Always Something There to Remind Me

by Beth Harbison

  She raised her chin. “No, but only because I never had, like, a love of my life like that.”

  If she was lucky, she never would. “Who says this is the love of my life?”

  “He does.” She reached for the box and I held it out of reach. “He loved you, he wanted you, he needed you, he’d love you forever. Omigod, Mom, that’s, like, huge.”

  “That’s, like, youth,” I corrected, standing up and putting the box back on the shelf. “And a few weeks spent apart. Find me a teenage guy who doesn’t suddenly turn his ordinary girlfriend into the girl of his dreams when he can’t see her for a few weeks and I’ll show you a unicorn.”

  She looked disappointed. “But he sounded like he meant it!”

  “That’s what I thought too, honey.” I felt sick. Somehow I’d gotten so tangled up in these memories that it hurt me too, to think he’d sounded like he meant it when he didn’t.

  I’d sincerely believed it was forever, and I’d believed, even more than that, that Nate would be there forever.

  What a mess this had all become.

  The past, the present, and all the stuff that lay in between. “At the time. But we were just kids.” I looked at her with sincerity, since I believed what I was saying even though I thought Nate and I had shared something a lot more intense than the usual youthful relationship. “You don’t meet the love of your life when you’re a kid. You have to figure out a whole lot of things before you’re ready to say what you want.”

  “So…” She looked at me tentatively. “Is Rick the love of your life, then?”

  For the first time in years, I wished I could say yes to a question like that. I wished I felt like someone in the present, someone who was really here for me, was a great love of mine.

  But I couldn’t.

  “Rick is great,” I dodged. “Don’t you think?”

  “The greatest! Obviously!” She narrowed her eyes with a disconcerting amount of perception. “But … do you think so?”

  “Of course!” I did! I really did! So why did I feel the need to point out his added value? “And it’s a nice bonus that he has Amy, what with you two being so close.”

  “Totally.” She looked at me intensely. “But I want to hear more about this Nate guy.”

  “There’s really nothing else to say. It was a thousand years ago.” And yesterday.

  “Didn’t your grandparents meet in elementary school?” Cam went on, raising an eyebrow.

  It was true; we have a picture of my father’s parents in their second-grade classroom together. “Yes, but that was a small town in the thirties. Things changed a lot over the next fifty or sixty years.”

  “But you never found anyone else.”

  “Um, besides Rick, you mean?”

  She was young and romantic and obviously wanted this to be earth-shattering. “You’ve never been in love like that”—she gestured toward the letters—“again.”

  “Who says?” This was getting tricky. I was well aware that I was screwed up emotionally—I didn’t want to encourage her to be the same. “I’m just not in love with him anymore.”

  She looked sad. “It’s just so romantic. And so sad now.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded and put my arm around her, closing my eyes against the emotion for a moment. “It is. It was. But it wasn’t real.” Funny how it made me sad to say that. Not sad that it wasn’t real now but sad for the girl I’d been who was so completely sure she knew her heart and that Nate was the guy in it.

  Boy had she been naïve.

  “So if I fall in love with a guy, I can’t believe it’s real?” she asked, disappointed.

  “If you wait and fall in love with a guy when you’re emotionally ready, it will be amazing.”

  “Or it will be a complete failure and I’ll be forty-five and single, like Lois DeMatto’s mom, who shows up with a different ugly guy at every school event.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said. “For one thing, there aren’t that many school events, and for another, you don’t know what she sees in them. Not everything is about appearance, remember.”

  Cam gave a sarcastic shrug. “Maybe not, but isn’t some of it about looks?”

  “Some. For a very short time. And even then, everyone’s different.” I looked at her, and saw the baby she’d been not so long ago. I saw all of the people she’d been so far; the pudgy infant, the three-year-old who loved wearing one black patent-leather shoe and one white one, always with her rose-patterned dress; the six-year-old I’d made into a Twister game box for the first-grade play; the ten-year-old who cried to me that she was taller than everyone in her class and was embarrassed and awkward; and now this fifteen-year-old who was starting to bloom into the woman she’d become but who was still so much a child that it made me want to cry.

  Suddenly I was a crier.

  If I could go back in time and slow myself down from the insane drive to grow up at that age, I would. I’m not sure why my mother didn’t. If I’d had a little more childhood, I believe I would have been a lot less wobbly in my adulthood. Particularly my young adulthood.

  “I never want to be a desperate older woman, looking at creepy guys through new glasses and saying maybe they’re not so bad after all,” she said.

  Wow. I didn’t either.

  “Well, how about you wait and see what happens?” I suggested. “I promise you, you’re not going to lose anything by playing it cool with guys in high school.” The chorus of “Sunrise, Sunset” swelled in the back of my mind. I ruffled her hair. “You are a prize. You need to be won, not hand yourself over. Never forget that!”

  “Jeez, Mom, it’s not like I’m going to do it with anyone right now!”

  She might have been me, trying to sell my mother the same lie, even while I was Nate’s personal amusement park at night after she went to sleep.

  Not that Camilla didn’t mean what she was saying now.

