Page 17 of Anywhere with You
I laughed. “Okay, I can understand that. But that’s really what you like most? Not your intelligence or your humor or…I don’t know, your curls? I don’t want to be shallow, but you have some pretty amazing curls.”
Her cheeks reddened, just a smidge. “I like those things, too, but if I had to pick one…”
“Curiosity.”
“Curiosity,” she confirmed. “Okay, now you.”
I could tell she was eager to get the focus off her, so I played along. “There areso manyoptions.”
Cara shook her head in sympathy. “How will you ever choose?”
“You picked something all deep and thoughtful. I can’t just say I like my purple hair.”
“I mean, you can. I will judge you, though.”
I laughed. “I like…music.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Let me finish, Impatient McJudgy. It’s maybe not a surprise that music is a big part of my life. I can still remember…Never mind, that’s a long story. I don’t have to tell it. The answer is that my connection to music—”
“Tell it,” Cara interrupted again.
“What?”
“Oh no, wait. I do have a meeting I need to get to.” She looked pointedly at the miles of empty road ahead of us, then back at me, blandly demanding, “Tell the story.”
For a moment, I stared at the road, wondering when was the last time I’d been invited to talk about myself, my life, with someone who actually wanted to listen.
As if to make a point, Cara stopped talking altogether and waited.
“Okay,” I started, then kept looking ahead, thinking. “Okay,” I tried again. “When I was in middle school, I had a Savage Garden CD.”
Cara squeaked. Literally squeaked, then went quiet again.
“I assume that the mouse in the passenger’s seat also had a Savage Garden CD?”
She nodded with enough enthusiasm that I knew she would understand the rest of the story as well as anyone else could.
“So, I had been singing ‘Truly Madly Deeply’ along with all my preteen friends for weeks. I finally talked Mom into buying me the CD, which she did only because I swore I’d use the headphones I hated. I preferred to loudly share my music with the whole household, and Mom’s never been a nineties pop fan. And to be fair, it’s not the most musically or lyrically sophisticated song, right?”
Cara nodded.
“Right after the last verse, one of the vocalists whispers—and it was hardly noticeable when I played it through the speakers, but unmistakable through the headphones—a breathy, quickly whisperedI love you.”
Cara put her hands over her mouth, and I knew that she knew exactly what I was talking about.
“It gave me fucking chills. Not metaphorically. I had a physical reaction. Not my last, when it comes to love songs. And like I said, this isn’t a masterpiece. But I caught a glimpse of what music could do, and I was awestruck. Right then, I started begging for piano lessons, and I was very, very lucky to have parents who…well, for all that they were brass players, they understood the feeling.”
Cara didn’t rush to fill the silence after my words, but after a minute, she said, not in a critical tone, but just as though she wanted to be sure she understood, “That’s what you like most about yourself? Your love of music?”
“I think…I like that I’m a part of it. Like, as a woman, I’m a part of the history of womanness, in my own small way. It’s something I understand and belong to and also get to be a part of making and telling that story. I also understand and belong to and create music.”
After a moment, Cara let out a breath that sounded a little like, “Wow.”
Then she was quiet again for a long time, as though thinking about what I’d said, and I wanted to interrupt, to make a joke, but also, I wanted to keep the silence, to think about what she and I had both said, and about how and why I felt so breathless.
What did it say about my marriage that this was the first moment in years when I felt heard? There was something about the opened-upfeeling that stripped away some of the loneliness I’d hardly noticed building up inside me.
