We didn’t say anything more. I closed my eyes and Sid’s breathing got soft. For a moment, the world seemed whole. For a moment, everything was all right.
Chapter 31
BAD LIVER AND A BROKEN HEART
I wasn’t drunk when I went to bed, but I woke up with a hangover of regret for the whole previous night. I hadn’t heard Sid get up, but he was already showered and dressed.
“C’mon,” he said. “There’s an IHOP down the street—it’s no Waffle House, but it’ll fix you right up.”
“I’m fine,” I groaned, filling a tumbler with water and killing the whole thing in one gulp. It hit my stomach with the punch of a prizefighter, but it stayed down. I closed the door and showered with tiny shampoos that smelled like fairy puke. The towels were nicer than my bedsheets back home. I had fallen asleep in my clothes, so I re-dressed and embarked on a wet walk of shame across the room to my suitcase.
“You got a call while you were in the shower,” Sid said, tossing my phone on the bed. “I didn’t check to see who it was.”
It was George’s number. He’d left a message, but I didn’t feel like hearing his voice right now. I gathered up my clothes, went back into the bathroom, and reemerged a cleaner, yet no less miserable, specimen of a human girl.
SID SNAPPED HIS menu closed and handed it to the waitress with a smile and a “Thank you, darlin’” that made her blush. I poured a little more of our endless pot of coffee into my cup and stirred in the last of our creamers. I felt a little better with the coffee, and my stomach had surprised me by perking up, rather than shriveling into a little ball, at the smell of bacon and syrup.
“He really got to you, didn’t he?” Sid asked.
“Under my skin,” I admitted. “Like Frank Sinatra. Like prison ink.” I wasn’t ever going to forget that look on George’s face, the way he’d turned to me at the end of the night like I might be able to change it all back to how it should have been. It was that look—not the gin, not the bad news—that had made me need Sid as badly as I had.
I glanced up past Sid and there was George coming through the front door, holding the hand of a little boy in a Spider-Man sweatshirt. His wife, a plain woman in a cowl-neck sweater and blue jeans, was there next to him. He didn’t look a whole lot better than I felt.
He looked away as soon as he recognized me and I heard her ask who I was. He said something about a student and ushered his brood to a table as far away from us as the walls of the restaurant would allow. His wife didn’t look like a murderer. She didn’t even look like a woman pissed at her husband for coming in drunk at one A.M. and putting on a happy family show for her son. She just looked like any ordinary suburban mom taking her kid for Sunday brunch at the IHOP on the Vestal Parkway.
I was now officially out of suspects. My detective skills had burned themselves out, and I had nowhere else left to look. Bronco was still the one in the metaphorical cuffs, and if I didn’t find out who’d killed KitKat, the cops sure as hell weren’t going to waste their time looking. My heart twisted up like a worm poked with a stick, and by the time the waitress put our plates in front of us, I had once again lost my appetite.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw George get up and go to the bathroom, passing our booth without looking down at me. A minute later, my purse buzzed. Sorry about last night, he wrote.
Me too, I texted back.
I want to know who did this. Keep me posted.
Will do. I didn’t know what he wanted me to do—send him updates, get him a ticket to the trial, break out the champagne when they convicted Bronco on a crime he couldn’t have possibly committed? Maybe I could have the Post headline fucking framed for him. Frustrated with George, with the case, and mostly with myself, I hacked into my pancakes like a pirate with a rusty cutlass.
George crossed back to his family, and I tried not to look at them. Sid gave up trying to make conversation. When the waitress cleared away our plates, she smiled at Sid and ignored me. “Check’s been paid,” she said.
Sid eyed me and then slipped a sideways glance over to their table. “You think he . . . ?”
“Better be,” I snorted, in no mood to be paid into silence. “I got the cab.”
Chapter 32
WILLIAM, IT WAS REALLY NOTHING
Baldrick was howling like he hadn’t been fed in months. He hadn’t eaten more than half of the mixing bowl of food I’d left out for him, but I picked him up and carried him around like a baby until he stopped crying and started purring. It was nice to come home to someone who wanted to see me, something other than junk mail and the TV. There wasn’t even a postcard from my grandmother to welcome me back.
