The Big Rewind

by Libby Cudmore

  “Are they still together?” Sid asked.

  “Who knows?” I replied. “It’s not like we’re pen pals.” That was a lie. I’d Facebook stalked them one night last year when I couldn’t sleep and Bob Dylan’s “To Make You Feel My Love”—Ryan’s song for me even though I’d never really liked it all that much—was used over the credits of some TV show I had fallen asleep in front of. My detective work showed that Ryan was engaged to a chubby Asian woman and Amy was dating a chinless guy who looked like the Johnny Depp puppet in Corpse Bride, and it was not a good look. “But it’s not going to stop me from enjoying this song.”

  “And from now on, when you hear it, you can remember this trip,” Sid said as the next song came on. “Do you know this one?” I shook my head. “The Clarks, ‘Hell on Wheels.’ Always makes me think of summer in Oklahoma, the endless miles of highway stretching out into nothingness. Oklahoma City’s like that, patches of buildings and then nothingness for a few miles until you get to the next city street. It’s strange and kind of beautiful. You ever been?”

  “I haven’t, but we did the musical in high school.”

  “And you’d better not start singin’ it, because I’ve put up with that my whole time here,” he said. “In between Terry incorrectly calling me a ‘southern gentleman’ and drunk girls demanding to know if I’m dating my cousin, I don’t know if I can take one more deep-fried stereotype.”

  The Pet Shop Boys’ “Suburbia” came on next and I froze. I’d avoided this song since Catch and I split up; it was one of our anthems for driving around when classes got out, drinking out of the same Dr. Pepper, and believing that as soon as we got our master’s degrees, they would give us the keys to the city and we would be free to take over the world together. Even now, the song swelled up that same glorious feeling of freedom just beyond constraint, the youthful thrill of believing the world was ours to possess whenever we were willing to grasp it.

  “Something wrong?” Sid asked. “I can skip to the next track.”

  “My friend Catch and I used to play this song all the time,” I said. “It just makes me miss him, that’s all.”

  He skipped ahead to Tom Cochrane’s “Life Is a Highway,” and the inherent cheesiness made me feel a little better.

  “I hear that,” he said. “I haven’t listened to ‘Just a Little Lovin” by Dusty Springfield since Katy and I split up. I was saving that song for the perfect girl, and I thought I’d found her . . . now it just makes me feel foolish, like when you lose your phone on the subway. You know you should have held on to it better, but it’s just . . . gone.” He gripped the steering wheel and stared at the ribbon of highway stretching out before us.

  “Maybe one day you’ll have something better to associate it with,” I said. “Like, you’ll be out playing Frisbee in the park and you’ll hear it on someone else’s Spotify and you’ll forever associate it with that new moment instead.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Except that I’m terrible at Frisbee. I always throw down.”

  “Me too,” I said. “So we can play. Terribly. Together. Who knows? We might actually learn how to throw a Frisbee like real fourth graders.”

  He put his hand on my knee again. I got that same nervous drumbeat in my heart as I had when I’d met up with Gabe. “I’d like that,” he said. “As soon as it warms up.”

  I didn’t want him to move his hand, but he drew back and took the wheel as Hall and Oates’ “You Make My Dreams” came on. I hummed along with the chorus and he chuckled.

  “You have to be Oates,” he said. “You get to sing the ‘hoo hoo’ part.”

  “Why do I have to be Oates?” I asked.

  “Driver always gets to be Hall,” he replied. “Those are the rules of the road.”

  “I thought that was ‘Gas, Grass, or Ass,’” I said.

  “Different rulebook.”

  “Even if Oates is driving?”

  “Absolutely.” He wound through his playlist and put on “Portable Radio,” grinning. “Now, let’s try this again,” he offered. “And this time, we’ll do it right.”

  Chapter 29

  I NEVER TALK TO STRANGERS

  Sid dropped me off in front of the Belmar with a strict warning to call if I needed anything. “I’ll just be at the hotel,” he said. “I won’t even go to the bathroom without my phone.”

