Meet Me in Manhattan (True Vows) (20 page)

And he didn't want them back together, either. He'd told her
he would never be with her again. She had to take him at his
word.

She tossed the teddy bear onto the shelf in her closet and tried
to forget it was there. She tried to forget Ted, too. Tried to forget
how wistful he'd looked in the airport. He'd exuded a potent
mixture of emotions as he'd stood with her at the gate. Hope.
Fear. Bravado. Sentimentality. Condemnation.

He'd hated her hair. He hadn't had to say it; she'd sensed it.

She told herself that what Ted Skala thought of her hair, or
anything else, didn't matter. He was now living in Tempe,
Arizona, of all places-she had no idea why, and she told herself
that didn't matter, either. What mattered was that he was moving on with his life. Like her, he was breaking away from home
and the past and their adolescent love. He was embracing new
adventures.

Teddy bear or no teddy bear, he was kissing the past goodbye, turning his back on what had once been and opening himself to the world that awaited him beyond the safe, cozy confines
of Mendham. This was a good thing. She should be happy for
him.

Every now and then, she glimpsed the bear as she rummaged
through the clutter on her closet shelf for a scarf or a pair of
gloves. She saw the plush brown doll sitting in the corner, staring
at her with an accusatory expression that reminded her too much
of the way Ted had stared at her in the airport. "I should throw
you out," she muttered, shoving the bear deeper in to the closet.
"I should donate you to a children's hospital or a shelter or
something."

But she didn't. She couldn't get rid of the bear any more than
she could get rid of the letters and drawings Ted had sent her.
They all remained safely in a folder inside her desk, except for the
first one. She'd framed that one.

Because it was a beautiful piece of artwork, she told herself.
Because it was worthy of display. Not because Ted had drawn it
for her.

Moving on with your life didn't mean you had to forget about
what you'd lived so far. She could remember Ted, remember how
precious their love had been. Remember the nights in the backseat of the Wagoneer, when he'd been so gentle and careful with her, when he'd accepted her gift of herself and treated it as a
priceless treasure. Remember their long walks and their long talks
and even their long, companionable silences, when the only
sound was the music spilling from the Wagoneer's radio. Phish.
Spin Doctors. Fleetwood Mac, that gorgeous, tender ballad: I love
you, I love you, like never before ...

Oh, hell. She wanted to forget. She just couldn't.

YOUR FATHER WAS RIGHT. The world is full of girls.

Girls at Arizona State. Girls with sun-streaked hair and sunbaked skin who study all day and party all night. Girls whose names
and faces melt into a sweet blur, thanks to the recreational ingestion
of booze and grass. They're just as hammered as you are, so it all
works out somehow.

You party with them during the night, and during the day you
learn how to balance a checkbook and how to deliver what your boss
is asking of you. When work at the call center begins to pall, you
land another job, this time as a salesman at a Dodge dealership. Not
such a huge leap from pumping gas, when you think about it. Cars
are cars.

You've never done sales before, but you're friendly and helpful
and clearheaded on the job. Dealing with all those numbers-negotiating the prices for accessory packages, calculating sales taxdoesn't come easily to you, but if you can balance your checkbook,
you can figure out how much to charge for floor mats without losing
the dealership its profit. You're the youngest salesman, and your colleagues all remind you of your friends' fathers-beefy, responsible
heads-of-household, guys who've gained enough weight since their high school days that their hands have become plump and they have
to wear their school rings on their cocktail-hotdog pinkies.

These are not guys you'd do a number with after work. They
aren't guys you could sit down and discuss Soundgarden and Alice
in Chains with. They probably wouldn't know what to make of the
drawings you did late at night when you weren't lost in a happy
haze at some campus party, drawings of laughing donkeys and
desert flowers, flowing lines and vibrant colors.

But the guys at the Dodge dealership accept you as a fellow sales
associate. An adult. A man.

And you get a business card. A business card! With your name
printed on it, along with the Dodge logo and the dealer's address
and phone number.

Your own freaking business card!

If that's not a sign of success, you don't know what is.

As weeks passed without a phone message from Erika, Ted
stopped racing to the answering machine the minute he entered
his apartment. She wasn't going to call. He got that. It was over.
Done. Stick a fork in it, Skala-it's cooked.

But then she surprised him by sending him a postcard. He
didn't always remember to check his mailbox, a narrow rectangular receptacle with a locked door, one of many in a panel
attached to the apartment building's wall near the front entry.
Sometimes he'd unlock the mailbox door and swing it open, and
dozens of commercial mailings would spill out. He'd realize that
days had passed since he'd last looked inside the box.

