chapter 5

BONNY MORELAND

eighteen years old

 

PROM 1983

Imelted the eyeliner pencil to make it goopy and dark. My eye shadow was sparkly blue and my neon pink blush was definitely too much. Baby’s breath flowers were clipped into my French-braided hair. I wore a white eyelet dress and later that night I changed into a flowered sundress I’d made in sewing class. I was naïve, and my date, Eglan Davis, was both popular and arrogant—a terrible combination, which I was drawn to until I married the same. He was a prototype of my charming father, who ruled the world with the surety that only a privileged male, who has been granted an all-access pass to authority, could get away with.

We stood outside the gymnasium, streamers bleeding in the rain, swamping on the pavement. Eglan puffed a cigarette and I waited, holding the umbrella over both of us so he could finish smoking before we left to meet a party on the Chattahoochee River, where all our friends were lighting a campfire and setting up for the real party. Then I saw a car just like Owen’s: an electric blue Camaro. But there were so many of them at that time and I didn’t want to get my hopes up—not at all. This was the stuff of my dreams—a fairy tale as romantic as a white horse and prince.

All I knew about Owen at that time was that he’d quit college to work in ski resorts or wherever he could find a job out west. Of course it wasn’t Owen in the parking lot of my high school. First, he probably didn’t own that car anymore, and second, Colorado was too far away for him to make it there for my prom. But the thrill of the maybe was always by my side.

I shivered and watched Eglan smoke the last of his cigarette and crush it under the shiny toe of his rented shoes, the ones that came half price with the tuxedo with the baby blue ruffles on the shirt. His tux was supposed to match my dress, but at the last minute I’d switched to an all-white dress, which “pissed” him off, thus the pouting since the pictures taken at my house with a group of friends that afternoon.

Eglan grabbed me for a kiss, and I pulled away, which only made him draw me closer, his tongue shooting into my mouth like a lizard. “Stop,” I shouted and pushed at him. “Seriously, you taste disgusting—part ashtray, part whiskey. Not my favorite flavors.”

“Why do you always have to be such a cold bitch?” he asked and pulled the umbrella away so I stood alone in the rain while he was covered. His lips curled in a nasty scowl. I didn’t want to be anywhere near this guy, and the night had just begun. There was only one way out of this—to get sick and go home—but in doing so I would miss the event of a lifetime: prom.

The baby’s breath was sopping wet, drooping into my eyes. I yanked the flowers from my hair and threw them on the ground. “I don’t know, Eglan. Why do I have to be such a bitch? Probably because you are such a dick.”

Owen’s voice sounded so close that I knew it had to be coming from my imagination. “Go ahead,” he said. “Call her a bitch one more time.”

But it wasn’t my imagination. His voice came from his mouth, which was next to me along with his body and his clenched fists and his brown leather jacket splattered with rain.

“Who the hell are you?” Eglan asked and dropped the umbrella, his fists raised and ready. The umbrella wobbled on the ground, a bowl of black nylon catching the rain in the opposite way it was designed for, swaying back and forth in the wind, skittering like an empty boat.

“Stop,” I said and stepped between them. My back was to Eglan, and my face to Owen. “What are you doing here?”

My heart beat wildly against my chest; it was a wonder they couldn’t hear it.

“It’s your prom. I didn’t want to miss it.” Owen grinned at me, and I couldn’t help but smile back.

“Well, it might have been nice if you’d told me that. You can’t just show up like this whenever you want. I have a date, you see.”

“Well, he’s quite the charmer.”

Eglan stepped from behind me and swung his fist in a sudden and unannounced movement. Owen, although he stared at me, ducked and bobbed, coming to kiss me just as Eglan punched through air, lost his balance and landed on the umbrella. The flimsy spikes collapsed under his weight and a stream of curses exploded through the high school parking lot. Owen grabbed my hand and we ran through the puddles to his electric blue Camaro and I stopped pretending that I didn’t want him there or wasn’t waiting for him or didn’t need him.

Through the five years since his mother had disappeared, we’d flirted and we’d kept in touch, but this was the night he came to me. “I’ve been waiting,” he said. “All these years I’ve been waiting until you graduated.” And he kissed me the same way I’d always dreamed about.

And we didn’t stop kissing even as he drove to the motel an hour away in the North Georgia Mountains where he’d paid for a room. We didn’t stop kissing as he carried me into that room and laid me on the bed with the red-and-blue-checkered bedspread that smelled like pine. “I have loved you for so long, Bee. For so long. Since the day I found you on the dock staring at the sky and mumbling the names of the stars, and maybe even before then. Maybe I loved you the moment I arrived in Watersend and saw you standing in front of the river house in that silly sundress covered in daisies.”

And I told him what I’d always kept hidden in the secret corners of my soul. “I’ve loved you since that afternoon when you climbed out of the back of that car all rumpled and bleary-eyed to stare at only me.”

“You were meant to be mine,” he said as he covered me in kisses, as his lips found the parts of me that had expected him.

“I waited for you,” I told him. “All this time, I waited for you.”

That was the first night we made love, but it wasn’t the last. I loved him completely and unalterably, and for years afterward he consumed my thoughts and my bed. I was as desperate for him as I was for air or water. And he for me. There wasn’t anything we didn’t talk about, and even when he was away from me we spent those free hours on the phone. Letters on stationery and on legal-lined paper, on napkins and on any scraps of paper we could find flew between us. We quoted our favorite lines from books or poetry. We clipped and sent articles. We were consumed with each other to the exception of all others.

Yet throughout college and my early twenties, this was a scene that repeated itself too many times to count: Owen would come to me when I needed him most, and then he’d leave for some adventure with promises to be back soon. He loved me; I never doubted it. When we were together, nothing else seemed to exist. We’d lose days, and sometimes weeks, until he left again.

Lainey knew only that we saw each other every so often. I confessed to her my love for him, but never told her the extent of our affair. It had seemed so private, so simply ours, that to share it would diminish it.

But what if I’d stopped him at the first leaving? Did the form of our love repeat itself because I was too weak to stand and say, “Stop”? Or did the pattern repeat because I wanted him so desperately that each time he came to me, I convinced myself he would stay.

When he’d leave, I would tell him it was over. It was over when I graduated from high school and left for Vanderbilt. It was over when I was a sophomore in college and he found me on a date at a fraternity party. It was over when he left for Colorado to train for wilderness rescues. It was over when I begged him to stop leaving and he said he couldn’t. It was over when I went to medical school. But it was never over. He always showed up when I was done crying. He always appeared when I’d convinced myself that I didn’t need him anymore. He ran and ran and returned and returned.

Finally, at twenty-seven years old, I desperately needed to move on. My heart was bloodied and exhausted. I met the charming and quick-talking Lucas and found safe love. The laughter and the parties and the Charleston society life caught me in their sweet net. I believed I was free of Owen’s heartbreak, until the night before my wedding to Lucas, when Owen arrived and asked me to wait a bit longer. “Please be a little more patient.”

“Don’t come back,” I told him. “Let me get over you. Let me have a good life. My heart can’t take any more and I’ve found a safe place to land with a good man.” Which was exactly what I believed was true.

Owen did as I pleaded—he physically stayed away, even when there were times I wished he didn’t. But he didn’t leave me alone. No, not that. There were phone calls, texts and e-mails with long letters. Over the next twenty-two years, we never stopped communicating for more than a month or two. We confided in each other and shared our lives with merely words. I didn’t see him; I didn’t touch him; but my heart never listened to the edict to stay away—it didn’t abstain from loving him at all.