Catching Tatum (2 page)

I wish they were all like that, full of love and excitement and happiness, but I saved others too: memories that are not so nice, but in some weird way they are just as special. Mom taught us to save the bad along with the good. She told us that all memories were important and deserved respect, if only to remind us of roads we should not travel again, or to help us empathize with others saving their own dark memories. I keep the sad ones and bad ones on a higher shelf in my musty memory cave. Almost all of them are covered in thick dust and cobwebs; the way a bad memory should be. But I know them as much as the good ones, though I seldom uncork and savor them. They are harder to relive and only come out in emergency situations.

All it takes is a quick glance up there to those sad, sorrowful, moments in my history and I can remember enough. Really, how can I ever forget the searing pain of my physical and emotional scars? I think they stick with me easier than the good ones, whether I want them to or not, so I leave them up there, out of my way … except for two.

I'm lucky that the worst physical pain I've ever been in was just a busted face, but the memory of it haunts me every day when I look in the mirror. It happened in a fight with my brothers, Theo and Brett. They were playing keep away with my favorite GI Joe, Scarlet, when I was seven. I tried to karate kick Theo but he moved out of the way too fast and I flew straight at the porch rail. My leg slid between the slats and I turned my head and caught the top edge of the railing with the side of my face. My face exploded in fantastic pain like I had never felt before nor have I since. I saw stars and fell to the slatted wood below me in a daze.

Then the blood came. It was spectacular; my shirt was drenched in seconds. All I remember at first was Theo saying, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” and throwing Scarlet at me. I knew it was bad but I ran after him, chasing him into the house. I was going to make him pay for taking my toy and hurting me. Mom started yelling for me to cover my face to keep the blood from getting everywhere before she even asked what happened. I ended up with ten or eleven catgut stitches that she sewed herself with a sterilized needle. Theo and Brett were forced to be her surgical assistants and get her what she needed to fix me up. She grew up on a farm; they fixed the animals all the time when they got torn up, so I don't think she was thinking about the long term effects of a home-stitched fix on my face when she did it. She was reacting quickly, like she had to on the farm. The whole time she was sewing and squeezing my face together, I was screaming and she was lecturing the boys about sharing and including me in their games.

Once it was sealed up, I got the last laugh. The boys both got whooped and I got Fudgsicles for a week. I loved asking mom for one and eating it right in front of them. I guess that memory is tempered with a little bit of sweet-smelling revenge.

Unfortunately, Mom left the stitches in a little too long so when she pulled them out she had to yank hard to get them to come through my skin. I swear that part hurt as bad as when she put them in. The scar, a jagged and glaring two-and-three-quarter-inch flaw on my face, is pock-marked above and below with little dots from the stitches. I don't blame her for the hideousness of it, but I think she blames herself. Eventually the physical pain faded even though the scar never has. It's a memory I can't escape even if I wanted to. It uncorks itself every time I look in the mirror.

That's the easy part—my physical pain healed quickly—it is the emotional scars that are bad. Sometimes I can still hear old classmates calling me Scar Face like it was yesterday. I hate those memories of being picked on because of the way that I looked. I wanted to cry but knew that would only make it worse, so I endured and pretended like I didn't hear them when they called me names. As hard as the name calling was, it was nothing compared to the pain of heartbreak.

That bottle is the darkest of them all. The memory: a name. Cole.

Cole Jackson, sixteen years old with hazel eyes and a dimpled grin that weakened my knees.

He was a memory on my bad shelf that tormented me the way my scar did for years. He was the first to hold equal space on both shelves. He was my first official date, my first back-seat make-out session ... my first time. It took a long time for me to decide what shelf he truly belonged on, and by then it was too late to go back down the road and start over. I loved him but I loved others, too, and therein was my problem.

The thing is: I have always known that I am strong, capable, and independent; that's how my parents raised me. I am happy doing my own thing and living life on my terms. I don't need a man, but I want one. I've always wanted one. Worse than that, I was so eager to make memories with my man that I fell in love easily, with everyone. It was my greatest weakness; my heart wouldn't behave itself. If there was the slightest chance I could find love with a boy, I was all in, even if the object of my affection wasn't. That's just me, who I am, how I am—passionate, hopeful, lovesick. Yep, I fall in love easily and all I want is love in return.

