Drowning Is Inevitable (11 page)

Steven stuck his head back into the living room, to tell us that it was in fact ready. He was not my grandmother. We went into the kitchen. There were no chairs, but there was a table in the middle of the room. There was some sort of chicken casserole and rice and French bread. The live-ins came out of their hiding spots and grabbed bowls. I grabbed my own bowl. Steven started to leave the room.

“You're not eating?” I asked.

“No, I never eat before a show.” He went into the living room and greeted a group of people that had just come in the house. “Hey boys, we're in the back.” Then he and the rest of them disappeared down the hall.

I'd pushed the homesick feeling away until I brought the food to my mouth. The taste brought tears to my eyes, embarrassing me, so I put my bowl down and excused myself from the room.

I walked back into the living room to find Max sitting on the couch. The relief at seeing him was immediate and sharp, a literal pang in my chest.

“Where've you been?” I whisper-yelled. “What took you so long?”

“I needed some time.”

“You needed time?”

I had expected him to look relieved after calling his dad, but he seemed agitated or restless or something else I couldn't name. He stood up and moved around the room like an animal pacing inside its cage. There was a faint whiskey smell in the air. He abandoned the living room for the front porch. I followed.

The night was falling down around Oak Street. Max put both hands around the railing on the front porch He held on to it hard, like he was afraid someone or something was going to come along and try to knock him off the porch. He wouldn't look at me.

“Where have you been?” I asked again.

Nothing.

“Fine, don't answer me. I can smell where you've been.”

He glared at me. “I'm sorry. But I needed a drink. You'll need one, too, in a minute.”

“You scared me.” My voice caught. “I've been sitting in this house, imagining the worst. And you've been getting drunk.” I hated that Maggie was right about him.

He dropped his head. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“What did your dad say?”

“I thought I could make one call and everything would be better.” He lifted his face to mine. His look said everything wasn't better.

I kept swallowing, my mouth drier than it had ever been. He opened his mouth to say something else, but no sound came. I stepped closer to him, as if his body could absorb some of the blow when he told me whatever was coming next. Standing so close, I looked into his chest, my nose almost touching him, and asked, “What did your dad say?”

I felt him looking down at me with tired eyes. I felt the breath from his mouth moving above my head, but still he said nothing. Instead he put his hands on my back and pulled me into him, making me turn my face to the side. I wanted to look up at him, but I only held on. I wondered at his silence and what he was holding so hard to. I wondered why everything wasn't better. Maybe his dad wasn't as good as he thought, or maybe we were in more trouble than we thought; maybe we wouldn't be forgiven or justified; maybe there would be no way out. I was grateful for this silence that allowed me not to know what he knew. I felt his heartbeat against my forehead, and I concentrated on the feel and rhythm of it.

My reprieve wasn't long. He took me by the shoulders, and I took a deep breath. When I looked up at him, he asked, “Did you know about the journals?”

I replayed his question over and over again in my head, fast and then slow, trying to make sense of the words. There were journals on the shelf in Jamie's bedroom, and there were two underneath his floor. My first instinct was always to protect Jamie. I kept quiet.

“Sure you did,” Max said. “You guys know everything about each other.” He didn't try to hide his frustration. “So you know he planned it.”

“What? No, he didn't plan it. I was there. I was in the room.”
I hit his dad with a skillet.
“There was no plan.”

Max's face said he didn't believe me.

“I need to talk to Jamie,” I said.

“Now is the time to talk to
me.
Jamie is screwed. You need to trust me now. Please.”

“I have to talk to Jamie.” I pulled away from him.

“My dad has a friend in the DA's office. He says the journals change everything.”

I was pretty sure that whatever Jamie had needed to tell me earlier had to do with his journals.

There are things you don't know.
Jamie had been trying to tell me something all along. It didn't matter, though. There was nothing Jamie could say that would change my mind about him.

