Meet Me in Manhattan (True Vows) (16 page)

Each time was better than the previous time. Each time she
and Ted made love, she learned how to read and react to his
moves, how to adjust, how to take chances and trust that he
wouldn't let her fall. How to soar and how to land safely, cradled
in his arms.

Each time, she lay beside him afterward, her feet caught on the
door handle and her head cushioned by his arm, and thought,
How will I leave him? How can I?

She never gave voice to that question, and he never raised it
himself-until one night in mid-August, when her departure
date was within sight. She was snuggled up to him, her eyes
closed and her heartbeat gradually slowing as their bodies cooled,
when he said, "Marry me."

She flinched, her eyes popping open. "What are you, crazy?"

He didn't look crazy. He looked earnest and pensive. "I love
you, Erika. I want us to stay together. You don't have to go to
Colorado. You could stay here and go to Rutgers, or Princetonor, I don't know, there are so many colleges in the area. We could
get married and you could still-"

"I can't," she cut him off. Of course she could go to Rutgers or
Princeton ... but that wasn't part of her plan. Marriage wasn't
part of her plan. "We're just kids, Ted. We're too young to get
married."

"I will never love anyone the way I love you," he said, sounding even more earnest. His certainty scared her a little.

"We're too young," she repeated. "I can't even think about
marriage right now. You shouldn't be thinking about it, either."
He looked so hurt, she added, "If it's meant to be, we'll wind up
together."

"I know it's meant to be," he said.

"Then my going to Colorado isn't going to ruin anything.
We'll stay in touch and see each other on school breaks, and we'll
grow up a little." She cupped her hand over his cheek, trying to
coax a smile out of him. "Come on, Ted. You know we're too
young to be talking about marriage."

He didn't look persuaded, but at least he didn't argue anymore.

She should have been relieved. She was relieved. But as soon as
he stopped talking about marriage, she found herself worrying
the idea like a bruise she couldn't stop touching. Of course marrying him was a preposterous idea, but ... what if? What if she
could sleep in his arms every night and wake up to his laughter
every morning? What if they could cook dinners side by side in a
cozy little kitchen and sit side by side on the sofa while they
watched Law & Order or MTV, and then retire to their bedroom and make love in a real bed, not in the backseat of a car?

It wasn't what she wanted. It wouldn't work. They were too
young.

But still ... she couldn't escape a tug of wistfulness when she
thought about it. It was such a lovely idea. And Ted ...

Don't say it, she warned herself. Don't say you love him. If you
don't acknowledge it, maybe it won't really be true.

"Marriage?" Laura squealed. "Oh, God, that's so romantic!"

This was not what Erika needed to hear from her friend. They
were seated on the floor of her bedroom, which looked decimated, so much stuff packed away, a few boxes already shipped
out west. Ted had gotten a couple of days off at the gas station and
traveled up to Maine with his parents, who were apparently serious about moving to East Machias. He'd shown her where it was
on a map-a speck of a town, not far from the ocean and not far
from the Canadian border. Housing was less expensive there-a
hell of a lot cheaper than housing in northern New Jersey, which
wasn't saying much. Ninety-five percent of the country probably
had housing cheaper than in northern New Jersey.

She was glad Ted was gone for a couple of days. She needed a
chance to clear her head, to think about his proposal. To talk to
Laura.

Laura was hogging the bowl of pretzels, and Erika reached out
and grabbed a handful, then settled against her bed, which she
was using as a backrest. "I know you think he's perfect for me,"
she said between bites of pretzel. "But we're only eighteen."

"So say yes and set the date for four years from now. Can I be
your maid of honor?"

"He's serious, Laura," Erika scolded. Laura seemed much too
tickled by the idea. "He wants to marry me so I won't go to Colorado."

Laura munched thoughtfully and shifted her butt against the
carpet. Erika's desk couldn't be as comfortable to lean against as
the bed, but if they sat side by side they wouldn't be able to see
each other. And Laura wouldn't be able to hog the pretzels as
effectively. Finally, she asked, "Do you want to go to Colorado?"

