If I Could Turn Back Time (23 page)

I shook my head. “I really didn’t.”

“Then go ahead and take her car home.” She flashed a surreptitious glance at her husband. “I don’t think she’ll be needing it for a while. We’ll coordinate picking it up later.”

“Okay.” I nodded. “And I’m sorry. But she’ll be fine in the morning. She was just, you know. Upset.”

She gave a nod. “Good night, Ramie. Thank you for being responsible.”

That was me. That was me in a nutshell, actually, if you looked at how my life had gone afterward. Responsible. Mature. Serious.

Unfulfilled.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

When I got home I was exhausted, but my father was still up, night owl that he always was, sitting in the living room, reading James Michener’s
Space
and smoking those damn cigarettes. There was an assortment of snacks on the coffee table in front of him, including those red-candy-coated peanuts and a brick of baklava, which I could not—and cannot—stand.

“Hi there, chicken,” my dad said, a stark contrast to the uneasy “welcome” Tanya got from her parents. “I thought you were staying the night at Tanya’s.”

“Little change of plans.”

“Well, did you have a good time?”

Good question. It had been an
interesting
time. Illuminating, certainly. Possibly life-altering. But when all was said and done, could I really say I’d had a
good
time at a teenage beer blowout? “Not particularly.” I laughed. “Since you ask.”

“No?” He didn’t really look surprised. “You’re an old soul, Ramie Phillips. You don’t really fit in with your crowd so much anymore, do you?”

I gave a short spike of laughter. “You have no idea.”

He gave a small shrug and took a drag off his cigarette. A light sulfur scent still lingered in the air; he must have lit it right before I walked in. The Pall Mall smoke encompassed that scent and joined the faint whiff of the coffee they’d had when they got home from dinner. I hate to admit that the smoky smell was slightly comforting to me, even while it was damning in every way that mattered.

“Have a seat, kiddo. Let’s talk.” He moved and patted the sofa next to him.

I dropped my purse on the floor and went to sit heavily on the cushion. It squeaked the same now as it had back then. “I’m scared,” I heard myself say.

“What do you have to be scared of? All of life is ahead of you. The world is your oyster. If you’ll pardon the clich
é
.” He chuckled. We both hated when people threw clich
é
s at a real situation.

“When in Rome,” I said.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

“Make no bones about it.”

“Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

Well, wasn’t that the truth?

Things were starting to get fuzzier and I had this strange sensation of thinking of my eighteen-year-old self as
her
, a separate person who was trying to get in and commandeer my thoughts. But, really, wasn’t it the other way around? I tried to remember if I’d ever gone through a period of constant disconcertion at this point in my life, but I couldn’t recall anything beyond the usual teenage thoughts and angsts.

This wasn’t real. I wasn’t “haunting” myself; there was no way that made sense. It was a dream. A long, drawn-out nightmare of a dream. Or dream of a nightmare. I guess I didn’t know yet.

“What do you want to do with your life, now that you’ve graduated high school?” my father asked me. “Where do you see yourself in five years?”

I could have answered that exactly, but he reworded his question before I felt tempted to.

“How would you like to
feel
in five years?”

That was an interesting question. I’d always planned my life in terms of what I thought I needed to accomplish, never thought about how I wanted to feel; that just happened, for better or worse.

“I want to feel
relaxed
,” I said, recalling how
stressed
I had been in grad school, looking for an internship—along with a million other equally qualified and equally ambitious students—that would propel me into the next stressful segment of my life.

I liked the success I’d had. Or the
idea
of success, at least—certainly that beats feeling like a failure, but had the cost been worth it?

My thoughts were racing far ahead of the conversation, of course. “Then you must feel your way along your life’s path,” he said, looking me kindly but steadily in the eyes. “Reevaluate now and then to see where you are and how you feel about it.” He paused, then shrugged. “Quite simply, ask yourself if you’re happy.”

“I never ask myself that.”

