The reminders, p.12
The Reminders, page 12
I guess Mom is just like Sydney because Sydney was a future person and it seems like Mom is also a future person because she loves to plan everything out before it happens. I wonder if that’s why they were such good friends.
“Do you miss him?” I ask.
“Who?”
“Sydney.”
She puts her smoothie on the table even though there’s a lot left. I know remembering hurts, just like Gavin says, but he and I both know that not remembering is even worse.
“Of course I miss him,” Mom says. “I miss him a lot.”
But she hasn’t been crying lately, not like when it first happened. If she ever starts to forget him, our song can remind her. “Our song is about him. Gavin is writing the lyrics.”
She thinks about this for a while. “I’m glad he’s writing again. I wish you could’ve seen him and your father play back in college. They were pretty amazing to watch.”
It annoys me that Mom gets to watch those memories but I don’t.
“How is Gavin?” she asks. “Does he seem like he’s doing okay?”
I’m only just getting to know him, so I don’t know the way he’s supposed to be. “He was pretty shy at first, and quiet, but he’s not like that as much anymore.”
“I can’t imagine,” Mom says. “Sydney was an important part of my life, but I only saw him once a year at the most. But Gavin…” Mom makes a whoosh sound like she’s blowing out a candle on a birthday cake except she doesn’t look like she’s having any fun.
“How come you and Dad never had another baby?” I ask.
She turns her head to me. “Where did that come from?”
“Me and Gavin were talking and I told him I wanted a sister or brother and he asked me if you and Dad ever wanted to have another baby.”
Mom is sitting up straight now. “And what did you tell him?”
“I said yes, you guys talk about it, but I didn’t think you’d ever actually do it.”
“Did he say anything else? Anything about becoming a father?”
“No,” I say, and I’m not sure why she’s asking. But then I remember. “Well, the woman in New York did say that Sydney and Gavin were going to start a family. Is that what you mean?”
Mom leans in. “What woman?”
“The woman who showed Gavin the apartment.”
She picks up her smoothie cup, but she doesn’t drink it. Actually, she’s not doing anything right now. She’s frozen.
“Mom.”
Her eyes are aimed at me, but it’s like she doesn’t know what she’s looking at. And then she says, “Sorry,” and she takes a very slow sip of her smoothie. “I just remembered, I have to tell your father something.”
She doesn’t say what it is and that’s okay, because she just reminded me that I have my own thing I need to talk to Dad about when he gets home later tonight. Today is Thursday, which means we’re only two days away from the weekend and that’s when Dad said he would record our song for the contest and I have to make sure he’s not going to forget.
This may be one of the last times we ever record in his studio. I remember when Dad and I took out a bunch of keyboards and we used our fingers and toes to play eight different C notes all at once and when I asked Dad why we were doing it he said, “To see how it sounds.” And I remember the day he taught me how to tune a snare drum by tightening and loosening those little metal knobs and I accidentally tuned the drum so low that it started to growl and that made me laugh so hard that I swallowed my gum.
Mom should be even more upset than I am about the studio closing because she has even more memories of Dad’s music than I do. She’s been watching Dad play ever since college. I look over at Mom and she’s frozen again and doing something I’ve never seen her do before: it’s her very own rock-star look. She’s looking out the window, but she’s not paying any attention to what her eyes are seeing. Actually, she’s staring so hard it’s almost like she forgot how to blink.
18
I’m deep in a digital daze—answering e-mails and skimming a heavy run of Twitter comments, the majority of which are complimentary, but a few contain alarming vitriol about everything from my lack of acting skills to my sinful sexual proclivities—when Paige throws open my door.
“Hello,” I say, taken aback by the sudden intrusion.
“Sorry,” she says. “I should’ve knocked.”
I didn’t see much of her yesterday. She took Joan to a doctor’s appointment in the morning and then to an afternoon playdate that stretched into dinner. Without Paige here to care for me, I returned to my bachelor ways. I ended up eating Chinese takeout in bed while streaming a movie on my phone.
After scanning my unkempt room, Paige locks eyes with me. “Get dressed. You’re with me today.”
We’ve been cruising down the turnpike for thirty minutes now (the same distance would’ve taken twice as long back home on the 110). Paige won’t tell me where we’re going, but I figure it out as soon as she veers off at exit 9. We’re going back to college.
Finding a spot to park on the New Brunswick campus is even harder than it was fifteen years ago. We walk down College Avenue toward the parking lot across from Voorhees Mall.
It’s clear from our trajectory, and the oily smell in the air, that Paige and I are about to dine at the Rutgers food mecca known as the grease trucks. It’s an outdoor cluster of permanently parked vehicles serving exactly the kind of fare you’d expect: food normally devoured by drunk students at two in the morning. Today it will be consumed by us at the embarrassingly adult hour of eleven thirty in the morning.
“I can’t believe these are still here,” I say, salivating.
“I’ve dreamed of this day for so long,” Paige says, possibly drooling.
“You’ve never been back?”
“Nope,” Paige says. “First time since we graduated.”