I went back in the house, but instead of going to the kitchen where Jamie was, I walked down the long hall, looking at all the art that hung there. My mind needed a minute to process what I'd heard before I said anything to Jamie, or maybe I wanted to put off what I knew was coming next.

At the end of the hall, a door was open. Steven and the people that had just come in were sitting around a table doing lines of cocaine, the sound of the drug going up their noses louder than I thought it should be. I'd never seen anyone doing that, in person that is, and I knew I should look away, but I couldn't. I stood frozen to the spot, shocked. The people at the table turned to look at me. A girl was with them, not at the table, but standing up, facing the window. From behind she looked young, my height with short hair. When she turned around to face me, I saw that her eyes were ninety years old.

“Hey,” she said to me. “Do you want to come in? Do you party?”

“No, she doesn't party. This one's a baby,” Steven said. He came to the door and shut it, his eyes never leaving mine.

On my way back to the kitchen, I bumped into Luke coming out of one of the other bedrooms. He reached out to touch my face. I hadn't had time to put my expression back in its everything-is-normal place, so I thought he might ask me what was wrong. If he had, I just might have told him that everything in my life was out of control. I wanted to tell him I was too young to be in this place, and that I wanted to go back to St. Francisville, where no one looked at me. I wasn't used to being seen. But he didn't ask me what was wrong.

“I know who you are now,” he said. “You don't have to be afraid of me. I won't tell your secret.”

“I don't have a secret.”

He pulled his hands away from my face. “Okay. Just know I'd never judge anybody, because I've made a few bad choices myself.”

I didn't know why he was telling me this, but I knew I didn't want to talk to him anymore. When I tried to pass him, he reached out and grabbed my arm.

“Be careful where you go. Your photos are everywhere. I went downtown earlier. Y'all are splashed all over the TV.”

I stopped breathing and my eyes filled with my stupid guilty tears. I waited for him to say something else, but he didn't, so I just said, “Okay, we won't.”

He nodded.

I wanted to offer him something in return for his warning. “There's food in the kitchen. Steven cooked, it looks really good.”

He shook his head. “I don't go into the kitchen.” At first he didn't offer anything more, like what he'd just said was normal, but then he said, “Once I was on a really bad trip. I went into the kitchen and the cabinets started to breathe.”

“Oh.” And then I added him and that girl's eyes to the growing list of reasons not to do drugs.

Luke walked into the living room, but I wasn't ready for that yet so I stayed put, pretending to analyze one of Steven's paintings. I stayed there until I was convinced I understood what was in front of me. When I came back down the hall everyone was in the living room watching Luke, who was sitting with a guitar. Jamie and Max were standing together against a wall, and Maggie was nowhere to be seen. Max looked at me inquisitively because he knew I hadn't said anything to Jamie. They moved apart when they saw me, giving me room to slide in between them. I went to my own corner instead. It was while I watched Luke move his hands on the guitar and listened to his voice that he revealed himself as beautiful.

People with break-your-heart voices could afford to say strange things and avoid kitchens. And as I listened to Luke, I reached my limit of surprises for the day and felt the tears sting my eyes again. I wanted to stop them, so I did something to surprise them, thinking that maybe if I caught myself off guard I'd stop crying.

I plucked a pack of cigarettes from a nearby table and put one in my mouth. I realized too late I didn't have a lighter, and then a light appeared in my face, like magic, offered to me by one of the live-ins. I took a pull on the cigarette and nodded him a thank-you. I inhaled it and my lungs squeezed tight inside my chest, trying to keep the smoke out, but I won, making the smoke move down my throat then back up and out my mouth, exhaling with my cool, not-my-first-time-face. Jamie's and Max's surprised looks got on my nerves, so I stared back at them as a new Olivia, a cool, crying, smoking Olivia, one who appreciated good art and didn't get scared when people started doing drugs in front of her or told her they knew who she really was. I was nothing if not adaptable.

