Perhaps most eye-opening of all was what I found in a small shoebox that was buried at the back of her bedroom closet. It held dozens of photos of my great aunt as a young woman. It boggled my mind to see a representation of a woman that looked nearly identical to myself—tall, curvy and thick in the same ways that I had always been, but with stick-straight hair and a far less serious expression than I ever saw from her in real life. Finding my face in old photos was surprising. For years, I thought that I must have looked like a long lost relative since I didn’t look anything at all like photos of my parents or grandparents. It hurt more knowing that Enid had given me so much grief as a young girl about my appearance when we looked exactly the same as young women.
She was flanked by a young couple in the photos, and all three wore bright smiles and the long, straight hair that was so popular in the 60s. There were magazine clippings from over the years recounting the glory of the Woodstock Festival from the summer of ’69. She was 24 then, and in love, if the letters I found were any indication. They all started the same way—My Dearest Enid—and ended in much the same manner—With all of my heart, from Albany to Oxford, Sharon. The letters started in the fall of 1969 and ended in the winter of 1979. My heart broke as I read the last one.
My Dearest Enid,
I fear the time for goodbyes has finally arrived. Our time together burned bright and hot and intense, but it burned us too quickly, and we were never able to react quite quickly enough. One long decade has passed since our chance encounter at Woodstock, and every single day since has felt like a decade in itself.
There have been so many words left unsaid in the time that we have known one another. The frenzied, “I wish I had known you sooner”s and “I wish we lived closer”s whispered while we laid in one another’s arms in that field of mud. Maybe if John had been more forceful then, we could have been saved from years of heartache. Maybe if you had been more forceful after, we could have saved ourselves years of heartache. Maybe if I had ever just taken the time to say “I love you, I love you, I love you…”
You must understand, dear heart, that I do not blame myself, and I could never really blame you for the way things had to turn out. It has not been easy for those like us in these tumultuous times. My family expected more of me, forcing me to marry young to a man that I could never actually love. We could never have been together in the end, but it didn’t keep me from wanting it for years on end. Maybe if you had ever just come to stay in Albany like you promised so many times…
Maybe if you had the courage to confront your family, to share the real you—the bright, passionate young woman that I found at a dairy farm in the middle of nowhere New York… If only you could share with them the rebel spirit that you’ve buried so deeply inside of yourself for so long… But I suppose your small town in Ohio has always been just a little different from my home in New York, and your family would have been no more accepting than my own.
It is with all of the pain of a broken, desperate heart that I write to tell you that I cannot continue to put my heart through this kind of hurt. John and I are moving across the country to a revitalized Haight-Ashbury, and I have each and every intention of losing your address in the process. It was never meant to be, my love, thus we cannot continue to treat it as if it were.
I wish you all the best in life, and I hope you someday find the happiness that you so dearly deserve.
With all of my heart, a final letter from Albany to Oxford,
Sharon
I folded the letter with the same amount of care Enid had shown my cap and gown and re-tied the ribbon that bound the stack of love, adoration, and heartbreak together. The letters were part of a hidden history that I could have never hoped to learn of while my great aunt was alive, and there was a part of me that couldn’t let them go. The ache in my gut was deep. Sharing a broken heart with a woman that I never understood was beyond strange. It was uncomfortable thinking that I was too tough on her. I found myself wondering if our relationship might have been different if she’d shared that part of herself with the world.
It was with deliberate care that I dropped the box on the “keep” stack as I passed through the dining room to the kitchen. I mindlessly moved through the kitchen, pulling open and closing cabinets on auto-pilot as I prepared myself a cup of chamomile tea.
It hurt, I realized, learning that Enid and I had so much in common. Both of us were headstrong women with a penchant for the kind of love that would never work. Maybe that’s why she was so tough on me. Perhaps her treatment of me was her bastardized way of teaching me the lesson that girls like us didn’t get what we deserved from life. I pushed the thought away as I moved through the kitchen.
Two weeks had passed in a blur, and I was nothing if not completely spent, both physically and emotionally. My grandparents were life-savers when it came to the burial arrangements and dealing with Enid’s attorney. My grandmother was a well-renowned realtor in the town; and before I could ask for it to happen, Enid’s house was on the market. Juliana guaranteed that the proximity to the college would drive the price up and have it sold in little to no time at all. After all they’d done for me, it felt wrong to ask them to help me sort through Enid’s belongings. That task was mine alone.
