The Men I Didn't Marry

by Janice Kaplan

  “He said to get rid of you, whatever it takes,” she whispers.

  “Well, try this,” I say. “If he doesn’t see me, every newspaper in Tennessee is going to know about a story that he buried twenty years ago.”

  She seems uncertain what to do.

  “Go tell him that,” I say. “Use those exact words: A story he buried twenty years ago.”

  The young woman looks stunned. Her freshly minted degree in poli-sci didn’t prepare her for scandal. Although probably it should have. But sympathizing, I decide to take her out of the middle of the situation. I stride past her desk and boldly open the door to Dick Benedict’s office.

  “Don’t . . .” calls the young woman rushing after me. But we both see immediately that the room is empty. A half-eaten sandwich is sitting on the desk and a TV tuned to a local news station is still on. The volunteer looks around, baffled, but I notice a back door, still ajar, and rushing through it, find myself outside in a parking lot. Someone is just turning the ignition on a Mercedes, and I race over and plant my hands angrily on the hood.

  Through the windshield, I stare at the silver-haired man behind the wheel, but he refuses to return my gaze. He looks behind him as if ready to back up, and revs the engine.

  I pound my fist against the hood, and without thinking scream out, “Go ahead, Dick. Run me over! Why not kill me, too!”

  He leans out the window, his face frozen. “Please get out of the way. I don’t want to have to call the Secret Service.”

  “You don’t get Secret Service when you’re running for Congress,” I snap. “And anybody who knows you wouldn’t even think you rate help from a crossing guard.”

  “Please just get out of the way,” he says tersely.

  “I got out of your way once, and I’m not doing it again,” I scream.

  Dick turns off the engine and gets out of the car, closing the door behind him. I’m almost surprised to realize that he doesn’t look at all like the monster who’s loomed so large in my nightmares. He’s maybe five nine and ordinary looking, not six foot six with bulging eyes and veins popping out of his forehead. Instead of a malevolent gleam, his eyes just reflect the average weariness of middle age.

  “If you want to talk to me, this isn’t the way to do it,” he says.

  “What would you suggest? The moment you heard I was here you ran out.”

  “I had someplace to go.”

  “Where? Your daddy’s office, to see if he could protect you again?”

  Dick takes a long moment before answering, and I can see him trying to hide his uneasiness. “What do you want Hallie? What are you doing here?”

  I glare at him scornfully. “I hadn’t been to Tennessee in a long time, Dickie,” I say, practically spitting. “Thought I’d check out Dollywood. Or maybe the Grand Ole Opry.”

  The Grand Ole Opry. I try to stay cool as I say that, but I have to steady myself against the car as I remember that evening with my little sister Amy sitting on one side of me, Dick sitting on the other. All of us are in high spirits, celebrating Amy’s Sweet Sixteen.

  “Been to any good concerts lately?” I ask Dick bitterly.

  “Hallie, don’t do this,” he says, a tinge of anguish in his voice.

  My birthday gift to Amy had been a trip to Nashville to meet my boyfriend Dick. I couldn’t believe how fast I’d fallen in love and how wonderful Dick seemed, and I wanted Amy to get to know him. Dick arranged a special surprise—tickets for all of us to hear Amy’s idol, Reba McEntire. Amy kept telling me I was the best big sister in the whole wide world. Dick’s family controlled half the state, so our seats were front row, center. Midconcert, Reba sang “Happy Birthday” and stepped off the stage to give Amy a hug. My sister squealed in delight, kissed me and Dick, and said we’d given her the most fabulously amazing night of her life.

  How could I have imagined that it would also be her last?

  “Why shouldn’t I talk about this?” I ask Dick now. “Somebody has to tell the truth. Do the voters know about that part of your life? Do they know that you killed an innocent sixteen-year-old?”

  Dick takes a deep breath. “Hallie, I’m not going to have this conversation with you.”

  “I bet it’s nice to be able to forget all about it,” I say venomously.

  “I haven’t forgotten. That was the worst thing that ever happened to me.”