This was one of those days. When he turned the lock, the mailbox's skinny silver door practically burst open, releasing a blizzard of fliers, glossy catalogues, and take-out restaurant menus.
He gathered the scattered mailings from the floor in front of the mailboxes, carried them to the trash can, and, one by one, tossed
them.

If he'd discarded them all together, he might have missed
Erika's postcard mixed in with the junk mail.

He read it. Read it again. Shit. It didn't say anything.

Sure, it said something. She was busy, hoped he was enjoying
Tempe, blah-blah-blah. Like he cared. Like this mattered.

He tossed the postcard on the kitchen counter once he'd
entered his apartment. En route to the bedroom, he emptied the
pockets of the neat khakis he had to wear for work and tossed his
keys, change, and wallet onto the dresser. As he reached for a pair
of shorts, his gaze snagged on his wallet.

He had a business card. She wanted to know how he was
doing? Hell, he'd show her how he was doing. Nineteen years old,
and he had his own business card. If that didn't impress her ...

He didn't question why he wanted to impress her. Instead, he
slid the card into an envelope along with a note telling her he was
now working as an auto salesman and doing well. He didn't even
mention the business card. Let her open the envelope and find it
in there, and think, Wow! Ted has a business card! He's a man and
he's going places!

Eventually, the place he went was Seattle. Selling cars wasn't for
him. He was into art, not commerce. He heard the pot was as
good in Seattle as it was in Tempe, and the air wasn't as dry. And
the music scene up there was supposedly phenomenal. He'd
listened to the mix tape Erika had made for him so many times
he could sing all the songs, in order, from memory.

Enough. Time to move on. Time to stop listening to her music
and start listening to his own.

So he bought a one-way ticket from Greyhound, packed up the few possessions he'd accrued since arriving in Tempe, and headed
north. Seattle was as cold and damp as Tempe was hot and dry,
and after a while in the great Northwest, he headed back south,
over the border, down to Costa Rica.

He was young and the world was full of girls.

He fell in with a shaggy expat named Bob who hadn't quite lost
the West Virginia twang in his voice and who scrapped and
scrounged for food. "You wanna learn how to surf?" he offered
Ted. "I can teach you that. You wanna learn how to catch a turtle
and turn it into soup? I can teach you that, too."

"I'd rather learn how to surf," Ted said.

So Bob taught him how to surf.

Conquering the waves convinced Ted he could conquer anything. He could stand on a narrow board and not lose his balance,
even if a ten-foot roller tried to crush him. He wasn't quite as daring as Bob, or as crazy, but he figured if the waves couldn't
destroy him, nothing could.

Not even a broken heart. Especially not a broken heart. You
just had to learn to protect yourself, keep your wits about you,
maintain your footing when the board was slick with seawater
and the ocean was foaming all around you.

At one time, he hadn't been able to do that. Now, he could.

Costa Rica was full of girls, but he avoided a lot of them for the
simple reason that they were Latina. He'd once loved a girl who
was half Latina, whose skin turned bronze at the first hint of sunshine, who had dozens of cousins living in Colombia, who could
speak Spanish like a native when the atmosphere was right. He'd
once loved a girl whose name began with a vowel, so he avoided
girls whose names began with vowels. Eva, Irina, Olivia, Ursulano, thanks. He learned to read the potential danger in certain ocean conditions and stay on dry land, and he knew to avoid
potential danger in relationships.

"Life is about two things," Bob once told him, pushing the
long wet snarls of his hair back from his face as he and Ted lugged
their boards across the sand after a day of surfing. "Survival, and
getting wrecked. Sometimes you need to get wrecked if you want
to survive. Sometimes, seems like the whole point of survival is to
get your hands on some booze or weed and get yourself wrecked.
They go hand in hand."

Not exactly Ted's philosophy, although he respected Bob's
hard-won take on the world. Ted's philosophy was that the best
way to survive was to protect yourself. Take chances with your
body if you want, but protect your heart. Vulnerability equaled
death, so don't ever let yourself be vulnerable.

He'd had his heart broken once. He was never going to let that
happen again.

THIS IS WHAT LIFE IS ALL ABOUT, Erika thought, stretching
languidly beneath the Caribbean sun. The heat baked her, the
sand beneath her towel cradled her, and the salt-laden breezes
blowing in off the water reminded her, with each gust, of how
much she loved the ocean.