Drowning Is Inevitable (24 page)

“We're here,” he said.

“Where's here?”

“Come on. I'll show you.”

He stepped out of the truck and walked around and opened my door. “Do you want to see inside?”

“You live here?”

He nodded. “I rented it a couple of days ago.”

“What's wrong with your apartment?”

He didn't answer, just said, “Come on. Come inside with me.”

He turned and walked to the front of the house. I watched his back as he moved to the door, and then he disappeared inside.

The living room was small, and boxes of his things were stacked here and there. He stepped out of the kitchen when he heard me come in the front door.

“Hey,” he said, and I thought I saw a look of faint surprise on his face, like he'd never really expected me to follow him inside.

“It's not much, but it's got two bedrooms.” He paused then added, “I thought you might want one of them.”

I stared at his face, at the little lines around his eyes. He walked down the hall. I followed. He stopped in front of a door before opening it.

“This could be your room,” he said.

I stepped into the room. It was a perfect square, and it was perfectly empty.

“I bought a bed,” he said. “Just in case you said yes. They're delivering it later today. I bought pillows and a comforter too, but I didn't know what color you'd like for the covers. I didn't know what to buy.”

He looked at me in a kind of hopeful way, like maybe I could help him out with that, but I didn't know what color I liked either. That made me frown, because I was pretty sure that a favorite color was something an eighteen-year-old girl should know about herself.

After a minute or so, he dropped his head and stepped into the hall. “I'll be in the living room.”

I walked farther into the room. This place was altogether unexpected. If I had to guess, I'd say it was about ten feet long and ten feet wide, making it one hundred square feet of space for me in my dad's life that had never existed before. It was the only space anyone had ever said was mine. There was a lone window opposite some built-in bookshelves. I went to it and opened it a crack, just enough to let in the breeze. I turned back to face the room and tried not to feel small as I stared at its bare walls and empty shelves. A room with no shadows.

I
t was a perfect blue-sky day, and we were barely thirteen—the last time we'd both fit comfortably in the seat of my tree. Jamie and I sat and watched the people of Fidelity Street going about their day. My grandmother was digging in her petunia bed, humming a song she must have sung to Lillian, and Jamie's mom was swinging slowly on her front porch swing. They were flesh and blood but caught in between living and not, and we sat still and watched them, our hands holding tight to the branches. It was my favorite place in the whole world, my bird's-eye view of the tiny street with its green slopes leading down to the river and its people who wore their love like badges and made promises that lasted forever. We sat and watched, the smell of flowers mixing in with their devotion.

Jamie's face was sad. He was staring at his mom, which made me do the same. She looked straight ahead, flinching at slammed doors inside her house. I saw how tired Jamie looked—too tired for someone so young. I wanted him to be able to see the beauty around him, to see the tree holding him, the one that had stood in its spot for the last hundred years, but he couldn't. His mom was taking up all the space in his head, and it was only her face he could see. I wished I could take him somewhere new, someplace he'd never been, a place without sad mothers. So I said, “Let's go somewhere new today.”

“Where?” he asked.

I shrugged and said, “I don't know, just someplace we've never been.”

Our options were limited, because we were too young to drive. I perked up and said, “Close your eyes,” and he did. He smiled when I leaned in to him, like even though he didn't know what was coming next, he thought it might be fun.

“Imagine you're somewhere new, someplace you've never been before,” I told him.

He got very still and then leaned back against the tree. After a time he nodded his head, like he was there.

“Now imagine me with you,” I said.

We were having record rainfall for September, rain pouring down day after day, the noise it made loud on the metal roof of our front porch. It soaked into the mostly dirt front yard, leaving a muddy pond in its place. Day after day it fell, as if the sky was mourning him, too. There were days when I didn't think I could handle both our grief, but today was different.

The sun was rising with no clouds to hide behind, its light coming into my room through the window, spreading across the floor, fanning out, and sliding underneath the furniture. I sat up in my bed and watched it while I waited for it to reach me. It wrapped me in its velvet light. Today was the beginning of something new, even if that was just a day with no rain.

