If I Could Turn Back Time (19 page)

“Vodka can do that too.”

Sigh. “Well, yes, but this was a major panic attack. Not a psychological I-don’t-think-I-can, but a physiological freak-out. So”—I shrugged, I couldn’t even help it—“I did what made the most sense, given that I had two and a half minutes to think.”

There was a long pause as he surveyed me. “Alcohol is never the answer. You know that.”

“It was yesterday.”

“Why? Because you thought you
couldn’t
handle it on your own? Of course you can. Why can’t you be the mature person you’re supposed to be and just take a deep breath and move forward unaided?”

“Maybe because life is a
little
hard to go through unaided?” I answered sarcastically, then realized how bad that sounded. Particularly given the case I was trying to plead. “Though usually I do. It’s better than smoking all those cigarettes, right?” It was kind of a low blow, but he didn’t know it was as much as I did.

He looked down, though. “Touch
é
.”

I’d taken a few pre-law classes in school, when I thought I was going to move into that field, but I’d stopped and switched to finance after my father died; still, I tried to pull out the would-be lawyer in me. “So I was nervous about school ending. It was a big challenge, more than you could ever know or believe, and I had only a few minutes to make the decision that was fastest and easiest and
safest
for me, so I did. I had a couple of shots of vodka. I watched you drink six Irish coffees at Normandie Farm one night, so don’t tell me I’m in some kind of danger zone.”

He laughed. Heartily. “That was an unusual night for me,” he said, more to whatever small, imaginary audience might have been in his lap, where he was looking down and smiling while shaking his head, than to me. Was he trying to explain to my mother? Himself? “A fun night. A sleepless night. But a good one, and definitely unusual.”

I tried to remember any salient facts from the night that I could, but nothing came to me. The truth was, at the time it had sounded like “coffees” to me, as I had no idea what the “Irish” added, and even so I didn’t know or appreciate the danger of so much caffeine. So all that had remained in my mind, really, was the waitress’s amazement, not my father’s consumption.

But, of course,
now
I knew what all that Irish coffee meant. It meant a lot of shots of whiskey and a lot of caffeine. No health benefits whatsoever.

“No harm done, I suppose,” he said with an offhand shrug.

“I’m not so sure.”

He sighed, and I realized, for the first time, this wasn’t really all about me. He was entering the last stretch of his life, and quickly. Now that I really looked at him—instead of marveling at my retro surroundings and friends and so on—I could see he was seriously faded. In my memory, which is quite good, his eyes were not such a pale, watery blue as they were now. His skin had never been this white-crayon pale, though despite the pallor, it
did
look better than I had remembered as far as scars and age spots went. Then again, he had less than two years to make himself indelible and unchanging in my memory.

“Listen,” he said, very seriously. “Here is a lesson you need to learn, whenever you take it in, because it speaks to your quality of life, now and always. You need to be able to handle your stresses and moods and fears on your own, without artificial aid, or you will never be as happy and confident as you should be.”

He was alarming me. It was such a
last speech.
“Dad—” I started to say.

But he held up his hand to stop me. “You need to have the tools
inside of you
to take care of yourself no matter what. Not alcohol, not sedatives—none of that stuff offers anything more than a temporary solution that ricochets back harder later. I spent a good portion of my life dealing with anxiety the wrong way, as you have pointed out. And in the end that resulted in a price I’ve had no choice but to pay. If you take nothing forward from here, take that: You have everything you need inside you. You are Dorothy from
The Wizard of Oz
, you know? You already have everything you need.”

I sighed, not dramatically but with the exhaustion of bundled emotion. I’d lived long enough now to know that was true in theory but not always in practice. I
wanted
to believe it—don’t we all? Wouldn’t we all want some private stash of harmless and natural Xanax that would flow automatically into our veins the minute life got tough? Of course! But the fact was that life was sometimes far more than any of us bargained for, certainly more than I ever expected it to be and way more than I felt prepared to handle, and on those occasions a crutch was helpful.

