Feels Like the First Time (20 page)

Nearly three years passed between the day I said my last goodbye to Dawn and her 18
^th
birthday. I thought about her nearly every day with the same intensity as the day I said goodbye, but I had to get on with life. The obstacles I had with the opposite sex slowly evaporated, and I went out with a series of women. It was easier because I didn’t care. The less I cared, the easier it was to find women who would go out with me. A guy with a broken heart is a fixer-upper most women can’t resist.

I loved Dawn, and I knew no one would ever equal her in my life. I was confident our years of exile would pass and we would eventually be together. I still imagined that we would get married, have kids, and grow old together.

I decided not to go back to the University of Washington for spring quarter. It felt like that was too tied up with the future I had planned for Dawn and me. Even though she had never so much as stepped foot on the UW, it had felt like I carried her with me to every class. Just walking onto the campus again was painful.

Still, I had to do something with my life, so I enrolled in The Ron Bailie School of Broadcast, located at 2
^nd
and Denny in downtown Seattle. I graduated in February 1980. My first full-time gig in radio was at KHDN in Hardin, Montana, “The Zucchini Capital of the World.” It was every bit as exciting as the name suggested.

After I’d spent six months in Hardin, KHDN went broke. I ended up back in Seattle, which is where I was living during Christmas 1981. The economy was in the tank by then. Most of my family was unemployed and so broke that we didn’t have money to buy each other presents. Instead we agreed to re-gift items we already had, or give homemade gifts.

Dawn was set to turn eighteen two days after Christmas, and I would be released from the prison of waiting for her. I drove to Mossyrock on Christmas Eve. I brought the engagement ring that I had bought years before. I wanted her to know she had never been outside my heart.

I also brought a birthday present for Dawn. I talked a friend of mine, who specialized in calligraphy, into writing a phrase on heavy card stock. It read,

Let I, Who am a Part of God,

Find the Part of Me that Is a Part of You
.

I matted it so it was ready to hang on the wall. That’s how I felt when I was with her–like we created something sacred.

I hadn’t even seen a glimpse of Dawn next door by the time her birthday arrived. At 8 PM that night, Mom, Dad, Terri, Tommy and I were in the living room watching a movie. My eyes constantly strayed over to Dawn’s house. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I slipped into the kitchen. Even though it was still four hours until Dawn’s 18
^th
birthday, I couldn’t wait any longer. We had done the time for our crimes. I knew I could finally call her, after three years of waiting.

I had pictured this moment in my head thousands of times. It was finally here. My hand trembled as I picked up the phone. I dialed Dawn’s number from memory. Walt answered after a few rings.

“Walt, this is Shawn. Can I speak to Dawn please?”

He didn’t answer me. I heard the clunk of the receiver hitting a table. I thought of the anger and recriminations I heard the last time I spoke to Walt on the phone three years earlier. At least he didn’t scream at me before throwing the phone down this time. After a long wait, I heard Dawn’s voice.

“Hello?” Her voice was so tight and unnatural that I barely recognized it.

“Dawn, it’s Shawn.” I paused nervously and listened. There was no response. “I was wondering if you want to meet me out in the yard so we could talk.”

I had spent a lot of time thinking about exactly what I would say when I could finally talk to Dawn again. This seemed like the best choice. I liked the symmetry of meeting in the same spot where we had shared our first kiss and spent so many happy hours together. This all depended on one key element that I hadn’t considered; whether Dawn might want to talk to me.

“I don’t think so,” she said. Her voice was hollow, and I heard a sense of finality.

My heart broke.

“You don’t think so,” I repeated.

I heard her exhale, and the distant sound of TV in the background.

“Okay then. Bye.” I hung up. There wasn’t anything else to do. I felt the vinyl of Mom’s kitchen chair under me and realized I had sat down. I had been waiting for this moment for so long. Now that it had come and gone so fruitlessly, I didn’t know what to do.

I waited for my world to start spinning again. Without knowing where I was going, I was on my feet and moving. In the living room, the rest of my family was still watching the movie. I walked numbly back to my childhood bedroom and picked up my UW backpack with Dawn’s birthday present. Without telling anyone I was going, I slipped out the back door, walked out to my car and started it quietly.

I stared through the frozen windshield at Dawn’s room, waiting to see if the light would come on. It stayed dark. I felt like someone had knocked the wind out of me, and I wondered if she felt the same.

I slipped my car into reverse, backed onto Damron Road, and headed for Seattle. I replayed our conversation over and over in my head as I drove.

Somewhere between Centralia and Olympia, I realized I still had the little blue box with the engagement ring in my coat pocket. I rolled my window down and frigid air filled the car. I took one last look at the rings, framing them in my memory. I threw it as far out the window as I could. I was doing better than seventy miles per hour and never saw them again.

As 1982 wore on, I began to think that the cold December night when Dawn spurned me was some sort of mistake. Maybe I had caught her off guard, calling her out of the blue after three years.

