Drowning Is Inevitable (22 page)

Maggie broke away from me and Max, running to her dad, throwing herself at him. He caught her. For a long time we all watched their embrace, like we were silently taking notes on what reunions should look like.

I felt my dad's gaze on me, but I didn't look at him right away. I looked to the floor and counted the number of tiles between my feet and his. There was only a little space between us, eight three-by-five tiles, but the distance felt much greater. He stood slowly, and my face lifted to meet his gaze. He was wearing a look of disbelief, like even though he'd been sitting there waiting for me, he was never really convinced I'd show up. With the only light in the room coming from the main office, the hall was dark and shadowed, hiding the lines in his face, making him look like the boy in the pictures, the one always standing next to Lillian. He stepped into the light, and he was my dad again. I wasn't expecting his tears, but then again I had come home, and the first girl he loved hadn't.

He looked at my face for a long time. I imagine he saw the miles there; he saw how far I'd gone. Then he stepped closer to me, and his hand reached for mine. There was no dramatic embrace like the one Maggie and her dad were still in. He just held onto my hand really tight, giving it a squeeze.

The policemen pulled us away and said there was business to attend to. They led us into a different room, our parents following. There were papers piled up and spread across a table in the center of the room. Our pictures were lying on top of them. Max's dad took over, telling us where to sit, what to read, and where to sign. He explained the details over and over again, the trouble we would still be in if we didn't listen to him. We just nodded.

“Go home and stay out of trouble,” he said. “If you get into any more trouble, I won't be able to help you.” He looked at Max long and hard, and there was a pained look on his face that said, “I won't even be able to help
you.
”

We nodded again.

Everyone stood, and as the others moved to the door, Max, and Maggie, and I moved toward each other, coming to stand so close our heads bowed and our bodies touched. There were no tears, just a quiet moment of being connected and still, like we knew that after that moment we'd forever be moving farther apart, and our bodies wanted to remember the closeness. I felt the others watching us; I felt their held breaths.

“I love you,” Max said.

“I love you, too,” Maggie and I said.

Maggie's dad cleared his throat, and one by one we peeled away from one another. Soon, the people I'd grown so close to were walking in separate directions.

Sitting in the passenger seat of my dad's truck, I looked straight ahead, too scared to look anywhere else. For a while we rode in silence, and that was fine with me, but soon my dad spoke.

“Your grandmother doesn't really know what happened.”

I looked at him as he continued.

“Well, she knows about Tom Benton, but she never connected that back to you. At first I worried town talk would upset her, but then I remembered … she only hears what she wants to.”

I guessed that meant she'd believed the note I'd left her and was expecting Lillian to come home before her birthday. I wondered if that was good news. We rode the rest of the way in silence.

As we drove down Fidelity Street, I kept my head turned to the right, not wanting to see a single piece of Jamie's house. Soon we were pulling up in front of my grandmother's house, and it looked just like it did the night I left it. We sat in the truck for a little while, neither one of us looking at the other, but instead looking toward the trees that hid the view of the river. It was my dad who broke the silence.

“Look, I don't …” He stopped and took a deep breath, then blew it out slowly. “When you l-left … the—the night you left …” His words came out in a stammer, and he paused for a really long time. “I thought I might not ever see you again.”

I thought about telling him how close I'd gotten to never coming home. I decided to stay quiet.

He turned to look at me and said, “I'm sorry about Jamie. I know what he meant to you.”

I swallowed hard at his use of the past tense. Should I tell him about some of the things I had learned, about the things worse than death? I didn't, because his hand reached across the seat of his truck and took mine. Again, there was that squeeze.

“I saw you. In New Orleans,” I said. “At first I thought I was seeing things. It means a lot that you came for me.”

“I couldn't not come for you.” After a minute he said, “I'm glad you're home.”

“Me too.” There was so much more we both needed to say, but for the night we needed to leave it at this.

He used my key to open the front door. I walked into the dark house and dropped my bag at my feet before turning back to face him. I watched him, his feet planted firmly on the porch, not taking one step inside. This was as close as he ever got to coming inside my grandmother's house. There was only a tiny space separating us, but it highlighted the line he wouldn't cross for me. I was suddenly angry, and I wanted things of him he wasn't ready to give me. I wanted him to step over the threshold of my grandmother's door and pick up my bag and say, “You don't live here.”

