What Might Have Been

by Glenda Sanders

  But he didn’t go away. He waited a reasonable interval, then rang again. And knocked. “Barbara? I can hear your television. I know you’re in there.”

  Gizmo went wild, and Barbara groaned again. She should have known ignoring him wouldn’t work. Feeling wooden, she switched off the television and walked to the door. Still, she hesitated, not finding the strength to reach for the knob.

  She leapt when the bell sounded again, then, with a grim shrug, opened the door with the chain lock still engaged and spoke through the narrow opening. “Go away, Richard.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “It’s late.” Gizmo was in a frenzy, zipping and scratching at his door.

  “I want to explain about last night,” Richard persisted.

  “I didn’t need any explanations when I was seventeen. I certainly don’t need any at thirty-four.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong, Barbara.”

  The door next to Barbara’s opened an inch, and Gizmo’s nose pressed through. His owner’s eye also appeared and gave Richard a critical once-over. “Are you all right, Barbara?”

  Barbara sighed dismally. “Yes, Carolyn,” she replied. “It’s all right. I know this man.”

  Gizmo clawed at the ground. “Humph,” Carolyn said skeptically.

  Barbara shrugged, and closed her door far enough to disengage the chain. “He was just coming inside.”

  Pinning Richard with another look—as though memorizing features for a police report—Carolyn said, “Well—”

  “It’s all right, Carolyn,” Barbara said emphatically, giving Richard an even more pointed look than Carolyn had. “Trust me, I know this man. He’s not going to try anything.”

  “You didn’t have to say that,” Richard said once they were in the living room.

  “Carolyn was concerned,” Barbara countered. “I don’t get many male visitors this late at night. I thought I’d put her mind at rest. And it’s not as though I have to worry about your jumping my bones, is it?”

  “Barbara, please. Don’t. You got it all wrong. It had nothing to do with you.”

  Barbara’s humorless laugh bordered on hysteria. “We kissed. I asked you to stay. You left. What’s to get wrong?”

  “Barbara,” he said, and cringed as she winced. She didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t want to hear anything he had to say, didn’t want him in her home. He didn’t blame her, after what had almost happened between them and the way he’d bolted.

  He hadn’t meant to hurt her, but that didn’t excuse the fact that he had. From the way he’d reacted when he found her in that office, he should have had better sense than to trust himself alone with her, but he’d been greedy for all the things she represented to him.

  “It was five minutes of insanity,” she said, clinging to control with the most tenuous hold possible. “We listened to an old song and—”

  The guarded expression in her eyes tore at Richard’s heart as he realized that the wariness was his handiwork.

  “Hurting you is the last thing in the world I’d want to do,” he said. “I hope you can believe that.”

  She bowed her head, refusing—perhaps unable—to look at him any longer.

  “Why are you here, Richard?” she asked softly, her words laced with profound sadness. “What did you hope to accomplish by coming back here?”

  “I couldn’t let you think that my...hasty departure had anything to do with you.”

  She chortled incredulously. “Why would I think that? I threw myself at you and you retreated. Nothing personal.”

  Silence followed, broken finally by Richard’s sigh. “You wouldn’t have a cup of coffee, would you?”

  “Sorry,” she said, then offered reluctantly, “I could make hot chocolate.”

  “I haven’t had hot chocolate in—”

  “If you say seventeen years, you’re a dead man,” she snapped.

  He grinned sheepishly. “A very long time.”

  He followed her to the kitchen. Although she had instant mix that required only hot water, she made real cocoa, making a paste of powdered chocolate and sugar and then adding milk. She heated it in a saucepan on the stove, stirring constantly, instead of sticking it into the microwave. Maybe she wanted something to think about besides the discussion that was both imminent and inevitable. Or maybe, despite all reason and self-preservation, despite common sense, she liked having Richard there, liked doing something domestic for him while he watched her work.

  Maybe she was just plain crazy, she thought, staring at the swirls her wooden spoon painted in the white froth atop the brown liquid. Or maybe she loved him, and always would. Even if it made no sense. And even if it meant she’d be hurt.

