The Big Rewind (22 page)

Tears filled his eyes. “I really did love her,” he said, turning his face from me and staring into the wide window of the restaurant. The gawkers had already grown tired of the scene playing out before them and had gone back to their lunches. “Both of them. I meant every goddamn word I said to Cassie in there.”

“I never doubted that,” I said. “I don't think they did either.”

I had a momentary instinct to get us a cab back to Grand Central for a proper good-bye, follow him on Twitter, friend him on Facebook, to make sure we stayed in touch. But with all we had in common, I realized it was probably best if we parted ways now.

“Guess I'll see you at the trial,” I said.

“Guess so,” he replied.

And then we didn't have anything else to talk about.

T
he L train was filled with people chattering about Cassie's arrest, and I thought of how fucking
nice
it must have been to live in an era where the newspaper only arrived once a month, maybe, if the postmaster's horse didn't die. By the time I reached my stop, I'd heard so many armchair lawyers spout their TV court cases that part of me hoped Cassie was acquitted, just to prove them all wrong.

At home, I tore the Boyfriend Box out of the closet. Fuck nostalgia. Fuck all of it. Cassie murdered KitKat because she couldn't let go of the past. I pulled out love letters, mix tapes, and burned CDs with decoupaged liner notes, stuffed animals, college T-shirts, broken necklaces, guitar picks, the black bowling shirt Catch used to let me fall asleep in . . .

Into the bathtub it went. Everything but the stuffed animals; Gabe's bear and the rest of them went into a Trader Joe's bag destined for the Salvation Army. I lit a match and tossed it onto the pile in the bathtub. A stack of bad poetry went up first. Then William's Sailor Moon stationery, the last love letter he'd sent me before getting engaged. All the track lists, the notes passed in math class, postcards from halfway around the goddamn world. And when the smoke detector began shrieking, I smashed it open
with a broom and ripped out the battery. Baldrick dove under the bed.

I sat on the toilet and cracked open the cassettes. I gripped handfuls of tape, pulling it out like it was a cheap weave in a reality-TV catfight. I tore up
Rent,
the Smiths, Devin Townsend, the Shins. I smashed CDs into shivs on the edge of the bathtub.
Hardcore Pining, The Portable Saturday Night, The Wind
. It wasn't until I tasted the acrid black smoke in my lungs that I even noticed I was sobbing.

But there was one piece I hadn't torched, one item left dangling off the edge of the sink. Sid's blue toothbrush, the bristles worn and almost dry from when he'd brushed his teeth before leaving for work. I threw that in too. Everything must go.

Then finally, I cranked on the shower and extinguished the blaze. I gathered everything up into a garbage bag and dumped it in the basement of the building. I scrubbed the black out of the bathtub. I washed the tears off my face. And when I went to the drugstore, I left the windows open to air out the place and release all the memories lingering in the smoke above my head.

S
ID DIDN'T ASK
about the remaining burned smell. He didn't ask about the busted smoke detector. He didn't ask why Baldrick wouldn't come out from under the bed.

“Where's my toothbrush?” he asked, emerging from the bathroom with the toothpaste in one hand.

I got up and rummaged through my purse to retrieve the new one.

“What, did you clean the toilet with mine?” he joked, cracking open the package.

“Just thought you should have a new one,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, as though hours before, I hadn't almost burned my apartment to ashes, his toothbrush included. “New apartment, new girlfriend, new life, new toothbrush. Leave what's past in the past.”

“New girlfriend, huh?” he asked, his mouth full of toothpaste. “Who might that be?”

I swatted him on the arm. He ducked back into the bathroom to rinse and spit and wash his face. “This is real, right?” he asked after, holding my face with two long, delicate fingers. “Us?”

“It's as real as you want it to be,” I said. “You and I are both coming off a lot of weirdness and if you want to take things slow, I get it.”

“Why, Miss Bennett, are you trying to appeal to my chivalrous cowboy nature?” he teased.

“Perhaps I am, Mr. McNeill,” I replied in a honeysuckle drawl.

“Well, don't,” he murmured, kissing down my neck. “Not tonight.”

T
hings went back to normal pretty quickly. The charges were dropped against Bronco, and Cassie pled guilty to KitKat's murder, sparing us all the stress of a trial. I wondered if George had really told his wife all about his affair with KitKat, if she left him, if he was okay. But I knew better than to call him. He, like Gabe and William and Catch, was a man better left in my past.

Three weeks went by. Sid and I formally announced ourselves as a couple at a party Natalie threw to celebrate the launch of the KitKat Memorial Scholarship. No one was surprised. But the morning after the party, I woke up after Sid had gone to work and found a box of Swiss Colony petit fours and a mix tape stuck in my coffee cup on the kitchen counter. Except it wasn't a mix tape; it was just a rubber case that looked like a cassette, slipped onto my phone, with a hot-pink sticky note attached that read “Play Me.”

I smiled and cued up the
New Toothbrush
playlist to track one, the Vapors' “Waiting for the Weekend.”

There are bands that are so precious to the listener that their songs aren't given away lightly. These songs are held close, the listener waiting until he or she finds the perfect person to deliver
them to. When you assign a track to a lover, that track will remain attached to that person forever. I was never going to exorcise Bon Jovi's “I Am” from Catch, and Sid was risking forever entangling his precious Vapors with me, the way all the grand lovers before him wound their hearts in ninety-minute bursts of magnetic and digital hope.