I'd been living in my room for a month now, but it didn't really look like it. Partly because I was adding the pieces of me slowly, and partly because I was still learning what those pieces were. My bookshelves stood empty except for the two photos Beth Hunter had given me, the one of my mom and me in the hospital and the one of her and my grandmother sitting on a bench in their backyard. They didn't have frames yet; they just lay on their backs and stared up at me when I went near them. I added some books but then took them back down, because I didn't know if I'd put them there because I liked them or because Lillian did. She and I were still tangled together, a muddled mess of mother and daughter, and it would take some time to separate the pieces of us out.

The walls were still mostly bare, with the exception of Maggie's present to me, a painting. I watched the sun bounce off it and change its colors like magic. I smiled at the painting, something I always did when I looked at it. I loved it, mostly because it came from Maggie, her hands, her art, but also because it was something only a few people in the whole world would be able to look at and recognize.

The painting carried its own sunrise, except this was a view of the sunrise over Oak Street from Steven's front porch. It shone through the cracked wood of the banister, the one we'd leaned our troubles against. It shone over Steven's front steps and the street we'd danced in—the place where we became something new. It burned its light through the alley next to the buildings, Maggie catching all the colors there, even the ones I didn't have names for, even the ones layering the sleeping homeless man on the street. Off to the side stood four silhouettes, dark shadows of the four of us watching the sun rise to its spot in the sky, like it knew it was rising over something special. There were days when it was the only thing I looked at.

Staring at the painting, I decided I wanted to do something I hadn't done in weeks. I wanted to go outside. My body moved slowly, my legs stretching out one at a time, testing to make sure the muscles hadn't atrophied from lack of use. I stepped down from the bed, and my feet landed on a piece of paper. It was crumpled, and I bent down to pick it up. When I unfolded it, I saw it had Max's handwriting on it. It looked like his attempt at taking notes. It must've fallen out of his backpack. I smiled at it, at the evidence of a secret I kept.

Sometimes, in the night, Max snuck back home to me, even though I was a sinking stone and it might not be safe to be near me. He didn't seem to worry about me pulling him down and would climb into my room through the window without warning and then slide in between the covers, always saying the same thing.

“I'm here.”

I'd sink into him at those words, his touch reviving me. I knew it was wrong to use him as a life raft, but each time he came I wrapped my arms around him, holding on tight to the memories of our shared time, like echoes of a favorite song stuck in my head. He always slipped out sometime before dawn, but never before saying, “Tell me again.”

“I love you,” I'd say.

He usually left something behind, like the piece of paper. I kept each thing. It was my proof he was real and not some imagined comfort. Today he'd left more than one thing. I saw a smaller piece of paper a couple of feet from my bed, maybe trash from his pocket, and not too far from that another one. It was like he was leaving a trail for me to follow, one that led me to him. Maybe that was what the lost girl in the mirror needed.

I picked up each piece and smoothed it out before stacking them on my dresser, next to the college brochures littered there. I'd given myself a deadline for picking one. The brochures from LSU always found their way to the top of the pile after a visit from Max.

I pulled on clothes and walked down the hall. Mr. Barrow was sitting on the couch like he was supposed to be there. He smiled at me, a small smile.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

I was surprised to see him. He hadn't missed his son by that much. “Better,” I said, because that's what people wanted to hear.

“I'm sorry it's so early. I was headed out of town on business, and I wanted to talk to you about something. Your dad let me in on his way out. I hope that's okay.”

“Yeah.”

He stood. “I've managed to work out another deal. Y'all are so young, and I don't want the bad decisions you've made to affect the rest of your lives. If you all hold up your ends of the deal without incident, and stay out of trouble for the next five years, your records could be expunged. They'd be wiped clean. It would be like it never happened.”

