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Imprints

The notebook that outlasted us.

By Lindsey JoanPublished 3 years ago 7 min read
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It arrived cocooned in a padded manila envelope. How many years since I had last seen that small black notebook?

Before I even opened it, I could see the crimson berries, hear Jeremy’s voice: “Don’t eat them, Caddy! They might be poisonous.” He could never stop himself from warning me.

“I’m not a moron,” I had retorted, continuing to impale the berries with a stick. I had resented how he had always felt the need to double check me, examining the patches that I had made to the holes in our inflatable boat; tracking my bare feet through the mucky shore to make sure that I didn’t step on broken glass.

Jeremy, who had an older brother, had explained about the brown glass bits: “High schoolers sneak over here at dark. They drink beer. Make out and stuff.” We had both gone sour faced, imagining a foreign tongue entering our own mouths.

“Bet it would feel like that slimy bark,” I had said, pointing to a tree that grew out of the water’s edge.

During the day, the island was abandoned by everyone but muskrats and insects. About 112 paddles away from my family’s dilapidated dock, the tiny land mass was far enough from the “Why-don’t-you-go-for-a-bike-ride?” suggestions of our parents—a temporary surrogate for all of the places we hoped to one day travel beyond our small town.

Flipping through the weathered notebook now, I couldn’t help but smile when I came to the dragonfly page: “Bag 4, June 14, 1986.” Jeremy had carefully recorded everything that summer, but his pencil sketch didn’t do justice to the shimmering gold and blue creature that had flitted to me, its touch as light as a first kiss. I hadn’t even noticed the insect until I had become aware of Jeremy beaming at my upper arm.

While I normally got mulled by horseflies, Jeremy had a way of attracting beautiful things—moths, butterflies…eventually women and money too. I was the assassin; the one who bludgeoned mosquitos and sealed whatever Jeremy had caught by net or fingers into ziplock bags. His mother, who had deemed our insect collection filthy, had banned him from using their freezer to kill the bugs. I had volunteered the one in my garage, hiding the labeled bags beneath the nutty buddies that my family stockpiled, determined to prove my worth to him.

It was only because of Jeremy that I had mastered a certain amount of stillness. When I had asked him about his mom, who had spent the second half of that summer in the hospital, he had not responded. Earlier in the week, I had heard him tell another neighbor, “Oh, I’m sure she will be home soon,” with an almost indifferent shrug. But when Jeremy had ignored my inquiry, I had dropped the subject, understanding that his silence and squeezed eyebrows told me more about his mother’s condition than any verbal details could.

After her funeral that fall, I had brought over two nutty buddies and sat quietly with him on his porch, only occasionally pointing out a spider.

There were times when he had comforted me. One September day, I had been sullen, inwardly fuming that I had not been chosen as the sixth grade yearbook editor. Jeremy had persuaded me to take the boat out after school. When I had gashed my knee scaling the island’s eroding bank, I had hurled out every curse word that I had ever heard on HBO.

Jeremy had poured his water bottle over my knee and assured me that the yearbook was a stupid tradition. Then he had picked a nearby dandelion and tucked it behind my ear. Neither of us had dared to comment on the flower, but I had made sure that it was still hugging my ear when we had returned that evening. I had said a quick goodbye and then hurried inside to fold the flower into wax paper and press it into my father’s thick Sports Almanac. Once it had dried out, I had taped the dandelion into the notebook, wanting to remember the day that I had decided to marry Jeremy.

The notebook pages had become increasingly rumpled with use, shriveling after I had set it down on a wet log or an unseen puddle on the boat floor. I would lay it open on my dock to sunbathe—my sheepish apology for getting it wet yet again. And, as Jeremy trotted back to his own house, he would yell out something like: “Don’t forget to bring it inside before bedtime, Catherine,” using my hated birth name to reprimand me for my carelessness.

After I had graduated from high school, Jeremy had provoked me again with my real name. His “Hey Catherine” had leapt off his porch when my friend had dropped me off in my driveway.

Jeremy had already been back from college for three days. I had watched him unpack his car from the window of my second floor bedroom, sure that he would be knocking on my door at any minute. When he hadn’t, I had determined that I would avoid him. Deny him the satisfaction of lording it over me that he had a life apart from our shared dirt road, prohibit him from illustrating that we no longer had anything in common.

But the pain of his betrayal had made it hard for me to play cool. I had cocked my head toward him: “Glad you found the time to finally acknowledge me.”

Jeremy’s body had been barely illuminated by the porch light, but I could see him sliding over on the swinging bench, making room for me. “You’re usually the one to initiate the action,” he had said, as I had settled down next to him.

When I kissed him, I had discovered that his tongue was coarse, like the rope handles on that boat we had outgrown. For years leading up to that moment, that kiss had tormented me as an impossibility—especially during those last few months when his house had seemed to grow with his absence, a towering reminder of what I had lost. But once our lips had touched, I had realized how inevitable we had always been.

Paging through the notebook all of these decades later, I wondered why Jeremy had sent it now. Stamped with insects and flowers, it was like a passport of adolescence, documenting the people we had been before we had married, before our love had burst apart like those red berries.

My fingers couldn’t resist turning to the dandelion page. Jeremy must have known that I would; that this was the only way to make me listen to him. Paper clipped to the page was a $20,000 cashier’s check. My hand first went to my mouth, and then to the crisp gray rectangle with my name on it.

I don’t know how Jeremy had learned that my husband needed a surgery. Perhaps someone had told him about the Kickstarter page. Maybe his dad. Or my mom. Our parents could not decouple like we had; to this day, they still inhabited our childhood houses with adjacent lawns. I wouldn’t be surprised if that deflated boat was still in one of their garages.

When Jeremy and I had finally split, I had meticulously separated our belongings, leaving behind a wake of things that I could no longer bear to touch. Jeremy had wordlessly placed the black notebook on top of my suitcase, but I had chucked it at the bookshelf.

Clutching it now, I was glad that it had been in his safekeeping. I would have probably exacto knifed it, or thrown it into the fireplace. Jeremy was better at waiting out his feelings.

My husband had been blown away by the check. “Are you sure we should accept this?” Rick had asked me.

“He has good intentions,” I had assured him. “And tons of money.”

After Rick had recovered from the operation, I took the notebook out of my nightstand drawer. Although I remembered our pre adult language, I no longer had the appetite for pinning lady bugs or beetles. Instead, I pasted a photo of myself into one of the few remaining blank pages and labeled it: “Caddy’s arm, July 23, 2019.”

The picture showed a black and orange splotched butterfly resting on me. My daughter had grabbed my phone to capture the moment, amazed at how long the butterfly had lingered.

I thought back to before Jeremy and I had frozen our first cricket, when those notebook pages had been a stark white. We had been brave enough to expose our true selves then, to believe that our love would survive metamorphosis.

I dropped the manilla envelope at the post office, certain that Jeremy would discover the photograph—my final love letter to him. He would understand that I was thanking him, not only for the check, but for all of the ways that he had imprinted me.

breakups
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About the Creator

Lindsey Joan

Reader. Compulsive line rewriter.

"I suspect it has to do with a small, incremental persistent insect-like devotion to putting one word next to the next word. It's a very dogged process."

-Louise Erdrich on being prolific

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