She went inside, and it took her eyes a moment to adjust to the light after coming in from the sun. The house was always dark and cool because tall shady trees blocked the side and back windows.
First she stopped in the bathroom and squirted some more Sun-In on her hair. It was already looking pretty pale, but she wanted to keep it that way, and using Sun-In with the sun instead of a blow dryer made her feel like it was happening more naturally.
Then she went into the kitchen and took out the bread, then went to the fridge and got mayonnaise and mustard, plus some turkey and ham deli meats. It was almost a club sandwich, but they didn’t have any bacon.
However, there were Bac-Os in the cabinet. She’d often eat them right out of the canister.
So she toasted two pieces of bread, then spread the mayonnaise and mustard together on both slices, cracked some pepper over them, then sprinkled on a few Bac-Os. Then she layered the meats on and hesitated. There was no lettuce but there were tomatoes. She found a large red one that smelled of summer, and sliced it paper-thin, layering the slices on thick enough, she hoped, to make up for the lack of lettuce.
Then she mixed up some water and iced-tea powder, tossed in some ice cubes, and put the whole thing on a tray to take out to Nate.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t paying attention when she opened the door and knocked it right into the ladder he was standing on, sending him and the paint flying into the bushes.
For a moment she stood there in shock, looking from the mess to the tray and back again, as if somehow she could reconcile the two.
Then her faculties returned to her. “Oh, my God!” She put the tray down and ran to Nate, who was recovering himself and the can of paint. “I’m so sorry! Oh, my God!”
“You are a mess around paint.” He pulled a rag out of his belt loop and started cleaning up a couple of spots that had splashed onto the previously perfect brick. “Get the hose, would you
?”
“Yes!” She ran to the side of the house and got the hose, dragging it across the newly cut grass. She handed it to him and ran back to turn it on. “Now?” she called.
He yelled back and she turned the faucet on full blast.
When she got back to the front of the house she was surprised to see his hair and shirt were wet, and the walkway was sprayed with water.
“What happened to you?”
“Someone turned the water on.”
“I asked if you were ready!”
“Is that what you said?”
“Yes. And I thought you said yes!”
“I said what,” he corrected. “Because I didn’t know what you said.”
“Ohhh.” She couldn’t help it, she had to laugh. “I’m so sorry. Really. I was just trying to help.”
He laid the hose down by the bush to dilute the spilled paint, and went over to her. “Baby.” He took her into his arms and held her.
“Ew,” she said against his shoulder. “You’re wet.”
“You don’t mind.”
She didn’t. “I guess I don’t now.” She ran her hands up his back and held on. He was solid against her.
“Okay, so what did you bring?” He drew back and went over to the tray she’d set on her lawn chair.
She followed. “My magazine is wet!”
He looked at her. “So’s the sandwich.”
“Oh, no!” She looked at it. Only a corner of the sandwich had really gotten it, but it looked like a soggy sponge. “Gross. I’ll make you a new one!”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s fine.”
“Are you sure?” she asked dubiously. She wouldn’t have eaten it.
“It’s great,” he said appreciatively, his mouth full. “Seriously.” Then he frowned. “Is there something chewy in here?”
“Chewy? You mean more than just the regular amount you’d expect from bread and lunch meat?”
He swallowed and opened the sandwich to reveal pink dots all over the meat.
For a moment she was horrified, but then she remembered. “Bac-Os!”
“What?”
“You know, bacon bits. Those things you put on salad. They’re usually crunchy, but I guess either the hose or the mayo ruined them.” She crinkled her nose. “That’s really disgusting. Let me make you another one.” She reached for it.
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