  “Not as bad as it was for me,” I say, and in my overwrought state, I suddenly burst into tears. My sobs echo through the parking lot, and I clench my fists against my eyes to stop the flood of tears. Dick steps uncertainly forward and reaches a hand to my shoulder as if to comfort me. I flinch and pull away.

  “Get away from me,” I say, my whole body shaking so hard now that I’m afraid my knees will give way and I’ll collapse in a heap on the asphalt.

  It must look that way to Dick, too, because he says, “At least sit down,” and opens his car door. Without thinking, I slide onto the smooth leather backseat and he joins me. When I realize where I am, I turn even more hysterical.

  “I want to get out! I can’t be in a car with you. Nobody should ever get in a car with you.”

  Dick turns ashen as he realizes what it means to be in a car with Amy’s sister. His head drops down and his own shoulders start to shake.

  “Hallie, it was just a horrible, horrible time,” he says.

  I hear his voice break and I’m momentarily stopped. I’m the one who’s been tortured by this, not him.

  “I’ve re-lived that night a million times, with every ‘if only’ you could imagine,” he says. “If only I didn’t get so stoned. If only I hadn’t gotten so mad at you after the concert. If only I hadn’t driven off in a rage with Amy and hit that tree. If only I’d been the one to die.”

  “Die? You never suffered for a moment. My sister was killed but your parents pulled every string to get you off. Two months probation and a suspended license. Barely a slap on the wrist.”

  Everyone in town knew Dick used cocaine but laughed it off as the drug choice of the rich. I’d been too innocent to understand that he had a serious problem. Dick was older than me—smart, rich, and handsome. I naïvely believed my beloved when he said the drug was harmless. Then at the concert, he got high and for the first time turned mean and raucous. Dick sneered when I confronted him and told me to grow up. Why was I such a little priss, he taunted. I got scared, and we had a nasty fight.

  “It was my sister,” I say now. “I should have known. I should have protected her.”

  “You tried,” Dick says. “You’d insisted you were going to drive us home, but the coke made me feel invincible. I whisked Amy off and told her you’d meet us later.”

  “You wouldn’t listen to anything. I didn’t know how to stop you.”

  “Nobody could stop me. After the accident, I spent six months in rehab before I could even admit it to myself. There was nothing you could have done.”

  “I could have stayed away from someone like you.”

  Dick grimaces. “Could have, would have, should have. Isn’t that how we all destroy ourselves?”

  “Pat little answer to make yourself feel better,” I say angrily. “I can’t let myself off the hook that easily. How can you?”

  “What other choice do I have? I’ve come to believe that you change the things you can and accept the things you can’t. Here’s what I could change. I got straight and now I have a wife and three good kids.”

  “Bully for you. But how do you have the gall to run for Congress?”

  “Whether you believe it or not, I think I can do some good. Maybe improve people’s lives.”

  I get out of the car and Dick follows me. I know why he bolted when I showed up—he realizes I can ruin his plans. I turn around and face him squarely. “I came down here to make sure that you drop out of the race. I could cause such a nasty scandal that even your daddy’s money won’t buy you out of it.”

  Dick takes a deep breath. “Yes, you could. But is there a way I can convinc
e you that I’m doing my best to make up for a bad past?”

  “You can never make up for someone being dead,” I tell him. “No matter how clean you are now, or how many bills you sponsor, you can’t give me another sister.”

  When I leave Dick, I’m too shaky to get into my own car, so I wander through the neighborhood near his headquarters. Nashville has changed since I was last here. The street scene is even more crowded with camera-clicking tourists and every block has a couple of good restaurants and at least one bad trinket shop.

  I gaze into a store window that’s full of vintage guitars, and I think of Amy sitting in her room when she was growing up, strumming and dreaming of being a big star. Seeing a poster advertising upcoming concerts now at the Grand Ole Opry—Clint Black, Garth Brooks, Vince Gill—I think how much Amy would have liked to hear them. She’d laugh to know that the whole country has gone country. Back when she was a teenager, her taste for twangy tunes was considered offbeat for a New York girl. Now stars like Clint and Garth are national heart-throbs.