I got Baldrick some fresh water and put him down in front of his food dish, where he started eating and purring with an enviable enthusiasm. I still felt like shit. The ride home had been long and silent except for Sid’s recycled playlists; I dozed off around Liberty and woke up embarrassed a few minutes later. Sid had dropped me off in front of my apartment and I hadn’t even invited him in. I wanted to be alone.
I put on some tea and changed into my pajamas even though it was barely four P.M. I was sick of thinking about George, about Bronco, about KitKat. But I listened to George’s message. Just an apology for last night and a thanks for the cab. But he still hadn’t answered my question about who wrote that song. Maybe I’d try him another day, when the wound wasn’t quite so fresh.
I thought about what he’d said about his marriage. I knew some people from my high school had gotten married, but none of my friends were even engaged, let alone hitched.
No one, I realized, except William.
I got out the Boyfriend Box and took it into the living room. I rooted around until I found a small velvet box underneath stacks of letters. Inside was a sterling silver ring with a pink enameled rose, the promise ring William had given me only two months before he met his so-called soul mate at the Dartmouth anime club meeting, proposed to her, and dumped me. It was my last big breakup before I met Catch, a hurt I’d hauled around out of pride for two years.
William had lived in the suite on my freshman-year dorm floor, which meant for the first two weeks of classes, he had no reason to come out other than in the morning for class and in the evening for dinner. But when I did finally catch sight of him during a two A.M. fire drill, with his wire-rimmed glasses and Cowboy Bebop T-shirt that was too big on his skinny frame, it was kind of like love.
He was majoring in math with dreams of being a statistician, planning to transfer to Dartmouth in the spring. We stayed up late watching fan dubs of DNA2 and All Purpose Cultural Cat Girl Nuku Nuku on VHS tapes he ordered from Japan. I paid for midnight Chinese takeout because all his money was eaten up on fandom. But I had gone to a couple of fair-pay, pro-choice rallies and figured that meant I was on the hook for paying for most of our dates. After all, I rationalized, that’s what liberal, freethinking college women did instead of waiting around for a man to buy them French dinners and long-stemmed roses.
William’s CD collection consisted almost entirely of imports: anime soundtracks and J-pop albums by cute girls in sailor uniforms. But the one album he’d played over and over and over was October Project’s eponymous debut. Despite the fact that it was about mourning the death of a beloved, “Bury My Lovely” became our song for driving, making out, and post-sex staring into each other’s eyes while he told me I was the only girl who’d ever loved him.
I’d taken that to mean he loved me too.
Right before he went home to Cleveland for Christmas break, he met me outside of class and we took a walk through the snow-covered nature preserve, holding hands through cheap gloves, blowing cold rings of winter breath like dragons. He’d gotten down on one knee and held up the ring, asking me to be his kanojo, his girlfriend, even after he went away. I said yes and although the ring was too big, he promised me we could get it resized when he came back to visit.
So when he dumped me for Kendra, I took it as though I’d been left at th
e altar, crying for days, listening to my burned copy of October Project over and over on my Discman, looking for clues in Mary Fahl’s voice like a love spell I could cast to lure him back, cursing the sign I should have seen, that a song of mourning was probably not the best harbinger of a happy ending.
He e-mailed me only once about a year later, a bit of a casual chat, a How are you? and the mention of his wedding date, if I wanted to come. For a week I rehearsed the speech I would give when the minister asked if anyone had any reason why the couple should not be wed, holding this ring aloft as proof of our eternal love.
But then I’d met Catch and pretty much forgotten William existed.
I ran a quick search on Facebook and found him named in photos, but without his own account. He was still with Kendra and they had two kids: a toddler daughter, Meryl, and an infant son, Hunter. I rationalized that the cold knot twisting at the base of my spine was just leftover tension from my meeting with George. I found William’s old e-mail and the phone number he’d left at the bottom in case you ever want to chat, an offer I’d never taken him up on, and dialed with apprehension and hope.
