Woodstock Day Four
Woodstock
Day Four
After the Crosby, Stills, Nash it was a mistake. I didn’t cause Ron’s enlistment. I knew that now. Leon had helped me to understand.
This weekend had helped me to see that someone could be the most beautiful girl in the world, but if her inside didn’t match her outside, so what? All the hours I’d spent obsessing over Livy’s beauty had been a big waste of time.
As I made my way down Gentle Path, I saw the sun’s first rays sparkling from the tips of the trees like diamonds.
Once I spotted the tire swing, I knew my way.
Following an imaginary train of butterflies, I strolled out to the first meadow.
People were sleeping. So I crept through the dewy foliage with my eyes pinned to the ground, softly kicking at the weeds.
Finding my jacket was imperative. It was the only one I had.
The tall, dew-glistened reeds of goldenrod made my search more difficult, but I knew my clothes would be there.
No one at Woodstock would take anything that didn’t belong to them.
Once I’d made it to the second meadow, I noticed a dude sitting with his back against a tree.
His legs were stretched out on the grass below.
It was hard to tell if he was awake or asleep, as his head hung to the side.
I tried to be quiet, but the stillness amplified the sound of my feet shifting through the grass.
“Hey,” he called, startling me.
I wanted to ignore him, but that was not the Woodstock way, so I glanced over my shoulder, gave him a quick wave, and returned to my search.
“Morning,” he said louder.
I knew that voice. Relief melted throughout my body, yet I was caught so off guard words escaped me. I just stood there gaping at Leon, while he did the same to me.
“It’s about time you decided to show up,” he said.
“How long have you been here?” I asked, walking toward him.
He picked at something in the corner of his eye, then scratched the top of his head. “Four hours. Maybe more—”
“Four hours?”
“You didn’t answer your page, so I figured it was the only chance I had of seeing you again.”
I stopped moving as my relief crashed and burned. “You paged me? When? I never heard it.”
He moved back and forth against the tree, like he was scratching his back.
“I paged you. I went back to the Hog Farm. I camped out at the information booth. I’ve basically gone back to every place I thought you’d be within three square miles.
Where have you been?” There was a harsh tone to his voice.
Cords in his neck bulged as he ogled Brady’s Indian blanket.
Lying crossed my mind. Yet I knew if I lied, I’d be taking a giant leap backward. “Sleeping. Inside a wigwam. A dude named Brady invited me to get out of the rain.”
“Brady? Who the hell is that?”
“Where’s Shelly?” I retorted, with the same amount of sarcasm.
“Hell if I know. If you hadn’t disappeared so quickly, you would have known I had no desire to spend what little time we had left with Shelly.”
We just stared at each other. Without words.
“Didn’t you know that?” he asked.
I shook my head. My resolve was waning.
“How could you not know that?” His eyes were tight.
Unable to shake the feeling of deep regret, I broke eye contact with him and wrapped the blanket tightly around my body.
“What’s the real reason you walked away, Suzannah? I need to know.” He hadn’t called me by my real name since we first met.
I just stood there with the sad realization that my lack of trust—and my immense insecurity—had caused every bit of this.
What’s worse, we had missed our last day together because of it.
My insecurity roared back. “When I saw Shelly, I . . . guess I figured you wanted to be with her. She’s—” I stopped short of saying beautiful, like Livy.
“Complicated. I told you that. She’s the looniest chick I’ve ever known.”
“You didn’t exactly say it like that.” I forced a nervous chuckle, wishing I knew what made her so loony.
He didn’t answer me. And I didn’t say anything else. The silence between us stretched so long it seemed even the droopy, dew-laden necks of goldenrod sensed our despair.
Not able to stand the distance any longer, I sat down next to him. Only then did I notice my clothes in his lap.
He shifted until we were facing one another with our knees touching. “Shelly was important to me once. She’s not anymore. She’s nuts.”
“Maybe so. But she’s . . .” As much as I wanted to say beautiful, like Livy, I stopped myself. Was her heart beautiful? Was she kind? Loving? Good to others? Leon had just said she was nuts.
“She’s what?”
