The Big Rewind (7 page)

J
eremy and I got dinner at TGI Fridays, for old times' sake, making dinner out of appetizers and ordering our daiquiris virgin.

“Jim would
never
let me get away with this,” he said, catching stray mozzarella-stick cheese on his index finger before popping it into his mouth. “Ugh, last year he went through a
vegan
phase; we almost had to break up. Even now if I order bacon at breakfast, it's like I'm cheating on him.” He took out his phone and held it up, pulling me in close. “Let's taunt him with our love affair,” he said, picking up a potato skin and passing it to me.

We both made ironic duck faces and I held the potato skin up to his mouth, tilting it so Jim could see all the bacon piled on top. The flash went off and he quickly texted it. A few minutes later the phone buzzed with a photo of Jim, spooning a piece of cake into his gaping maw. He had a neatly trimmed goatee and clever eyes, a striped polo shirt and a leather cuff bracelet. “He went out and got an Entenmann's lemon cake,” Jeremy explained. “He knows I love them, and now he's threatening to eat the whole thing before I get home. What a jerk!” A second message rang in and he smiled. “Jim says you're very pretty,” he read. “He can't wait to meet you.”

My own phone buzzed with a message from Sid, his picture
flashing up on the screen. “Who's that?” Jeremy said, snatching my phone out of my hand. “He's cute. Jett, please tell me he's your boyfriend.”

“Just a friend,” I said, surprised at how sour the words tasted on my tongue. I took a bite of brownie sundae to wash out the taste. “Wants to know if we're still on for TV Tuesday night.” I texted him back a
yes
as I talked. “We've been doing these cop-show marathons.” I still hadn't come up with an apology, but if he was trying to set up dinner plans, maybe that was his way of letting it all go. Chalk it up to a lack of sleep and pretend it never happened.

“That is too darling,” he said. “Jim is addicted to
Cold Case—
the two of them could talk about that while we sing show tunes on the Wii in the den.”

I laughed. “That sounds like the best double date imaginable.”

“Then let's make it happen. I'm going on tour with
Jesus Christ Superstar
—I'm playing Herod, obviously, duh—in two weeks, but when I get back, we'll make a plan.”

He paid the check and held my hand as we walked to the subway. “I'm so sorry I didn't keep in better touch,” he lamented. “It wasn't personal; it wasn't even gotta-get-out-of-this-small-town angst. I'd think about you and plan to look you up and then I'd just . . . forget. You know how it goes.”

“It was just time,” I said in agreement. “I could have looked you up too, but life gets busy.”

There was a warm glow of pride in my heart. He had made it. Where everyone else in our small-town class—including me—seemed so doomed for dead ends and middle management, he'd clawed his way to the top of his dream. If it had been anyone else, I might have been envious, but I loved Jeremy with the soft, sweet kind of love that stays long after you've set a man free to fulfill his destiny. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving person.

He took both my hands and kissed me on the cheek. “It's really great to see you,” he said. “Of all the girls I tried to date, you were always my favorite.”

I drifted all the way home on that compliment. The idiot rom-com part of my brain wanted to be a little sad, to feel cheated that the two of us would never be together even though he was so perfect. I saved his number in my phone. His CD didn't go back in the Boyfriend Box. Instead, I put it on the shelf with the rest of my musicals. It deserved no less of an honor.

There was a postcard from my grandmother in my mailbox. Greetings from Paris, love from her and Royale. I fed Baldrick and added Jeremy on Facebook. I sent a friend request to his fiancé too.

Okay, so maybe I couldn't date Jeremy—but I was starting to feel confident that I could reclaim my past, make right the wrongs that had taken love from me in the first place.

E
ven after work on Tuesday, Sid was carrying a fresh cup of coffee. It had only been a few days since I'd seen him, but he looked exhausted and jittery, like a junkie informant on prime time. He hadn't shaved since brunch and his wrinkled blue dress shirt only made his eyes look more bloodshot. “Rough couple of nights?” I asked.

