Apparently not. “I told you,” he said, his voice so hard it felt like blows. “We just weren’t working. It’s over.”
Two months ago he’d cupped her face in his hand and pressed his body into hers and told her he’d always love her.
Just weren’t working? It didn’t make sense.
It wasn’t true.
“I’m hanging up now,” he said. “Don’t call back.”
“But—”
He was gone.
No point in calling back. It wasn’t like if she did he’d finally say, You know, it’s good you called again, because I realize now that I’ve made a huge mistake.…
She cried until she was empty, and fell asleep for the rest of the afternoon, curled up tight on the bed where he’d first told her he wanted to stay with her forever.
* * *
Though Erin had done her time as a drama queen, and Nate had certainly witnessed it time and again when they were together, she didn’t like being depressed. Girlish tears over some semi-imagined slight were one thing, but the heavy dark cloak of relentless sadness she was beginning to carry everywhere was another.
It was starting to feel dangerous.
So when Theresa called that night, Erin forced herself to rise to the occasion.
“Ronnie has a friend,” Theresa said, “who is apparently so gorgeous that some girl walked up to him in a bar the other day and handed him her phone number.”
Erin doubted it. “Who does that?”
“I know. So the guy must be hot, right? Anyway, you’re going out with him tonight.”
Erin’s first reaction was to say no. She didn’t want to get dressed up. She was too tired to go anywhere. And she certainly wasn’t interested in meeting any new guy, no matter how cute he was.
But this was getting ridiculous. She had to get out and shake off this depression. Maybe if the guy was really that great, she would start to forget Nate. It wasn’t like Nate was being so gallant right now. He didn’t really deserve all of the regard she was giving him.
Maybe he never had.
The idea took root uneasily in her mind. Could she have been wrong about him all this time? Had she invented him, in some way, to accommodate her ideas of what she wanted him to be?
Maybe he’d never really loved her.
In fact, maybe he’d just used her until something more interesting came along. Had he? She hadn’t even thought about this before, but was it possible that he’d found someone else and that all of this supposed hurt-and-betrayal business was just a way to scrape her off so he could be with another girl instead?
Could she have been that wrong about him?
A couple of weeks before they broke up, he’d dropped her off at home and indicated he was going to his house, but he’d gone to his friend’s sister’s party instead. Erin had been kind of pissed, but she hadn’t really made much of it. Maybe she should have. Except that she’d been really sure he’d just gone because his friends wanted to go. She’d trusted him enough to feel like there was nothing more to it.
Then there was the night David and Kenny had called her house, asking where Nate was, saying they needed a ride home from the gym, but then David’s mother had picked up the phone and asked who was on the line. So they were obviously calling from his house, not the gym, but why? It was just … weird. But now she wondered if it meant something she should have read into, or if it was just Nate’s stupid friends being their usual stupid selves.
She’d just chalked it up to everyone being a little immature and bored.
At this point she didn’t know anything for sure anymore.
She returned her attention to the conversation with Theresa. Fuck Nate. She wasn’t going to mourn him forever. She wasn’t going to lose herself in this grief, no matter how awful he acted toward her. Enough was enough.
“What are we doing?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Probably just go downtown or something. They’re picking us up here at seven. Get over here and we’ll get ready together. It’ll be fun!”
Erin looked at the clock. It was five thirty now.
Something inside of her pushed her onward. It was well past time to move on. People broke up all the time. Maybe Nate had ended things badly, but that didn’t need to be her burden forever. She wasn’t willing to take that on. He was her first love. Big deal. Everyone had one, but most people didn’t marry theirs. If she and Nate hadn’t broken up now, and in this way, they would probably have done it at some other point in a different way. The end result was the same.
She needed to stop feeling like someone had died.
“That sounds great,” she said, with forced enthusiasm. If she repeated it enough, she’d start to believe it. “I’ll be right over.”
She took her time driving through the winding Glen Road to Theresa’s house, rolling down the windows and breathing in the first green scents of early spring. It was a beautiful evening. A tiny bit of optimism bloomed in the back of her mind. If she concentrated on one hour at a time, she could get through this, and this hour was fine.
It was only overwhelming if she thought about everything that had happened and imagined the rest of her life without Nate. But if she removed Nate from the whole equation and just thought about now, she’d be okay.
Hearts broke all the time. There were a million songs about it. And a million more about hearts being mended. She’d get through this. It was just going to take a little bit of time. And a super-hot guy wasn’t going to hurt matters any.
In five years, she might not even remember Nate very well.
At this point, she hoped she wouldn’t.
* * *
He was good-looking. His name was Brendan and, although she would never have done such a thing herself, Erin could see why someone had been moved to take a chance on giving him her phone number. Dark blond hair, light blue eyes, the kind of tawny skin that looked tan year-round. He could have been in a Coppertone ad or a beer commercial.
On top of that, he was charming—nice voice, intelligent, funny. He drove a Jeep, a nice manly vehicle. They parked in a parking lot off Wisconsin Avenue and as they walked over to Windsor McKay’s, Erin couldn’t help but notice that people were noticing him. He turned heads.
