Always Something There to Remind Me

by Beth Harbison

  “I don’t see how. She’s not me.”

  “No. She’s not. I guess that was the problem.”

  “Surely you realized that before you married her.” Despite myself, I was sad at the idea of him having what had to be a pretty difficult home life.

  “Yes,” he said. And it was clear there was no questioning it now. It had been a mistake and it no longer mattered why he’d made it or what he’d been thinking when he did.

  “Nate, why are you staying in a marriage you don’t want?”

  “I thought it was because I’d made a promise I had to keep,” he said, then looked at me again. “Now I don’t know.”

  I did. Because sometimes in life you do something that seems right even if it doesn’t feel right.

  I cringed, picturing him planning it out, getting on one knee to propose, when, practically reading my mind, he said, “When Theresa suggested we get married, it seemed … reasonable.”

  When Theresa suggested … It didn’t erase the facts, but it certainly added to them. “Why?”

  “Because there was nothing else.” He met my eyes. “There wasn’t going to be anything else. There was no chance, I knew there was no chance, of really falling in love again.”

  Oh, God. I knew that feeling.

  And sometimes grown people, who have actually learned something from their mistakes instead of just being doomed to repeat them until they die alone, needed to do the right thing, even if it wasn’t the most gratifying thing.

  “What a mess,” I said to him. I wanted to reach for his hand, I wanted to touch him so badly, but it wasn’t my place anymore.

  “Big mess,” he agreed.

  He had no idea how big a mess this had become.

  It had been almost two decades, yet part of me yearned for days that seemed like only moments ago, when Nate and I were free to do what we wanted, when we wanted, with each other, and no one would ever think twice about it.

  Those days were long gone, tangled by the threads of more lives than I could even count at this point.

  After a moment, I said, “I’d better go. I should have been home an hour ago.”

  “Is Rick waiting for you?”

  “No.” I swallowed. My lips ached to kiss him. My hands tingled, wanting to touch him. “I just shouldn’t be here.”

  He nodded.

  I got out of the car and went to mine, a few spaces over. He watched me go, I could feel it.

  And it took all my willpower to keep moving and not turn back and run to him.

  Chapter 23

  Yes, I was nervous about Roxanne’s party the next day, but that wasn’t the reason I did what I did.

  Well, nervous … I’m not sure that’s the right word. I wasn’t afraid of things going wrong, I was just wondering how many things would go wrong and how many Blame Balls would be lobbed at me for them.

  Pippa had ordered what felt like hours of taped interviews and establishing shots. She’d talked to me, Jeremy, the chef, the parents, the most attractive and the most unstable friends, and absolutely anyone else who might have slipped up and said something unflattering about Roxanne.

  Helicopters were out at the last minute—it didn’t make for the most desirable sound—and somehow Pippa had talked Roxanne into a whole mermaid theme, which would begin with her being driven up in a giant fish tank. It looked something like a parade float, or something out of a Busby Berkeley film for synchronized swimmers.

  It promised to be very embarrassing for anyone with the sense to feel humility.

  So far that was only me. And that made me tense.

  So when I got home that night and found Cam in my walk-in closet, surrounded by vestiges of Nate and me—in the form of letters, a prom garter, dead corsages, etc.—I nearly flipped out.

  As in Nancy Grace could have talked about me for a week.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I demanded, as soon as I saw her. Yes, she was my daughter, my flesh and blood, but this felt like a huge violation of my privacy.

  “I’m doing what you should be doing, Mom,” she patronized, better than a fifteen-year-old should have been able to. “I’m trying to figure out where things went wrong and how to fix them.”

  “Where what things went wrong?” I went over and started snatching things from the floor and putting them back into the box.

  “Your relationship.” She began picking up letters and holding on to them. “You are in love with this guy.”

  “Was.” I went to her, now competing to grab the letters off the floor around her ungracefully. “I was in love with him. I don’t even know him anymore!” That was the truth.

  And that was the hell of it all.

  “You had dinner with him the other night!”

  “Yes.” I continued to pick up the envelopes, ticket stubs, and other memorabilia she’d strewn around. “And that was the first time I’d seen him in…” Years would have been perfect, but untrue. “Ages.”

  “So all this”—she gestured now at my hands, because that’s where most of the letters were—“is all meaningless? All those feelings you had, all those feelings he had and said to you in such huge ways, were all just fake?” Her voice was sharp with emotion. She didn’t want it to be untrue.

  “Give me the letters.” I held out my hand.

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  She handed them over and I shoved them into the box. My emotion took over. I had no control. My eyes burned like I’d gotten acid in them, and I turned away from Cam and sat on the end of my bed, still holding the box like a six-year-old getting ready to bury a beloved hamster. “Just go to your room. We’ll talk about this later,” I said, hoping to sound normal. Angry. Maternal. But normal.

  Not like a fifteen-year-old basket case.

  Unfortunately, basket case won out.

  And Cam wasn’t fooled. “Mom!” She rushed to me, kneeling before me with her hands in my lap. “Are you okay?”