I wasn't expecting him to smile and I sure as hell wasn't expecting him to reply, “Best nights of my life.”

“Yeah?” I asked. “Care to share?”

Instead of answering, he produced a corkscrew from his jacket pocket and wrestled with a bottle of pinot noir while I lit the candles. “One of these days I'll buy you a damn corkscrew,” he teased.

“But then you won't have an excuse to come over anymore.”

“I'm sure I could find one,” he said, handing me a glass of wine. “After all, we haven't even started on
Magnum, PI
.”

Normally Sid and I just ate frozen stuff from my Trader Joe's pilgrimages. My kitchen was a joke; while all my peers were starting food blogs and writing recipes for making gluten-free vegan lasagna in the microwave, a real fancy night for me might involve putting bacon, eggs, and toast all on the same plate. But tonight I'd planned ahead and bought a chuck roast to braise in
my grandmother's Crock-Pot. My mother had e-mailed me her secret barbecue sauce recipe, given to her by a North Carolina cousin who swore all three of her husbands had proposed after the first bite. I'd burned myself browning it and almost dropped it on the floor, but all that was forgotten as the whole apartment filled with the smell of late summer.

I wasn't expecting Sid to propose, but I felt bad about the last few times we'd gotten together—KitKat's memorial, the incident at Egg School, all my snark about his stripper love interest—and if there was any way to a man's heart, my mother's cousin told me, it was through meat.

“Everything smells delicious,” he said. “You couldn't buy this scent at Whole Foods or Fairway.”

“I slaved over the Crock-Pot all day,” I joked, holding up my glass for a toast. “Cheers, Sid.”

“Cheers, Jett.”

I took a drink and
mmm
'd in approval. I'd gone through a brief wine snob phase—like everyone did—when
Sideways
came out; Catch, Reese, and I would go for tastings because it was the cheapest way to get a drink, buy ten-dollar cabs and pinots and imagine we could taste notes of grass and strawberries. But now, thankfully, I just drank it like a normal person.

Sid put on Duran Duran's
Rio
while I plated our meals. “What's this?” he asked, picking up KitKat's tape from where I'd left it sitting on the end of the table, next to mail for my grandmother. “A mix tape?” He examined it like Indiana Jones. “Wow, I can't even remember the last time I held one of these.”

Panic. I hadn't meant to leave it out, but I'd been caught, and if I was going to fess up to anyone, it would be Sid. After all, he was the only one who knew I'd found her body. “It was for KitKat,” I said, putting down our plates and taking my seat. “It ended up in my mailbox by mistake. . . . When I took it downstairs . . .” I took a long drink of wine, as though that could wash my memory clean.

He squeezed my hand under the table. “Who made it for her?”

“That's what I've been trying to figure out,” I said after swallowing. “Call me crazy, but I cannot get over this weird feeling that something on that tape is linked to her murder.”

“What, you mean like a full confession?” he asked. “How convenient would that be, Joe Friday?”

“I don't think it's that,” I said. “It's just this feeling I've got. Call it a hunch if you want to get technical.”

“The best detectives listen to their guts,” he said. “What do you have so far?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just a set of initials—GPL, a mystery in itself. Her sister gave me a box of tapes and there were three others from the same person, but no picture, no one with those initials on her Facebook or Twitter, nothing to say who he—or she—is. The secrecy alone is enough to make me suspect.”

“So you think maybe she had something going on the side,” he said, finishing my thought. “That doesn't make Bronco look too good.”

“I know, and that's why I want to figure this all out,” I said. “Bronco's my friend too; I saw him the morning she was killed. I don't want to believe that he could do this, but if he did, I want to be able to hand over the most damning piece of evidence.” I took a bite and chewed for a minute before continuing. “My friend Marty suggested I call Josie; heard she had a tape player. Maybe once I know what's on it, I'll get a better sense of its connection. Unless there isn't one, of course. Then it's back to one—or worse, zero.”

Sid leaned back in his chair and grinned. “I'm impressed,” he said. “I probably wouldn't have put those pieces together.”