But of course he didn't move. I stepped toward him, but only to close the door. For a while we continued to stare at each other through the glass, but eventually he turned around, and I watched his back as he went down the porch steps to his truck. I made a mental note to tell Lillian, the next time I saw her, what she had done to him.

I turned my back on the front door and faced the dark living room. My mom's room was directly to my right, but I wasn't ready to face it yet, so I kept my eyes trained on the hallway in front of me. I walked down it, past Lillian's framed school pictures, and stopped outside my grandmother's bedroom door. She had left it open, and I watched the lump in her bed, her chest moving slowly up and down. Part of me wanted to go to her and wake her up, to get this over with, but another part said it could wait until morning.

I walked back down the hall to my mom's room, the wood floor creaking underneath my feet. I slid my shoes off right outside the door, but I didn't step into the room, just reached my hand in and flicked on the light switch. The light shone brightly on the shrine to my mom: the curtains hanging from the window, the quilt on her bed, even the lampshade; everything made with Lillian in mind, a collection of soft yellow and white, her favorite colors. My eyes stopped on my crib standing in the corner of the room. I wondered if my grandmother ever wondered about the baby that had slept there.

At the sight of my mom's bed, I was instantly tired, deep into my bones tired. With a deep breath I stepped into the room and felt myself stepping back into her skin. It wrapped around me, enveloping me, but it felt uncomfortable. It was as if in the days I'd been gone, I'd outgrown her. It was choking me, making me step back into the hall. I knew the days of playing dress-up in my mom's clothes were over. I turned the light off. I'd sleep on the couch instead.

I went to the front window and looked across the front yard to my tree. It stood solid and perfect in front of me, and for a second I wanted to open the front door and run to its waiting branches. The promise I had made Jamie that night not so long ago stopped me.

If you come down, I won't let anything bad happen to you. I'll take care of you.

I knew I'd be held to that promise, the promise I made on Fidelity Street. I looked away from the tree, back to the couch. I slumped down along the length of it before turning on my side and forcing sleep. Jamie didn't meet me in my dreams, even though I looked and looked for him.

Sunlight streaming through the window and the sound of my grandmother shifting in the seat next to me woke me up. I turned my face and lifted my eyes to her. There was this blissful moment, this tiny moment, when I'd forgotten why I was sad, and the only thing I felt was happiness at seeing her. I almost flung myself at her. It was the worry and confusion in her face that stopped me. And then there were her tears. These were old tears, ones that had been cried a long time ago but were back again now. I knew she knew who I was. This wasn't going to be a happy reunion. Because if my grandmother saw me instead of Lillian, it meant that Lillian was gone.

My grandmother leaned closer to me, and there was a smell like baby powder mixed with her perfume that made me homesick even though I was already home. I sat up slowly so as not to startle her. She looked so confused, and it was my face that was causing her distress. For a second I worried it had been too long since she had seen me as Olivia, that she might label me an intruder and send me from her home. She touched my knee, and her skinny fingers curled around it, shaking. I wanted only to make her happy, to rearrange my features so that she saw Lillian once again.

She got up and walked to my mom's room. I followed, but stopped in the doorway. My grandmother sat on the bed, on top of the quilt she had once made for my mom, her back to me. She rubbed her hand across the pillow sham, back and forth, and then she traced the stitching, so slowly, like her fingers were remembering the needlework.

“W
hat do you want to be when you grow up?”

It was a question I'd ask Jamie every so often, wanting to stay up to date on any life-changing decisions he might've made.

“I want to be a tree.” That was the first answer he gave me, back when we were five and didn't realize our options were limited to the human realm.

“I want to be a kite flier.” That was what he told me when he was a little older and had become slightly more realistic.

Because I thought it was my job to make sure he thought everything out, I asked, “What if there's no wind?”

“Then I want to be a wind maker,” was his response.

I liked the idea of Jamie the wind maker. We ran around my grandmother's yard, Jamie blowing his wind and chasing me.

By the time we were teenagers, he no longer thought he could make the wind.

“I want to be the ferryboat captain.” That was what he said on his sixteenth birthday, when we were camping under the stars in my grandmother's backyard. I knew he was deflecting to avoid telling me what he really wanted to say.

“No, that's
my
fallback plan,” I said. “You can't have that one.”

He smiled, but later, when we were almost asleep, he whispered the truth to me.

“I want to be a writer. When I write in my journals, I can be anybody and do anything.”