I blame it on my parents. They are strong-willed, opinionated, proud, and they have always been ridiculously in love with each other despite it. I'm not saying their love is perfect. I remember them fighting from time to time when I was a kid. My mom, Kathy, has Italian in her blood, so when she's mad everyone knows about it. My dad is a Colonel in the United States Air Force and is used to things his way. They've had some pretty good arguments, not hitting and screaming and throwing things, but heated and awkward-to-be-a-kid-in-the-room kind of fights. But they're both hopeless romantics. They promised forever to each other and they're either proud enough to keep their promises or too proud to break them, one or the other. I was doomed to be a passionate, romantic soul when they conceived me. I prefer passionate to aggressive; romantic to desperate, but I've been called the latter a whole lot more than the former. What can I say? It's not easy to balance my personality, especially when my heart gets involved.

Then there were my brothers. I was the girl sandwiched in between the four of them. Thomas and Theo were just as hopeless when it came to passion and love. Thomas so much so that when he found the girl of his dreams in fourth grade he kept her through all of our military moves, and hers; even when he enlisted in the Air Force, and she in the Navy, it's always been Thomas and Belle. They found love as children and stayed in it their whole lives—well at least their lives so far—and there's no sign of their love fading. Theo was more of the hopeless kind of romantic (we are the same like that) but he didn't fall hard until his senior year in school. That's when he met the girl of his dreams, Kennedy, and completely changed his lifelong plan to enlist and follow the family into the military, to suit her. Don't get me started on how Mom and Dad handled that.

The younger boys were less of an influence. Brett's my closest brother (don't ask me why my parents gave us all “T” names except for him; I do not know). During the time of my great indecision and heartbreak, we lived together in a small apartment about fifteen minutes from McChord Air Force Base, which was home to our family unit since my junior year of high school. Brett is passion incarnate. He's so passionate about baseball he can't think about a girl, only making it to the majors. Lastly, there's Travis, the perfect mix of us all—passionate, opinionated, proud, and a hopeless romantic who had his heart completely and utterly broken by the girl he wanted. I had bottles full of memories of one boy after another—crushes, kisses, dates, and infatuations. Not Trav; nope, he found his girl young. Like Thomas, he poured his heart and soul into her and had it ripped out when she broke up with him in a letter when he was a teen. I made my rules to be sure I didn't fall in love with the wrong guy ever again. But when Travis got ditched he made rules to be sure he never fell in love again ... ever. Now he is so distracted by military life and training that he has maybe forgotten her, but she is, as yet, still irreplaceable.

Then there's me, Tatum, the only girl of the group (except for my mom), the hopeless romantic, the headstrong dreamer, the maker of rules and memories. I wasn't desperate, I just wanted to give and receive love the way my parents did and thought if I loved a boy enough he would love me back the same. With my parents it was mutual—they were both all in; I never checked with the boys to see if they were before I decided to fall in love. I just fell and usually landed on my face.

As a little girl, of course, my first love was my daddy. What girl isn't in love with her dad? Mine was the best kind. He never broke my heart. Most of the time I was Daddy's “Tomboy Princess;” with four brothers it was hard to be his “Little Princess” all the time. But with a mom who was the definition of femininity, I was never quite “one of the boys” either. My dad and I danced all the time. Some of my best bottled up memories are of dancing with him. He still dances with me and my mom whenever a good song comes on. He taught all the boys to dance when they were younger, too.

Let me pull down a bottle and uncork it and stop and take it in.

Yep ... there it is. I was seven and the radio started in on Van Morrison singing “Brown-eyed Girl.” My mom was doing dishes and batted him away when he shimmied over, so he swooshed on the balls of his feet, big old smile on his face, and spun toward me, with arms open wide. He grabbed me and we spun around the kitchen to the beat of the song. There was another time when I was learning how to drive. My mom was in the back with Brett and Trav and I remember Dad got all excited and made me stop the car on the side of the road. I thought he must have wanted me to practice pulling to a shoulder and re-entering traffic but instead he told me to turn the music up. He pulled my mom out of the car and busted out a dance with her right there on the shoulder of the road. The love they had for each other twinkled in their eyes as they danced.

