Chapter Twenty-Three
Braxton
“It was kind of you to give me another chance to go out with you,” I told Jaimie. “I didn’t realize you were so upset.”
“Well, I couldn’t stay away,” she replied. “And maybe that’s my problem.”
It was Sunday night. We had gone to one of those eighties-themed restaurants with a video arcade and waiters with permed hair who rollerbladed through the dining area. A jukebox by the door was playing “Come On, Eileen” while a couple kids who were too young to have been born in the nineties, let alone the eighties, flailed their arms wildly. We had split a spinach artichoke dip served in a bread bowl while we waited for our pastas and salads.
I had gotten an attack of nerves that night while I was dressing. At first, I had wanted to wear a black button-down, but the moment I put it on, the cat leaped on it and began kneading it with his feet as if looking for a place to lie down. I let him have it. In the end, I had gone with a pair of brown corduroys and my favorite gray marl jacket, and stood analyzing myself uncertainly in the mirror while the cat napped in the corner of my bed.
“What do you think, Winston?” I asked him as I fluffed my hair with a comb. “Are the corduroys too much?”
But Winston didn’t answer; he lay purring contentedly, apparently lost in dreams.
It had been overcast all day. By the time I finished dressing, the sky was graying ominously and the wind smelled of rain. I scrambled to pick up Jaimie before the storm hit, only going a few miles over the speed limit, and made it to her house about five minutes ahead of schedule. She emerged from the house wearing a purple fleece jacket open at the top to reveal just a hint of cleavage and a pair of ripped jeans. She looked irresistibly sexy, and I was inclined to make out with her right then. But alas, I could not.
“We’d better get going,” she said as she climbed into the car. “I always get nervous being on the road when it rains—like, for real. I panic.”
“Well, if you’d rather stay here…”
She shook her head. “We should be good as long as we leave right now. The movies can wait until after we get back.”
“Are we really going to watch all of them tonight?”
“Oh, no! The ideal way to watch them is nine years between each movie, but we can probably manage one per week.”
“It’s nice that you think we’ll still be seeing each other in two weeks.”
Jaimie gave me an inquisitive look. “And you don’t?”
“I didn’t say that,” I said with a laugh. “It’s just encouraging, after all the things I’ve done.”
Jaimie smiled as she buckled her seat belt. By the time we reached the restaurant, it had begun raining. Rain hammered against the windows, and lightning streaked above the shopping center, startling a flock of grackles perched on a power line.
“I love it,” said Jaimie, reaching for the spinach dip. “See, I don’t mind if it’s raining outside as long as I’m safely inside.”
“What did you mean,” I asked her, “when you said, “‘Maybe that’s my problem?’”
It took Jaimie a moment to remember the context. “I was just teasing. Just having a little fun at my own expense.”
“You sounded pretty serious.”
Jaimie shrugged her slender shoulders. “I mean, maybe I was. It wouldn’t be funny if there wasn’t some truth to it.” When I went on staring at her curiously, she added, “It wasn’t a knock against you, honest.”
“You sure? Because it sure sounded like it.”
She made a sour face, full of regret. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. I just wanted to know what you meant.” I couldn’t help feeling that she was avoiding the question.
“I was poking fun at myself more than anything.” She shut her eyes for a moment as if praying. “When I was in high school, I made the mistake of going out with a boy who wasn’t exactly good for me. And even after I found out, I still loved him. I couldn’t help it.”
“Well, I think everyone has at least one bad relationship in their past,” I replied. “Especially if you start dating when you’re younger—when you’re still figuring out what you want.”
Jaimie grimaced uncertainly. “I don’t know if I’d say this was normal. It was pretty bad.”
“Tell me.”
Just then, the waiter rollerbladed over with our orders. Jaimie had ordered bow-tie pasta with a Caesar salad, and I had ordered a classic pasta salad with cubes of cheese, pepperoni, and tri-colored rotini. It was the type of meal my mom used to make when she was pressed for time, even into the late aughts.
The jukebox was now playing a gloomy The Smiths song, and the rain continued to blur the windows. While we were eating, Jaimie told me her story.
“My freshman year of high school I met this boy. His name was Daniel—Daniel Mills—and he sat behind me in English class our second semester. And I liked him because we were the only two who ever seemed to do the reading, and because he was hilariously snarky. He would sit behind me whispering sly comments, and I would try hard not to laugh. Somehow I was always the one who got in trouble.