  I was too nervous to do anything but nod and watch him drive away before sucking up a deep breath and going inside. From the look of the place, George had picked well. The bar was a Tom Waits song come to life: dimly lit and cramped with rickety tables, dirty mirrors, a pull-knob cigarette machine, and a jukebox with Elvis Costello and the Smiths. Perfect for an aging hipster to kill a few drinks while crying quietly in the back corner for the death of a girl he had clearly adored.

  I was the only girl in the place except for the blond bartender, who didn’t look old enough to get into an R-rated movie, let alone work the bottles and taps. Nobody seemed to notice that I had come in. I sat in the back and watched the door. I’d get a drink when George did.

  A tall man with middle-aged weight and weekend stubble came in, glanced around, placed an order. If that was him, he didn’t look like the aging punk I’d expected. He didn’t even look like his photograph except for the Red Sox cap. No black jeans, no earring, just a guy in a blue scarf and a corduroy jacket. He’d taken punk all the way back to its blue-collar roots and left it there.

  He finally spotted me and approached with the same caution one might use when nearing a skunk.

  “You George?” I asked.

  “That depends,” he said, wetting his chapped lips with his drink. “Are you Jett?”

  “I guess we’re in agreement—you want to sit?”

  He sat. “You want a G and T?” he asked, and gestured to the bartender without waiting for an answer. He waited until I had a glass in my hand to ask, “Did my wife send you?”

  “Why would she do that?”

  He drained his drink to the ice and wrapped his hands around the glass. The table shook as he tapped his foot against the table leg like a nervous rabbit. “I think she knows,” he said. “About KitKat.”

  If I had been a private eye like Philip, I would have played this little Q and A all night long. Instead I steadied myself with a drink and gave him what he came to hear. “KitKat’s dead.”

  I’ve never seen a man take a bullet to the chest, but the slow-motion look that crossed George’s face was about what I’d imagine it would be like. I motioned to the bartender to fix him up a second.

  “Jesus,” he breathed, his fingers fumbling across the table as though he was trying to gather up marbles. “What happened?”

  “Someone beat her to death,” I answered. “I found her body.”

  But he hadn’t come here to hear my sob story. He was shaking as though he’d fallen through ice. “Oh God,” he hissed, rocking back and forth in his seat. “Oh God, no, not KitKat. Not KitKat.”

  If I’d had any doubt that he was innocent, it was all erased now. But I still wanted to know who he was to her, what that tape meant and why he’d sent it when he did. I put the cassette on the table between us. “Tell me everything.”

  He stood like I’d just put down a grenade. “I need a cigarette,” he said. I worked on my drink while he wrestled a pack of Marlboros from the vending machine. I followed him outside and he bummed a lighter, pacing around the parking lot. I watched him like he was some kind of nature documentary: the habits of a man grieving for his mistress.

  He lit a second smoke off the first. “No,” he said. “This can’t be real. This is blackmail.” He pointed at me with the cigarette. “You’re trying to get me to say I was sleeping with her so you can report back to my wife. I won’t say anything. Not a goddamn thing.”

  “No one in our neighborhood has ever heard of you, and I don’t think her boyfriend has either,” I said. “So all I want to know is how long you two had been hitting the hot sheets.” It was gaudy patter, sure, but I want
ed to know how long this affair had been going on. The longer they were together, I rationalized, the more chances they had to slip up and reveal themselves to someone who might want KitKat dead.

  He whirled on me. “Don’t you dare!” he snapped. He was shaking so hard he could barely get the cigarette to his lips. “I wish it was that easy. I wish she was just another dumb grad student looking for a daddy figure and an internship. Those I can brush off. Those I can ignore.” He stamped out his cigarette and shoved his hands into the pockets of his corduroy work coat. “But not her. Come on, let’s go inside—our ice is melting.”