My dad was the one who made the first rule in my game of love; way back before I even knew I had a game. His rule: I wasn't allowed to date until I was sixteen. I didn't love that rule so it didn't really count in my world. By the time I was sixteen I think I probably had already lost my heart a dozen times. I don't mean crushing, I mean love ... like I said, I fall in love easily.

The first love of my life, after my dad and brothers, was a boy named Sergio Chavez. We were in second grade together and I was sure I would marry him. His skin was darker than mine and he was taller than me, but our hair was the exact same color—pale brown, a smidge darker than dirty blonde. (That was long before I started wearing my hair in dreads, but it was already an annoying tangled mess by then.) We would sit next to each other during reading time and hold hands. At recess we ran as fast as we could out of the school, hand in hand, to climb on the “Big Toy,” as we called the round metal dome. If we were first to the top we sat like king and queen the whole time, holding hands, and kicking the other kids down when they tried to displace us. It might not sound like love but it was. When it was cold he would take my hand and tuck it, with his, into the pocket of his little red quilted coat, and keep me warm. He was the best kind of boy. I probably would have married him and my life would have been a whole lot simpler, like Thomas', if that had happened, but it didn't. Our love was short lived. Dad got orders and we moved and I had to say goodbye to the love of my seven-year-old life. Don't tell me it wasn't love; I have the memories to prove it, on the good shelf. They are real. I can still feel the satiny smoothness of his coat on my fingers. Our souls collided and he will ever be a part of me.

Same with David, my next little lover boy. The thing is: I can't remember his last name. That doesn't mean it wasn't love; it means I was only ten and had better things to do than remember last names. He was my age and as soon as we moved to Seymour Johnson AFB in North Carolina, he was the first kid we met on the base. Brett, just eighteen months younger than me, hit it off with David immediately and the three of us were nearly inseparable. We spent hours riding around on dirt bikes and making forts and having wars. The three of us walked together to the school on the base every day, the older boys caught a bus to a school off base, and Trav wasn't in school yet. One day Brett was sick so when David came to the door to meet up, we walked the sidewalks to the school alone. It started out like any other walk, then he said I was pretty. Up until that moment we were “just friends.” That was it; I was in love, just like that. I ripped my heart out of my chest, packaged it up, and handed it to him to love and to cherish until death do us part. As it turned out it only lasted until half-way through the next year when his dad was reassigned and his family moved away. But until then we were “us.” Brett helped keep our relationship a secret from the parents; he was good that way. No longer did the three of us climb trees together. David and I climbed together and Brett followed. We got ice cream cones but David and I shared the same one. We played war games but I was always on David's team

David and I kissed too—actual real French kissing. I started young, what can I say?

The first time was more of an experiment than a kiss. All we had was what we'd seen our parents and movie stars do, which isn't close to what it's actually like to kiss someone. The school on the base only went to fifth grade so when David and I moved on to middle school in sixth, we left Brett completely behind for the first time. Kissing seemed like the next logical step in our relationship. It was a mature and grown-up decision the two of us came to one morning on the bus near the beginning of the year. He loved me, I loved him, we weren't getting any younger, but we were certainly old enough to kiss. There was no friend or younger brother tagging along anymore, so what were we waiting for? We kissed on the green vinyl seat of the cheese wagon.

Oh, boy, was it a sloppy messy affair! We closed our eyes and the next thing I knew, my nose was in his mouth! The bus went over a bump and he missed the mark. Me, being me, I laughed at him, then told him that must be why the guy grabs the girl's face in his hands. I told him to touch my face; it was the first time he touched me there and it felt almost as intimate as anything else about the kiss. It was a valiant first attempt at Eros' game. We gave it a good effort—eyes closed, tongues touched, lips smacked, spit swapped—deed done. Success! When I opened my eyes I saw them ... the others on the bus, watching. I was not embarrassed that they found us out like David seemed to be. I smiled with pride. I was the kisser of David. Our first kiss was their entertainment and I liked that. I didn't know the word then, but I was on my way to becoming an exhibitionist.