“Time to start, eh? Life doesn’t go on forever. You don’t know when the dice will come up snake eyes. I know it’s not practical to live
each
day as if it were your last—”

“When in Rome.”

We laughed.

“But it absolutely makes sense to check in and make sure that at
most
times you’re more happy than sad.”

I had never done such a thing. Never evaluated my emotional state at all. I had always done what needed to be done, whatever it was. It had worked for me, for the most part, but
was
I happy? Not entertained now and then, not just tipsy on good champagne now and then, but did I smile like a Disney princess when I woke in the morning, and have a nice big stretch, smiling at the world for the chance to do another day?

No, I woke up too late every day, charged around getting ready, chastised myself for never taking the time to put on more than a little mascara and lipstick, and hurried off to work, mentally building a to-do list every step there, to go with the to-do list I had left over from the evening before.

“Are you happy?” I asked him.

He smiled so genuinely that I couldn’t help but believe his answer. “I am
so
happy. Every single day. You and your mother mean the world to me, and that is what I live for.”

There was an awkward moment, when I imagined us both thinking of his impending death, but I knew it was just my thoughts coming in so strongly that I was afraid they might penetrate into
his
consciousness somehow.

So I cast the thought from my mind. “I’m glad,” I told him. “You are an inspiration. I will never forget that. I will never forget this conversation.” And I wouldn’t.

Emotion took hold of my throat and suddenly I was having trouble swallowing the lump there. It was so damn unfair that he was going to go. It was so damn unfair that he was going to leave my mother right as their child went off on her own and they could finally start living their golden years together.

Maybe it was fate, maybe there would be some big answer when I got to the Great Beyond, and I’d understand that everything needed to be the way it was, but I sure didn’t get it now. And it didn’t look promising that I ever would.

“Dad.”

“Mm?”

“Would you see the doctor and get a thorough checkup? Just, you know, to make sure everything’s all right?”

He stubbed out his cigarette and blew the last of the smoke into the air, watched it for a moment, probably aware of the irony, then looked at me. “What makes you say that?”

“Nothing in particular,” I said quickly. The last thing I wanted to do was intimate that he
looked
sick or that he needed to spend his endgame worrying. “I’m just thinking that because my friend…” I tried to think of a name. “Debbie Soldour, remember her?”

He shook his head, of course, because I’d just made her up.

“Anyway, her dad is, like, a tennis pro and a runner and never smoked or anything”—my eyes traveled to the full ashtray—“and he just had a heart attack. He’s fine, thank goodness, but he had a heart attack and no one saw it coming. It just made me feel worried.”

“Well, I’m sorry to hear that. But there’s nothing for you to worry about, I have been checked thoroughly. There is nothing going on in me that the doctors don’t know about.” He met my eyes for a second, and in that instant I knew—I just
knew
—that he
did
know the state of his health. And he knew it was too late.

Grief so huge came over me that I couldn’t stop the rush of tears that fell from my eyes.

“Hey there.” He put his hand on my shoulder and pulled me in for a hug. I cried against the crisp cotton of his J.C. Penney button-down shirt and wondered if this was the last time I would feel and hear his reassurances. Even though they were empty, I didn’t want this comfort and feeling of safety to end.

“Sorry,” I snuffled against his shirt. “I don’t want to wake Mom up with my crying.”

“It’s all right,” he said, and gave me an extra squeeze. “Neither of us is ever going to feel put out if you need us. You know that.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

Then, of all times, that stupid alarm started going off upstairs. The shrill
beep beep beep
seemingly getting louder and faster. “I better go shut that thing off,” I said, and drew away from him.

He looked puzzled.

I gestured vaguely toward the stairs. “Stupid clock-radio thing. It keeps going off at weird times and I can’t figure out how to turn it off. Anyway, thanks, Dad. I really appreciate … well, everything. I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you too, chicken.”

I gave him one more hug and said, “Good night.”

This was how I had to remember him.