“I figured she was your first love. And that y’all had lost your virginity together. I figured you’d always be bonded because of it.”
He didn’t confirm or deny my suspicions; he just said, “I’m not bonded to Shelly.
Look, Suzie, I know we just met two days ago.
And maybe it’s ludicrous to think down the road when we live in opposite directions.
” We caught one another’s eyes. Deep inside those pretty green irises of his, I saw an earnestness I hadn’t seen before.
“I don’t want this to be the end of us.”
There. He said it. Us.
He took my hand in his. “I don’t know what the future looks like, or if I’m nuts to think we can have a long-distance thing, but I don’t want to be another face in your crowd.” He had remembered my exact words.
“I don’t want that either.”
“Johnny and I have to split right after Hendrix. That’s in a couple hours.” At Leon’s reminder of the time, I felt the hornet’s sting again. Our hourglass was almost empty.
“When I was alone during the storm, I realized a lot of things about myself,” I said.
“Like what?” he asked, with that tender expression I’d grown to crave.
“Like how hard it is for me to trust boys. Trust anyone, really. So many people I should have been able to count on have let me down.”
Leon sighed, shaking his head slowly. “I know, and I’m sorry.”
At the mere thought of my complicated, psycho family, I pulled my legs up close to my body and hung my head. “I’ll never be able to forgive Dad for what he did to Ron. Or me.”
Leon parted his lips to say something but stopped.
“What? Say it.”
“I understand why you’re mad; I’m on your side. But who knows what war did to your dad? There’s no telling what he witnessed.”
I let his words sink in before answering. “I’ve never thought about that.”
“War changes people. It’s done it to my kid brother, and it’ll do it to Ron.”
Thinking about how Ron would have changed made my heart burn.
“Besides that, unforgiveness has a way of poisoning you.” He tapped my chest. “It locks you in prison and throws away the key. I learned that the hard way. Johnny and I didn’t speak for a year.”
This surprised me. The two cousins seemed closer than brothers. “Why?”
“He totaled my car. It was an accident, but the way he handled it was shit.”
“What did he do?”
“It’s what he didn’t do. I’d saved for that thing since I was thirteen.
He knew how much I dug it. One night, he begged me to loan it to him so he could impress this chick.
So I loaned it. Gladly. But on his way home, he hit a fire hydrant.
He’d had too much to drink. Messed the engine up so bad the car was toast. I was mad for a long, long time. ”
“Were they okay?”
“Fine. No cops, no blood, no whiplash, no nothing. But they left my ride there and walked home. Johnny called me the next day to tell me he’d pay for the tow charge but didn’t have the dough to fix the car.”
“Why didn’t insurance cover it?”
He shook his head. “Johnny was driving. I didn’t realize I’d declined that coverage.”
“How did you forgive him?”
Leon rubbed the back of his neck, then met my gaze. “I chose to forgive him.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You make it sound easy.”
“It’s not easy. It’s a choice. Not an overnight choice—one you keep working on. Know what I mean?”
A big shrug was my answer to that.
“One night I was lying in my bed, so pissed off I couldn’t sleep. That’s when I realized I’d spent too many hours angry over something I couldn’t do a damn thing about. So I decided to take the high road. And forgive him. It took a long time. But I knew it’s what I needed to do.”
I just stared at him. Forgiving Dad would be a much bigger challenge than forgiving Johnny. It might have worked for him, but it would not work for me.
“You can’t let your dad ruin your life, Suzie.”
Visions of Dad breaking my records over his knee made me shudder.
So did the ones of me holding the protest sign.
“I know that, Leon. It just seems unfair that I have to forgive him when he’s the one who’s caused me all the pain.
” My voice cracked. “He should be begging me for forgiveness. He’s said so many hateful things to me. ”
“Come here.” Tenderness blazed in his eyes as he reached out.
Once I’d settled inside his arms, my blood flowed again. Thoughts of Dad had tightened my muscles into giant knots. But not as many as I had had from missing Leon.
He kissed the top of my head. “He might not ever do that. But like I said, forgiveness is for you. So you can have peace. Not him.”
Pulling away, I looked him in the face. “But how? How do I do that?”