In his stories he could be a wind maker again. I smiled, because I still liked the idea. We were quiet for a long while, both looking at the stars blinking at us through the leaves on the trees.

“You can be anybody and do anything,” I said. “One day you'll leave this town, and me in it. But that's a good thing.”

“You can come with me,” he said.

“I don't know how to leave.”

He sat up and turned to me. I could just about make out his face in the dark, and he said, “One day you'll know how to leave. Besides, maybe one day we won't need each other so much. One day I don't think you'll need me at all.”

“That's not true. I'll always need you.”

“When you're an old lady you won't need me.”

“That's a really long time to wait, and what if I don't live that long?”

“You will live to be an old lady, and then you'll die,” he said, like it was an order. He laughed then.

“You're the only one who thinks so,” I said.

He got quiet again before saying, “You only need one person to believe it for it to be true.”

“Fine. I'll live to be an old lady. And
then
I'll die.”

He lay back down.

“Where will you be?” I asked.

His eyes met mine. “I'll be waiting for you.”

Under the faint glow of the stars above us, I didn't question why he thought he was going to die before me; I just smiled, because I liked the idea of dying an old lady and Jamie waiting for me on the other side.

The shovel was heavy, heavy and hard, the wood of the handle rough against my hand. I felt the blisters already forming, but I didn't care. I kept pushing the blade of the shovel into the grass, over and over again. No one stopped me. I thought someone might. I'd thought about it earlier while walking down the steps of my grandmother's porch. And as I walked to the shed in the backyard looking for the shovel, I was sure someone would stop me before I was able to finish what I wanted to do.

It had been a few days since we'd come home, and there was this thing I woke up knowing I had to do. With my backpack on and the shovel in my hand, I walked down the middle of the street with my eyes closed. I counted the steps, because I knew exactly how many there were between my grandmother's house and Jamie's, and when it would be safe to open them.

My arm was tired by the time I made it to the graveyard. I looked around, catching the eyes of a couple standing a few feet away. They didn't stop me, just watched. I dropped my backpack next to Lillian's grave and looked at her name in the stone for a really long time. Then I started digging.

After a time I had dug deep enough, and I dropped the shovel, sweat stinging my eyes. I sat down and brought my bag into my lap before opening it. I pulled out Beth Hunter's letters. I closed my eyes and imagined her face, the one in the photos on the wall in my mom's room and the one that belonged to the woman she grew up to be. She had wanted to use the letters to communicate with my mom.

I placed the letters in the hole I'd just dug. It was maybe two feet deep—just deep enough to be considered buried, but shallow enough so the rain could still get to them. It wouldn't be long before they decomposed. The rain would help. The letters would decay, word by word, and in this way they'd finally find their way down to Lillian. I found peace in that.

My bag had been confiscated in New Orleans. They'd found the money Beth had given us, and since we didn't tell them where it came from, they seized it. I'd already mailed Beth a letter and put a hundred dollars in it. Paying her back was something I had to do.

I stood and picked up the shovel. The couple watching me didn't move. The woman was Mrs. Copeland, my fourth-grade teacher. Every time I saw her, I thought about the look on her face when she finished reading our class
Old Yeller,
like she thought she'd made a mistake in reading us something so sad. I didn't know the man standing with her. I filled the hole back up, the sound of the dirt hitting the letters loud in my ears. I dropped to my knees and began smoothing the dirt with my hands.

It wasn't just me and the couple in the cemetery now. There were workers clearing a spot not too far from me, about fifteen rows behind my mom's grave. I sat on top of Lillian's tombstone and watched them digging for a time, the two of them taking turns stabbing their shovels into the ground. It had taken me a long time to dig a tiny hole, but it wouldn't take these men very long to dig that grave. They were expert gravediggers. They'd be finished in no time.

I knew it was Jamie's grave they were working on, and I watched their shovels do their work, deeper and deeper. It was his mom's family's plot. I'd already walked over there to see if Jamie's dad was buried there, and to my relief he wasn't. That made me feel better—the idea that Jamie wouldn't have to lie near his dad.

I felt heavy, and I turned my back to them before sliding down the front of the tombstone. I hadn't gone to Jamie's visitation the night before, and I wasn't going to his funeral today.

My body was so heavy that I imagined I sank into the ground a little—just enough to make my legs disappear. Someone would have to dig me up if I was ever going to move again. It was a good thing I was comfortable.