“What else could I do?” I asked. “She was my friend, and with Bronco on the ropes for her murder, I don't see any other choice.”

He wiped barbecue sauce off the corner of his mouth and stood up. “And that, Miss Bennett, is why you're Sherlock. I'll be your Watson, if you'll have me.”

I loved when he called me Miss Bennett. Coming from anyone without a southern accent, it might have sounded corny,
but the lilt in his voice sent shivers down my spine. I held out my hand and he escorted me to standing. “I welcome your assistance, Mr. McNeill.”

“Guess this means our weekly viewings have turned into training,” he said. “Maybe we should be taking notes.”

“Sid, it's bad enough no one invites me to record parties anymore, not after I derided Mumford and Sons as being ‘like Flogging Molly if all the punk rhythms and talent was removed,'” I said. “Can you please let me just watch TV for the sake of watching TV?”

“Fair enough,” he said. He picked up the tape again and held it between two fingers. “I can't even remember the last time someone made me a mix CD, let alone a tape. But when you hear that first song and your heart soars and you
know
. . .” He sighed. “It's the best feeling in the whole fucking world.”

I
t was two days later when Josie called me back. “Sorry, I was doing a wedding out on Shelter Island,” she said. “Huge affair, but they let me use their kitchen. It was bigger than my apartment, I swear. But I'm free this evening and I have a
ton
of leftovers.”

“Can I bring anything?” I asked.

“Just a bottle of wine,” she said. “White, dry, don't pay more than fifteen bucks. Call when you get here and I'll buzz you up.”

I put Sid's copy of
Go West
on the turntable and spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to put together an outfit that conveyed casual carelessness with deliberate intent. I settled on a silkscreened squirrel shirt I got at the last Irony Auction, a gray dad cardigan, and leggings with ankle boots. The only thing separating my ensemble from straight-up pajamas was the red pashmina I'd picked up on St. Mark's. But a pashmina, I realized as I walked out the door, is really just a security blanket adults can wear.

At Bouquet Liquors I picked out an eleven-dollar Riesling with a funky label. That was how Catch and I had always picked out wine. I hadn't had a Riesling since we'd broken up, and it seemed so long ago, I couldn't remember if it was a deliberate act of casting him off or just changing taste. It left me with two bucks
cash and less than a hundred in my checking with student loan payment due soon. I was going to have to get work—real, full days of work, not just three-hour washerwoman duties—soon.

Josie lived in a studio apartment in Brooklyn Heights above one of those boutiques that carries only four items, none of which are in your size. She'd painted each wall a different color: green around the kitchenette, blue behind the futon—which had striped sheets on it—bright red behind the record cabinet and bookshelves, and purple in the bathroom.

“I like your scarf,” she said after hugging me at the door. Today, hers was blue, worn over an untucked black blouse so sheer it looked like it was made of spiderwebs and dreams.

She already had our two plates waiting on the table, plated effortlessly with frilly-toothpick meatballs, caprese salad, and tiny egg rolls. “These were just the prewedding appetizers,” she said, pouring the wine into
Pokémon
juice glasses. I got Meowth; she had Togepi. “I must have made twenty different tapas plates, and bridezilla had the nerve to bitch that my quiche cups didn't look
exactly
like the ones on her Pinterest board. By the end, I wanted to dump a tray of chicken satay on her head. But eat up, there's plenty more. I know I'm supposed to get rid of it after the event, but that just seems so wasteful for such good food.”

“I won't sue if I get food poisoning,” I joked. I hadn't eaten since the scrambled eggs and toast I made for breakfast, and I was so hungry it was taking everything I had not to just dump the entire plate into my face, frilly toothpicks and all.

She held up her glass for a toast. “To KitKat,” she said.

“To KitKat,” I repeated, clinking my cup against hers. I tasted Catch in the first sip. His hands, his eyes, his laugh all washed over my palate. Memory linked this bottle with the last one we'd shared, watching
Pacific Heights
on VHS while the entire city was shut down with snow, his arms around me, wine-fragrant breath warm on my cheek. But now I wanted to spit him out, wash him away with Listerine, bleach him out of my brain and blood and
heart forever. Instead, I crammed a meatball into my mouth and tried not to cry.