What I was going through was tough! Completely confusing, impossible to comprehend, and even harder to walk through without leaning on the conceit that this was some highly imaginative dream I’d concocted in my subconscious in order to teach my conscious a thing or two before moving forward into my middle age.

But the truth was, obviously, I didn’t know just what the hell this whole thing was.

Who
wouldn’t
want a slug of hard liquor in my place?

Yet that wasn’t an argument that was going to hold water with my dad. Why should it? This was some form of reality for him and Mom and everyone I knew and was seeing now.

Including me, I guess.

There was no point in keeping it up. “Dad,” I said, “you’re right.” Because I knew he was and, more importantly, I knew that was what he needed to hear. “I’m a kid”—lie—“and I don’t have all the faculties you have to deal with nerves. Today was my last day of school. It’s the last time I’m going to see many of these people.
Most
of these people.” I thought of the deaths coming, the divorces, the messed-up kids, all the weedy screwups that grew from the fertile ground of youthful hope. I got choked up thinking about it, talking about it. Tears flowed from my eyes and I had no ability to stop them; it was like a magic trick. “Please don’t be disappointed in me. Please don’t let this be your lingering impression of me.”

My father’s expression softened. Soft gray, that’s how it struck me. Aged, more than it should have been for his forties. I’d
dated
men older than this. Not to be all TMI, but I’d
done
men older than this. To me they’d seemed vibrant, fun, interesting. Not old. Yet Dad seemed like a sad old soul to me.

Was that the visage of impending death?

The tears came faster as he reached over and mussed my hair. “I will always be proud of you, Ramie.” I thought I felt his hand tremble for a moment. “To the day I die, and beyond. I know that to be a fact, and you must believe it too.”

That was hard to hear. I couldn’t speak. And it didn’t matter because I wouldn’t have known what to say even if I could.

He got up, apparently feeling everything had returned to normal. No one truly has
not a care in the world
, but he was about as close as he could get to that. “Mom and I are going out for dinner tonight. Why don’t you go on to that party? I’ll talk to her about it.”

The party. That didn’t feel like it mattered as much after this talk. But, of course, it might. Anything in this weird vortex might matter. Even though I wasn’t positive Brendan was the key to the rest of my life, I knew that this night in particular had been a left turn for me and if it wasn’t the relationship, maybe something else had changed along with that and
that
was why I was back. To fix something else. Who knew?

I was pretty sure the only thing that
didn’t
hold at least a chance of getting me back where I came from was sitting alone in my room. So the party was important.

Then again, nothing I thought mattered or resonated for the future so far, so I wasn’t good at identifying the things that mattered versus the things that didn’t. As a matter of fact, I wasn’t feeling like a super-huge success in any way, given this apparent opportunity and my sheer failure in terms of changing anything, most importantly my dad’s smoking habits.

It was beginning to feel an awful lot like I was back here as a witness, nothing more. An observer to my life, for better or worse, without power. Sure, maybe I was supposed to turn this around into something new. Maybe I was supposed to gather all these lemons and make them into lemonade: determinedly suicidal father, weak mother who didn’t exert any change through her own actions, a self who couldn’t do anything that was actually meaningful.

Speaking of which
, I told myself, switching gears into business mode.
It’s time to start looking at Costco
.

“Thanks, Dad.” I got up and went over to hug him. Who knew if I’d ever get another chance? That’s how every moment of this felt. “I love you.”

He patted my back. He smelled lightly of Aqua Velva and smoke, a scent I remembered well now but could never replicate, though I did have a small plastic bottle of the aftershave in my bathroom drawer that I sometimes smelled just to try and bring back the memory. “I love you too,” he said. “Forever. Remember that. I’m always on your side. Just try to make better choices, eh?”

“Oh, I’m going to make a lot of bad choices,” I said with a dry laugh. “I’m certain of it. But I try to get it right.”

“I’d never ask more of you than that. I want you to have a happy life, Ramie. Make every moment count.”