“I know exactly what I’m getting.”
She turns to me, wild with hunger. “Me too.”
We sit on the curb with our massive sandwiches, just like we did all those years ago. A Fat Darrell for me and a Fat Sal for her. There can be no doubt—we’ll be sick if we finish these sandwiches. Also true—we will finish them.
“This was a brilliant idea,” I say.
She nods proudly. “Thank you.”
Summer students pass by looking way too young to be attending college. Paige and I follow their movements, inspecting their clothes and affects.
“Everyone always talks about college being the best years of your life,” Paige says. “Look at these kids. Can that really be true?”
I abandon any pretense of class and talk through the food in my mouth. “It wasn’t true for me. But I imagine it’s different for you.”
“Why?”
I wipe my face with a too-thin napkin. “Because you met Ollie here.”
She lowers her sandwich, waits until she’s finished chewing. “Yes, but I still wouldn’t want to come back to this. My friends talk about it like they’d return in a second, but they forget that we were poor, we had nothing, we knew nothing. I’ve done that already. I’m ready to be a grown-up.”
She chomps down, gazes across the avenue at the students in the quad. Clearly there’s a disconnect between what I see when I look at Paige and what she sees in the mirror. Even back in college, she seemed far more mature than the rest of us. Always focused and responsible, acing all her classes, somehow still able to make good decisions even while impaired and slurring her speech. And now she’s a married homeowner with a kid and a steady career. If that’s not a grown-up, what is?
And it’s an especially odd comment for her to make while she’s sitting on a curb, a girlish barrette in her hair, stuffing her mouth with a five-dollar sandwich packed with chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, and French fries while the rest of society is stuck at work. In other words, while she’s behaving like a child.
Then again, considering the satisfaction on her face, maybe that’s her point. Being a grown-up isn’t a matter of age or responsibility. For Paige, it’s finally having the power to do whatever the hell she wants.
“Save some room,” she says. “We’re going to Thomas Sweet next.”
“What makes their chocolate chip cookie-dough ice cream so special,” Paige says, “is that instead of just throwing a few chunks of cookie dough into vanilla ice cream, the ice cream itself is cookie dough.”
We’re at Thomas Sweet sharing a double scoop of what Paige claims is unequivocally the best ice cream in the world. What I assume has to be hyperbolic nostalgia becomes more plausible once I get my first taste. It’s damn good.
The fact that I have zero appetite left doesn’t stop me from sliding more ice cream onto my plastic spoon. It’s been a carefree day of gluttony so far, but no matter how much I stuff in my belly, I can’t fill the pit inside. “You were right.”
“About what?” Paige wonders.
“Sydney was looking at properties in New York. But not in January; in February. I met with his broker. She mentioned that he was with a photographer. Some woman.”
I hear a faint hmm. Not sure if it’s in response to me or the ice cream.
“That’s all I have so far,” I say, putting down my spoon. “I still don’t know if he actually came back in April. Or why he told me he was working when he wasn’t. Or why he lied about taking you out for your birthday.”
She nods, swallowing. “So what do you think it all means?”
“Obviously, I hate to think that there could’ve been someone else.”
She places her spoon on the napkin with mine.
“Listen,” she says, checking the corners of her mouth for cookie-dough remnants. “You came all this way, back home, finally, and I’ve already seen such a change in you from when you first got here. I’d hate for this to take you backward. Trust me, what you and Sydney had was real and pure and special. You never once had reason to be suspicious the entire time you were together, right? Don’t start doubting him now.”
It sounds fair and logical and caring. It’s probably even true. But I can’t change how I feel. People don’t lie because everything is fine and dandy. They lie because telling the truth is too hard. And though our relationship appeared to be solid, it seems even the best and most dedicated couples experience occasional periods of doubt. A one-night tryst I might be able to look past, but the thought of an ongoing relationship with repeated trips back and forth is a scenario that’s just too painful to fathom.
“Can I ask you something?” Paige says.
Something in the way she says it, I know playtime is over.
“What took you so long to come back? I mean, we were all so close in college. You were a groomsman at our wedding. Then you just vanished, zipped off to California, changed your name. How come you never wanted to visit?”
I wasn’t expecting to have to deal with this now, but I knew it was coming eventually. “It’s not that. I wanted to.”
I can tell from her face that it’s going to take more than that. There’s a stubbornness in her stare that reminds me of Joan. I’m suddenly very thirsty, but there’s no water at the ready.
“Look, I had a really tough time in Los Angeles at first, leaving my sister and mother, being out there alone. I had to learn to push certain thoughts out of my head. I had to give myself permission to move on and not look back. I’m not saying it’s right. It’s just what I needed to do.”
She’s gearing up for a response, but I’m not finished.
“Then I came home for Veronica’s graduation. She was just a little girl when I left and now she was this woman. My mother looked so much older, and all the guilt I felt about leaving came back, but this time it was even worse than before. It was hard on them, too, having me in their life again for this one brief moment. I remember flying back to California, telling myself I probably shouldn’t go home again. It was just easier that way.”