“You’ve reached William, please leave a message . . .”
Did anyone pick up their phone anymore? His still-familiar voice was so stiff and professional, it sounded like it was wearing khakis. I left a halfhearted voice mail, already regretting the call. What was I hoping to accomplish with all of this? Get him to cheat on his wife and marry me in Atlantic City with a cheap sterling silver ring? Brag about how much better off my life was without him? I felt like a jerk. I stuffed the ring back in the box, slammed the lid on it, and shoved the whole mess back in the closet.
WILLIAM CALLED BACK two hours later, and I almost didn’t want to answer his call, wanted to just let him go to voice mail, delete him without ever listening to what he had to say.
“I can’t talk long,” he said when I finally picked up. “But when I heard your voice . . . I told Kendra I was going out for groceries and hightailed it out of there. She gets jealous of the women in my school; she’d flip if she knew I was calling you.”
“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” I said, hoping it would be enough to end what I could already tell was going to be a very awkward conversation.
“I don’t care,” he said. “I just can’t get over how good it is to hear your voice. I have these dreams sometimes that we’re back together, and when I wake up, I go in the bathroom and just bawl my eyes out in the shower.”
A decade of anger and hurt came rushing back like I’d swallowed an Atomic Fireball. “Then why didn’t you ever call?” I demanded. “I’ve been here the whole fucking time.”
“I was ashamed,” he said. “I knew I fucked up. When you didn’t answer my e-mail, I knew how badly I’d hurt you. I’m a coward, Jett, in case you haven’t figured that out, and I’ve been kicking myself about it for seven years.”
In my early college years, cowardice had been one of those traits I all-too-often mistook for sweetness, the same way I mistook fedoras for charm and arrogance for brilliance.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Guess it turned out for the best.” I remembered what he’d looked like in a few worn photographs, but as he talked, all I could picture was George standing on his front steps, staring back at me. She’s really gone. Maybe old loves have to stay gone, for everyone’s sake.
“I saw your wife’s Facebook page,” I added. “Your kids are cute.”
“Thanks,” he said. “But the ends I’ve found myself in do not justify the way I left you. Especially since . . .” He trailed off, but I knew what he was trying to say and contemplated hanging up before he said it. “I love my wife, I really do,” he said. “But I love her because I don’t really have a whole lot of choice. She’s the mother of my kids. It’s not like I can leave her.”
So it wasn’t just George. Was this how all marriages were destined to end up, cold and stale, like leftovers forgotten in the back of the fridge? This was not what Disney movies had taught me about romance.
“No one’s asking you to,” I said, trying not to let anger creep into my voice. “I just called to say hi. I was thinking of you, and I wanted to know how you were doing.” I was lying to him the way he was lying to me. The truth was that I didn’t know why I’d called—to get back together? To prove my life had moved on without him? To make sure he wasn’t dead, that I had nothing else to mourn?
“I know, I know,” he said. “But if I so much as look at another woman, she gets so paranoid that I’m stepping out. She follows the Huffington Post divorce section like hippies after the Grateful Dead—she tells me it’s so she can ‘be prepared’ for when I do leave her.”
I hadn’t intended to open his own personal Pandora’s box. Up until now, my ex-boyfriend quest hadn’t had any real consequences. Jeremy and I were sexually incompatible but already had plans to hang out again. Gabe and I had had a good time, parting on friendly enough terms.
But William had been doing just fine before I came in like a whirlwind, reminding him of his sin, boasting of what could have been without saying a word. For all the hurt he’d caused, he didn’t deserve me as punishment. He’d fallen into the same lonesome trap as George, a prison of picket fences and PTA. And maybe one day he’d find his own Technicolor KitKat, but today wasn’t that day and I wasn’t that girl. Though it killed me to do so, the least I could offer was to end the pain quickly.
“I should probably get going,” I said.