"Of course I do."

"More than you want to be with Ted?"

That question had no of course answer. "The timing sucks," she
said. "If I'd just graduated from college instead of high school,
this would be a no-brainer."

"Would it?"

Erika toyed with the last pretzel in her hand. She slid one finger through the salted loop, then realized it was her ring finger
she'd slid through. She knew for a certainty that she wasn't ready
to place a wedding band on that finger. But in four years ...

In four years she would be a college graduate, and Ted
wouldn't. In four years she'd be eager to travel, to explore, to
move on to even greater challenges. In four years she would be
someone else. So would Ted.

In four years, she might meet someone else. So might he.

Nothing about this was a no-brainer.

"You can keep the relationship going while you're away, if you
want," Laura reminded her. "You can write letters, call each other.
I mean, just because you're moving away doesn't mean you have
to break up."

"Right." Erika wished she felt as certain as Laura sounded.

"You're going to stay in touch with me, right? You can stay in
touch with him, too."

Erika snorted. Sure, she could stay in touch with Laura, and
Allyson, and all her other friends. But she wasn't sleeping with any of them. She wasn't dreaming about any of them. None of
them had ever held her in their arms and peered into her face
with eyes so beautiful they made her heart ache and said, "I love
you.

"I don't want to hurt him," she said.

Laura regarded her thoughtfully. "Sounds as if you've already
made up your mind on how this is going to go."

"I'm going to leave him?" Erika guessed. "I'm going to break
up with him?"

"Sounds like."

A few tears escaped Erika's eyes, skittering down her cheeks
and getting caught in her lip, adding their salt to the salt of the
pretzels she'd been nibbling. "What if no one else ever loves me
as much as he does?"

"What if you never love anyone else as much as you love him?"
Laura shot back.

I don't love him, Erika wanted to say, but she couldn't lie to
Laura. She did love Ted. And she was going to leave him.

That's it. She's gone.

You play everything over and over in your mind, a continuous
loop of torture. You play that last time, just before she left, and she
said, "We're going to be two thousand miles apart, Ted, so really, we
should both be free to see other people." You told her you didn't want
to see other people and she kissed your cheek and said, "We'll always
befriends."

You play that moment over and over, that awful scene, that fatal
cut. You play it over and over until your brain wants to burst out of
your skull.

You play the mix tape she gave you just before she left. Phish, Spin
Doctors, Helen Reddy, a sweet, soulful Fleetwood Mac love song. Songs you listened to with her all summer, songs you sang in your
choir-trained voice. Songs you made out to. Songs you made love to.
You play the tape over and over, you play the summer over and over.
You torture yourself with the sounds, the memories, the loneliness of
everything you lost when she left.

You lie on the old blue sofa in the living room. The room is
gloomy; the trees outside the windows block the late summer sunlight, and that's fine with you. You don't want light. You want the
quiet dark of a movie theater so you can play the film of you and
Erika over and over in your mind.

You don't eat. You don't talk. You don't move. You just lie there,
wallowing in the memory of every moment you spent with her.
Especially those last moments.

"We'll stay in touch," she told you. "I'll always care about you.
But let's just befriends."

No. Let's not just be friends. "I will never date you again," you
tell her. And you mean it. You mean it with all your heart.

Your shriveling shell of a heart.

"You're eighteen years old," your father says. "You've got your
whole life ahead of you. The world is full of girls. You'll find someone else."

No. You never will.

"Maybe you should see a doctor," your mother says. "I think
you're coming down with something."

Yeah, you're coming down. Down in the world. Down into the
darkness that is the end of love.

After a few days, you somehow find the strength to go to work.
You sit inside the gas station, staring past the candy racks and the
stacks of newspapers to the pumps on the other side of the glass wall,
waiting for a car to drive in so you'll have something to do. Thinking
maybe an old Wagoneer festooned with horse show stickers will pull in, and Erika will climb out and race to the building, throw open the
door and say, "I was wrong to leave you! I love you! I came back."

