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Chapter 16
Natalie
“Natalie? Natalie Deane?”
I heard someone say my name behind me. I turned around to find a tall man with a wide grin and curly, dark hair beaming at me. He seemed familiar but it took me a few moments to place him.
“Marcus Reinhardt!”
We had dated briefly in high school, then he transferred to another school, and we’d lost touch.
“How are you?”
I was in the local bar in Sandwich, waiting for Zac. I had come home to bring my brother back from rehab. It had been a month since that terrible night when I had driven him to the facility in Boston. A male nurse had to carry him inside because he was refusing to go. I had to talk to him with the help of a medical officer on duty. Four weeks later, it was a completely different story. The Tucker who’d come out to greet me reminded me so much of my brother the way he’d used to be that I found tears of joy streaming down my cheeks. I’d dropped him off at home to catch up with my parents while I grabbed a drink with Zac.
“I’m good, what’ve you been up to?”
Marcus came to stand next to me at the bar and ordered a beer. He told me he’d graduated and was about to take up his first job as a dentist at a nearby dentistry. He’d come out to see his family and hang out with some friends.
“What about you?”
“I studied teaching and tried that for a while, but I’m working as a nanny now.”
“How come?”
I didn’t like talking about my first teaching job at a school in downtown Boston. It had been a public school in desperate need of committed and dedicated teachers. I’d been warned not to go there but I wanted to make a difference and I thought I could help. The kids were from troubled backgrounds, many of them took drugs and were involved in gangs. They barely made it through high school, usually dropping out or getting arrested at some point. I left after a few months, after one of the kids waited for me with a knife after school, demanding that I change his mark to a pass rate. When I refused and tried to talk to him, he tried stabbing me. Fortunately, my handbag got in the way, and I was able to run away. But the incident had left me badly shaken. I was not the first teacher to be attacked in the school and I couldn’t face going back there again.
“That’s terrible,” Marcus said, his face filled with concern.
“I started the nanny work only temporarily, but it suits me better. I’m one-on-one with the kids and I feel I can really help them.”
Marcus showed no sign of rejoining his friends.
“I often thought of you after we moved to the city, wondering what had happened to you,” he said. “I’d liked you,” he looked away, bashful.
“I liked you too,” I said with a smile. “Remember how we used to walk home after practice?”
Marcus had been one of the star athletes at the school and he told me he had managed to get a track scholarship to study dentistry.
“Let me buy you a drink,” he said, noticing that I wasn’t drinking anything. I checked my phone but there was no message from Zac. Denise was working, but we had barely greeted each other. I’d rather spend time catching up with Marcus than avoiding her unfriendly glances my way.
We went to sit down at a table and reminisced about the past. Marcus told me what some of our friends had gotten up to, many of whom I’d lost touch with. I’d never been particularly social, even back then. He’d kept contact with most of them though. Talking to him came naturally and we fell into the same effortless banter that we used to share. He was a nice guy and I briefly considered what life would have been like if I’d dated someone like him in college, instead of Sam. I didn’t want to think of the past, especially now that Sam and I were together, and things were going well. But occasionally, I would wonder how my life would have been if it hadn’t been for the breakdown and the battle to finish my degree. If I hadn’t been so traumatized by Sam and then the experience at school. I never seemed able to develop the resilience and the grit necessary for adult life. I was beginning to get there now, but I was taking baby steps and was nowhere near where I would have liked to be. When I thought of my older brother and sister, I was envious of their ability to move away from home and live independently, making a life for themselves and not depending on anyone.
Sam was being very nice to me, but we’d only been back together for a month. I often found myself looking at him and wondering when his mood would change, or he would lose his temper. It made me anxious to think about how altered he was now. He said he was happy, and I feared that it couldn’t last. What would happen then? Would he go back to being the way he’d been before. I almost thought of him having two sides, Mr. Nice and Mr. Nasty. Just because I was seeing one side of him didn’t mean that that the other half had gone away. It was still there and sooner or later, I feared I’d see it again.
Marcus, on the other hand, was simply kind and good.
“So, have you been seeing anyone?”
“Kind of,” I said, wondering at my answer. Did I not want to tell Marcus about Sam because I was keeping our relationship private, or because I didn’t want him to think I was unavailable?
“There is someone but it’s very new, I’m not sure if it will work out.”
Marcus smiled, “I had a girlfriend, but we broke up recently.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shook his head. “She wanted to get married, buy our own place, look at furniture, the whole deal. It was too much. I felt we were too young.”