“I think he was my first serious crush on a boy. It took me a while to admit that I liked him because I was proud and stubborn and thought I was too good for boys. But he used to walk me to class even when his classes were on the other side of campus, and he was always immaculately dressed in Wranglers with pearl snaps. I knew he didn’t come from a wealthy family, but he took the time to iron his shirts every night by hand, and for some reason, that meant a lot to me.”
“Sounds like a keeper,” I replied.
Jaimie raised her brows. “Yeah, you would think.” She told me about making out with him at summer camp and how her parents had forbidden them from being together. “But of course they couldn’t stop us from being in the same classes, or signing up for the same extracurriculars. First semester sophomore year, I found out he had signed up for newspaper and quietly changed my schedule so I could be in it. We started seeing a lot more of each other because we had to stay late at the school night after night.
“By that point, he was learning to drive, and he still wasn’t particularly good at it. He used to take me out in his parents’ ’73 Camaro, out on the back roads where you could do ninety and not get in trouble and not have to worry about hitting anything except maybe a stray deer. He was at the age where he still seemed to think he was immortal. And of course I would panic and yell at him to slow down, and he would just laugh and place a hand on my knee and say, ‘Jaimie, life isn’t going to slow down. You have to be ready.’ And then, to make it up to me, he would take me out and buy me gelato.”
“And your parents never suspected?” I asked.
She shook her head. “They thought I was up at the school—which, most of the time, I was.”
“I’m honestly kind of surprised you didn’t end up with this guy. It sounds like you really liked him.” Like him, I wanted to say.
“I mean, yeah.” Jaimie brushed a stray hair out of her face. “By the fall of our senior year, we were pretty deeply in love. It had gotten to the point where we were talking about getting married, maybe right out of high school. I was pushing for a summer wedding, but he seemed reluctant, I assumed because he wanted me to finish my education before we started a family. He had always encouraged me never to let him get in the way of my dreams. And I told him, ‘Daniel, you are my dream…’
“I think it’s fair to say I wasn’t expecting things to end up the way they did. One night in late November—it was just after Thanksgiving, which I had spent in my grandparents’ loft in Minnesota, missing him terribly—I got a call from Ren.”
“You knew Ren?”
Jaimie nodded. “She had transferred in the year before, and we were already becoming best friends. Sometimes she would call me just to chat, and that night I didn’t feel like talking, so I just let it go to voicemail. But she kept calling, and I picked up on the third call. She didn’t sound happy, and I could tell right away there was something wrong. She said, and I’ll never forget this, ‘Jaimie, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Daniel’s been in a bad accident. They don’t think he’s going to make it.’
Fighting back tears, Jaimie said, “And, of course, I rushed to the hospital, but by then it was too late. He was dead, and I never even had the chance to say goodbye. It was so sudden, just—a man’s life could be erased in a second. I don’t think I had any idea, until that happened, how swift and how…final, death could be.
“But he was a reckless driver, and I had always known something like that could happen. It wasn’t a total shock. What was more surprising were the things I started finding out about him in the weeks right after his death.”
“Oh, man. What sort of things?”
“Well, he wasn’t alone in the car when he died. There was a girl with him, a girl named Susan that I knew from school. She was rushed to the hospital but escaped with only minor injuries, but I came to find out that she and Daniel had been seeing each other on and off, and that the reason they were in the car together was because he was taking her to the movies. I hadn’t even known he was back in town—as far as I knew, he had gone to Pittsburgh for Thanksgiving—so this came as a complete shock.” She hesitated, then added with an effort, “It was almost like he didn’t even want to see me.
“And she wasn’t even the only girl he had been seeing! He had been with at least four girls, and those are just the ones I found about. Of course, I knew he had a problem with self-control—he had talked me into sleeping with him, maybe before I was really ready—but I thought it was limited to me. I assumed he just really liked me. No, he loved women and fast cars a little more than was healthy, and in the end, it caught up to him. Ren even came to me later and confessed that he had propositioned her, but that she had told him no and asked him never to approach her again.”
“Why didn’t Ren tell you sooner?” I asked. “Seems like that might’ve saved you some heartache.”
Jaimie frowned thoughtfully. “I think Ren was scared. Because she knew how much I loved this guy and she didn’t want to be the one to break up our relationship. She worried that I would never forgive her if she caused a fight that ended up leading to the end of our relationship. So she sat on it for a few weeks, not sure what to do. And toward the end, I knew, I could sense that she didn’t like him, but she wouldn’t tell me why. It was a mystery to me, up until the moment he was laid in the ground and the secrets started spilling out.”
