The Big Rewind

by Libby Cudmore

  “Jett? Jett, stay with me.”

  “I’m here,” I said, warping back to my ugly reality.

  “You okay?”

  “Not really,” I said. “So please don’t be offended when I hang up.”

  “No offense taken—”

  I dropped the phone on the couch. I forgot I had a couch. The whole world went numb and empty, a white room with just a black rectangle for a door and somewhere, faintly, the sound of a record needle easing off the last groove.

  Catch had left the door open and left me standing there in it, watching the two of them leave with their hands in each other’s back pockets. She’d sneered when I tried to put Excitable Boy on the turntable and asked me if I had any Katy Perry because records are for old people. Catch had acted like he’d never heard of Warren Zevon, like he hadn’t bought me that album for my birthday, the night he kissed cupcake frosting off my lips, tracing one smear on the inside of my knee before maneuvering his mouth further up my thighs. I should have just put the record on. Maybe it would have changed time like Marty McFly, stopping her from cuddling up to him and cooing, I made him throw out all those hideous metal CDs, like I would be impressed with the bone-china box she kept his balls in. Somewhere in the back of my mind I heard Huey Lewis, but he was wrong, so fucking wrong. The power of love was an ugly, unwieldy one.

  Chapter 45

  KING OF WISHFUL THINKING

  By 8:20 A.M. I was on the Megabus to Baltimore, making a playlist for Catch and trying to rehearse what I was going to say to him. I wasn’t going to get all John Cusack Say Anything on him with my phone held high and “Reconsider Me” blasting. Life is not a movie, I told myself, but I couldn’t let him get married to the girl who’d come between us. I was going to have to do it calmly, rationally, and hopefully over lunch, because I was starving. There wasn’t time for breakfast when I had to plead my case for true love. This terrible silence between us had gone on long enough.

  I had been quietly compiling this playlist for years, songs that I heard at random times with his spirit still clinging: John Mellencamp’s “Key West Intermezzo (I Saw You First)”; Donald Fagen’s “The Nightfly”; the Cure, “Cut Here”; Sting’s “Ghost Story”; the Smiths, “Bigmouth Strikes Again.” It was a mix to say I was sorry, that I missed him. Songs strung together in hopes that maybe my tunes would carve deeper than my words could.

  I downloaded Warren Zevon’s final album, The Wind, recorded just months before he died. I had it back at home, buried at the bottom of the Boyfriend Box, but I hadn’t listened to it since the day Zevon had died. Catch and I had skipped class and gone to buy the album, played it through once while we drank a bottle of wine, and kissed and cried. We vowed to only listen to it one more time in our lives: when the other was gone from this world. We hadn’t used the word death because death does not exist when you’re young and invincible. But if there was ever a moment that called for “Keep Me in Your Heart,” it was this one.

  My phone buzzed with a text from Sid. I’ll be late for dinner, he wrote in his perfect grammar. Have to get a few more things at the apartment.

  Any other day, I’d have been panicked that he was going back to Cinderella, but today, I was relieved. This gave me plenty of time to see Catch and still get back to Brooklyn in time to pop a frozen lasagna in the oven. Don’t forget to pick up wine, I texted back.

  I don’t even have to bring a corkscrew, he wrote a minute later.

  I stared at his message without words for a response. If everything went according to plan, if Catch remembered that I was the girl he loved, Sid would take back his corkscrew and his records and the shirts he’d hung in my closet. He might never tell me what he couldn’t tell me two nights ago. In the back of my throat I tasted wine and blood, coffee and painkillers.

  I ignored what I knew, the words unspoken between us, and turned all my concentration to the playlist in my hands. I could figure out what I would say to Sid later. He deserved more than a text message.

  CATCH’S LINKEDIN PROFILE revealed that he worked for Traubert House Publishing, a music publishing company that specialized in jazz and blues. It was a short walk from the bus to his office building, which looked like a space station from those sci-fi paperbacks I’d always teased him about, chrome and wood painted the color of dried blood, floors polished to such a shine I worried people could see up my dress as I walked. The air was so eerily silent that the clicking of heels and the ringing of phones and the ting of arriving elevators all echoed with eardrum-shattering volume. Even the foyer had a futuristic elegance that made Hartford look like a one-room schoolhouse.