  On a whim, I go into the store and pick up a Gibson guitar.

  “That’s a nice one,” says a young salesman coming over to me, tugging at his jeans to keep them from falling off his skinny hips. “Is it for you or someone else?”

  “I guess I’m just looking,” I say, putting it back carefully. When Adam and Emily were little, I sometimes imagined that they’d grow up like Amy, playing guitars and loving country music. But neither showed the slightest interest in cowboys with broken hearts or standing by their man. Emily perked up when I sang a few bars of “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” only because she thought I might buy her colored contact lenses.

  The salesman strokes the finely polished wood at the neck of the guitar. “I’ve been saving for one of these for years,” he says.

  “Expensive?” I ask, looking for the price tag.

  “Not bad. But every penny I have goes to tuition. I’m working my way through college.”

  I look at him sympathetically, knowing all about tuition woes. Across the store, two other young musicians are looking at an amplifier and the salesman excuses himself to help them. I overhear one of them say that he has a club date coming up, and the others slap him a high five.

  “Are you still studying with that cool guitar teacher?” asks the salesman.

  “Couldn’t afford it,” says the kid with the gig.

  “Know what you mean. But you gotta keep playing,” says the other.

  Thoughtfully, I walk around the store, trying to imagine what it would be like to have Amy with me right now. Would she still be writing songs? Maybe she’d be playing duets with Reba McEntire at the Grand Ole Opry. Or maybe music would be a hobby and she’d be working as a doctor in a free clinic in Costa Rica. Or she’d be living in Rochester, contentedly raising two sons. All the possibilities that will never be because that bastard Dick Benedict slammed the brakes on her future.

  Thinking about Dick makes me so angry again that I grab for a guitar and swing it in the air. I suddenly understand how good Pete Townshend must have felt, smashing an instrument at the end of every Who concert.

  “You okay?” asks the salesman, coming back as he sees me recklessly dangling one of his two-thousand-dollar babies.

  I abashedly put the guitar back down. “Sorry, just thinking about The Who,” I say.

  “The what?” he asks.

  “The Who.”

  “From where?”

  “You’ve never heard of The Who?” I ask, wondering if being in Tennessee is the same as being trapped in an Abbott and Costello movie.

  He grins. “Just playing with you, ma’am. I knew exactly what you meant. I love The Who. In fact, if I ever have my own band, I’m thinking of calling them The Whom.”

  “Crossover band,” I say with a laugh. “For fans of rock, country, and grammar.”

  He grins. “I might lose the rap audience. They’re not big on grammar.”

  “Well, you keep at it. I hope you finish school and get that band one day.”

  “Thank you.”

  I leave the store, grateful to the young salesman for cheering me up with his little joke. I walk for a while and go into Centennial Park, where I spot a bench and sit down. This section of the park is mostly empty and the shrubbery is barren, though I notice a few brave flowers trying to bloom in the dim winter sun. I sit back on the bench and close my eyes. I’ve built up two decades worth of rage at Dick, and what good has it been? Nothing grows from the seeds of resentment. Anger is destructive—whether it makes you want to smash guitars or smash someone’s political career.

  I came down to Nashville with half a thought of ruining Dick. But now that I’m here, I’m not sure what that would accomplish. His dropping out of the race won’t improve my life, won’t bring back Amy, won’t even help the kid in the guitar store become a musician. I don’t ever have to forgive Dick, but it would certainly feel better not to keep hating him. Adam and his professors might not be able to prove it in their physics labs, but negative energy saps the strength right out of you. I’m tired of holding on to the fury.

  Thoughtfully, I take out my cell phone and play with the buttons for a while. Finally, I dial Dick’s office and after a long wait on hold, I’m finally put through.

  “Yes, Hallie,” says Dick hesitantly.

  “I’m in Centennial Park. I need you to meet me here.”

  Now the pause is so long that I’m thinking it will be spring by the time he answers.

  “Don’t worry, it’s a public place. I’m not going to shoot you,” I say, trying to hurry things up.