Better still, he seemed completely unaware of it.
It was a testament to how fucked up Erin really was that she wasn’t into him. At all.
“What is wrong with you?” Theresa asked when they went into the bathroom together about an hour and two pitchers of beer into the date. “He’s gorgeous and you act like you’re sitting across from the Elephant Man.”
Erin suspected her friends were tired of hearing about what was wrong with her, so she lied. “My head is killing me,” she said, adding a wince that was slightly too small and slightly too late to be convincing. “It must be the beer.” She’d had three of them so far and they’d done nothing to numb her angst.
“This is about Nate, isn’t it?”
“No.”
Theresa wasn’t buying that. It would have been surprising if she had. “Yes, it is, you walk around looking like you’re going to cry all the time. Snap out of it!”
“I can’t just snap out of it! Don’t you think I would if I could? Do you think I want to feel this way all the time? I hate it! I hate him! I hate me!” Tears burned, but she swiped impatiently at her eyes. She was not going to cry again. She was not going to drown in this. She couldn’t let herself.
“Don’t say that.” Theresa pulled her into a hug, and Erin closed her eyes tightly against her friend’s hair. It smelled like Flex shampoo and cigarette smoke from the bar. “Look.” She pulled back. “You’ve got to understand that he has moved on. JP saw him and Todd out together the other night.”
“He did?” It felt like a knife to her heart. Todd—the one who had committed the biggest betrayal—was right back in with Nate, yet Nate wouldn’t even give her the time of day. It was devastating.
“Yes,” Theresa went on. “Todd’s back f
or the week. They acted like everything was normal, like nothing had ever happened between them, so he’s obviously blaming you for everything, and that’s not fair.”
“It’s not!” Erin felt so sorry for herself in that moment. Pure, unadulterated self-pity. “I don’t think I can survive this.”
She cried.
Then Theresa cried.
Finally Theresa gave her a squeeze and said, “Maybe you just need more time. Just take it one tiny step at a time if that’s all you can do.”
“I need a lobotomy.” It was one of many thoughts that had actually occurred to her as a viable solution to her problem. “I’m not giving him more time. Nate is an asshole. He knows what this is doing to me and he doesn’t care. There’s no excuse for that!”
“I agree. If he loved you, he wouldn’t put you through this.”
Wow, that hurt. The truth hurt. Especially coming from someone else. When Erin had had the same thought, she’d been able to dismiss it and replace it with a more comfortable thought, but when Theresa said it, there was no way to ignore it.
If he loved her, he wouldn’t let her hurt this badly.
Because this was bad.
This was way beyond normal teenage blues.
Theresa put her hands on Erin’s shoulders, looked into her eyes, and said, “Now you need to get out there and get into that guy, because he can’t take his eyes off you.”
“Who, Brendan?” She hadn’t noticed that.
Theresa nodded and made a face that clearly indicated Erin was a blind idiot. “He’s so into you. Don’t ask me why.” She laughed. “I guess he likes that distant, I’m-not-interested thing you’ve got going on. Whatever it is, you should take advantage of it. The best way to get over someone is to hook up with someone else.”
It certainly seemed true for Theresa. She never seemed to spend too long mourning over a guy. And there was always—always—a new one waiting in the wings. Nate used to say Theresa was Teflon—she didn’t let anyone stick around for long.
Erin wanted to be more like that.
She looked at herself in the mirror. She looked fine. None of the crap that was going on inside her head was visible on the outside. It was stupid to be moping around, weeping over a guy who obviously wasn’t giving her a second thought.
“You’re right,” she said to Theresa, fresh resolution pushing her voice. She was going to go with this. She was going to go all the way with this. “I just need another beer.”
“Sure it’s not going to make that headache worse?” Theresa asked with a smirk.
Erin smirked right back. “It might just make the headache a lot better.”
Four beers and two tequila shots later—bartenders in those days didn’t card in D.C. unless you looked like a third-grader—Erin was in the seat next to Brendan, and he was telling her how beautiful she was.
She still wasn’t into him.
But she pretended she was.
And when he came in for the kiss, she pretended she was into it. Fuck Nate.
In fact, what better way to screw Nate than to screw Brendan? And anyone else who appealed to her from now on, if she wanted to. Maybe she’d seek out Scott Koogan, whom Nate had once been jealous of, warning her that he was “bad news.” She’d date everyone he’d been jealous of, why not? She’d already decided she would never fall in love again, so what did she need to hold out for?
A girl’s first mattered. Losing her virginity was significant. But the second? The third? As long as she was careful not to get a disease or get pregnant, the rest didn’t matter. They had no more significance than the second and third teams knocked out of the NFC East playoffs.
Her Super Bowl was already over.
She’d lost.
She leaned in to Brendan and put her mind elsewhere and pretended he was someone else, from the first kiss to his final release. She felt nothing but pretended to be as into it as he was.
It was a trick she would employ for a long time to come.
Chapter 16
Present
It’s been my experience that the best cure for anguish or emotional duress is housework.