  At the end of a corridor was a secretary behind a Star Trek–looking desk, her hair done up in a severe bun and her blouse all but sheer.

  “I-I’m looking for Catcher McCarthy,” I stammered.

  She picked up a slim black phone and dialed with Pinterest-y nails more elaborately painted than the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “He’s not answering,” she said, gesturing with those same nails to a bank of sharp, low-slung chairs on the other end of the room. “You can wait, if you’d like.”

  I took a deep breath, as if that could reinflate my confidence, and picked up an old issue of Rolling Stone, staring at bylines on interviews with Adele and articles about Arcade Fire, wishing my name was there instead. Maybe then Catch would have noticed me sooner, seen that I wasn’t content to just fade into his history. Maybe he would have found me instead, been haunted by my name, or maybe we would have found ourselves reaching for the last coconut-shrimp skewer at the same industry party. If only I’d tried a little harder, gotten a better internship, not been so scared to put myself out there in my career and in love . . . I ran through all the could-have-been scenarios, trying to figure out how to salvage the scene.

  Then Catch stepped out of the elevator in a blue suit and pink shirt, mead-colored curls cropped close, and the whole damn world slowed to a freeze frame.

  Chapter 46

  KEEP ME IN YOUR HEART

  His green eyes narrowed and my knees got buttery. The suit, the tie, the curls now shorn short—it was like staring at a stranger. Three years seemed like an eternity and a blink all at once, and I became acutely aware of how different I looked: the weight I’d put on, the hair I’d chopped off as though it might make me forget how his fingers had felt against my scalp.

  He dismissed whoever he was riding with and approached me with a firm walk that wasn’t his. Nothing about him was familiar, not even the way he put his arm around my shoulder and guided me into an empty hallway, out of sight of his coworkers.

  “Reese told you, didn’t he?” he said.

  “I got on the first bus as soon as I heard,” I said. “Catch, I had to see you. . . .”

  “Why?” he demanded. “You think you’re going to show up and talk me out of marrying the woman I’ve been with since you left me?”

  “I left you?” I snarled. “Funny, that’s not the way I remember it.”

  He held up his hands. “I’m not doing this here,” he said. A girl in an emerald-green sweater set passed between us and he turned toward the wall. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting. A kiss? Another slammed door? I wanted to reach for him across the void, apologize and beg. This was not how it was supposed to happen.

  He took a visibly deep breath and faced me, a flicker of his old self passing across his face. “My first instinct is to just walk away from you,” he said.

  “And your second?”

  He crossed the hallway, put his hands on the wall behind me, boxing me in. “To throw you in that elevator, pin you up against the wall, and fuck like we’re back in the library during finals week,” he murmured, his mouth all but brushing my ear.

  All the breath I’d ever held escaped my body like someone had yanked opened a rubber plug in my side. “Good thing I wore a dress,” I whispered.

  He laughed—it was as velvety as I remembered—then stepped back and took my hands. “How about we just go to lunch?”

/>   IN HIS SHARP suit, Catch looked a little out of place in a corner pub filled with tech hipsters and trust-fund freelancers. “You’re worth a four-star steak,” he said, taking the menu from the waitress. “But this seemed more appropriate.”

  We ordered burgers and a bottle of cheap pinot. The waitress returned a moment later with the wine and two glasses so clunky they might as well have been plastic. “Let’s talk about music so I can write this off as a business lunch,” he joked as she poured. He held up his glass for a toast. “To the late, great Warren Zevon.”

  We toasted. For a moment, everything seemed normal, familiar, and perfect. There was a jukebox in the corner. I briefly toyed with the idea of pumping in my last few bucks to make a soundtrack for this reunion, but that would mean leaving his side. The thought of doing that, even for just a minute, seemed unbearable.

  “I heard you moved to New York,” he said.

