“We can go anywhere we want to now,” Jay said, wishing he believed that they were still talking about locations and places that grown people can go.
After Devon’s death he and Ava had talked for days in the dorm, exhausted themselves with talk. Jay rested on the roommate’s always empty bed, and tried to ignore the stucco nubs of the cinder block wall that dug into his back. Ava spread herself out on a blanket on the floor, her voice wafting up to him. Devon’s death still pulsed in their chests like they’d been kicked. She had wanted him to say everything he could remember about his mother, Donna Ferguson. He told her about his mother driving one-handed while she held him on her shoulder. His mother’s eyes were deep set and very dark but looked sunken and raccoonish in the light of cheap cameras. She had been the kind of woman pictures did not flatter. She’d pulled back her hair into a French knot, rarely wore it curled around her face, in the wavy, soft kinky halo that made him think of birds’ nests. She cranked up soul music every morning to help her forget that she had to spend eight hours on a factory line. But Jay could not see the picture of her in its entirety. He would always be too close to her to recount anything but the nuances, the gestures, the small stinging details of her.
“Don’t tell Mama yet. Not yet,” Ava said.
After a few days together in the dorm room, Ava had told him that he couldn’t stay. He had known all along that it couldn’t last and shouldn’t last, but for a few days they both had pretended it would. He had gotten them what food they needed, watched television with her. They had even managed to laugh together. If they could have lived in that room forever, they could have made it. But she would have to go back to her classes and march into her life. She would leave the stale little cinder block space and move into the unknown future. She would have to get on with it again.
“I went to his school. Henry’s son. I drove up at the pickup time and waited.” Ava stared at Jay and waited for shock to register on his face. Jay looked past her into the water. “When he came out to the bus, I left.”
Jay sighed, it had been a mistake to come here, but how could he refuse her? She’d seemed so sure seeing their place would help. After the horror of the morning, the awful scream about the blood she’d felt before she saw. She’d settled down, calmed quickly, too quickly, Jay thought. But that calm had been seductive and had scared Jay into doing whatever she asked. He’d known better. “You know you can’t do that. Don’t torture yourself, Ava.”
“I didn’t scare him, Jay. I swear. I just wanted to see him again.” The boy had run out of the school like he’d been spring-loaded and was herded by a teacher into a line to the bus. The boy dragged his oversize backpack on the black top as his group crossed the parking lot. Ava could not make out his voice or hear the song he sang as he rushed past her car. She willed him to look in her direction, and for a quick, foolish moment she’d wanted to step out of the car and touch him. Nothing else, just touch his face and look at him with concentrated attention. Thank god, he hadn’t seemed to notice her at all.
“I wouldn’t do it again. I felt crazy being there at all.” Ava said. “You know what, Jay? You’re the only person in the world I can tell.” Ava took off her shoes and socks and inched her toes into the water.
“Good lord, the water is chilly. The sun’s been hot all day, you’d think it would be warm, wouldn’t you?” Ava asked like she’d wanted a real response. “Take off your shoes. Get in.”
“No. Ava, please. I want to go now. This is not the place for us.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you hated it so much here? All the time we came and you weren’t even happy?”
“I wanted to be with you, Ava.”
Ava waded ankle deep into water the color of weak tea.
Jay couldn’t have told Ava exactly what bothered him about the reservoir, the brownish murky water, the drive through the woods that always felt menacing to him. The scene unfolded then as it had now. But then he was dying to fold into her and let her envelop him, cover him up, like a kidnapped boy, sightless, helpless, letting her lead him anywhere but where he started.
“If I’d gotten pregnant back in Raleigh our baby would be in college now or living in our basement.” The luxury some people had of children who stumbled into their lives, Ava thought. “Is that incredible to you?”
“We loved each other. It was okay to do whatever we wanted.”
Ava stopped her mincing steps in the water. “We were important to each other, Jay.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
Ava turned from Jay to look out at the water. Jay thought that there were turns of Ava’s face when he could see the age flowering and he could catch a glimpse of the older woman she would be. He thought he could see the years developing on her face. She looked not quite like her mother in those moments, but a version of her, another artist’s interpretation. He couldn’t figure out a way to tell her what he saw that wouldn’t insult her or remind her that she was aging, but he loved the feeling that their eternity, his and hers, was built in their faces.
“I used to park at the Ingrams’ house and stand in the ditch outside your house. I’d wait to see the light go on up in your attic. You took me up there a few times. Not with Sylvia around.” Jay laughed. “But we went up there.”
“Can you believe that was us?” Ava had found one of her old diaries she’d kept back then. Most of what she’d written was teenage stuff, girl problem anxieties, but for a few pages she’d written about a girl who shepherded her mentally challenged brother on the bus. The girl couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than her brother, but she was patient and uncomplaining. So much duty in love, Ava had written. She remembered the moment like she’d just lived it, like she had stepped off of that bus only minutes before. “We are all so lonely, Jay.”
“We’re okay. You don’t waste feelings loving somebody. I believe that, Ava.”
Ava closed her eyes and imagined the water around her filling her up in an inhalation.
“Feelings go away, Jay. You know how I know it? Look at Mama and Don. Now they can’t stand the sight of each other. I’m not nineteen, Jay. I’m not the girl in the dorm room.”
“They don’t go away, Ava,” Jay said.
“Don’t joke with me. How much has happened? God, Jay, we’re old people now.”
“And we’re still here. Right? Here we are, Ava.”
“I’m not stupid and you’re not either, Jay. You can’t just decide to erase everything, your whole past. You have to fill in the gaps.”
“What for? Who cares about gaps? Do you? I don’t give two fucks.”
“You do some, don’t you? I know you care some,” Ava said.
“Probably,” Jay said. “Probably one fuck.”
“Don’t joke around. This is your life. Why wouldn’t you care about it?”
“Doesn’t matter. Not to me.”