“If You See Me, Say Hello”
IF YOU SEE ME, SAY HELLO
Thomas Tessier
Ted was on his way back into town, less than a mile from home, when he saw the car coming in the opposite lane. An orange Mini Cooper. It was actually called Rally Orange and it wasn’t a stock color. You had to special order it. Her car, her color, she’d waited months for it to come in. A car he expected never to see again. The traffic was steady, the road wide at that point. It was early in the afternoon on a Friday in February, in an unusually mild winter.
Impossible to think it could be her. But the Mini drew closer and he saw the same racing stripe, and then the long blonde hair. No, it can’t be. She sailed past, her eyes on the traffic ahead, not looking for him or his nondescript Accord. Yes, no doubt at all. In his rearview mirror, the clincher: the Pennsylvania license plate.
Ted’s heart pounded and he was breathing through his mouth as he hit the horn, then the button to lower the window. He stuck his arm out and waved, but he knew it was too late then. Too many cars had passed. He couldn’t do a U-turn in this traffic. Then he was in a line at a red light. He could turn left, turn around somewhere up that street, head back and try to catch up with her, but he knew it was hopeless, he’d be guessing which way she went. She would soon reach both a major intersection and the highway. Ted pulled into a bank parking lot and sat for a moment, breathing deeply, trying to calm down.
It had been a little over a year since she decided that her life was going in a different direction and that he wasn’t going to be in it any longer. She never gave him a good reason. It wasn’t someone else. They were just not right together, at least not right enough for her. So she left him and moved back to the Philadelphia area, where she had family and old friends.
But now, here she was, and they’d just missed each other. He had been out driving for an hour or so, nothing important. The only reason she would have driven hundreds of miles to Connecticut was to see him. Why hadn’t she called first or sent him an email? And why hadn’t she waited at the apartment building for him to return? Ted tried to consider all the possibilities, but none of them made much sense. He’d seen her, she was there, she was real for a moment. But now she was gone again, and he was still lost.
He thought about the direction she was heading. He put his car in gear and started to drive. He decided to swing by the ice cream stand, the state park and a couple of other places in the area that they used to visit. Maybe she was driving around there too, killing time, before going back to the apartment building to see if he had returned home. Maybe he would spot her. If not, perhaps he would get back to his place – their place, really — and find her there, in the parking lot, in her orange Mini, waiting for him.
* * *
Jen accelerated and pulled into the flow of traffic on I-95. She had spent a couple of hours there, but she’d allowed for it, and she would be in Boston in time for the evening reception at the comic book convention. So many things seemed to get better for her after she left Connecticut – the talented people she’d met at Blue Terror Comics, the way she walked into the job and was doing so well at it, seeming to understand everything at once. She didn’t feel bad about any of it. She had grown up a great deal in the space of a year.
But sometimes she felt bad about Ted. This visit was for him. She hadn’t been growing up with Ted, not enough, and maybe that was why they couldn’t last. But at the same time, maybe she wouldn’t have grown up at all without him, and that was why she felt she still owed him something and would always miss him. For her, he’d been both necessary and impossible.
She drove past Swirlee’s, the ice cream stand, but of course it was closed until April. She swung through the state park on the edge of town, where they’d had picnics and necked passionately, but where the trees were now bare and the parking lots empty. She sat in her car outside the apartment building where she had spent so many delightful hours, and felt a sense of a loss that was still beyond her control.
She felt lonely and sad today. There were moments, now and then, when Ted still felt like a real presence in her life.
They’d found him on his sofa, fully dressed but with his shoes off, looking as if he had simply stretched out to take a nap. That was about six months after she’d left.
The autopsy found no apparent cause of death and therefore ruled it was the result of natural causes. As if to say, his heart just stopped. But she knew better. Nobody dies of natural causes at the age of 33.
I’ll always love you.
Traffic on I-95 opened up. Jen hit the gas.
– copyright © 2006 Thomas Tessier