  She poured the steaming cocoa into mugs and handed one to Richard. “I, uh, don’t have any marshmallows.”

  “I don’t need marshmallows,” he said, smiling so sweetly that Barbara wanted to cry.

  They stayed in the small kitchen, Richard leaning against one end of the counter, Barbara leaning against the other. Richard took a sip. “This is good.”

  Barbara set her mug down on the counter, hard. How much more of this was she supposed to take? “We’ve already established that I know my way around a kitchen, Richard. Why don’t you just say what you came to say?”

  Richard studied the liquid in his mug for several seconds before setting the mug on the counter with a thud. His fist followed, dealing a blow that set glass rattling in the cupboard. “Damn it, Barbara. Why couldn’t we have run into each other last year, or last summer? Why not three years ago, or three months ago? Why not any time before—”

  Turning his back to her, he slapped both hands on the countertop in frustration and muttered a curse. Every line in his body, from his tense stance to his clenched jaw, suggested misery.

  Barbara tentatively approached him and placed a hand on his shoulder lightly.

  A sigh shuddered through him, racking his shoulders under her fingertips. He spun around, leaving Barbara’s hand suspended in midair. She let it drop to her side as their gazes locked. Never taking his eyes from her face, Richard lifted his hand and traced the curves of her cheeks with trembling fingertips.

  Barbara held her breath as he plunged his fingers into her hair, cradling her scalp.

  “Your face,” he said. “God, Barbara, you should see it. And your eyes. I wish I could tell you how it makes me feel when I look at you and see you looking up at me. You make me remember what life was like before everything got so screwed up.”

  Barbara’s breath caught in her throat as he caressed the sensitive areas in front of her ears with his thumbs. His expression was primitive and hungry, as though he could devour her, and Barbara’s response was equally primitive and intense. He was the only man who’d ever made her feel this way; she thought perhaps he was the only man who ever would or could.

  Richard swallowed. “If I keep touching you, I’m going to forget all the reasons I shouldn’t.”

  His hands started to slide away from her head and Barbara stopped them by covering them with her own hands, trapping them. Her eyes locked with his unflinchingly as she rasped, “Touch me.”

  5

  RICHARD TENSED and rigidly pulled his hand free. He took several steps back. A strangled sound in his throat was his only reply.

  “Then tell me why,” Barbara demanded. “Just tell me what all these mysterious reasons you can’t touch me are. It’s what you came for, isn’t it? To explain? Well, I’m listening.”

  “I can’t risk...I’m not going to screw up your life, too.”

  “Too?”

  His bitter chortle was ugly. “Haven’t you heard? All I have to do is unzip my pants and lives go toppling like bowling pins. Just stand in line and take a number.”

  “Richard,” she said, too taken aback by his virulent self-derision to think of anything more coherent. She had sensed that he was under pressure—understandable for a single father with a pregnant teenage daughter. But this was more. He was tormen
ted. She must have been blind not to see how tormented he was.

  She reached out to him, instinctively offering a woman’s comfort, but he recoiled from her, holding his hands up in front of him as if defending himself from attack. “You can’t have a number, Barbara. I’m not adding anyone else to my list of casualties. Especially not you.”

  An awkward silence followed. Finally, Barbara picked up her cocoa. “It’s silly for us to be standing in here when there are comfortable chairs in the living room.” She squeezed past him on her way out of the narrow room. “If you feel like talking, I’m a pretty good listener. We were friends once, you know.”

  Friends, but never lovers. The old pain haunted her. Obviously he didn’t want a lover; just as obviously, he needed a friend.

  Richard was slow joining her—so slow that she half expected him to walk straight to the door for a clean getaway. But he came in and sat down in the same chair he’d sat in on his last visit. Perched on the edge, he leaned forward and propped his elbows on his knees, cradling the mug of cocoa between his hands.