I spent the rest of the morning on the couch, listening to his mix and eating the tiny cakes. I didn't even get coffee. I just sat there in love, with Baldrick at my side, as everything Sid had never said played: Depeche Mode, “World in My Eyes”; Tenpole Tudor, “Love and Food”; Huey Lewis and the News, “Stuck with You”; Cyndi Lauper, “I Drove All Night”; Sting, “Fields of Gold.” He even put on Hall and Oates' “You Make My Dreams,” and I laughed, singing along with the “hoo hoo” parts like the Oates that I was.

My phone rang. “Hello, dear,” came my grandmother's melodic lilt. “We got home late last night and I'm just getting settled. How are you?”

“It's been a crazy few months,” I said. That didn't even begin to cover it. “How was Prague?”

“Prague was beautiful, Paris was beautiful, Dubai was beautiful,” she gushed. “I have so many photos to show you. Can we get together for lunch?”

W
HEN
I
WAS
eight, our homework was to write a paragraph on what we wanted to be when we grew up. I'd written that I wanted to be like my grandmother, and, sitting across the café table from her as she scrolled through photo after photo on her tablet, I still felt the same way. She somehow seemed younger than when she'd left. She joked that she'd gotten a facelift in France, but I knew better—that radiance was the result of a life lived with joy. She'd never let the fact that her husband died young and suddenly sink her spirits. She'd surrounded herself with friends and art, took risks, and savored her days. You can't bottle that, although some
one had tried—among the many gifts she brought me, silk scarves and perfume and a hand-painted T-shirt from Tokyo, she'd filled a bag with French creams and cosmetics.

“Not that you need them,” she said. “But I thought you deserved a little pampering for that pretty skin of yours. Now, tell me, how are you enjoying the apartment?”

“I love it,” I said. “It's a great neighborhood; I've made a lot of friends.”

“I'm delighted to hear that,” she said. “You are welcome to stay as long as you'd like. We'll work something out with the landlord to get you on the lease, but I don't want you to worry about that right now. That's Royale's bailiwick.”

I got out of my chair and hugged her. “Thank you,” I breathed. “Thank you!” There weren't other words. I couldn't wait to tell Sid.

She squeezed me tight. “You are very welcome, my dear,” she said with a warm smile. “Just assure me you won't change the locks before I've had a chance to gather up my things!”

I
LISTENED TO
Sid's mix again on the subway, smiling like I'd eaten a fistful of Molly. And when he got home, I had fajitas cooking in our cast-iron skillet and the Vapors record propped up on his plate. It didn't matter that I had bought it while out with Cassie. It wasn't a memento of my cracking KitKat's case. It was a gift, one I knew he would adore.

He grinned and kissed me and put it on the stereo. “It does sound better on vinyl,” he agreed.

“Sounded pretty good this morning,” I said, holding up my phone.

There isn't a better feeling in the world—not an orgasm, not a first kiss, not even that glorious soaring sensation you get when those first few notes of a new song pierce your chest and fill your whole body with absolute bliss—than acknowledgment that your mix tape was not only received and played, but enjoyed. It's a
dance of sorts, balancing songs you think the listener will love while trying to say everything that otherwise dries up in your throat before you can get out the words. The way Sid smiled at me, his fresh-peach lips parting in a grin and a breath held in his chest, I knew that he must have been feeling that wonderful relief.

“I've been carrying that mix around for a month,” he began. “That night at Natalie's gallery party, when you got up on that stage, I couldn't stand the fact that you weren't singing exclusively for me. I'd had a couple drinks on an empty stomach and when you started singing, all that cheer turned to this, this irrational
thing
in the pit of my soul. I just . . . left. The whole way home I just wanted to kick trash cans, and when I got back to the apartment I poured another drink, sat on the edge of my bed, and bawled my damn eyes out. I made that mix the next morning on the subway.”

I traced my fingers down his cheek and he held my palm against his face. “Why didn't you ever say anything?” I murmured.

“Because I thought I was in love with a stripper,” he said. “Because what I felt for you wasn't giddy or jittery, the way love feels when you're a teenager. What I felt when you started singing was something so much deeper, something that hurt. And the only thing I could think to do was start putting together this playlist in hopes that maybe one day I'd get enough courage to give it to you. It didn't even have a title until this morning.”

For a moment I thought about telling him that I
had
been singing for him, that there had only ever been him. William and Jeremy and Catch had all been vapor. Instead, I just kissed him. There were words, sure, maybe even songs. In my head, I began composing a response, a way to tell him that I felt the same way. Tom Waits, “Little Trip to Heaven (On the Wings of Your Love)”; Ryan Adams, “My Winding Wheel”; Duran Duran, “Last Chance on the Stairway”; Warren Zevon, “Searching for a Heart.”

And then I stopped. “There isn't a song in the world that can tell you that I love you,” I said, taking his hands. “I'll just have to say it myself.”

T
o my beloved husband, Ian, who has cherished and supported me from the moment we met, filling my life with art and happiness.

To my sisters, Hilary, Laura, Shaun, and Beth, the first and most loyal of my champions. And to my nieces, Lucy, Melody, Rachel, and Josie, and my nephews, Max and Jacob, the next generation of storytellers.

To Matthew, my writing partner and BFF, whom I trust more than anyone.

To my dearest friends and fellow writers. I could write a whole other book just explaining why and how much I love each of you. And many thanks to my agent, Jim McCarthy, and to my editor, Chelsey Emmelhainz, who have been two of the most brilliant and nurturing people I have ever had the honor of working with.

And lastly, to Jason. He knows why.

LIBBY CUDMORE
worked at video stores, bookstores, and temp agencies before settling down in upstate New York to write. Her short stories have appeared in
PANK, The Stoneslide Corrective, The Big Click,
and
Big Lucks
.
The Big Rewind
is her first novel.

www.libbycudmore.com

@LibbyCudmore

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