Drowning Is Inevitable (2 page)

The first time Max told me he loved me was during junior year. We were standing in the school parking lot between the busses and teacher parking. That was also the year he told me he knew I was the girl he'd marry someday.

“I love you,” he'd said, the sun making him squint and his words making my heart rate double.

“You can't,” I'd said.

I'd turned and walked away, his “why not?” a whisper behind me.

Then he'd yelled out. “Yes, I can love you! I
do
love you.”

“Why?”

The look on his face said he hadn't expected to be questioned. At first I thought he wouldn't answer.

“You see the real me,” he'd finally said. “My dad, my friends—they see me how they want to see me. But you see me for
me.
”

Max loved me for the same reasons I loved Jamie.

Now he was looking at me, and there was fire in his eyes. Sometimes he looked at me like my dad looked at my mom in those pictures. I didn't know how to tell him his love burned me up.

“Hey,” he said. “I've been looking for you.”

“I've been here.”

I took the seat next to him on the swing.

“Is Jamie here?” he asked.

I nodded. Max had always accepted my friendship with Jamie and was never threatened by it. Everyone knew we were a package deal.

The air between us was thick. I kept replaying the last things we'd said to each other. Judging by the look on his face, he was doing the same thing. He reached for my hand and flipped it over. He traced the scars there, something he did every time he held my hand. He reached for the other one and did the same thing, like the lines were a code he was trying to break.

“I shouldn't have been driving that night,” he said, his soft touch an apology.

“No, you shouldn't have been.”

He grimaced. A few months ago, we were coming home from a party when a deer ran across the road. Max had been too drunk to drive, but I couldn't convince him not to. Max swerved, but we still hit it. The impact sent us off the road and into a ditch. The truck flipped over. Sometimes I still heard the sound of metal crunching in my sleep, my subconscious replaying that night. We'd landed upside down. Max was no help. I had to kick the window out to get us out, and I cut my hands on the glass climbing out. Everyone said I shouldn't have been strong enough to break the glass. I tore up my hands pretty bad, and Max never forgave himself.

After the accident Max started thinking I was a liar.

“I forgive you,” I'd say.

“I don't believe you. How can you?” he'd ask. “I almost killed you.”

“But you didn't. It was an accident. That deer came out of nowhere. You would've hit it even if you were sober.”

“Don't make excuses for me,” he'd argue.

No matter what I said, he wouldn't believe me. Since then, it was like he was on a mission, loving me more to atone for his sins.

He rubbed my scars now and shook his head. “I love you,” he said.

He was wild, throwing around words like
love.
He pushed most people away, but not me. With me, he was dying to be saved. I wanted to tell him that love never saved anybody. It didn't save my mom.

“That's done,” I said. “You don't have to be sorry about that anymore.”

He had other things to be sorry about.

“I'm sorry about what I said the other day.”

I pulled my hand from his. We both knew that wasn't true.

“I'm sorry for
how
I said it,” he said.

That I believed.

“I didn't know asking you to come to Baton Rouge at the end of the summer would be a deal breaker.”

“I can't see myself there.”

“Even though that's where Jamie will be?” he asked.

Jamie was going to LSU in the fall. The thought made me hollow. It was only about thirty miles away, but you couldn't measure the distance from St. Francisville in miles.

“I can't see myself anywhere.”

“Look, I get it,” he said.

But he didn't. Max had always had a place, in the past, in the present. Max had a future, even if it was one he didn't want. His dad was a prominent attorney in town who expected his son to follow in his footsteps. Max was headed to LSU, pre-law of course, and his dad had already added the
and son
to the sign outside his office.

There wasn't a lot of new ground broken in St. Francisville. Most people just did what their parents did, which was why almost everyone who knew me half expected me to follow my mom into the water. No one asked me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” If I was honest, it was a question I didn't want to hear. In two months I'd be eighteen, and a day after that I'd outlive her. I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, because there had never seemed a point in planning past eighteen. I figured if I pulled through, then I'd make some decisions. This frustrated Max to great extremes and had been the catalyst for our last fight.

“Olivia, you have to pick something. You have to do
something
!” he'd yelled.

“I am doing something!” I'd yelled back.

“You're playing dress-up in a dead girl's clothes. That doesn't qualify as a life plan.”

My eyes had watered and my nose had stung at his words, like he'd struck me. “Should I keep doing whatever it is we're doing?” I'd asked. “Having sex in your truck on turnrows and getting day-drunk for no reason. Is that a better life plan?”

It was his turn to look like he'd been kicked in the gut.

“I haven't had a drop of anything since that night, and you know it.”

I did know it, but I couldn't keep myself from rubbing salt in his wound. I'd wanted to hurt him back.

“I know. I'm sorry.”

“I try every day to do the right thing,” he'd said. “My dad says I have to be honest, own up to my mistakes. And that's what I'm trying to do, but you make everything so hard.”

“How do I make things hard?”

“Because you're not honest back. You're always pushing me away. You won't let your guard down. You won't let yourself be with me, really
be
with me.”

“What does that have to do with me forgiving you for almost killing me?”

We'd been standing in my grandmother's front yard, not far from where we were now, and he'd picked up a rock and thrown it. It had hit one of my grandmother's flowerpots and shattered, soil and petals flying everywhere.

“I'm sorry,” he'd said. He'd started cleaning up his mess, gathering the pieces of clay pot and cussing. His nickname on the football team was the Tasmanian Devil. He wrecked everything in sight, and I had the scars to prove it.

“I don't want to do this anymore,” I'd said.

He'd dropped the pieces of flowerpot. “You're gonna break up with me again?”

“Yes.”

“How long this time, do you think? So I can plan out my week.”