  “IT WASN’T ABOUT sex,” he repeated, just in case I hadn’t heard him the first three times. “But Christ, I loved her. She brought color back into my life. I was living in black-and-white and she filled everything in like a paint-by-numbers kit. Did you know her?”

  “She was my neighbor,” I said, tapping the tape still between us. “I got this tape by accident and when I took it down to her, she was dead. Hope you don’t mind, but I gave it a listen. Thought it might have a clue as to what happened.” The gin was making me chatty; I took another sip to fill my mouth long enough to shut me up and let him plug the silence.

  “Then you know how she was,” he said. “She was here for a year before she moved to Brooklyn; we used to meet for coffee, go to the movies, make each other mix tapes. We kissed, but we only slept together once, when she came to visit. We’d been drinking, here, actually, and my wife was out of town. But it didn’t feel right, like what we had was too pure and perfect to mess up with sex.”

  That much I understood. Maybe that’s what Sid and I had, something beautiful and chivalric. And maybe that’s where Catch and I had gone wrong, using sex to fill the silences between us. But if that was the case, why had he left me for someone who seemed like nothing but sex? It seemed like I’d never get the balance right.

  But I hadn’t come here to drink and overanalyze my relationships. I’d come here to drink and overanalyze his relationships. “How did you meet KitKat?” I asked.

  “I had her in Punk Theory, a grad class I teach every few semesters. Her knowledge of punk was Green Day and the Offspring, neither of which she liked very much, but she took the class because she had this absolute hunger for knowledge. She wanted to know how music could make her feel the way it did, why the 6ths’ “He Didn’t” ate away to the marrow of her bones while Talking Heads’ “(Nothing but) Flowers” made her blood sing. Music was an emotion she felt at her absolute core. It wasn’t shit to dance or get drunk to. My love for her wasn’t represented by music—music was represented by love.”

  I wish I had known the KitKat he knew. We’d never talked about music; it wasn’t until I’d gotten her tape collection that I’d even known what she listened to. I thought of all the mix tapes and CDs I had buried, the music I could have shared with her, the playlists we could have made each other. I took another drink and tried not to cry for the friend I never got the chance to know.

  “But my wife started getting suspicious,” he continued. “She was threatening to check my phone and e-mails and she’d already scanned my Facebook looking for evidence.” He held up the tape. “This,” he said, “is the elusive breakup mix, rarely made or given. It’s all here: the Innocence Mission, the Sundays . . . I wanted her to know that I loved her and would always love her, even if we couldn’t be together.”

  “What about that last song?” I asked. “The one that goes ‘I wither without you’? I found all the others, but I couldn’t find that one.”

  He drank. “That tape wasn’t yours to listen to,” he said, scowling.

  “That’s how I found you,” I said. “That tape was in my mailbox and when I took it to her, she was dead. I used the tape to track you down, so now I’ve gotta ask—do you know anyone who could have done this? Any chance your wife could have . . . ?”

  He took that better than I expected. “No,” he said. “I don’t think she loves me enough.”

  This was making less sense than before I’d come in, and it couldn’t be blamed on the gin. “So why didn’t you leave your wife for KitKat?” I asked.

  He eyed me, half-squinting in the bar’s darkness. “You’re not married, are you?” I shook my head and he kept explaining. “Marriage isn’t the same as love. It’s just a legal contract, and I wasn’t going to break the contract I made with my wife, my son, leave my job and my neighborhood and my life for something as fickle as love.” He stared at the ice in his glass. “At least that’s what I keep telling myself,” he said. “Guess it doesn’t matter now.”

  “For what it’s worth,” I said, “she never got the tape. She died knowing you still loved her.”

  He drained the last dregs of his drink. “Fuck-all that’s worth,” he said. Putting his hands on the table, he pushed himself to standing. “Guess there’s nothing left to do now but go home to my wife.”

  It was the saddest fucking thing I’d ever heard a man say.