She winces at my words. “Thanks.”
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t about you guys. You know that.”
“But your family still visited you in California. You handled that okay, didn’t you?”
“For some reason, it didn’t affect me the same way. Something about being home.”
New Jersey had become synonymous with my father’s death and all that followed. I can sense the same thing happening now with Sydney and California. Yet another forbidden zone on my trauma map.
“I meant to come back eventually,” I say. “It’s just, the longer I waited, the harder it got.”
“You’re back now. Is it so bad?”
“I don’t know. No. But—”
“Listen to me. This stuff, whatever it is you have to push out of your head, you can’t just ignore all that, because it doesn’t go away. You have to deal with it eventually. There’s no other way.”
This sounds eerily familiar. “Did you and Sydney talk about this?”
“Of course,” Paige says. “I wanted to know where you’d been all these years.” Her face softens. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re here, even if it took a while. We just can’t have you setting any more fires, that’s all.” She smacks my arm playfully.
I meet her eyes, which are unyielding but not unkind. “I don’t care what you say. You’ve been a grown-up since the day I met you.”
I mean it as a joke, but she responds in a solemn manner. “I know,” she says, “just not in the way I want to be.”
Joan finds me on the studio couch and notices the notepad in my lap. “Are those lyrics?” she asks.
After spending the morning with Paige, I feel lucky to have an outlet for the tornado of emotions spinning inside of me. “Trying,” I say, underwhelmed by the progress I’ve made on the page. “How’s your day been so far?”
She strikes a foreboding bass note on the piano. “Harper’s mom took us to see a movie but I couldn’t concentrate. When it was over Harper wanted to talk about how ridiculous it was when the alien showed up, but I didn’t even know there was an alien. I guess I didn’t see that part.”
“It must not have been a good movie if you couldn’t concentrate.”
“No,” Joan says, staring down at the piano keys. “It’s not that. It happens with every movie. I’ll see something that makes me think of a memory and then I just go somewhere else.”
“It happens to me too.”
She plops down next to me. “Can I see what you wrote so far?”
Now that the song has taken on a clearer shape, I’ve become pickier about what I’m willing to add to it. Most of the words on my notepad are crossed out. “I don’t have much to show. I think I may need some inspiration. Do you think we could do another memory?”
“After this memory, we’ve got only one more left.”
“I know.”
Joan begins to tell me about Sydney’s visit in 2012. She starts on September 9. The following day is when she saw Syd in his Ted Baker suit.
“We’re in the courtyard,” Joan says. “Dad is standing in front of the barbecue. He’s dragged his studio speakers over to the back door so we can listen to music while we’re outside. I don’t know how many people are here but our courtyard is pretty crowded.”
“What is Sydney doing?” I ask, eager to see him again.
“Sydney is sitting next to me at the table. He says he brought me something from California. He reaches into his pocket and then he makes me guess what’s in his fist. I say, ‘Candy,’ and he says, ‘No,’ and I say, ‘Earrings,’ and he says, ‘No. Give up?’ And he opens his hand and it’s a bag of guitar picks and each guitar pick has my name on it. It’s definitely one of the top three presents I’ve ever gotten.”
Syd was a talented gift giver. He’d always get me something I’d never buy for myself, intuiting what I didn’t know I wanted or needed. One time it was a personalized book embosser. Another time a Santoku kitchen knife.
“Everyone’s eating burgers,” Joan says, “but Sydney is eating some type of rice thing. I’m eating watermelon, which Mom hasn’t brought outside yet, but I snuck a piece out of the downstairs fridge when she wasn’t looking.”
“What does he look like?”
She describes him: V-neck, shorts, sandals, eagle bracelet. But it’s all surface. She couldn’t have known that our relationship had progressed drastically since she had previously seen Sydney in 2010. We’d left Syd’s apartment in West Hollywood and bought a house together in Los Feliz. Talk about grown-up. It was the most adult thing I’d ever done and also one of the scariest. As big a commitment, I thought, as getting married. We didn’t have a bed yet, but we were so excited to move into our new house that we slept on blankets on the wood floor. Maybe that’s my favorite memory.
“The music on the speakers changes,” Joan says, “and I realize that Dad is playing a song that we recorded together last week. My face is turning red but I’m also very excited that everyone is hearing it. There’s no singing in our song, so no one knows whose song it is, but Dad gives me a wink and I think Sydney sees the wink because he says, ‘You must really like this song.’ And I say, ‘I do. It’s my song. I wrote it with my dad.’ And then instead of telling me how much he likes my song, Sydney looks at Dad and he says, ‘You have a really good father,’ and I say, ‘I know,’ and Sydney says, ‘I hope one day I’ll be a good father too,’ and I say, ‘I bet you will,’ and then Sydney says, ‘I’d like to keep my name alive,’ and when I hear that I’m really interested because I like when things stay alive and never die and that’s when Sydney tells me that he’s the last Brennett, but I don’t know what that means.”
Joan waits for me to explain. “It means that unless he had a child, he would be the last person to be born in his family. There would be no one else.”
