The wedding guests spent their time gawking at Trip all evening, despite the warning we put out to the family not to treat him like a sideshow freak. Thank God for my cousins. They took shifts running interference for all the curious rubberneckers intent on bugging him all night.
Not that I couldn’t deal with it or anything. I’m kinda used to it by now. After all, that part of him is just make-believe. The part that’s all mine is what’s real.
After all that we’d been through—all the laughs and the heartache and the mistakes—the reality was that we were who we were. Not perfect. Just perfect together. More importantly, while the future wasn’t mapped out, we at least had the knowledge that we’d always be together through it. The words spoken at our high school graduation came back to me: We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
Whatever it was, I knew it was going to be great.
NOVEMBER 2006
EPILOGUE
Trip bought my old apartment building in the village.
The plan is to rent out the other eight units, but keep the entire top floor for ourselves. I’d originally wanted to knock down all the walls on the fourth floor, but Trip wouldn’t hear of it. He’s making me leave my old apartment exactly as it was when I lived in it. So, I have to content myself with remodeling the other three units on that floor into a penthouse suite instead. I’m not complaining. The plans my father and Jack have drawn up are beautiful. Trip and I spend most of our time in Jersey anyway, but it’ll be nice to have a space in the city to hide out when we’re not at the TRU, or when Lisa and Pick or any of our other friends want a place to crash for the night. As with our California home, we plan on doing a lot of entertaining there.
My downstairs neighbor Angelo passed away, and his son found three letters addressed to me from way back in ninety-four. Trip had written the wrong apartment number on the envelopes and they’d been sent to Angelo, who never bothered to give them to me. One day during the demolition, Anthony showed up and just handed them over, apologizing and explaining what had happened. Trip put down the sledgehammer and the two of us sat right there on the floor amidst the rubble to read them. I won’t bore you with the details contained within those letters—most of what he’d written had been about his daily life out in Los Angeles; auditioning, playing hockey, etc.—but there’s a part of that first one I think that’s worth sharing: It started off as all the others, telling me about the latest dramas taking place in his seedy apartment building (but hey, it’s near the beach), talking about his latest audition (I don’t know. I don’t think I got the part. Tawny Everett was there doing the readings, though. Right there in the room! She called me “cute”. It was so freaking awesome!), and mentioning how he was dropping out of school (It’s not why I’m here anyway. How’s the new apartment?)
But then, a few paragraphs down:
It’s hard out here. It’s lonely. It’s fake. I’m thinking of packing it in and coming home.
Will you be there if I do? You’ve only got this last year of school and I thought maybe we could make some plans. I miss you like crazy and I just want to come home to you.
You’re my home, Lay-Lay.
And yeah. He was right. If I had read that back when I was twenty-one, I would’ve been scared half to death.
But I would have taken him up on his offer. I would have welcomed him back into my life with open arms.
And then where would we be? Would we have torn each other apart, so young and so clueless, or would we have built each other up? Would I be writing? Would Trip really have given up acting? Would he have grown to resent me because he did?
I could ask myself those questions until my head hurt.
Thankfully, I’m not tasked with having to find out the answers. Somewhere in a parallel universe, Trip and I are miserable together. Just not in this one.
Along with the apartment building, Trip bought his old house in Norman from his mother, and she bought a new one out in Malibu to replace it. I never thought in a million years when I was standing in that foyer back in ‘91 that someday it would be my house. The demons of that first night have been exorcised, triumph over my first memory of the place. It’s a beautiful home, and we shared our first kiss right out there in the driveway, confessed our love properly for the first time right there in his old bedroom. It’s the good memories my mind keeps alive.