The Reunion

When I hear about the festival and learn that he’ll be there, something begins to happen. I find myself spending too much time in front of the mirror, trying to see what he will see; too much time imagining what he looks like now. It’s been fifteen years since we last saw each other, and twenty-five years since we last made love...

I confess I’m anxious to see him, to see if time has knocked him around a bit, to see if his handsome has faded, his seriousness lightened, his sometimes awkward and slightly effeminate way of moving has been replaced by something more definite, more confident, now that he’s 49.

So girls like me have no business falling in love with dark, handsome musicians. Why? Because we spend most of the relationship feeling grateful that someone like them could care about someone like us. A small town girl in her not-quite-right clothes, moved alone to the “city.” Hanging with the in-crowd—with an albatross of insecurity joyriding on my back. Watching all those pretty girls in their skin-tight clothes and perky new breasts, clustered around his side of the stage.

Fell. In. Love. I did. Not the half-portion kind of love. Super-size love. The Grand Slam. A take-my-head-off-my-shoulders-and-deposit-it-on-a-shelf-‘cause-I’m-not-going-to-be-using-it kind of love.

He loved me, too—regular size. Side salad size.

Really what he loved most was me not loving anyone else but him—while he loved any girl who had an itch between her legs. Turns out, there were hundreds of them looking to get scratched. But what did I know about that? Me sitting doe-eyed in front of a weary gynecologist, who had to write out a script each time I came in. I understood that it was a sexually transmitted disease, but I never followed the logic of how such a thing came to be. Rachel the Pathetic, holding on to her dirty love.

But nothing lasts forever, not even ignorance. Mine eventually helped along by someone smart enough to shake me by the shoulders on a rainy afternoon. What the hell’s wrong with you? she’d said, half nuts with it all.

But once I got it, I was done. D-o-n-e. Oh, the tears (his, not mine); the flowers; the gifts; the waiting on the front steps of my apartment; the following me in his car (me discovering him behind me whenever I stopped at a light and happened to glance in my rearview mirror); the phone calls; the showing up at my job; the unannounced middle-of-the-night visits to my apartment to plead his case and to check to see if someone else was there; the phone call in which he threatened to kill me on Christmas Eve; and eventually jumping my new boyfriend in a bar and knocking him over the head with a beer.

The man was like a dog with a bone.

Funny how people only want you after you realize you no longer want them…

Then today… I am standing beside an outdoor stage on a hot and muggy evening in the dead of summer, back “home” in that rusty Upstate town. Got my posse of old girlfriends, and my 5-year-old son. Roadies move around us, adjusting cords, changing guitar strings, setting things up and taking things down. Aging musicians in varying degrees of hair loss arrive with their gear.

And suddenly—a tap on my shoulder—he’s there. He smiles the pursed lip smile that I remember. We embrace. Not too long, but enough for me to smell him, feel the roughness of a threatening beard against my cheek, his chest against mine. We stand back and examine each other: there’s a sprinkle of gray at his temples and places on his face where life has landed a few good punches. But other than that, the years have been kind. Very kind. And suddenly I’m remembering things I have no business remembering…

And of course I wonder what he finds when he looks at me. The slow erosion over time rarely noticed by the daily observer—me and my mirror—but I’m laid out tonight on a pretty lace doily. And of course he says nothing.

We talk. I introduce him to my son—who he studies with an intensity that surprises me. He talks to my son, getting down on his knees to engage him eye to eye. When he stands up and adjusts the legs of his jeans, he tells me my son looks exactly like me.

Afterwards it’s dark. My little guy has gone home with his aunt. The girlfriends have yawned their way into an early night. So I’m alone on a table they’ve set up behind the stage. He leans his guitar case against the table and sits down beside me. We swing our legs. It’s hot. He sweats from the heat of the night and the stage lights that were just on him. I tell him it was a good show. He nods. Touches my hand in one quick, awkward gesture.

It’s good to see you, he says, and we both look away.

The next band begins to play, the melody and thud of the kick drum a bit faded back here. He tells me that his mother died last year, that he took care of her at the end. That he was grateful to be able to have done that. I can see in the muscles of his jaw how much this pains him to say.

But, he says, on a much lighter note, look at this. And out comes the cell phone, which he opens to reveal a picture of a dark haired little girl holding a blanket.

My daughter, he says. Ella.

I lean in to get a closer look, but I can see nothing other than the pure unfiltered white flash of pain. I fold my arms across my belly where the blow has just landed. His daughter?

That’s her binkie, he says, and his face and smile and eyes are lit up. Radiant. Head on crazy about the little girl staring back at us from the palm of his hand. With our little girl flushed away that hot June day twenty six years ago. Me on the table and that awful doctor telling me to scooch down. For nearly a year I heard her cries from the gutter in my dreams at night. I knew it was a girl, felt it deep down, even though it was never confirmed.

He continues on about his daughter, yet I hear nothing but the roar of my own raw pain, which shocks me, even as I reel from it. I thought I had put this to rest years ago—especially after my beautiful little boy came squalling into the world, red, fierce, demanding. Mine.

Finally the cell phone snaps shut, and Ella disappears. Replaced by our own little girl. Our own unwanted little girl who is making her presence known. I search his face for her imprint, her touch. I can feel the desperation in my eyes.

What? he says as I look at him.

I open my mouth to answer, but our nameless little girl sits silently, heavily on my tongue. Unmoving, unmovable. There to make sure that I never forget her.

***