“God, Max!” I'd screamed. “You're impossible! You always want more. You push and push. You're never happy with the way things are.”

Our yelling had brought my grandmother outside, and now she was standing there staring Max down.

“I'm sorry about your flowerpot, Ms. Josephine. I'll clean it up.”

“No, that's fine. Just leave.”

“Alright, I'm leaving,” he'd said, his face looking dejected. “Olivia, you don't have to come with me to Baton Rouge. Just pick a direction and go,” he'd added much quieter. He hadn't meant that, though. He'd wanted me to follow him.

That brought us to our current problem. “Whatever I do has to be mine, Max.”

“I get it,” he said again.

This is what Max said anytime he didn't understand something. We were in stare-down mode when the front door opened.

Jamie stepped onto the porch and said, “Your grandmother started cleaning around me. I took that as my cue.”

“Hey, man,” Jamie said. He nodded in Max's direction. “I hear you've been a dick lately.”

“I'm trying to apologize,” Max said.

“Good luck with that.” Jamie looked at me. “Are we still meeting at Bird Man's later?”

“Yeah, I'll see you there.”

We watched Jamie walk away. The closer he got to his house, the more his shoulders slumped: Jamie's attempt to make himself smaller.

There were a few moments of awkward silence, and then my grandmother appeared in the front window, giving Max her death glare.

“I think that's my cue, too,” he said. “Will I see you later tonight?”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Maybe,” he sighed. He stood and walked down the porch steps. With his back to me, he said, “You know you love me.” He got in his truck and drove away, the dust kicking up from his tires.

It was true. It was my gut instinct to love him. He was broken, but he was mine. I was scared, though. I'd seen the consequences of love in my dad's eyes.

My dad was a shadow in my life, standing in the corners, only coming close when it was absolutely necessary or in his most lonesome moments. He watched me warily, as if I was a clue to her, as if the time I spent inside her body had given me a secret, and one day I'd tell him what it was. I was scared to love or be loved in that way.

It was on this street—Fidelity Street—that he promised her he'd love her forever. They were sixteen and standing under the gigantic live oak tree across from my grandmother's house. I once asked him to show me exactly where he stood and exactly where she stood.

“Tell me word for word what you told her,” I'd said.

“I told her that even though we were only sixteen, I knew I'd love her for the rest of my life.”

“What did she say?”

“She said she'd love me for the rest of hers.”

He didn't know his love would outlive hers by a lifetime. Then I'd asked him why he'd never moved on. He'd paused, then grunted and said, “Lillian was enough.”

He didn't live with us. He wasn't comfortable in my grandmother's house. Then again, nobody had expected him to move in after my mom died. He lived in a one-room apartment above the garage where he worked. I once asked him why he didn't want me to live with him. He said there wasn't enough room. I didn't think that was it. One time he admitted, “Sometimes it hurts to look at you.”

I stood up from the swing and walked to the tree where they'd declared their love. The big branches swept all the way to the ground, and all it took was a little balance to get to the sweet spot. I could see this tree from my mom's bedroom window. When I was little I imagined the branches were arms, always open, a constant invitation. Over the years I had occasionally woken up in this tree, having sleepwalked there.

I climbed up the huge branch that was rolled out like a red carpet. I sat in the seat, its handholds worn smooth from years of my touch, and looked down the street into everyone's yards. If I strained my eyes, I could see all the way downtown. There were small towns, and then there was St. Francisville.

It stretched three miles along Highway 61 and was home to less than two thousand people. People could say what they wanted to about small towns and small minds, but the people here knew how to do things without being taught. No one remembered learning how to swim, or how to tell a harmless snake from the ones that killed you. Knowledge was passed down through the generations. The babies were born wise.

I looked down along the bluffs to the river. People were boarding the ferry to New Roads. New Roads was the town we shared the Mississippi with, and even though there were rumors that we might be linked by a new bridge, for now it was up to the ferry to get us back and forth. I wanted to learn how to steer the ferry. It couldn't be that hard, just going back and forth all day long.

Fidelity Street dead-ended at my grandmother's house, which was pale pink with the required front porch. There was a pathway that led around the side of the house to a trellis wrapped in flowers. The trellis opened into a garden that was wild and whimsical, leaning heavily on the whimsy. Nothing in it resembled a straight line or hinted at a plan. In one corner was a swing from which, if you swung way out on it, you could get a peek at the river below. One of my earliest memories was of being in this yard with my grandmother, back when she called me Olivia. She used to push me on the swing.

“This was your mother's favorite thing to do when she was your age,” she'd said. “She once made a promise, right out loud to the house, that this would always be her favorite place in the entire world, and that she'd never leave.”

That made sense, because in pictures from my mom's childhood, the house and yard looked like something out of a storybook. The kind of house your fairy godmother or the tooth fairy might live in, or the kind of house a five-year-old might pledge her undying love to. Not so much anymore. The paint was peeling, and some of the windows were cracked; nothing broken ever got fixed. The only thing my grandmother tended to was the garden. The house itself looked abandoned.

I saw Jamie in his backyard. He was sitting on the patio and writing in his journal, this speckled notebook he took everywhere. He'd filled up dozens of them, and they took up whole shelves in his bedroom. He only wrote in them in his backyard, where he was now, pretending not to notice me watching him from my tree. His brow was furrowed and he was writing furiously, like the words were screaming from his hand. Sometimes when he couldn't say things out loud, he took them out on his journal. I heard the sound of his parents fighting coming from inside their house.

Jamie's dad had split personalities. If you went over there in the morning, Mr. Benton could be kind and loving, even funny, but in the afternoon he was sad and mean and terrible. His mood slowly slipped down as the day wore on, his whiskey consumption the deciding factor.