I paced back through the cluttered dining room with a long sigh. It was fortunate that my internship with Dr. Cline wouldn’t begin until late July. I was certain that it would actually take me three full months to sort, sell, and donate all of the artifacts of Enid’s lonely life. I glanced over my shoulder at a banker’s box sitting off to the side—it was full of the things of mine that she’d kept. My stomach clenched uncomfortably, and I found myself questioning whether or not I actually wanted to sell the house. I shook my head slightly, clearing it of the foolish thought. A box of my childhood belongings wouldn’t support me through my internship, and I wasn’t certain that the modest life insurance payout would either.
My fingers passed over the soft velvet of Enid’s much loved blush-pink sofa. As a child, I was forbidden from sitting on the sofa, as if Enid was afraid my pudgy little fingers would sully the piece of furniture that she reserved solely for company. I hated the sofa with a passion as a kid.
I sank into the buttery-soft embrace of the sofa and closed my eyes. It had grown on me sometime over the past week, and I couldn’t stop imaging it as a centerpiece for entertaining in my own living room. I’d already bought a set of soft-gray, tufted pillows to display on it once it sat in my apartment. Juliana was horrified, insisting that she and Granddaddy William would gladly purchase me a more modern and fashionable living room set, but I wanted the velvet couch. A rueful smile crossed my lips at the further evidence that Enid and I were way more similar than either of us might have imagined.
I shook my head and fished my phone from the pocket of my jeans. Texting my best friends over the past week was the only thing tying me to my sanity.
Today 5:15 PM
You will never guess what I
found while cleaning out
Enid’s bedroom today.
Oh my god. Her crusty old
ass had a vibrator didn’t
she?
Linds! Gross, no!!!!! You are
so absolutely disgusting.
Lol, sorry not sorry! But I
guess I’ll bite; what did you
find in devil-bitch’s
room?
So… I was going through
her closet, right?
The suspense is killing me.
Stop being an ass.
Sorry! (Not sorry.)
Okay, well at first it was all
just ugly pumps and faux-
leather purses that she’s
probably had since the 80’s.
But I kept digging, and I
found a box of pictures
and letters.
Okay…?
L-O-V-E letters, Linds.
WHAT? I thought you said
she was never married?!
>
OMG, did crusty-ass have
an affair or something? Was
she in a tawdry love-affair
with a married man?! That
dirty old hypocrite! I’m
gonna dig her ass up and
take her to church.
Someone needs some
Jesus.
Lindsey, the letters were all
from a woman name
Sharon that Enid met and
apparently fell in love with
when she went to
WOODSTOCK!!! The whole
things was actually kind of
heartbreaking. Sharon was
from Albany and her family
knew she was a lesbian but
still forced her to marry a
man named John.
WAIT WHAT
And John totally knew what
was happening between
Sharon and Enid but never
really cared enough to do
anything about it. An entire
decade passed of them
being just hopelessly,
recklessly in love before
Sharon washed her hands
of the entire situation
because Enid would never
come out to our family. It
was seriously gut wrenching
to read!
OMG!!! THAT EXPLAINS
SO MUCH ABOUT THE
MEAN OLD BITCH!!!
That’s it. You’re officially the
worst. That’s the last time I
tell YOU anything
heartwarming.
Love you too girl.
I shook my head with a chuckle and dropped the phone onto the couch next to me. The laugh was needed, even if the comment was inappropriate at best. Time slipped by slowly as I sat in the front room and watched the faded curtains wave in the evening breeze.
Chapter 21
I didn’t realize I dozed off until I jerked awake at the sound of knocking on the front door.
“One moment,” I called out drowsily, hoping my voice would carry.
Long forgotten neighbors were stopping by each night with their condolences. My stomach rumbled as I stood and stretched my arms over my head with a yawn. I shuffled listlessly toward the door, hoping that Mrs. Johnson from across the street decided to drop off another pan of her delectable hash brown casserole.
As it turned out, there wasn’t anyone waiting on my doorstep with a look of pity on their face. My thoughts of hash brown casserole were dashed at the sight of a small, unassuming box sitting on the fabulous pink flamingo doormat. I reached down with tentative hands to pick up the package as I looked down the street. If I’d gotten up a little faster, maybe I would’ve seen who dropped the unmarked box on my doorstep.
As a cop show aficionado, I should’ve felt leery of opening an unmarked package from an unknown sender. Instead, I simply felt curiosity over the lightweight package as I carried it back toward the living room. I didn’t think I was back in Oxford long enough to piss anyone off, and the only people that even knew my address were my grandparents, Lindsey, and Nate. The box obviously wasn’t posted to my house, and my grandparents were far more likely to simply burst into my house than to leave something unprotected on the porch.
