Both Sides Now

by Shawn Inmon

  In the back of my head, there was a small voice telling me that it might be real. What if he had loved me all this time and I never knew about it? That was a bigger idea than I could deal with.

  I found a manila envelope and stuck the story inside it. I did my best to focus on work over the next few hours, but my mind kept wandering back to the story.

  When I got home, I immediately went to the desktop computer and signed into Classmates.com. I had signed up for it the year before, but had never gone back. I thought that might be a good place to try and find out about Shawn, and what he had been up to for the last thirty years.

  When I signed in, a little icon said I had a new message waiting. When I looked at the date I had received it, I saw that it wasn’t new. The date it had been sent was February 23rd, 2008—almost a year and a half ago. It was a note from Shawn Inmon, and it had been sitting in my Classmates account all that time.

  Dawn,

  I’m sure it seems a little out of the blue to get an email from me, but I would like to have a chance to talk with you. I’d like to see if we could be friends. When I left you in 1979, I was counting the days until I could talk to you again, and now over 10,000 days have passed and we haven’t had a single conversation. That seems wrong to me.

  I don’t have any way of knowing where you are in your life right now, but I’d like to catch up with you. It’s possible you’re happy with not having spoken to me for the last thirty years. I wasn’t sure if your first reaction at seeing me again was happiness, horror, or just shock, but I admit it was a little deflating when you looked at me and said “Shawn who?” I would like to get to know you again, but if you don’t have an interest in that, just drop me a line and let me know and that’ll be that. I agreed not to see you until you were 18 all those years ago because I thought that was what was best for you. My regret now is that I didn’t talk to you about that decision. That was wrong, and I’m sorry.

  I hope to hear from you…

  Shawn

  I read it over three more times, trying to capture the flavor of what he was saying. More than a year after I last saw him at Bill & Bea’s, Shawn had sent me a letter the only way he could. He sounded contrite and apologetic, unlike when I had seen him last. He didn’t sound much like any of my mental images of him.

  I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t thought about Shawn in a long time; now I couldn’t get him out of my mind. I hadn’t thought of any of the happy memories of Shawn in decades. That had been a weakness I couldn’t afford if I wanted to survive. Besides, first Mom, and then for many years Rick, had told me that what Shawn and I had when we were young was nothing but a fantasy. They told me that the fantasy had ruined me for a real-life love.

  For the first time in thirty years, I closed my eyes and let the memories come. I remembered a skinny young boy riding his bicycle around the neighborhood or playing in his yard, the hours that we talked and played together in our side yard, and the way he always seemed to be there to help me when I needed it. Then I thought about our best times, the gentle kisses, the laughter, the safety I found in his arms. None of those memories matched up very well with the boogeyman image I carried around all these years.

  Even so, I remained wary, and for good reason. I had trusted too many times in my life, and not once had it turned out well in the end. Why would this be any different?

  I almost couldn’t believe I was doing it, but I sat down at the computer and started writing an email to send to the address he had left me on Classmates.com.

  Well, hello.

  I don't know if I am fated to contact you or what. I logged into Classmates.com and saw the message you sent how long ago? I haven't been there since I signed up over a year ago. Then Connie, the daughter you met, called me to let me know some odd dude wrote a story about me and you can find it if you Google Bill & Bea’s. I was mortified. My daughter now knows that "my first" is still in love with me.

  I'm happy, in love, and my two daughters are happy. I am a supervisor for Verizon Wireless customer service, which means I get called terrible names all day, every day. The only difference between that and my marriage is that now I get paid for it.

  Sorry I didn't recognize you at Bill and Bea’s. I was what, 15 when I saw you last? I don't remember a lot of that time. In your message you asked if we can we be friends. Well, there’s no such thing as too many friends. However, my daughter thinks you are odd. I wonder myself.

  Dawn

  It might have sounded a little defensive and angry, but that was how I felt. Well, part of it wasn’t completely honest—I wasn’t all that happy or in love—but he didn’t need to know that. I still had no idea how much I could trust him.

  I stared at the screen for the longest time, took a deep breath and hit “send.”

  It was a little after 10:00, so I turned on the ten o’clock news to see if it was supposed to be as warm the next day as it had been today. The forecast showed nothing but blue skies and sunshine ahead.

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” I mumbled to myself, and went to bed, happily alone.

  Because the Night

  As soon as I woke up the next morning, I turned the computer on and checked my email account. Nothing. I already regretted sending the message. I went to Google to see if there was a way to pull back a sent email if the recipient hadn’t read it, but apparently you can’t do that.

  I got dressed and had my usual healthy breakfast—strong coffee with hazelnut creamer—and headed off to ACS. When I got there, I checked my email again. Still nothing, so I did my best to forget about the whole thing. It had been dumb to send him anything. He had published that story months ago and written that email a year and a half before. He had probably forgotten the whole thing and moved on to someone else.