  An awful silence ensued. Curled up on the end of the couch, as she had been earlier, Barbara thought that it would be much easier if he left. The emotional turmoil of having run into him had exacted its toll. She was tired, physically and emotionally. She still ached from wanting him, and his rejection was still wedged in her heart like a dagger.

  But he needed a friend. He was tormented and alone, more isolated, in his own way, than his daughter Missy was, and there was no way she could have denied him the offer of friendship. The silence engulfing them was thick with his need to unload the demons of guilt and self-loathing, and Barbara was too tired for subtlety.

  “It’s not a magic cup of cocoa,” she said flatly. “You’re not going to find the solutions to any of your problems by studying the foam on top.”

  Richard looked at her and shrugged.

  “Tell me why you feel so responsible for Missy’s pregnancy,” she said.

  Richard hesitated. At length, he released a chortle of bitter laughter. “‘Of all the gin joints in all the world.’”

  “Of all the guidance offices in all the schools,” Barbara paraphrased drolly. “Exactly.” Richard forced himself to meet Barbara’s gaze. “You’re probably the last person I ever expected to be talking to about my daughter’s problems.”

  Barbara shrugged. “You’re not talking about your daughter’s problems yet. Right now, you’re avoiding my question.”

  Scowling, Richard set his cocoa on the coffee table and turned his full attention on Barbara. “Of course I feel responsible for Missy. I’m her father.”

  “You’re responsible for her well-being,” Barbara said. “But even the most conscientious parents can’t assume the responsibility—or the guilt—for every action a teenager takes.”

  “I have every right to feel responsible for this one.”

  “It’s natural to feel that way. It’s not easy to accept the idea of children growing up and becoming more independent, but they do, and very quickly. It probably hurts to think of Missy being independent enough to—”

  “You can spare me the guidance counselor gibberish,” Richard snapped. “You don’t know—” Shaking his head, he laughed bitterly. “Of course you don’t know. But you’re going to. I came back tonight to tell you all about it. I didn’t want you to think that my leaving—that I didn’t want to stay. I just...I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it to you.”

  He rose and restlessly paced the small area between the entertainment center and the coffee table. Eventually he stopped in front of the stereo, opened the cassette holder and took out the tape and read sarcastically, “‘Sizzlin’ Seventies.’”

  He turned to face her then, but Barbara wasn’t sure he was actually seeing her. “When that song came on and you were right there in front of me, it was like the years just fell away. And then you were in my arms and I forgot everything except what it felt like to hold you.”

  Abruptly he put the tape back in the cassette holder. “It was like tasting innocence again.” He laughed a laughter that was ugly and bitter. “You want to know why I feel responsible for Missy’s pregnancy? Because my daughter came to me and asked if I thought girls should have sex with their boyfriends. She trusted me enough to come and ask, and I wasn’t sharp enough to realize that it was more than a rhetorical question. So I gave her rhetoric.”

  He ran his fingers through his hair. “Parental rhetoric. The old party line about how sex should be an expression of love between two people who care about each other.”

  “That’s a very healthy ‘party line.’”

  “Yeah,” he agreed bitterly. “And Missy listened very politely. Then she wanted to know if it was true that guys need sex more than girls. What was I supposed to say to that? I told her that it doesn’t mean the same thing to guys that it means to girls, that to them it’s just a physical thing, but that girls get more emotionally involved. I impressed on her that she should never feel obligated to have sex just because a boy wanted her to, that she shouldn’t let anyone pressure her into doing something she wasn’t ready to do.”

  Again he laughed that bitter, self-deprecating laugh. “Did you have some strange sensation that someone was thinking about you? It wasn’t easy for me to look at my daughter and remember my performance as a horny teenager.”

  Barbara grinned. “You’re not the first father to do a little squirming when his daughter started to blossom.”

  “She asked me how long I had to know a woman before I expected her to have sex with me.”

  “That’s a tough one.”