  Was I okay? How could I answer the one fate I couldn’t live without—my daughter—that I wasn’t okay because of the other fate I could never forget?

  It wasn’t even just Nate. It was the whole life we’d laid out, as two individuals together; a life that had been totally in line with who we essentially were because we’d planned it when we were too young to have piled on the baggage of realistic expectation.

  Yet now, with the wisdom of more than twenty years past, I saw that the intentions of my younger self were more true to what I needed than anything I’d built on the details of my subsequent life. My ideals had disappeared somewhere along the way and I didn’t even know where or what they were anymore.

  I just knew they once felt like “me” and now very little did.

  And I had to wonder if that was what was the most painful part of this episode—though, if it was, I don’t know why Nate’s face always had to be painted across the emotions.

  “I’m okay,” I said to Cam, in a fairly even voice considering, though we both knew it was untrue.

  “Wasn’t it real?” she asked after a moment, with something that looked like desperation in her face. “Didn’t you really love each other?”

  And that’s when I lost it.

  It’s one thing to try and be a grown-up and hide your childish emotions to protect your child, but it’s quite another to be pushed to the limit where you can’t hold your emotions and, moreover, you can’t even be sure that keeping them secret is the best thing for that child.

  In short, in that moment, I had to make a decision whether to perpetrate the endless lie of You’ll meet The One when you’re older and You’ll know him when you see him, or to just admit that, yes, sometimes maybe you meet someone perfect for you when you are a kid and you should try to scramble over all the childish impulses that come naturally to you in order to keep him.

  Because I was honestly sure that—Cam aside—I would have been far happier all these years with Nate than without him.

  And that was taking into consideration all t
he great things that had happened to me in my real adult life.

  It still would have been better with him.

  Now, how could I hide that, as it came to me right when Cam started questioning me?

  Maybe someone stronger could have, but I couldn’t.

  Still, I tried to be the adult. As much as I could, that is, when I was obviously in tears. “Look, Cam,” I said, opening up all the doors to honesty that I’d tried to keep shut. “Yes, I really, really loved him. And I think he loved me too. The same way. But I’m really torn about telling you the truth here, because I just don’t know what would have happened.” I shrugged. “And I really don’t want to give you the impression that you’re supposed to find the love of your life as a teenager, because most people don’t.”

  “I know that,” she said. “Obviously.”

  I was surprised. “You do?”

  She looked at me like I was a pitiable moron. Which, maybe, I was. “Obviously. None of the coolest couples meet in high school.” She rolled her eyes. “No offense. But it’s not like I’m going to be trying to imitate that.”

  I had to smile. “Good.”

  She was on a roll. “I mean, can you imagine Brad and Angelina meeting in high school? I mean, I know they’re kaput now, or so everyone’s saying, but either way most normal hot relationships don’t start in civics class. Jeez.”

  She was so right. Not only about Brad and Angelina—who were said to be totally kaput—but about the unliklihood of teenage romance ever meaning anything. I didn’t know anyone who thought anything more than I wonder how X is doing now about their high school sweetheart.

  I mean it, I really, literally didn’t.

  Why was I the lone exception that looked back, wishing, still, to be understood or forgiven or—maybe this was the big point—fought for?

  Yet even that didn’t feel right. What I longed for was just the everyday life I always thought I’d have with him: the intellectual equality, the same sense of humor, the same values … and I knew that Nate would feel like home to me no matter where we ended up living.

  Nate was home, and I hadn’t felt at home in years.

  And I could go the rest of my life like this, don’t get me wrong. This was reality and I’d certainly learned to adapt to that reality. I didn’t love it, I’d never loved it, but I lived with it pretty well.

  But it was a life spent denying something that had once felt important to me. Something that had once felt as obvious to me as breathing. And I don’t just mean Nate; I mean the way it felt to love him and be loved by him. I had taken for granted that that was what love felt like, and that that feeling would always be part of my life.

  That’s the assumption, right? When you’re young, you wonder who you’ll marry when you grow up. Because, at least in my circle, marriage and family were always obviously going to happen.

  Even into my twenties, as a single mother, I’d kept a tenuous hold on that assumption. He—whoever he was—was out there.

  So it was kind of jarring to realize maybe that wasn’t going to happen. Then it was depressing.

  Then it was just how it was. I was resigned to the fact that passionate love wasn’t going to be part of my adult life the way I’d assumed it would be when I was a kid.

  Actually, I’d assumed that was how it was for everyone. Then I started noticing that people around me, people my age who had been married for years, still seemed to be in love. Jordan and her husband Curtis were a good example.

  I didn’t know where all this left me. All I knew for sure was that my life wasn’t fulfilling in all the ways it could be and now my daughter was learning all the wrong things from me about relationships.

  “Do you miss him?” Cam asked, interrupting the swell of thoughts and guilt that were taking over my mind.

  “Nate?”

  She nodded.

  I hesitated. There had to be a way to say this properly. To phrase it like an Oprah interview somehow. I ran my hands through my hair and took a breath that felt like it came from underwater.

  “Until recently, I hardly ever thought of him,” I said. True. Yet the reason was that it was too painful to think of him. There was no resolution, just an open-ended question. Who needs that?