  “That’s something of a relief,” he says.

  I describe exactly where I am, and Dick reluctantly agrees to come find me. “Can you tell me what you want, Hallie?” And then nervously, “Are you looking for a payoff?”

  “All you have to pay is penance,” I say.

  Dick arrives sooner than I would have expected, and I catch sight of him walking with his head down, a plaid Burberry scarf wound around his neck. He shoves his hands into his pockets and moves toward me. It’s odd that for all these years I’ve thought of Dick as the powerful one who rammed into my life and did whatever he wanted. Now I’m the one in the proverbial driver’s seat, but my goal is no longer to smash Dick’s world.

  “I’ve spent a lot of years thinking how much I hate you,” I tell him when he stops in front of me.

  Dick shuffles uncomfortably and digs his hands deeper into his pockets. “I don’t hate you.”

  “Why would you?”

  He gives a faint smile. “I have a feeling you’re about to show me.”

  “No, I’m not.” I shake my head. “But I’ve always thought you don’t deserve to have anything good happen. Tell me the truth. Have you been happy?”

  Now Dick looks even more uncomfortable, obviously not wanting to say that except for my being here, life has really been pretty okay. He pulls a picture out of his wallet and shows me three tousle-haired little girls.

  “Whether I deserve it or not, I’ve been blessed. I’d be pretty ungrateful not to be happy every time I look at my children.”

  Despite myself, I smile at the photo of his sweet, eager-faced daughters in their matching blue-and-gold soccer uniforms. “Maybe one of them will be the next Mia Hamm,” I say, handing it back to him.

  “The little one’s pretty uncoordinated, but I haven’t told her that yet,” Dick says, tucking the photo away. “My wife says I’m an overprotective father. But it’s because I know how quickly bad things can happen.” He looks at me meaningfully, then sighs and sits down next to me.

  We both stare off into the distance, and I try to think of reckless Dick as a doting dad. “Your kids are lucky. My kids are lucky. Amy wasn’t,” I say.

  Dick looks down. “If I could bring her back for you, I would.”

  “You can’t, I know that. I heard what you said before. All you can try to do is change what can still be changed.”

  “It’s
a hard lesson to learn.” He rubs his hands together, warming them against the chill. “So given where we are, what can we try to do now?”

  Good question. Vague ideas have been whirling in my head all afternoon, and now they start to take shape.

  “I met a kid today in a music store who’s trying to put himself through college and start a band,” I say slowly. “Why not do something for him?”

  “We can hire his band to play at my campaign rallies,” Dick suggests.

  “Not enough. I was thinking you could pay for his college—in Amy’s memory. And not just him. Take some of that family money of yours and fund ten music scholarships in Amy’s name.”

  He thinks about it for a minute. “I’d be glad to do that. Very glad.”

  “And an endowed chair at Vanderbilt,” I say, my plan building steam. “I want there to be an Amy Lawrence Professor of Country Music.”

  “I should have done something like that years ago, I guess.”

  “Do it now,” I say.

  “I will. We can think of it as my way of telling you I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry. Something you never bothered to say.”

  Dick puts his head in his hands. “My parents wouldn’t let me talk to you after the accident and then they hauled me out of town to a rehab center in Arizona. Eventually, I woke up and realized what I was doing to myself and everybody I cared about. When I got out and finally tried to call, you never answered.”

  “By then there was nothing for us to say to each other.”

  “Both of our lives were turned upside down. And there was nothing either of us could do. We’d been in love and then we couldn’t even talk. It’s awful to feel so helpless.”

  “I had plenty of ideas about what I could do. Pulling you apart limb by limb was high on my list.”

  “And there were plenty of days back then when I wished you would.” He looks at me plaintively. “What else can I do now to make amends?”

  I clasp my hands so tightly in my lap that my knuckles are almost white. Am I really ready to let go of my anger? I was always able to displace some of my sorrow about Amy into hate for Dick. It almost seemed that forgiving him would be letting myself forget my sister. But now I’m hoping for better ways to keep Amy’s spirit alive.