Volvo wagons stop at the pump. Dodge Caravans filled with little
kids in soccer uniforms. Mercedes coupes. Trucks bearing the logos of
house painters, lawn services, plumbers. Lincoln Town Cars with
tinted windows.

Never a Jeep Wagoneer with wood siding and horse show stickers.

Your mother is right. You are sick. You're dying.

Erika's first letter arrived about two weeks after she'd left for
college. When he saw it waiting for him on the kitchen table after
he got home from the gas station-saw the return address, the
Colorado Springs postmark, her familiar handwriting-he
thought he just might not die, after all.

He resisted the urge to tear the envelope open right there in the
kitchen, with Spot sniffing at his heels and his mother peeling
carrots at the sink. Instead, he carried the letter up the stairs to his
bedroom, climbed onto his bunk, and held it in his hands. Stared
at it. Let it lie on his chest in the hope that it might seep some
magical power through his shirt and his ribcage and into his heart.

He listened to the stillness around him, then heard a creak above
him, in the attic. One of the ghosts, he thought with a smile. The
ghosts Erika insisted didn't exist.

Hell, he'd practically become a ghost himself these past two
weeks. If she didn't believe in ghosts, she should have come back
to New Jersey and checked out Ted Skala, the haunted guy, the
walking dead.

Finally, when he was calm enough to open the envelope without shredding it and damaging its contents, he slid his finger
under the flap, shook out the letter, unfolded it, and read.

She was doing well, she said. Colorado Springs was awesome. He wouldn't believe how beautiful the mountains were. Some of
the kids in her dorm said they'd teach her how to ski. Apparently
you couldn't live in Colorado Springs and not know how to ski.
It defied the laws of nature or something. Besides, she said, if she
wasn't going to do show jumping, she needed to find some other
sport that would give her the sense of flying.

Her classes were interesting. She was especially enjoying her
psychology class, and she thought she might major in psych,
although she didn't have to choose a major until the end of her
sophomore year. She was also taking a fine arts class, and she had
a newfound respect for Ted's drawing ability. She wished she had
half his talent.

Her roommate was great and she was making lots of friends.
The sky was bigger in Colorado, she reported. She couldn't
explain it; she knew logically that the sky above Colorado was the
same sky as the one above New Jersey, but everything felt bigger
out there, wilder, brighter. More open.

She sounded so damned happy he wanted to weep.

He didn't. He just felt his heart shrivel a little bit more, shrinking into a dark, wrinkled raisin in his chest.

She had written to him, he reminded himself. She was obviously thinking of him. She wanted to share her experiences with
him. The letter was a good thing.

What could he write back to her? "Hey, Fred-I'm still pumping gas in New Jersey."

He read the letter again, and then a third time. He analyzed it
for hints that she missed him, clues that she still loved him, insinuations that she hadn't completely discarded the notion of marrying him.

Shit. She was having too much fun to marry him. She was growing, learning ... Christ, she was going to major in psychology.
Once she'd mastered that subject, she would look at him and
think, What a head case.

He had to write back to her. Not just write back-he had to convince her that his life was as wonderful as hers. But writing didn't
come easily to him. He was so much more visual than verbal.

He would draw her a picture.

He heard another creak upstairs in the attic. Maybe the wind
had kicked up, maybe the house was settling-that was something two-hundred-year-old houses liked to do-or maybe the
ghost was simply letting Ted know he liked the idea. A picture for
her, with color, with detail, with brilliance and emotion. A picture
that expressed everything he couldn't write in words. He would
send it to her, and she would know his feelings for her were a hell
of a lot stronger than her feelings for the mountains and the big
sky and her psychology class.

He started planning out the drawing the next day at work. He
spent large chunks of each day sitting behind the counter at the
gas station, doing nothing, simply being present in case someone
pulled up to the pump or wandered inside to buy a scratch ticket
or a pack of smokes. If he was idle and the mechanics needed his
assistance in the garage bay, he'd help them, but they didn't ask
him for help too often because if they did they'd have to pay him
a hell of a lot more. He wasn't earning mechanic wages, so they
couldn't really expect him to be a mechanic.