  “Tough? This is my baby girl. She’s not supposed to know what sex is, much less question me on my personal sexual policies. I was in shock.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “What do you suppose I told her? I’d just given her the ‘meaningful expression between people who care’ speech. I told her that I had to know a woman well enough to have developed a special affection for her.”

  He dropped wearily into the chair, sucked in a deep breath, then released it very slowly. “It wasn’t just rhetoric, you know,” he said defensively. “Playboy isn’t exactly sending out reporters to cover my social life. I was faithful to Christine when we were married, although, God knows, she had no clue what being faithful meant.”

  Barbara nodded. Despite how their relationship had ended, Richard—the Richard she’d known—was a decent man. It was not surprising in the least to hear that he would take marriage vows seriously, even if the woman he was married to didn’t.

  “After we separated,” he continued, “I was too busy trying to make a living to get involved with women. Even if I’d had the time, I wouldn’t have had the energy. There were a couple of relationships that didn’t go anywhere, and then, two years ago, there was one I thought might.”

  He paused pensively, and frowned. “That was another disaster. Neither Missy nor my mother could stand her. But the point is, I didn’t lie to Missy when I told her that I had to know a woman before I got involved.”

  There was a troubling note of defensiveness in his voice. “Did she accuse you of lying?” Barbara asked.

  “Accuse?” He pondered the question before replying bitterly, “No. She never...accused me.”

  “But you don’t think she believed you?”

  “Oh, she believed me,” he said grimly. “Why wouldn’t she, until—” Abruptly he stood and paced again, finally stopping in front of a large framed print on the side wall. As he studied the colorful depiction of a Sunday afternoon park scene, he absently slid his hands into the front pockets of his pants.

  Barbara’s heart swelled with tenderness. She’d seen him stand just that way so many times when he was thoughtful or troubled. The shape and subtle slope of his shoulders was suddenly painfully familiar. She longed to slide her arms around his waist, nestle her cheek against his hard, smooth back and whisper reassurances to him that everything was all right. But that wasn’t the kind of reas
surance he wanted from her, so she sat perfectly still, waiting, with an air of patience that she did not actually possess, for him to continue confiding in her.

  Several minutes passed before he asked, “Do you remember that ticket I got on the way home from the prom?”

  “The one for running a red light?”

  “It was a yellow light. I sped up to make it through a yellow light. Everybody speeds up to make it through yellow lights, but the one time I tried it, I got a ticket.”

  “There was a cop sitting at the corner,” Barbara said, wondering why he’d brought up such an innocuous event from so long ago.

  “Exactly,” he said sarcastically, nodding his head. “There was a cop at the corner. The one time I decided to speed up for a yellow light, there was a cop at the corner. It’s a pattern in my life—when I take a chance, I get caught. I make the same mistakes other people make, and I end up paying for them forever.”

  “Mistakes like Christine?”

  He spun to face her. “Most guys have a Christine in their background. But they don’t end up married to her. I wasn’t the first boy Christine was with by a long count. But I was with her twice, in one weekend—twice, and bingo! Forget college, forget the girl you’re really crazy about, you’re going to be a daddy.”

  “That was a long time ago, Richard.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m good at mistakes. My mistakes usually have long-reaching repercussions.”

  He dropped into the chair again. “I’m still damned good at mistakes.”

  “What mistake did Missy catch you making?”

  Richard froze. Then, slowly, an eerie smile crept over his features. “The same old one,” he said. “History repeating itself. I unzipped my pants again.” He laughed bitterly. “As usual, it resulted in disaster.”

  Barbara encountered a lot of self-loathing in her work with troubled students and parents, but she’d seldom witnessed the degree of torment she sensed in him. His misery was almost palpable.

  “It was an agent from another Realtor’s office. She sold a house I’d listed, so we met during the negotiations. After the closing, she suggested we go to dinner and celebrate. I—” He shook his head. “I wasn’t even that interested in her. I guess I developed a habit of tuning out that possibility with women. But Missy was at a football game, and one of her friends was having a slumber party after the game, and Mother had just left for Aunt Sharon’s, so—”