“So let's get to this tape,” Josie said, taking a sip of her own drink. “I'm excited—when was the last time you got a real physical mix someone actually made?”

“I can't even remember,” I said, handing her the cassette. That was a lie. I remembered the moment perfectly, the same way I remembered every moment with Catch. He had come to pick me up for a movie, and while I fretted with my earrings, he'd reached into the pocket of his leather jacket and produced
She Doesn't Think My Tractor's Sexy Anymore:
Live's “All Over You”; Garbage's “The World Is Not Enough”; Bryan Adams and Sting and Rod Stewart, “All for Love,” because at his core, Catch was an utter cornball. I'd kissed him quick and played that CD until it skipped on Nightwish's “She Is My Sin.”

“I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss those days,” Josie said. “Finding that tape in your locker, playing it over and over, trying to figure out what he was trying to say. Tapping a playlist off some guy's iPhone just isn't the same, you know? How the hell else are we supposed to know what love is, from a Facebook update? Give me a Sony any day. Where did you even find this?”

I hoped the mozzarella in my mouth would disguise my lie. “I found it while, uh, Dumpster diving. I thought I'd give it a listen.” I may have told Sid my intentions, but that didn't mean everyone else had to know.

She examined the tape with a jeweler's eye. “
Cure Kit—
sounds romantic.” She turned it over and cracked the case. “No track listing, no artwork, what is this, amateur hour? Who is this GPL? Someone needs to have a word with him about proper mix tape etiquette.”

She took it over to the elaborate stereo setup and popped it in. The tape opened with Squeeze's “Tempted,” and already, I felt a silent tension hook reverberating in my chest. Track two—the Smiths' “I Want the One I Can't Have”—didn't do anything to make me feel better.

“Aww, this guy is pining,” Josie cooed. “But seriously, the Smiths? The eighties are over; find a new band. Or at least a new Morrissey song. Heaven knows he's written plenty.”

I wished I could listen with the same sarcastic nostalgia as Josie.
I want the one I can't have and it's driving me mad,
Morrissey wailed. But GPL already had KitKat. Clearly Bronco wasn't standing in the way; the three track lists already in KitKat's binder implied that the two of them were in agreement about their love. So far, this was more suitable as a confession of wine-drenched abandon, and all I could think of was the first time Catch had said he loved me, parked in his '89 Camry while we waited for Reese to get out of work so we could all go to the drive-in. We were eating Red Vines and drinking Dr. Pepper, and he'd just blurted it out like it had been swelling inside him for days. I was so surprised that all I could do was cram another Red Vine into my face because love was too fucking common for people who felt things as deeply as we felt things. I couldn't let myself believe him because if I had, that might have meant I was penetrable, defenseless, vulnerable. And that night, after he dropped me off at my shitty little grad apartment without even trying to steal a kiss, I went inside and played his CDs over and over, trying to decipher if maybe he really did love me through U2's “All I Want Is You” and the Cult's “She Sells Sanctuary” and Feeder's “Just the Way I'm Feeling.” Could you ever really know what a man was thinking in someone else's words?

“I don't know this next one,” said Josie as the song changed over to a pretty piano and a delicate woman's voice. She tapped her iPad and pulled up the lyrics to the Innocence Mission, “My Waltzing Days Are Over.” She took another sip of wine and sat back on the couch. “This is so beautiful,” she said. “I'm downloading it right now.”

At my age, I'm content to watch . . . so go on, go on . . .

“Shit,” I breathed. “He was breaking up with her.”

“No way,” Josie said. She cocked her head and listened a bit. “No. Nobody makes a breakup mix. She must have already
dumped him, but he's still in love with her. He's trying to win her back.”

“Hey Nineteen” by Steely Dan was next, followed by Billy Bragg's “A Lover Sings.” The mix was coming together almost too perfectly, a soundtrack for mutually broken hearts.

