a mid-night confession

Her name was Quinn that’s all she knew, but he knew more. 

She had come to him in a dream, actually two.  She had told him everything, well, anyway that it would be okay.  But now she wondered.  It wasn’t like the dreams she’d had, true love affairs, swept-off-her-feet years later even in a dream…but her name was Quinn. There must be an e in there Quinne.  That was more like it.  Yes, Quinne.  She had died in a car crash.  Years earlier, when asked why he didn’t go after the pretty, skinny, blonde or brunette girls that so obviously liked him; what was there not to like?  Swiss blonde hair, crystal blue eyes with a hint of rebel, muscles developed, not from baseball, or basketball, football or even wrestling, but from concrete.  At fifteen, tougher and cooler than James Dean, too old, an untouchable at Central Bucks, he had lied.  He had said he loved a girl and she had died.  In a car crash.  Now, thirty years later, he told her she would think he was crazy.  Her!  The craziest chica he had ever known, endured.  But she didn’t.  She just smiled and said she understood, and he knew she did.  And their little girl slept with the Chihuahua that had snapped and bit his chemical burned finger tips for two weeks, who just days earlier had not been able to raise her head off a Philadelphia alleyway, who was now playing like the puppy she should have been five years ago, like him, the boy that should have grown.  Both of them, reveling, growing, in the safety of what’s known and trusted in the comfort of home.  Suddenly, she remembers the California boy, from somewhere in the valley; Palo something or something Verde.  He was the little brother of her sister’s college roommate.  It was that innocent thing where the parents think they have some sort of connection because their daughters have somehow been placed together in a tiny room, somewhere far from home.  She went out with that California boy, with the blonde hair and big smile while the rest of the family went out to dinner.  They drank dark beer at the place that explained what a levy was when the levy was dry, she was a dreamer, a poet, really it was a dried up wash, arroyo seco, like the LA river.  That night, thirteen, drinking beers in a van driven by a fifteen year old kid, they had kissed and it was heaven.  A boy, the same kind she was always attracted to, the clash between her dark brown skin and eyes and his eyes that glowed in the dark, his skin that did the same…His sister had leaked milk out her breasts without even knowing she was pregnant.  This was years later.  After the crush had faded.  Someone had jumped out a window and then she had started gushing.  This all made perfect sense, even though things were so terribly confusing.  Everything happened so perfectly, always, though there was never an explanation as to why.  And that’s the way she gave up her virginity, one night, with a boy who would later say he was sorry, if he had only known, things would have been different.  As if that made any sense or even mattered.