Go ahead and make June Cleaver jokes about me. I’ll wait.
But that physical exertion, all of which makes a house a home, has always made me feel better about just about anything that was upsetting me.
Unless, of course, it made me confront memories that made me feel worse.
I spent the day after seeing Nate vigorously cleaning baseboards, organizing the pantry, digging stuff out of closets that had been there so long I didn’t even recognize it all, and so on. Not one thing was interesting, but I listened to NPR while I worked and lost myself in the tasks at hand.
It was better than thinking about what had happened.
Until late afternoon, when I came across an old box of letters and pictures in my closet. They were from high school, and I saw the gingham ribbon that I recognized as flagging the pile of letters Nate had sent to me from his grandfather’s summer place in Michigan.
Why is it that people always seem to find this stuff just when they’re thinking about it or, more to the point, trying not to think about it? That’s always the way it went in movies and books. It seemed like some big Foam Finger of Fate pointing something out, but I couldn’t buy that.
Fate had already given me the finger.
“Okay, I get it,” I said out loud. “He’s an issue for me. Jordan was right. Got it.”
“Are you on the phone?” Camilla asked behind me.
Startled, I dropped the box and turned. “Oh, my God, you scared me to death.”
She laughed. “Um, not as scary as your mom going crazy and talking to herself.”
“Believe me,” I said, reaching to pick up the various papers and pictures that were now strewn on the floor, “some things are better said only to myself, not to you.”
“What’s that?” she asked, honing in on the pile of letters. How was it that kids always seemed to know and go for the things you don’t want them to see?
I tried to shrug it off. “Just a bunch of old stuff.” I dropped the letters into the box.
“Lemme see.” She reached for a picture.
I moved it out of reach. “It’s nothing interesting.”
“You just pulled it away from me,” she pointed out. “It must be interesting.”
“No, seriously, Cam.” I put the last of the pictures in the box and put the lid back on. “It’s my high school stuff. Really dull.”
That ignited a fire I wasn’t expecting. “Oooh, I want to see it!” She grabbed the box.
At that point, I had two choices: I could either let her get bored with it by herself, or I could make it seem super interesting by taking it away from her. I’d been at this game long enough to know the better course of action.
“Suit yourself,” I said, sitting down in the closet. “You’ll be disappointed.”
Her slender hands pulled an envelope out of the bunch and pulled one of his letters out.
“Hi Baby,” she read, then raised a questioning brow to me before continuing. “Today we went to the mainland to check for mail and supplies but the boat broke down. I had to improvise a fix on a hose with Band-Aids from the first-aid kit until we got to land. I was glad there was a letter from you waiting for me!” She looked at me.
“Date smart boys,” I said, trying to sound light. “That’s the lesson there.”
She gave me a dubious look and continued reading. “We’re in tents tonight because we’re starting fishing at three a.m. I know you will still be asleep but I’ll be thinking of you and hoping I’m in your dreams.” She set the paper down and asked me, “Um, was this guy, like, totally in love with you or what?”
I hesitated for a moment, feeling disconcerted. How could I explain Nate to Cam? He wasn’t just another ex-boyfriend, yet how could I explain to her that he was anything but? I’d never had to before. I’d always skipped over Nate in the let’s-talk-about-your-ex-boyfriends game.
I laughed, but it sounded hollow to my own ears. I just had to keep this light. “Yes. He was totally in love with me. Who could blame him?”
“No, seriously, Mom, what’s the story about this guy?”
“He was my high school boyfriend,” I said, making a face like, Everyone’s got one like this. She would never know how much more Nate had meant and how completely blown apart that was now.
“Not everyone. Look at this stuff.” She read from another letter she’d pulled out. “It’s three a.m. and I can’t sleep. I want you. Now. I love you more than anything, my baby. Forever.” She looked back at me. “I mean, that’s not Rick.”
“No,” I agreed, a dull ache in the pit of my stomach. “It’s not Rick. It was just a little high school romance, that’s all. Don’t make this more than it was.” It was already more than it should be.
“Are you kidding?” She slipped the letter back into its envelope and picked another one at random. “Who was this guy?”
I winced inwardly.
“I want you, I need you, I miss you, where are you?” she read, then looked to me for the explanation that was still not forthcoming. “This is intense.”
I reached out and took the letter from her and put it back in the envelope. My hand shook slightly. I hoped she didn’t notice. “No, it’s not,” I said, putting the envelope back into the box. “It’s not that big a deal.”
“What was his name?”
No point in lying. She’d never hear it again. That chapter was now officially over. “Nate.”
“What did he look like?” she pushed. “Is there a picture in there? Is that a box full of him?”
Yes, it was. And over the past few years, I’d probably looked over the outside of the box a million times and just hadn’t given it much thought. Why did I have to find it and drop it in front of its greatest audience ever?
“It’s got a bunch of stuff in it,” I told her, keeping a firm hold on it. She didn’t need visual aids. “Mementos and letters and all the same kinds of things you save now, but no pictures. Nothing that interesting, truly. Do you have anything super significant in your closet?”
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