He smiled broadly, like he'd delivered good news. I thought about Maggie's painting as he talked about blank slates. I imagined the colors melting off the canvas, sliding down and dripping onto the floor like colored tears, leaving an empty white space behind. It would never be like it had never happened. It hurt to breathe, and I shook my head.

He frowned and said, “You need to think about this, Olivia. Don't give away a second chance.”

I wanted to tell him that I didn't think we'd made bad decisions. I wanted to tell him about the things I'd learned, about sacrifice and perfect love, and how I wanted a record of that. I knew he wouldn't understand, so I said, “Thank you,” so he'd leave, and he did.

Once I was sure I'd given him enough time to leave, I stepped toward the front door. I paused in the doorway of my dad's bedroom. His bed was unmade. We were still figuring out how to navigate the same space, sometimes only circling one another, but each day we got a little more comfortable.

Stepping out onto the front porch, I felt like an animal coming out of hibernation, and my hand went to my eyes to shield them from the sun. I stayed like that for a while, giving my body time to readjust, before lowering my hand and staring with blinking eyes at the muddy mess that was our front yard. I turned my attention to my dad's gift to me: a car made two decades before I was born. I hadn't driven it yet. It might be a good day to do so.

I knew where I was going before I left the porch and carefully walked around all the puddles, then slumped down into the car's seat and used both hands to close its heavy door. It took three tries before it started. I drove down the quiet road and into town, my car the only moving thing in the still-sleeping streets, the morning dew shining brightly on the front yards I passed.

Turning onto Fidelity Street, I slowed the car to a crawl and kept my eyes straight ahead, coming to a stop right next to my tree. I turned to face my grandmother's house. Being there was like going back in time, and I wondered whether I'd always feel like a little girl when I stood in front of this house.

I climbed the front steps of the porch, and my hands shook a little.

“Lillian?” My grandmother's voice coming from inside stopped me in my tracks. I stood just outside the front door, my hand stopped in midair as I reached for the handle.

“What are we doing today?” she asked.

I moved to the window and looked inside. She wasn't speaking to me. She was standing in the kitchen, looking in the direction of my mom's bedroom, like she was waiting for Lillian's reply. She threw her head back and laughed, like my mom had said something funny. The laugh was a full-belly one, and her hand reached to her stomach to stop its shaking. My grandmother didn't need my face to see Lillian. I sat down on a little stool beneath the window and watched.

“Lillian, you are my prize,” she said. My grandmother's head turned, like she was following the apparition of my mom as it moved from her room into the kitchen. I strained my eyes, trying to see Lillian, too, but she was invisible to me. My grandmother hummed and moved about her kitchen, and then she twirled, like they were dancing. She used to twirl me in just that way, and I closed my eyes, recalling the feel of it, my small hands in hers I knew what it felt like to be her prize, and tears stung my eyes.

When I opened them, she was looking at me, stopped in mid-twirl, shocked out of her fantasy long enough to see the real me. Our eyes locked, and we each stared at the other. Her face looked like it did in the days after I came home and before Jamie's funeral: timid and somewhat remorseful. In those days she'd tiptoed around me as I slept on her couch, bringing me food and going to the window to see Max sitting on her porch. She did her best to ignore him and dusted around me, occasionally touching my face to make sure I was real.

The moment between us only lasted a few seconds, and then she looked from side to side, her eyes searching. She frowned, like she'd been unable to find what she wanted, making me wonder if Lillian had become invisible to her, too. Maybe she couldn't see both of us in the same place at the same time. Maybe I canceled Lillian out.

She turned back to me, and instead of looking sad she just shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “Where's that girl of mine gone now?” Then she smiled at me, a little unsure but smiling just the same. After a second, the smile widened, like even though Lillian was gone from the room, she was glad to see me in her window. I smiled back. Maybe Lillian and I could share her. That thought made me happier than I'd been in a long time.

She went to the edge of the kitchen counter and picked up her gardening gloves and spade. She gave me a little wave with her fingers, and I waved back. She smiled again and went out the back door. I got up from the stool and turned my back on the window.