  Cam furrowed her brow. “That’s just really sad.”

  “Sad? Why? Isn’t it better if you move on and don’t hold on to that kind of thing?”

  She shrugged. “You wrote all this stuff in your diary about how much you loved him and what it was going to be like when you were old together. Like that movie you both saw—”

  “Whoa! You read my diary too?”

  “Well, it’s ancient! Do you really care if I read something you wrote when you were fifteen?”

  Um, yes. There were enough details in there to lose me credibility in just about every arena with her: sex, alcohol, sneaking out.… Of course I didn’t want her reading it! “Cam, that’s private stuff no matter how old it is. How much did you read?”

  I saw her trying to guess how much she could play this to her advantage and realized, right away, that she hadn’t gotten any real dirt. “Just a little,” she admitted. “There was stuff, like, about him going to the barn with you and you wishing on a star that you’d marry him. That’s what’s so sad. You loved each other soo much. You wanted to marry him! And now you’re just all, Yeah, I saw him, it was nice, la-di-da.…”

  I sighed. “Okay, well, it wasn’t nice, and it definitely wasn’t la-di-da. But once you’re grown, you can’t really sit around your room sobbing to old records about the one person you’ll never forget. You have to move on and live your life. Sometimes that means not allowing yourself to indulge in those melancholy thoughts.”

  She really did look sad. This had affected her, whether it should or not, in some sort of real way. “Then how do you ever trust anything you feel? Are all my feelings wrong right now? Will they be in two years?” A challenge rose in her voice. “When do you reach the point where you can believe what you feel? Eighteen? Twenty-one? Do you even believe anything you feel now? I don’t see how you could.”

  Some small, teenagery part of me resented her assault on me like this, but now wasn’t the time for me to be adolescent.

  “Cam,” I said, quietly but firmly, “you know in your heart what’s real and what isn’t. The mistake we tend to make as teenagers is that we believe it all without really thinking about it. That’s why you make deals with God to please please please let you marry some punk you’ve got a crush on and a month later the sight of him makes you sick.”

  She laughed reluctantly. “But that’s not how it was for you.”

  I hesitated. “No. It wasn’t. If I had it to do over again, I’d treat the whole thing with a lot more respect. I would have honored my feelings more and understood that, even though I was young, they were real and rare. And I would have honored his feelings a lot more too. I would have treated him with a lot more respect. That’s the lesson to take out of this—don’t treat someone in a way that you wouldn’t want to be treated. You can quote me on that.”

  She persisted, ignoring my levity. “What happened? Why did you break up?”

  I considered her for a moment. “Because I flirted with one of his friends.”

  She waited for a moment, then her jaw dropped. “That’s it? That’s all?”

  “Well … I think I kissed him for a few seconds. I can’t honestly remember for sure now. But he came to my house in the middle of the night, and … it looked bad.” I thought back on it. “It looked really bad.”

  “But that was all you did?”

  I nodded. “It was enough.”

  She lowered her brow. “That’s just weird. If he loved you so much, why would he let you go because of something so small?”

  Exactly! That had been exactly my question at the time. Now I understood a little more, though. A little, I thought. “He took it as a measure of respect, or, more specifically, lack of respect. It didn’t ultimately matter what I did or didn’t do; as h
e saw it, the intention to flirt with someone else was there and it didn’t matter to me that it was his friend or that his other friends would see it. That was bigger to him than one mistake.”

  “What a douche!”

  “Cam!” I cautioned her. I hated hearing that kind of thing come out of her mouth even though I said worse all the time. “This is what I’m saying: you have to see someone else’s point of view. I didn’t treat him with enough respect and finally that broke us.”

  “Sounds like a big ego problem to me.”

  I sighed. “The night it happened, his parents had announced they were getting a divorce. I found that out later. I guess he wasn’t feeling all that up on relationships in general.” It was a big deal. I knew later it had been a very big deal to him. Of course.

  But honestly, at the time I’d been such a selfish adolescent that even if he’d told me, I probably still would have argued that he wasn’t being nice enough to me.

  Cam rolled her eyes. “So much for love.”

  I shook my head. “Listen, Cam, seriously. You need to hear me telling you this, because it’s one of the most important lessons you can learn. If you love someone, you should make sure they know it every day and make even more sure you never hurt them in the name of gratifying your own ego, which was what I did.”

  “You mean because it flattered you that this other guy was interested.”

  “Yup.” At that age, still so close to a particularly awkward and gawky adolescence, I had been very vulnerable to ego gratification. I looked down. “I knew Nate was off that night, acting weird, but I didn’t even ask him what was going on.” My hands felt shaky, thinking about it. I laced my fingers tight. “That was pretty crappy of me.”

  And it had never once occurred to me to consider how that might have made anyone else feel. At least not until Nate dumped me.

  “I don’t know.” She looked skeptical. “I still can’t see how he let that end everything when he loved you so much.”

  “Maybe he didn’t.” I shrugged. “Or maybe he did and he regretted it later.” I remembered his words from just the other day.