  Chapter 30

  ACCIDENTALLY LIKE A MARTYR

  George smoked another cigarette while we waited for a cab, a beat-up station wagon with a chain-smoking driver who charged us six bucks each and didn’t seem a whole lot more sober than George was. The heat and conservative talk radio were up full blast and the seats were patched with twisted strips of duct tape. At least this guy knew better than to try to talk to us. Some cabbies didn’t know when to shut the hell up.

  George leaned against the window and closed his eyes. I stared out at passing Laundromats, pawnshops, all-night convenience stores, and closing bars. There was a Kennedy Fried Chicken on the corner and I got a little homesick for Brooklyn. George hummed softly, like I wasn’t there. In his mind, I guess I wasn’t.

  You don’t have to see the sadness in New York. It’s there if you want to look, behind neon signs and polished counters and girls dressed like they’re waiting for Glamour to ask about their outfit. But this city wore its broken heart in pieces spilled down its sleeve. There was no hiding it, not behind the colleges, IBM money, or chic art galleries along the waterfront. It was a beautiful shithole, filled with bitter, broken men like George, drifting through lives soaked in booze and sorrow and absolute heartbreak.

  Brooklyn fakes this kind of desolation. It deliberately dirties itself so people like me and Natalie and Mac and Marty can feel cool and sophisticated in our world-weariness. Sid was the only one who felt anything even remotely real. His love for Cinderella wasn’t tethered to anything but his heart. What Sid felt, whatever it was, was true to the core of his being. I wondered if he was waiting in our hotel room, pining for her. I wondered if there was anyone out there in the world pining for me. And I wondered what it must be like to love someone to that unfathomable depth. I had liked all my boyfriends, I might have even loved some of them—but not the way Sid loved Cinderella. Not the way George loved KitKat. And ever since Catch left, I’d given up loving someone in a way that damaged anything but my pride when it ended. I was too scared to feel anything that deep, that terrifying, to risk that he might not love me back, that he might leave, that he might die without a chance to say good-bye.

  But that fear also kept me from feeling the kind of love that came from someone whose heart was so heavy with it that even when we were together he missed me, because we could never be close enough to balm the absolute ache of his soul. And if someone loved me like that, whoever he was, I could love him with the perfect, giddy happiness of that couple I had seen on the train, and what we had would be pure and for all eternity.

  The cab pulled up in front of George’s dark house. I got out with him and signaled to the cabby to wait. “You gonna be all right?” I asked.

  He nodded, stuffing his hands in his pockets. Then he shuffled up the walk, climbed the stairs, and turned back to me. “She’s really gone, isn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” I said, leaning against the hood of the cab. “She’s really gone.”

  BACK AT OUR Marriott, I bypassed my bed and went straight for
Sid’s. The thought of sleeping alone in a hotel bed in this strange, dirty city terrified me. I didn’t want to be alone the way George was—sure, he had his wife and his kid, but inside that beautiful house, inside the arrogant, fucked-up paradise of his mind, he was sleeping by himself.

  Sid turned over and sat up, fumbling for the light. “Jett, what time is it?” he mumbled, shielding his eyes.

  “Who cares?” I replied. “I’m exhausted.”

  He sat up, throwing off the covers. “You don’t want to do this,” he said. “Come on; let’s get you over to your bed.”

  I resisted, burrowing down until the fake-feather pillow was flat. “Let me stay, Sid. Just let me stay here. I’m just so fucking sad. Let me stay.”

  He kissed my forehead and turned off the light. I put my head in the crook of his shoulder and tried not to cry.

  “I broke a man’s heart tonight,” I said, not even sure if Sid was still awake or listening. “I had to tell him that KitKat was dead, and for a moment that was even worse than the one before, I had to wonder if he knew who killed her or if he did it himself. And whatever he had to tell her, everything that was on that tape, he didn’t get the chance to say it.”

  “Oh, Jett,” Sid murmured. “Jett, I’m so sorry.”

  Lying there in his arms and speaking it all out into the darkness exorcized the ghosts of the evening, the whole complex mess of emotions dissipating like the smoke rings Natalie blew when she was trying to impress a new hookup.