  I would have said and meant the same thing at her age.

  She just didn’t know how quickly her hormones were going to change her mind. Especially after a few well-placed strokes from a boy she thought she loved.

  I sighed. “Trust me, honey,” I said, wishing she never had to learn anything the hard way. “If you want so much as a good kiss good night, he has to feel like he pursued you, not the other way around.”

  Cam shrugged. “Is that how it was with that guy and you?” she gestured toward the box of Nate’s letters.

  I nodded. The desperation to get away from this conversation was intense, but this was one of those defining moments in a mother-daughter relationship and I couldn’t let the ball drop just because I’d been stupid enough to sleep with the guy again without knowing all the facts. “At first. He did all the traditional boy stuff he was supposed to. He called me, he asked me to do things with him and his friends, kissed me good night, the whole nine yards.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Only at first?”

  “Well, then we were going out, so we were equal. He didn’t always have to court me. We talked all the time, all night long, we saw each other every day before and after school, but we never really had the thing where the boy calls and asks the girl on a date. It was all just…” I shrugged. “Hanging out.”

  “That seems okay to me,” she said. “It would be weird if, after all that time, you had to wait for him to call you every time.”

  “True.” And that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that he’d never done anything that made me feel like he really wanted me. In some way, deep down, I had thought he had. I thought I’d known that was how he really felt about me, and the truth was he’d done a thousand little things to prove it—a thousand little things that would have been more than enough for the adult woman I’d become—but somehow they’d never added up, in my teenage mind, to mean the same as one single grand gesture.

  “So why’d you break up?” Cam asked, leveling what may as well have been a loaded gun at me.

  Ugh. I’d totally set myself up for this. I wasn’t ready
to tell her that particular story and she seriously didn’t need a mental image of her mother sobbing on some guy’s front step for days and weeks on end. So I employed the old rule about answering kids’ questions exactly and not overexplaining. It had worked when she was six and asked where puppies came from (“The mama dog carries them inside of her until they’re ready to come out and live in the world”), so I hoped it would work now.

  “We grew apart,” I hedged. “He finished high school and went off to college and I, of course, had to stay in school, so…” I gave an airy wave of the hand like, It was just one of those things.

  And like, I absolutely never called him, sobbing, forty-one times in one day.

  And I categorically deny having jumped into bed with him the other day without saying so much as hello first.

  “Aw. So can I read the rest of the letters?” She reached toward the box.

  A few things flashed into my mind. Intimate references she didn’t need to see. “No,” I said. “You’ll get bored and leave them lying all over the place and I need to clean up.”

  “But—” she began, but then the Black Eyed Peas started wailing in the other room. Her phone ringer. Thank God. “Gotta go!” She didn’t wait for an answer, just ran for it.

  It’s exactly what I would have done at the same age.

  I started to put the box back on the shelf, but then thought better of it. She might get bored at some point and remember it was there. Instead, I put it in the one place I knew she’d never look—on the top shelf of the hall closet, behind the cleaning supplies.

  Later, when I went to check my e-mail—again to keep my mind off of what had happened—I was shocked to see something there from Nate.

  I know you don’t believe it, he wrote simply, but I never wanted to hurt you.

  I would have asked how he got my e-mail address, but Theresa had already said my mother had given it to her. I could imagine it tacked to some twee suburban bulletin board in their suburban country kitchen.

  When? I typed back. High school? College? Yesterday?

  The answer came later in the day. Ever.

  I sighed. The I-never-meant-to-hurt-you cop-out has always been weak for me. I never meant to hurt you means but that was a by-product of whatever I was actually doing and I was doing it because I wanted to.

  In other words, Sorry if you got hurt, but I wasn’t really even thinking about you. I certainly wasn’t thinking about you enough to try not to hurt you.

  It would have been more gratifying, in some perverse way, if he actually had been trying to hurt me. That’s what you do when you love someone so much and you’re in a lot of pain—you try and strike back. Hurting someone inadvertently is like tripping over a cat you didn’t see darting out from under the sofa.

  But there was no way to say all of that. No reason to.

  The problem was that now I didn’t know how he’d ever felt about me. If he hadn’t even loved me back then—if his characterization of it now would be it was “infatuation” or some similarly diminishing term—it would really hurt. Not because of what had happened the other day—maybe someday I could write that off as a midday one-night stand—but because he had meant so much to me that I’d carried some part of him around with me ever since.

  And I’d given him some part of me I’d never get back.

  Instead of writing all that, I simply wrote, You should have told me before anything happened.

  His answer: I couldn’t think of anything but you.

  My heart pounded. I couldn’t help it. I believed him, clichéd as the line might have sounded, because I had felt exactly the same way.

  Why Theresa? I asked. There was no telling how long he’d be checking his e-mail, but I was eager for an answer, and checked back several times myself before he responded.

  Because I could never have you, he said.

  What???

  She reminded me of you.

  Wow. There it was. That was raw.

  I swallowed a lump in my throat. I wanted to believe him so much, but dating her a few times because she reminded him of me would have been one thing; marrying her was another.