By August, I was ready to try again. I drove to Mossyrock. Calling her out of the blue hadn’t worked out too well, so I thought I needed another plan. Eventually, I decided to send her flowers. I called a florist and ordered three roses to be delivered to her–one for each year we had been apart. I asked them to include a card that read, “I’m next door if you want to talk - Shawn.” My hope was that this time she would gather her thoughts before we talked, and maybe I’d get a different reaction.

I nervously watched the florist come and go at her front door. I fantasized about Dawn rushing across the yard and bounding up the steps like she used to do. But hours passed and nothing happened.

Finally, late that evening I heard my step-dad holler at me to come to the front door. I was hoping to see Dawn. Instead, it was Rick Johnson, a kid in Dawn’s class. He was holding the roses at his hip and looked pissed.

We stood staring at each other across the threshold of the front door. It took me a few moments to realize that Dawn had a boyfriend, and he was here to make a point. I walked outside to talk to Rick. He pushed the flowers in my chest.

“Look. I don’t want you bothering Dawn any more. She doesn’t want to see you.”

“Well, if that’s the way she feels, then I won’t try to talk to her any more. But, you know Dawn and I have a history together and there are some things I wanted to talk to her about. Still, if I had known she had a boyfriend, I never would have sent her the flowers. I don’t want to upset Dawn. Tell her I’ll never talk to her again if that’s what she wants.”

“I’m telling you to never talk to her again.”

He was getting more agitated and aggressive now. He wasn’t very big, but the last thing I wanted to do was get in a fight with Dawn’s boyfriend in my parents front yard.

“Will you just give her that message please? If she doesn’t want to talk to me, I’ll never bother her again.”

He didn’t answer me, but just shook his head, spit on the ground and walked away.

I kept my end of the bargain. I didn’t see Dawn again for twenty five years.
 

On January 5
^th
, 2007, I took the day off to drive to Longview and collect the rent on some duplexes I owned. It was the same thing I’d been doing the month before when I had run into Dawn at Bill & Bea’s. Collecting the rents was my excuse for the trip, but I was really hoping to see her again.

It was early afternoon when I passed through Centralia. I pulled hopefully into the Bill & Bea’s drive-thru lane, but I saw right away that Dawn wasn’t there. I recognized her daughter, Connie, and I think she recognized me, but neither of us said anything.

By the time I made it to Longview and collected the rents, it was getting late. When I pulled off at the last Centralia exit on the way back to Enumclaw, it was almost closing time at Bill & Bea’s. As soon as I pulled up to the drive-thru, I saw Dawn. My heart rate skyrocketed. Just like last time, it seemed to take each car in front of me forever to get their order.

When I finally pulled up to the window, I looked for a glimmer of recognition. Nothing. I grasped for something to say, hoping for something smooth or at least comprehensible. Instead, I thought back to our meeting a month earlier.

“You’re not going to freak out on me again, are you?” I asked. It wasn’t the best opening line.

“No,” she said coldly. “I’m over that now.”

Dawn can do so much damage to me with so few words. In 1981, when I asked to meet her in the yard, she said four words: “I don’t think so.” Tonight, it was “I’m over that now.”

“Can I take your order?” she asked. I chuckled nervously, hoping she was joking and this was her way of shrugging off her overreaction of the previous month.

She glared silently at me.

I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say, so I ordered a chicken sandwich that I knew I would never be able to eat. I watched as she helped a customer at the counter, smiling and being kind to him.

After a few minutes, she brought my order to the window, took my money, and handed me the bag with my order in it.

“It was great to see you again, Dawn.”

“You too.”

I knew she didn’t mean that in any way. She turned toward the counter and her other customers. I drove away blindly, certain I had blown it again, sure that had been my final opportunity. 

I closed the front door behind me, slipped my headphones on, and stepped off my front porch with Jenny leaping ahead of me. At home, she was never more than a few feet from me. At night, when I took her for a walk, she liked to run ahead of me, her feather-duster tail sweeping the air behind her. Jenny was originally for my girls when I brought her home from the pound, but everyone knew she was my dog.

That first day of June 2009 was unusually warm. The ten o’clock news said the high temperature was 83, and it was still warm outside. I worked up a sweat walking Jenny to the end of the street and back.

My malaise had only grown more pronounced over the previous three years. I was still unable to extricate myself from my unhappy marriage to Adinah. There had never been much intimacy in our marriage, but whatever little there had been was long since gone.

We had spent more than two years in counseling, but I had no intention of making progress. I was trying to find the most comfortable way I could to end the marriage so I could live peacefully alone. I had arranged a private session with our marriage counselor a few days earlier. After so many fruitless sessions, I finally told her the truth about how I felt about my marriage. At the end of that meeting, she said she didn’t need to struggle any more to save the marriage. Those few words lifted a massive weight off me.

Also, I was a real estate broker. It was a career that had afforded me a comfortable lifestyle for fifteen years. But since the real estate market crash in 2007, the joy had evaporated. In 2009, I earned less than half what I had made just three years earlier.

Most importantly, in the last six months I had lost the two people I was closest to. My nephew Tommy, who had shared so many lifetime adventures with me, passed away from liver failure in December. He was a lifelong alcoholic, and in the end, it caught up to him fast. He lapsed into a coma in California and died before I could get down to see him one last time.