I went upstairs into my room, but the beeping had stopped. Aggravating. For some reason it smelled funny in my room. Like Vicks VapoRub or something. Maybe some kind of new antibacterial cleaning fluid. I don’t know, but it was so strong that I went to open the window before brushing my teeth and climbing into bed.

Once there in the soft cotton cloud, I thought about the clock again. If it went off and woke me up in the middle of the night, I was going to go insane. I needed some sleep. All of this was taking a huge toll on me. So I forced myself to haul my butt out of bed, feel my way to the little red numbers that provided the only light in the room, then I reached for the wall behind it, where I knew the outlet to be, and yanked the electrical cord.

The lights went out, mercifully.

I got back into bed and drifted into a deep, dreamless sleep almost immediately.

Because I’d unplugged the clock, I don’t know what time it was when I heard the noise. At first my mind registered it
as
the clock, which didn’t make sense, and I lost all sense of where I was for a moment. That was a seriously disconcerting feeling. Nothing about my situation currently made logical or scientific sense, but at least it was a scenario that was familiar and one that I could maneuver, strange as it was. But to wake up with no sense of time or place was like waking up insane, and it was scary.

I blinked hard against the blackness and willed my eyes to adjust to the light.

“Ramie!” I heard the loud whisper somewhere close by. Under the bed? Outside the door? I couldn’t tell.

My heart pounded with strange anxiety and I almost imagined I could hear that damn alarm beeping along to the frantic tempo.

“Ramie!”

Wait. I knew that voice. And it wasn’t floating disembodied from somewhere in my room; it was … outside. I strained to see the outline of the window, the narrow gap between the shade and the sill where the meager light of night shone through. I got out of bed and headed toward it, stubbing my toe on the bedpost and swallowing a curse.

When I got to the window, I touched the shade and felt my way down to the bottom, I gave it a tug, and the spring released, so it rolled up fast and loud, scaring me half to death. It had been a long time since I’d had window shades like this.

“About time!” I heard out there.

I touched my forehead to the screen and looked out. There, on the grass beneath the window, next to the magnolia tree, was the outline of Brendan. “What are you doing?” I rasped.

“I had to see you.”

“
Why?
” But my heart did a little flip. He wanted to see me. He was making a romantic gesture, however lame. Man, it had been a long time since anything like this had happened.

I saw him shrug. “I missed you.”

“What time is it?”

“Late.”

“Hang on,” I said. Surely dad would have gone to sleep by now. “I’ll be right down.”

I was wearing only a long T-shirt, but I knew no one in the neighborhood would be up at this hour. They never were. It was a sleepy little enclave, reliably so.

I hurried down the stairs and carefully opened the front door. It creaked—it always creaked—but I stopped it and stood still, listening for any sound of movement upstairs. There was none, so I slipped through and out the screen door.

Brendan was standing just outside the light on the front lawn and I ran to him and jumped into his arms and wrapped my legs around him, holding on for dear life. “I’m so glad to see you!” I said. And I was. Good lord, my heart was positively pounding. Teenage hormones really
were
a whole different thing.

“Good thing I came over,” he said, between kisses.

“No kidding.”

We kept kissing and he eased me back down onto my feet and around the corner of the house into the dark privacy by the magnolia. Even someone inside the house couldn’t have seen us from the windows and there were no houses facing us.

We were completely free.

And I was going half crazy on him. I mean, I was on fire. Once again I was reminded how long it had been since I’d had an impulse like this and been able to follow it through.

We did.

I leaned against the brick siding and pulled him against me. He was young and instantly hard and hungry. I felt like he was devouring me. Every touch of his tongue, his fingers, everywhere his skin touched mine sent shock waves of pleasure and urgency through me.

It went quickly; the need was too great to take our time. And I didn’t want to. I wanted it hard and rough. I needed to feel the brick against my back and him thrusting so hard it was almost painful. I needed that like I needed air.

When it was over, we slipped our clothes back into place and sank to the ground to lie in the grass on our backs, side by side, looking up at the stars and the silver linen clouds drifting past them and in front of the full moon.