“He's saying he's too old for her,” I said. “That they don't have anything in common.” I was starting to get a picture of an aging punk, hair weak from years of dye and Elmer's glue, selling his band shirts at a garage sale, dumping his black jeans off at the Salvation Army. In a way, I was glad KitKat had never received it and instead died believing that GPL still loved her.

“Dumped via Billy Bragg? That's rough,” Josie said, draining her glass. “But that doesn't explain the first two songs. If he's so tempted, if she's the one he can't have, then why is he going to such lengths to break up with her?”

The Magnetic Fields' delicate, sorrowful “Smoke and Mirrors” ended side one, and she got up to flip the tape. I helped myself to a few more chicken satay skewers.

“Is this some kind of ‘You can't friend-zone me, I'm dumping you' bullshit?” She poured a little more wine into our glasses and I didn't protest. “If so, fuck this guy.”

“I don't think that's it,” I said. “I think he's trying to say that although he wants her, he knows they can't be together. It's complicated.”

“I guess,” Josie said as she tapped her iPad over the unmistakably nineties sound of a chick rocker. “Syd Straw, ‘CBGB's,'” she said, ID'ing the song. “But if he puts ‘Hands to Heaven' on here, I'm going to smash my stereo and make you buy me a new one.”

“Fair enough,” I admitted. It was even more haunting, now that CBGB was as gone as their love affair.
And I don't know why we never met again . . . but I still think about you sometimes, every now and then.
When was the last time they saw each other—weeks, months, years? Was this tape unexpected, one last gem forged in the middle of the night when longing fought off sleep, or the last
spoken line in a long good-bye? And why the hell did love always have to be so fucking coded? I vowed the next time I fell in love I was just going to come out and say it instead of relying on Joe Jackson to do it for me.

The next song was not “Hands to Heaven.” It was Concrete Blonde's “Someday.” “He's pretty heavy on the chick rockers,” Josie said. “Maybe he was gay and that's why they couldn't be together—she wouldn't drive him to Lilith Fair or help him pick up guys at the Inconvenience Lounge.”

The wine soured in my mouth. This tape was so much deeper than that, and she was brushing the whole thing off like it was a joke. Some people just don't understand real love, the kind that hurts somewhere deep inside, in a place you didn't even know you had. GPL understood that. I could only wonder if KitKat had or if he'd been just another fanciful curiosity, a cupcake, a
Paperboy
cartridge, a party guest who existed solely to be quirky and cute and adore her. I wondered if any of us had been anything more than that—KitKat and I had never had a deep conversation or a cry together, even if I had considered her a pal. But she had a lot of friends, and maybe I was just one more retro toy on an already-overstuffed shelf.

There were a few more songs on the B-side—Smashing Pumpkins' “Perfect,” the Rolling Stones' “Ruby Tuesday,” and the Sundays' “Here's Where the Story Ends”—but neither of us recognized the last song.
I wither without you,
a woman cooed, her voice distant behind a scratchy, faded recording.
I crumble before you.
Josie typed the lyrics into her search, but nothing came up. She tried the second verse,
Stars fall flash and slash my heart
. Still nothing. She held up the phone to the speaker, but Shazam came back empty.

“Rewind it,” I demanded.

“I can't,” she said. “The rewind doesn't work—we'd have to listen to the whole thing again.”

I grabbed my phone and scrambled to make note of the lyrics as they slipped into the nothingness. It struck something inside
me, twisted my guts into sick knots of love and longing. I couldn't remember the last time a song had made me ache so beautifully, and I never wanted it to end.

But it did end, and there was nothing left to do but finish the wine and say good night. I hummed it all the way home, not caring if I got dirty stares on the subway, knowing that the only important thing was to preserve this lost song like a piece of evidence, a fossil, a fly caught in amber. And when I couldn't sleep, I stayed up typing the lyrics out on my grandmother's old typewriter. At the very least, it kept Catch's ghost at bay.