  But you married her, I wrote. You must have loved her. Were you always attracted to her, even when you were with me?

  No, of course not, was all he wrote, and I knew he was responding to the latter part of my question and not the part about loving her.

  I wanted to ask him if he was happy, but part of me didn’t want to know. I mean, I wanted him to be happy, of course. Because I really did love him and, although my own desires ran a really close second, the thing I wanted most was for him to be okay.

  And for a long, long time after we broke up—even though the logical part of me knew that what I’d done hadn’t been that big a deal and shouldn’t have been unforgivable if he’d really loved me—I’d worried that I’d crushed something in him that would never come back. Optimism, trust, willingness to love … something. Maybe more than one thing.

  But at the same time, if he was happy now, that would mean I really never had been meant for him. Yes, the adult part of me knew that it was silly to give solid credence to the romantic fantasies of teenage me … but teenage me was still in there and the idea that the relationship had ultimately meant so much less than I’d been sure it did kind of smarted.

  So I left the question unasked, and unanswered.

  With nothing clever to say back, I decided not to answer at all. Instead, I just shut my computer down and went in the bathroom to clean the shower.

  Chapter 17

  My dreams are almost never fully satisfying. Yes, I might dream I won the lottery and can go out and buy a new house and whatever else I can think of, but inevitably there is also a “grounded” element of the dream; for example, when the IRS comes calling.

  I dreamed of Nate. At first it was promising. Romantic, intense. We were in the car, “Everything I Own” by Bread was playing, and we were making out, careening toward the hot sex that ended just about every date we had. His shirt was off, and I moved my hands across the broad expanse of his shoulders, remembering the light sprinkling of freckles on his skin, and that one on his ear that had been there forever.

  Suddenly he grew cold. His body stiffened and he moved his arm away from me.

  “Nate? What’s wrong?” I drew back.

  His eyes were fixed, like stone, on something in the distance. Or nothing in the distance.

  Not on me.

  I knew that look. It had been years and years, but I knew that look. He was shutting down, closing me out.

  “Nate?” Panic grew in me. This couldn’t happen again. He couldn’t do this again. I couldn’t stand it. “Nate!”

  He wouldn’t answer.

  Something hit my leg, but when I looked down there was nothing there. A phone was ringing. Then everything around us faded and I slowly came to in my bed in McLean Gardens.

  Rick was next to me, still sound asleep, despite his ringing phone. I tapped him, but he put the pillow over his head.

  Made no difference to me whether he got the phone or not.

  I rolled on my side and looked at his back, wondering when the last time was that I’d run my hands over it in ecstasy, feeling him inside of me.

  I wish I’d told Nate how much he meant to me back when I’d had the chance. I wish I’d given more instead of just taking all the time.

  I wish I hadn’t done anything like trying to make him jealous.

  There can’t be anything worse for the ego than dating a teenage girl, you know? Honestly. No matter how she feels about you, you’re still going to be dealing with someone who is insane with hormones and who has, almost inevitably, gotten her ideas about romance from TV, movies, and overwrought pop songs, sung by pretty-boy musicians who have mastered the art of manipulating tender hormonally driven feelings into dollars.

  No matter what poor Nate had going on in his life—and now that I’m an adult I realize that there was plenty—I was always ready to squeeze a little
more attention my way with a mention of, “I saw Derek today at the pool. He asked me out [casual laugh] [lingering ellipsis]…” or “Um … my other line is ringing, I’d better get that and talk to you later…,” whereupon I’d talk to Jordan into the night, keeping half an eye open for Nate to show up in my front yard with a boom box cued to “In Your Eyes” by Peter Gabriel like John Cusack in Say Anything.

  It never happened.

  Like I said, Nate wasn’t one for grand gestures. But I still kept trying to pull one out of him. I guess it was a function of my age and immaturity, and maybe basic selfishness.

  It had to be awful dating me.

  Nevertheless, I loved Nate with all of my heart, I really did. I guess I just made it hard for him to see that. Or to believe it. In retrospect I guess I was just trying to believe he would love me as much as I loved him and the only way I’d ever seen that demonstrated, I thought—since my parents weren’t newlyweds—was through the over-the-top antics of special guest stars on bad TV shows.

  So I tried to work it out in my dreams, the way everyone does when they’ve stuffed things so deeply into their subconscious that they’re in constant danger of imploding.

  Fortunately, Theresa didn’t show up in the dream.

  She had nothing to do with this, really. At least she had nothing to do with the old issues I needed to work out.

  Neither did Rick.

  As if hearing my thoughts, Rick stirred next to me, resisting waking up for work. That was probably what had woken me in the first place. When Camilla was home, it was always her iPod screaming from the bathroom while she got ready for school that woke me.

  But Camilla was at her grandmother’s, and Amy was at a sleepover, so Rick had stayed over and it was his earlier-than-mine hours that got me up.

  I turned away from him and closed my eyes, trying to bring the dream back to me, but it was too late. It was gone.

  I turned onto my back and lay there, discontented.

  “Good morning,” Rick said, chipper. He was much more of a morning person than I am.