By now, it was totally dark outside, and the rain had made an opaque fog on the windows. The dancing teens, having worn themselves out, sat in a booth toward the back of the room quietly scanning their phones.
“And was he the last man you ever dated?” I asked.
“He was. He was the last man I had any interest in dating. Worse than losing him was the thought that maybe I couldn’t trust anyone, that even the nicest guy who loved you and wanted to marry you was a liar and manipulator. He had used me, and he had used a lot of other girls. When I thought back over the moments of intimacy that we had shared, I wondered whether it had even mattered to him. Or if he just saw me as another body to be exploited. It was like losing him twice.”
“I see.” I did see—more than she probably guessed.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
I wiped at my mouth. “It just makes sense to me now, the way you reacted last weekend. The way you panicked. I think I would panic, too, if I had gone through all that and felt like I was just being used again.”
Jaimie nodded with an air of faint surprise. It seemed the idea was just occurring to her for the first time. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “Yeah, that’s exactly right.”
A silence fell over the table in which Jaimie stared sadly down at her plate. “I know that’s a lot for a first date. I guess I kind of killed the vibe, didn’t I?”
I shrugged. “Maybe I like talking about real things.”
“Do you really?”
“I mean, I’ve been out with girls who could never talk about anything serious. I like you because you don’t act like someone who’s been sheltered from the world all her life. You’ve confronted death. I could sense that even before you told me your story, back when we were sitting at the bar.”
“How could you tell?” She didn’t sound accusing, just curious.
“Because you were very quiet and serious, and serious, quiet people have usually suffered some misfortune or been kicked around by life. It was—well, it was refreshing to talk to someone who was so wise and thoughtful.”
“I don’t feel wise,” said Jaimie. “I feel like an idiot, still, to this day, for having trusted him. If I had listened to my parents, none of this would have happened, and I wouldn’t have gotten my heart broken.”
“But you learned from that experience. It’s hard to imagine you being anything like what you are without it.”
“Yeah. It was like being broken into a thousand shards and slowly having to piece myself back together.” She drew in a deep breath. “Ren says I haven’t dated anyone else because I’m afraid, and I think she’s probably right. If I hadn’t been drinking this weekend, I never would’ve had the courage to hook up with you.”
“Sorry that didn’t turn out so well,” I muttered.
She waved a dismissive napkin at me. “I’m sorry I reacted the way I did. When it was over, and I was cleaning myself up, all I could think was, ‘I’m doing it again. I’m just a—a cum dumpster.’ And this time I didn’t have even the emotional security of a loving relationship. I had been dating Daniel for a while, in secret, before we finally slept together. Whereas I had just learned your name like, an hour before.”
We finished eating in thoughtful silence. I paid for our meal, and we stepped out of the restaurant into the cold rain. I told Jaimie to wait under the awning while I ran to get my car, but she insisted on running alongside me and reached it before I did.
She was quiet for most of the way back to her house, staring through the rain-lashed windows at the dark streets. I sat pondering the story she had told over dinner and wishing there was some way I could make up to her for all the pain of the past. Where others had been deceitful, I wanted to be honest and forthright; where others had used her, I wanted to be selfless and giving.
We pulled up in front of the house. A single lamp glowed over the driveway in a blur of mist. A tawny cat stood at the window meowing softly, waiting for her to come inside.
“That’s Gina,” said Jaimie with an affectionate look. “She thinks she’s people.”
She climbed out of the car and ran to the front door, pulling her keys out of her purse. I followed close behind, removing my boots as I reached the porch and setting them down near the front door where they could dry.
By the time I stepped inside, Jaimie had just finished feeding the cat and was headed toward the entertainment center in the living room.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Boyhood,” she said, “or Dazed and Confused…”
“I’ve seen that one,” I said. “I loved it.”
“It’s the same director. He’s brilliant at creating these spontaneous, seemingly unscripted moments.”
While she was putting the movie in the DVD player, I hovered over her shyly. “Hey.”
Jaimie glanced up at me, perplexed. “Hey, what’s up?”
I suddenly felt stupid and over-large in my white socks. “Listen, if you don’t want to do anything physical tonight, that’s totally fine. I mean it. I want to go at a pace that you’re comfortable with, and I don’t want you to think I’m here just to enjoy your body. Not that you don’t have an amazing body—”
Jaimie left the DVD tray sitting open and rose to her feet.
“You really mean that?”
I nodded, hoping my sincerity shone in my eyes.
“Maybe the movie can wait for a bit,” she said, and pulled me into a hug.