I smiled. “When in Rome…”

“Better to have a bird in the hand than two in the bush.” He laughed. “Sometimes clich
é
s become clich
é
s because they’re good advice.”

I nodded. “I promise you I’ll always do my best.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I didn’t ride with Tanya to the party after all. She was eager to get there as soon as it began, and I had to take some time to calm down and get myself together. Besides, I still had all the time I wanted with grown-up Tanya, assuming I got back where I’d come from, but there was very little time left with Brendan at all.

I touched up my makeup and hair, and spritzed on the Obsession cologne I hadn’t thought about in years but found on the bathroom shelf and remembered had been a favorite of Brendan’s. Tonight I felt compelled to wow him. I still felt vaguely weird about it, but I reminded myself he wasn’t some kid I’d just encountered and was inappropriately older than. This Brendan was the only Brendan I’d ever known and he’d never left my memory, so in that sense he’d kind of “grown” with me over the years.

If nothing else, I wanted to have a little more time with this sweet memory of mine.

Actually, that’s a bit disingenuous. I didn’t just want to enjoy living in the live photo album this had become—the part of me that wondered how things would be different if Brendan and I had never broken up was getting louder and more insistent. I needed to know, one way or the other, if my life would have gone in a different direction if we hadn’t ended our relationship.

So was this my chance to undo that ending? Or even to mix it up so we had at least a little more time together? It wasn’t something I’d thought much about over the years; I was so determined in my career that I couldn’t afford to look back. But that day on the yacht had certainly made me question my ever-diminishing choices, and that had clearly taken me back to the beginning of my adult life’s path: the end of high school.

Was that why I was back here again? To take the other road at the fork?

He picked me up at eight. It was still light out and I saw his old station wagon—oh! the embarrassment I’d felt riding around in that back in the day!—pull up in front of my house.

Truth be told, station wagons are some of the best cars out there to drive. Even more unvarnished truth be told, they are just about the
best
vehicle to have sex in, if you’re going to have sex in a vehicle. I’ve done it on more occasions than I care to admit, and nothing beat the ol’ station wagon for roominess and semi-privacy out in the open.

I shouted good-bye to my parents, and bounded out the door, feeling, for just a moment,
exactly
as I had at eighteen. There was a lightness to my life. I was young and fit and strong, the world was still somewhat innocent, as I didn’t care about politics and 9/11 was still many years in the future, and I was bounding down the freshly cut green front yard of my childhood home at dusk, going to a party with the only boyfriend who’d ever really made me feel safe and coddled.

The reason for that, of course, was that I grew up and realized that I shouldn’t aspire to have someone else make me feel safe and coddled; I was supposed to take care of myself.

Nevertheless, in these halcyon days when I could still pretend, it felt pretty damn good.

So I was going to let it feel good now too.

“Hey there!” I slid across the seat and kissed him on the cheek.

“Hey, don’t be stingy.” He pulled me toward him and kissed me on the mouth. For a good, long, tantalizing time. If no one had been home, I’d have been sorely tempted to take him back inside and satisfy the longing that was suddenly raging in me.

I guess what they say about women reaching their sexual prime later in life is true. That, combined with a teenage body teeming with hormones, was lethal. Every time I’d seen or talked to or even thought of Brendan in the past couple of days, I’d felt a flush run hot right down my core. That body. That face. That passion.

“So why were you so determined to go to this thing tonight?” he asked me.

I couldn’t tell him the truth—that I thought it was the one chance to change the way things had gone downhill for us—so I just shrugged and parroted Tanya. “It’s the end of school, the last chance…”

“So let’s go someplace more private instead,” he suggested, and gave me a knowing look.

I smiled. It was so tempting. “Let’s just go for a little while at least. Tanya’s expecting me. She’ll be pissed if I bail.”

“Right.” A muscle twitched in his jaw and he put the car in gear and began to drive.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong.” He cast a quick glance my way. “I just feel like we do a lot of things because of what Tanya will do if we don’t.”