Two puffs in I remembered why I don't smoke. I turned and walked out the front door before the coughing started. It was Jamie who followed me. He didn't say anything; he just stayed three steps behind me as I made my way down Oak Street. When I stopped, he stopped, and when I walked, he walked. It was the same thing he did when we were little, when I was angry for some reason or another. He'd see me walking down Fidelity Street, come out of his house, and follow me down the street, never saying anything but always there. Just in case I wanted to turn around, he'd be there.

When I finally turned to face him, I cried harder because I'd promised him if he came down out of my tree, I wouldn't let anything bad happen to him. I was so scared I couldn't keep that promise.

“What's wrong?” he asked.

“You mean what else?”

“Yeah, what else is wrong?”

I wanted to ask him what he'd put in his journals that changed everything. Instead I said, “Max talked to his dad.”

“Yeah, he told me, but he wouldn't tell me what his dad said. He said I should ask you.”

“They found your journals.”

Jamie looked down at his feet. His shoulders tensed up.

“I'm guessing they're not talking about the ones on your shelf.”

Jamie didn't say anything, just walked to me and sat down on a bench. I sat down next to him. He turned his face away from me, and a heat settled in my belly.

“Jamie?”

“I watched him,” he said. “For so many years I just watched. He threw her around like she was weightless.”

I felt more tears burning beneath my eyes, and the heat from my stomach worked its way up my throat. His voice had lowered so much I had to strain to hear him.

“When I was younger, I looked up to him.”

He glanced at me, ashamed.

“When you were younger, he was someone to look up to.”

“But then he kept losing his job,” he said. “He couldn't provide for us anymore, and I could tell, even then, how ashamed he was. I guess he drank so he wouldn't have to feel it. Then everything turned to shit. He'd look into her face, the face of the wife he was supposed to love, the mother of the child he was supposed to love, and he'd hit it. He'd beat her face like her face meant nothing. I watched him hurt her, but he never hit me. He'd walk past me like I wasn't even there.”

He wiped his nose, and then he looked at me with tears in his eyes. “I started provoking him, just to see if he'd hit me, too. He wouldn't, though. He just kept looking through me. I knew I'd really have to push him.”

“Why did you want him to hit you?”

“I wanted him to see me. I wanted to take the heat off of her. That night was the first time he had looked at me in a really long time. I hated him so much. Every day I imagined how I could stop him,” he said. “I wrote down all the ways. I filled up two journals.”

He stopped talking for a while, and I was grateful. I scooted right up next to him. I laid my head against his shoulder and leaned into him to get as close as possible.

“The journals made them think you planned it,” I said. “You might've fantasized about it, but you didn't plan it the way it happened. We have to tell them the truth.”

Jamie tilted his head toward mine, his face resting on my hair. “I wrote about killing that prick every day for the last two years. They're not gonna believe I didn't plan it. It doesn't matter that I never thought I'd do it. What matters is that I'm not sorry I did.”

“But if I tell them my part in it they'll realize—”

“She had to be perfect. He'd blow up with no warning. Nobody can be perfect. Sometimes she never saw it coming. I ran away every time.”

I pulled away from him. “That doesn't matter. You didn't mean to—”

“Every time,” he said. “When I was younger I didn't feel guilty about it. I guess it was a survival instinct. I was so scared of him. The guilt came later.”

The street was busy, but it felt like we were the only two people in the world. I couldn't hear any of the surrounding noises, only Jamie's words.

“But you didn't mean it to happen,” I said. “He was threatening you. If we tell them I was there, that I hit him with the skillet, they'll know you didn't plan it.

“I'm not implicating you.”

“Jamie—”

“Let me be the one who finally stopped him,” he said. “By myself. Please? Let me be that for her.”

“Your mom knows what I did.”

“She knows you hurt him, but the knife in his gut is what killed him.
I
did that. Don't take that away from me.” His eyes were begging.

“I won't take that away from you.”