  I didn’t want to waste what little time we had on small talk, but we weren’t going to be able to get to the heart of this matter until I’d had a drink. I nodded. “About a year ago.”

  “What do you do there?”

  I couldn’t exactly tell him I was trying to solve my neighbor’s murder, at least not in here. “Temp work,” I said. “Still trying to get the journalism thing off the ground.”

  “You still sing?”

  “Not in public.” I wasn’t counting the night at the Brenner Gallery. I thought about the way Sid had looked at me, the way he’d disappeared. My heart felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. “You still play?”

  He swirled the wine in his glass. “Amanda’s not a fan,” he said. “I think about it sometimes, maybe joining a little jazz trio to play at wedding receptions and gallery openings, but . . .” He stared at his glass for a moment before looking up at me. “My trumpet didn’t sound right without you.”

  “I felt the same way,” I said. “About my voice.”

  He leaned back in his chair and glanced around the bar. “I come here when I miss those days,” he said. “I put a couple old songs on the jukebox—no Zevon, I already checked—and have a couple beers and a burger until I feel normal again. I’ve been here two years and I still don’t feel like this is my normal life; it’s like it’s some sort of amnesia. Like the Talking Heads—not my beautiful house, not my beautiful wife.” He took a drink and grinned. “But that’s what you came here to talk about, isn’t it?”

  “You always could read my mind,” I joked.

  He reached across the table and put his hand on mine. “Is it wrong that I’m glad to see you?” he asked with a squeeze.

  “Why would that be wrong?” I replied, the wine giving my heart small feathered wings that fluttered hard against my ribs.

  “Because I’ve spent the last three years trying to forget you,” he said. “I put away your letters, your pictures, all the CDs you made me. I’d be doing fine until the Pretenders’ ‘Night in My Veins’ would start playing at the grocery store and I would just stand there, frozen in the middle of the cereal aisle, trying not to remember what you tasted like in the backseat of my car and trying not to cry.”

  I gripped my chair to keep from falling out of it. I couldn’t tell if it was him or the wine that was making me suddenly dizzy.

  “I did the same thing,” I confessed. “But when Reese told me, I knew I couldn’t hide from you anymore. I had to see you. I couldn’t let it end the way it did, with you walking away like that.” I took another drink, a momentary reprieve from the aching depth of our conversation. “You left me,” I said. “You walked out my door and you never came back.”

  “Except that you’re changing the story,” he said. “Did you forget what you said to me that night? As I was leaving?”

  Amanda had already been in the car. He’d pretended he’d forgotten something, come back downstairs, and knocked on my door. What do you think? he’d asked. Isn’t she great? I’d known that eagerness in his eyes; it was the same look he got in the moments just before he would kiss me. But there were no kisses between us that night. He so desperately wanted his best friend’s approval of his new girlfriend, and all I could offer him was As long as you’re fucking her, I guess you don’t need me.

  Then I closed the door, and we never spoke again.

  He was right. I had told myself the story wrong, recast myself as the victim for so long that I had forgotten what really happened. This silence had started with me, with the hurt I caused. I could have said anything else. I could have told him I was happy for him. I could have called him the next morning and apologized, talked it out, dealt with it. But in my head I made it so that he’d just thrown me aside when a new girl came along, just so that I didn’t have to admit that I was the jerk who ruined everything.

  I started to get up to go cry in the bathroom like the big girl that I was, but he wrapped his fingers around my wrist. “Stay,” he said. “I haven’t seen you in three years—I’m not letting you out of my sight now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I blurted. “I never meant that to be a good-bye or a breakup. I was angry, I was hurt. . . .”

  “I’m sorry too,” he said. “I shouldn’t have been making out with her in your kitchen. I should have called the next day, tried to smooth things over, but I was just so furious with you. But then those few days of silence turned into weeks, then months, and now years. Three years, Jett, and I still haven’t figured out why you were trying to sabotage my happiness.”

  “Because I loved you,” I said. “And I thought you loved me, so when you brought her over, it felt like you were flaunting that you didn’t love me.”

  He put his glass down and dabbed at the edge of his gorgeous mouth with a napkin. “I never knew,” he murmured.