  In mid-morning, I logged into my email and there it was. There was no subject, but the sender was Shawn Inmon. I felt butterflies, which was silly. This was the boy/man I had despised for three decades. Why should I care what he thought? I clicked on the email.

  Hello Dawn,

  First, let me apologize for the fact that your daughter stumbled across that story online. I thought I had changed enough information so it wouldn’t pop up on a Google search. Obviously, I was wrong. I really am sorry. It was never my intent for anyone you know to see it and embarrass you.

  I contacted the site where the chapters were posted to have them taken down. They’re already gone, so nobody will accidentally run across them again. Anyway, please accept my apology for any embarrassment I may have caused you.

  In your email, you said you were in love, and I’m glad for you. When I knew you thirty years ago, I thought you were the best person I had ever met. You deserve happiness, and that’s what I hope you find.

  I know you said in your email that you don’t remember much of anything from that time, but there are a couple of things that I would like to talk to you about. Would you mind answering a few questions some time?

  I hope that everything is good with you and that we can be friends going forward. It was good hearing from you…

  Shawn

  This sounded like a different Shawn than I had held in my mind for so long. Three apologies in one short email. He seemed sensitive and happy I was in love.

  I checked my team. They were all handling calls with no problem and not a Sup call in sight. I went back to my workstation and answered his email.

  I will help answer questions you have. My memory of faces is lousy, but I think I remember just about everything else.

  Yes, I am in love. I married Rick Johnson a few years out of high school. We were together up until a few years ago. Drugs became a major factor in his life and I finally had enough. I am now with someone who thinks I am beautiful. We have been together for a couple of years and I am very happy.

  It’s good to hear from you.

  Dawn

  It was such an odd feeling. Shawn had occupied a powerful place in my life for as long as I could remember, first as a friend
, then as my first love, and finally as my betrayer. For the last thirty years, he hadn’t added anything new to the conversation. Any new elements had been layered onto my memory of him by other people. Now he was here again, a real living person with his own thoughts and perspectives. That complicated things. It was difficult to keep hating him when he was being so reasonable, which kind of made me hate him all over again.

  We traded emails the rest of the day. He brought up some of the things that we had done as kids and told me he was hoping to turn our story into a book someday. My take was that he was just trying to get me to think about the happy memories we had shared, so that I would forget the obvious—that he had gotten me pregnant and abandoned me. Evidently he thought I had learned nothing about people and deception since my teen years.

  Even so, talking back and forth with him, even via email, felt a little more natural every day. I couldn’t help but compare it to when we first became friends after I moved to Washington. It was almost like we both agreed to just put aside all the difficult issues of our separation while we got reacquainted.

  Within a few weeks, we were emailing each other seven or eight times a day. We started out just talking about things we had in common—old friends, Mossyrock, 70s music—but eventually we started to share details about our current lives. He told me he had been a real estate broker in Enumclaw for many years, but that the recent economic slump had just about wiped him out. He had three daughters he was proud of. Through it all, I kept my walls up, guarding against emotional involvement.

  One night I went back through all the emails we had been sending and saw that I hadn’t said one single nice or complimentary thing to him the whole time. He kept coming back for more. Was he paying his penance or was he hoping there might be something else ahead for us? Was it possible he felt that same irresistible pull toward me that I still felt for him, no matter how I tried to deny it?

  Finally, he asked me if I held a grudge against him because of the way we had ended. I wrote an answer that said “Grudge? No, a grudge is something small compared to what I’ve felt about you for the last 30 years. What is the word for something that is ten times as big as a grudge?” I thought better of it, though and deleted it. Instead, I sent this:

  I did have anger toward you. I was very young when we were together and I saw you as a manipulative older guy who talked me into things. I thought for the longest time you had ruined my life. I suppose it was easy to think that because you were gone and Mom was always telling me that.

  It wasn’t until my daughter Dani became pregnant at 15 that I realized that it didn’t really happen the way I remembered it. Dani’s boyfriend is 19, but she is the boss of that relationship. Over the years I have figured out that most 18-19 year old boys are not very bright. That is why I don’t blame you for anything anymore. It’s easy for me to blame you for everything, but it’s a waste of time.

  A lot of what I have thought about this has changed recently. I had told both Connie and Dani the stories about what had happened with us. I didn’t tell them about any of the good things that happened, just the bad stuff. I was hoping to scare them from having sex with anyone. Since Dani’s pregnant now, I have to admit it didn’t work.

  Anyway, the way I had told the story, you didn’t come out looking very good. I told Dani that I hated you for what you had done to me. She asked me why. I told her because I was an innocent young girl and you took my virginity away. You were the older, smarter one and you manipulated me. She looked at me like I was insane. She couldn’t believe I would hold on to that feeling for so long.

  Last night I finally told her that I’ve been talking to you via email. I admitted that I hadn’t told her the whole story about us when she was younger and I finally told her the good things that we had shared back then. The first thing she asked was if I saw how stupid it had been to hate you all this time.