I clicked on a table lamp as I passed, the weak glow of the old lamp barely illuminating in a circle wide enough for me to see as I dropped onto the sofa. I pulled my feet under me and sank back comfortably. I pulled the box open and stared at the contents with trembling hands. A Kindle Fire sat on a bed of bubble wrap. A single sheet of paper sat on top of the device, folded with my name scrawled across it in an unfamiliar script.
I peeked up, staring through the gauzy curtains that continued to flutter in the early spring breeze. The urge to jump up—to shutter my windows and lock all the doors—was nearly overwhelming. Who in the world knew that I lost my Kindle months before and still occasionally mourned the loss of the sleek tablet? I sat the box gingerly on the next cushion over and reached trembling hands toward the letter.
Charlie,
I’m sorry to be doing this in this way. Words could never express everything I feel the need to say to you, and I thought it would be selfish of me to force you to see me over something as simple as returning your Kindle. God only knows what I would feel inclined to say to you were I to face you head-on for the first time in far too long.
I’ve had your Kindle since the first night we met. I need you to know that I never meant to keep it so long. It felt inconsequential most nights as it sat on my night stand, quiet and unused. That first week, though, I read two of the romance novels you had pre-loaded there before feeling like enough of an intrusive creep to stop.
When I noticed it again this week, I was gut-checked by the memory of spotting you reading on it in a crowded sport’s bar. That had been the beginning of the end for me, I think; watching you ignore the world around you in favor of being lost with a book. I realized that I couldn’t stand the thought of you not having it with you on this new adventure.
I’ll miss you more than you could ever possibly imagine.
Devon
That damnable hard lump rose in my throat, and the heat of unshed tears stung behind my eyes. I blinked rapidly, hoping to dam the would-be river of tears before they had the opportunity to fall.
How dare he turn up out of the blue, uninvited and unwanted? I created a haven for myself over 600 miles away from the city where he was supposed to be. Nate’s final words to me haunted me the first week I was away. I don’t know that this would have hurt you so badly if there wasn’t a part of you that didn’t love him, even just a little. The feelings I developed for Devon were unintentional and unexpected in every way possible.
I spent my second week home accepting that some naive part of myself had fallen in love with the man. It had been days since I last cried over my hurt, days since I started reconstructing the feeble wall around my heart that he’d managed to knock down. How was it that I only ever managed to fall for those that couldn’t feel the same?
I choked on a sob and reached for the Kindle. Distraction would be the only thing that would get me through the hurt his presence dredged up. For most of my adult life, there was nothing I found quite as distracting as losing myself in a romance novel. I tapped into the Kindle reading app and puzzled at the fact that Cracked was pulled up as if I were in the middle of reading it. It may have been months, but I distinctly recalled already reading that particular title.
I navigated back to the Kindle Library page, hoping to quickly find the book with the cover of the swarthy, lounging Italian man that I was reading when I lost the device. Instead, my eyes immediately honed in on a white icon at the top left—it simply read “Untitled.” Curiosity led me to tap the icon. I knew better than to think that I downloaded an Untitled document to my library and forgot about it.
This is our story, the document read once opened, retold entirely from the point of view of a man that completely fucked everything up.
Fighting around the lump in my throat was nothing short of impossible as I read the document Devon left there for me. I swiped angrily at the tears that streamed down my face. Words blurred, too hard to read at times. The text was haunting, the prose altogether beautiful, and I fought desperately to remember if Devon studied English before he dropped out of college.
The haunting memory of Sharon’s goodbye letter gave me pause. The anguish was prevalent there as well. We could never have been together in the end, but it didn’t keep me from wanting it for years on end… Maybe if you had the courage to confront your family, to share the real you, the bright, passionate young woman that I found… If only you could share with them the rebel spirit that you’ve buried so deeply inside of yourself for so long…
My heart ached in my chest as I poured over the words a second time. Parts of me broke at the desperate sort of way he tried to explain himself, and I had the unfamiliar and ugly feeling that I was p
artially to blame for the way things happened as well. Misunderstanding led to our awkward first encounter, but I was the one to actively be such a crude bitch to him—my words, not his—over our next few interactions.
I could understand how he was frustrated with me. Even still, I couldn’t quite reconcile the part that ended with Sean Tremblay standing in my living room and saying that they’d made a bet over me. Regardless of the hurt and the intention behind it all, there was still a part of me that was rational enough to understand that people make mistakes. I knew that I owed him the opportunity to actually fully explain himself.
Breakaway: A Hockey Romance Page 21