  That I wasn’t buying, not for one damn second. Not after the CDs I’d made, the sex we’d had, all those nights where I’d held him so close in post-orgasm bliss that I swore our veins had intertwined and we were sharing the same blood. “You never knew? Catch, how could you have not known?”

  “You never said anything,” he said. “I must have told you a thousand times that I loved you and you never said it back.”

  How dense could a man get? “Do you think I put ‘My Lucky Day’ on a CD because I thought you’d like the Smoking Popes?” I demanded.

  “That’s just it,” he said. “You never said it. You let everyone else do the talking for you. And believe me, I played those CDs over and over, trying to interpret, trying to rationalize that yes, yes, you did love me. And then I would blurt it out and you would ignore me, turn up the radio, go back to your dinner, and I would just sit there feeling like an idiot. At least when I had you half-naked in my bed, I could pretend you loved me.”

  I looked down at the piled-high plate the waitress set down in front of me, suddenly not hungry anymore. I grabbed my glass and drained it, hoping the wine would soften the awful truth—that I had broken his heart long before Amanda had even arrived on the scene.

  “So maybe Amanda doesn’t challenge me,” he continued, pouring me another drink. “Maybe she’s got terrible taste in movies and music, but she loves me. I need that. I need to be loved, Jett. It’s a cold, lonely world out there.”

  “It was us against that cold, lonely world, remember?”

  “It was, but too often, it just felt like there was you, and there was me, and we were operating in some sort of Venn diagram of music and school and making out on your couch.”

  “No,” I said. “No, it wasn’t like that. You were my first thought in the morning and my last thought before bed, even when you weren’t there next to me. You were my everything: what I wore, what I ate, what I breathed. There wasn’t a word for how I felt about you. Love wasn’t strong enough to describe how my heart turned to stone when you had to go to a class we weren’t in together. Love was a word for people who weren’t capable of feeling what we felt.”

  “It would have done just fine,” he said. “I would have known what you meant because I felt the same way. I understood,
Jett, I was there, I knew what was between us, I just didn’t think you did.”

  Suddenly, there was no Sid. There was no Bronco or George. There was no William or Gabe or Jeremy; there wasn’t even Amanda. There was and had only ever been Catch and I. “Maybe we can repair this.”

  He reached across the table and took my hand again. “Life is not a love song, Jett,” he said. “It’s not a fairy tale or a John Hughes movie.”

  “Catch, give me another chance. . . .”

  He shook his head. “It’s too late,” he said. “Even if we exchange numbers and friend each other on Facebook and have lunch every month, we’re never going to be the same people we were. Even if I went outside and broke up with Amanda right now, we couldn’t repair this.”

  “You don’t know that—”

  “I don’t,” he said. “But what are we going to talk about? Work? Our spouses? Jett, I don’t want to remember you like that. I want to remember staring at the tops of your thighs during our jazz band rehearsals; you always wore those thigh-high stockings with the seams because you knew I could see the lace through the slit in the back of your dress.”

  “Is that why the director was always chewing you out for coming in late?”

  “He should have been grateful I came in at all,” he joked. “I want to remember lying on your dorm floor listening to The Envoy and complaining about how lame My Chemical Romance and Nickelback were. Not this. Not spreadsheets and conference calls and complaints about the kids we’ll one day both have. I don’t want grown-up Jett and I don’t want to be grown-up Catch. It’s ugly and it’s unfair, but this is the way it has to be.” He was breathing hard, and I thought I saw the faintest fringe of tears on his lashes. He dumped the rest of the wine in his glass and inhaled most of it, hands shaking. “For both our sakes.”

  I excused myself to the bathroom and he let me go this time. I put the lid down on the toilet and took out my phone and started to add one last song to his playlist, Simply Red’s “Sunrise.” Maybe next time I’ll be yours and maybe you’ll be mine . . . But as I looked at it there on the screen, all I could think about was Sid’s corkscrew sitting on my counter at home, and I knew Catch was right. He always was. I didn’t want this version of him any more than he wanted this version of me.