It was late in the afternoon when the cars began to line the streets. I heard the opening and closing of their doors, one after another. I heard feet moving in the grass as they came closer to that spot in the graveyard, the one that had just been cleared. I kept my eyes on my lap. They walked in from all corners of the cemetery, but I didn't look at them, not even the ones who walked past me. I didn't even look up when it was Max's hand reaching down to touch my face.

“I'm here,” he reminded me.

He squatted down and cupped my face in his hand. Eyes still on the grass, I leaned into his hand. He would hold me up forever if I let him.

Since we'd gotten home, he'd been sleeping on the swing on my grandmother's front porch. She wouldn't let him in, but he wouldn't leave me. The couple of times I'd been strong enough to get off my grandmother's couch, I'd gone outside to join him. He'd held me in the swing and whispered, “You'll be okay,” over and over.

“When?”

“One day.”

“Soon?” I'd ask him.

“Not soon, but one day.”

He was so careful with me, touching me lightly and speaking to me in hushed tones. At one point he'd used his body to block the wind, like he was afraid the slightest thing might break me into a thousand pieces.

I'd wanted to protest and deny that I was this fragile thing, but I was so light, and I had this floating feeling. Without Jamie, there was no one to be my anchor, to keep me on the ground. I'd been grateful for Max holding me to him on the swing. I was scared that without him I'd drift away up into the clouds, to a place where no one could reach me.

He looked at me warily now.

“Are you scared of me?” I asked.

“No, just for you.”

As Jamie's graveside service began, he walked to the crowd. I kept my back to it, the top of my head the only thing visible above my mom's tombstone. The day was windy, and every so often it carried the sounds to me. I hummed that song and stared straight ahead at an oak tree a few feet in front of me. I watched as the younger versions of Jamie and me ran around it, ghost children running and tripping over the roots, laughing and chasing one another. My ears filled with the sounds of their play, drowning out the town's crying behind me.

I was so content watching them that I smiled. Until they ran right by someone watching me, someone real. The playing children faded away, my dad's face making their laughter disappear. He was on the edge of the graveyard leaning against the front of his truck, his hands in his pockets. We each stared at the other, neither one of us moving. He pushed off the truck and walked toward the tree between us, the one on the edge of the graveyard. I wanted him to come into the graveyard for the first time in eighteen years and dig me up. But he didn't, he just turned around and walked back to his truck. He drove away. I watched his truck getting smaller and smaller, and because I didn't want to look at its taillights any longer, I turned my head far to the other side and accidentally caught a glimpse of the service.

I only saw a corner of the casket, but that wasn't what made me puff out the breath I'd been holding. It was the person looking back at me: Mrs. Benton, Jamie's mom. At the sight of her, my stomach clenched and my hand grabbed at the hole I knew was there. I wanted to look away from her, but her eyes trapped me and held me still. She'd aged twenty years since that night in her kitchen.

I'd gone to see her on our second night back in town. I couldn't go into the house, so she'd come outside to talk to me.

“I'm so sorry,” I'd said. “Everything went to hell. I thought I could keep him safe. I was wrong.”

She didn't say anything for a long while. Finally she said, “I don't want you to feel responsible. I set this in motion. Jamie should never have been in the position of having to stop his dad. I should never have put him there. I should've left a long time ago. If I had, they'd both be alive.” She'd started crying. “But I couldn't leave. I didn't know how.”

I needed to acknowledge my part in this mess, too. “I hurt him, too.”

She shook her head, much like Jamie had when I'd tried to take responsibility.

“No, this isn't on you. Jamie would never want you to take any blame. He'd want you protected from that. That's the last thing I can do for him. Protect you. So that's what I'm gonna do.”

I'd cried then, and she'd held me.

At the sight of me, Mrs. Benton—her face still carrying its faint yellow bruises where Mr. Benton had hit her—brought her hand to her stomach, covering a hole I knew was there.

Max and Maggie were standing together, watching the exchange between Jamie's mom and me. They both looked like they wanted to join me, but I turned my head back around and hoped they'd get the message that I wanted to be alone. I could still see Mrs. Benton's face though, even when I closed my eyes. I was surprised the bruises were still there, and I sank even deeper into the ground, because she had lost her whole family before her face had even had time to heal.

Much later, after the people had gone, I listened for the sound of the gravediggers again, for their shovels and the sound of the dirt filling up the hole. I only looked once, as they rolled out the grass they had cut away that morning, laying it across the grave like a blanket.