“I was just about to say the same thing,” he said, sighing. “Kendra’s already texting me, demanding to know where I am. God, I just want to throw this phone out the window and drive to wherever you are.”
I heard him start the car’s engine. “Don’t do that,” I joked, terrified it was exactly what he was doing. “Who will be there to teach your kids about Trigun?”
He chuckled. “Guess you’re right,” he said. “Jett, it was so good to hear from you. Can I call you again sometime?”
“Maybe it’s better if you don’t,” I said, wincing. “I don’t want to cause any problems.”
“You’re probably right,” he said. “And that’s my own damn fault. Hey, you still got that rose ring?”
“I do,” I said. “Finding it inspired me to call you.”
“Good,” he said. “Wear it tonight. Just tonight, and then you can put it back wherever you had it before. I’m going to go back to my house, drink a bottle of sake in my game room, and pretend for a few hours that everything is the way it was. And, Jett?”
“Yes?”
He swallowed hard. “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he said, “but I love you.”
Tears started to run silently down my cheeks. I was sorry I’d called, angry at myself for selfishly disrupting his routine because I needed to assert my own nostalgia. Now I had to be the one to put him through the awful heartbreak he’d run me through all those years ago. He could love me all he wanted, but it wasn’t going to bring me back into his arms.
We hung up and I retrieved the ring. I slid it onto my left hand, wondering if I’d dodged a bullet or lost the love of my life a second time. I warmed up my tea, pulled up October Project on my iPod, played the whole album twice and had myself a good long cry.
Chapter 33
NOBODY’S BABY NOW
Two days later I was washing Philip’s dainties and Mac’s number came up on my phone. I dried my hands and picked up just before it went to voice mail.
“There isn’t much, but I found something,” Mac said by way of greeting. “It took me forever, finally managed to track down a copy of Minnie Underground, a University of Minnesota zine from 1993 that had an interview with the lead singer of a band called the Chauffeurs and a pretty shitty photocopy of the liner notes. Your mystery song is called ‘Secret Girlfriend’ from the band’s only release.”
Perfect title.
“It gets better,” he continued. “The lead singer, Cassie Brennen, lives here in New York. She still plays gigs here and
there; she’s got a show tonight at the Bitter End. I’d go, but I’m at the store until ten. You should go, see if she’ll sign your tape. Bet she’d love to hear that her old song is still floating around.”
My heart did a weird fluttery thing and I couldn’t discern if it was excitement or fear. “Mac, you’re the best,” I said. “Thanks so much.”
“Anytime,” he replied. “Still got three crates of The Stranger, if you need any more favors.”
I CALLED SID and left him a message as I headed uptown. The show didn’t start for another hour, which gave me time to drop off Philip’s package and get back down to the Bitter End for Cassie’s show. I told Sid to meet me there if he could and shot him a text message, just in case he didn’t feel like checking his voice mail.
I loved the brick walls of the Bitter End. I loved that the bartender still ID’d me, and I loved sitting there imagining that I was seeing the next James Taylor or Lady Gaga, that one day I would be able to tell my kids that I saw such-and-such back before they hit the airwaves. I got myself an Original Sin cider and took a seat near the back because it felt like church in there. What I was hearing, what I was witnessing, was sacred and profound, and I didn’t want to interrupt anyone else’s worship.
Cassie wore burgundy Doc Martens with black tights and a flannel skirt; her dark-blond hair was crimped and pushed off to the side with a handful of clips. She was a relic of the last time music mattered, where a songwriter wasn’t some Swedish computer geek plotting songs like math problems. Her silver nameplate bracelet and the necklace that matched were the only things about her that looked new and shiny. Everything else about her had the worn edges of a hard-won life.
She played an acoustic guitar, seated on a stool, her voice no longer the delicate, unsure alto of “Secret Girlfriend,” now almost gravelly, but more confident, playful. She sang a whole set of originals, along with a cover of Billy Joel’s “State of Grace” with such raw beauty that I began to rethink Billy Joel’s entire catalog. With her talent, she could have even saved “Piano Man.”
The Big Rewind Page 13