  The things I have to learn from my children…

  He answered me that he didn’t mind that I had used him as an example of the boogeyman, but he seemed surprised that I saw things that way. The last time we actually saw each other, we were young, in love, and ready to be together forever. Everything else happened after he was out of the picture. Maybe the impact of that was lost on him.

  Meanwhile, at home, things were getting worse and worse with Aaron. Actually, things had been pretty bad for a long time. We had broken up a few times, but since we shared the lease on the house and all the bills, I felt financially dependent on him. After a while, I knew that wasn’t enough reason for Dani and me to be miserable all the time, so I picked a fight with him and used that as an excuse to break up. As soon as I did that, I felt free on one hand, but trapped on the other. The house didn’t have any extra bedrooms, but I couldn’t afford to move out, so I started sleeping on the couch every night.

  After sleeping on the couch for a few days, I mentioned it in an email to Shawn. I almost didn’t, because I didn’t want him to get the mistaken idea that I was interested in being with him, but eventually it came out because he had slowly become what he had been when we were kids—my confidant. Even though we had been emailing each other nonstop for almost a month, we still hadn’t talked on the phone yet. I think we were both more comfortable with the extra layer of protection that email provided.

  Within a few minutes of getting the email telling him I was sleeping on the couch, he sent me an email that said: I think it’s time for us to talk. Can I call you tonight?”

  I sent him my phone number.

  I was working a late shift at ACS that night and had been busy monitoring some of my agents’ calls when I remembered Shawn told me that he would call. I checked my phone and, sure enough, there was a voicemail message waiting for me.

  “Dawn, it’s Shawn.”

  His voice sounded so much older. Deeper. The boy I knew was gone, but the way he spoke rang bells of familiarity in a deep part of my memory.

  “It feels so weird to be calling you like this after all these years.” There was a short gap of silence. “Anyway, I’m just at my house, doing nothing. Give me a call if you want to.”

  I saw that I had only missed his call by a couple of minutes. I hit redial, heard two rings, then that same strange-yet-familiar voice said “Dawn?”

  “Hi.”

  “Are you still at work?”

  “Well, I’m at work. Am I actually working? No, not really.”

  “It’s early still, so I’m going to be up for quite a while. Do you want to call me back when you get off?”

  “No, this is fine. I’ve just been working some extra hours tonight. I can be done any time I want. So, go ahead.”

  “Well, I guess this is a good time for us to get caught up then. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to cover both our lives for the last thirty years, right?”

  “Still a smart-ass, I see.”

  “Some things never change.”

  And that was all it took to break the ice, at least a little bit. I still didn’t trust him, but it was easy to slip back into our old friendship, insulting and making fun of each other.

  He said “I’ll go first,” and told me about his life. He mostly talked about his daughters Desi, Samy, and Brina. He told me he had been married to their mom for fourteen years, and that it had never been a good match, but that they had stayed together that long for the sake of the girls. When they divorced, she moved with the girls to Arkansas, and he said that he had now made the round-trip drive from Washington to Arkansas more than a dozen times.

  “2400 miles, three days, overnight stops in Billings, Montana and Sioux City, Iowa, no sweat,” he said. He added that when his wife moved away, he didn’t miss her, but being away from his three girls almost killed him.

  He said he had dropped out of the University of Washington right after we broke up, went to broadcast school in Seattle, and worked mostly in radio for the next ten years. He had worked at radio stations in Montana, Wyoming, California and Washington. He had quit radio in 1990 becaus
e it didn’t really pay enough to support a family. In 1993, he started selling real estate in Enumclaw, and he’d been there doing that ever since.

  Then he said, “OK, now it’s your turn.”

  “I don’t think I want to go now, thank you. My life hasn’t been very exciting. I never left Lewis County. I’ve worked a bunch of dead-end jobs just to get by. There’s not much to tell.”

  “Sure there is. Tell me about your girls.”

  And so I did. I told him all about Connie and Dani from the time they were little girls until they were all grown up. There was a lot to tell. When I looked at my watch, I saw that we had been talking for almost two hours.

  I finished by telling him the story of Dani’s pregnancy and how strong she had been about what was going to happen. Talking to Shawn about it, the strong parallels to our story became obvious.

  He started to say something, then hesitated and stopped. “What is it?” I asked.

  “When we were separated in 1979, we never really got to talk about what happened with our baby. Would it be OK if we talked about it now? There are some things that I would really like to know.”

  “I guess. What is there to talk about, really?”

  I had been lulled into letting my defenses down, but the wall was back up instantly.

  “There are just so many blank spots for me. I’d love to fill them in.”

  “Blank spots? Like what?”

  “Well, I got that horrible phone call from Walt and Colleen, telling me you were pregnant. Then I came to see you in Morton but you wouldn’t talk to me. The next day we all met in your mom and dad’s living room and I agreed not to see you for three years. Then we didn’t talk for thirty years, no matter how I tried. I never even knew if you were really pregnant or not.”