“It does to me. Where have you been? Who have you been all these years, Jay?”
“Do you really want to know? I can tell you, if you do. I’ll tell you year by year.” Jay said.
“Have you been in jail?”
“One time.”
“Don’t you want to talk about it? I thought it didn’t matter,” Ava said.
“You can. I can tell you about it. What’s to tell?”
Jay’s posture stiffened. She had hurt him though she hadn’t meant to. She was just making a point. A stupid point. Ava glanced at Jay’s embarrassed face and bent to roll cuffs into her already wet jeans. She wouldn’t ask about the particulars. Something terrible happened and he lived through it. How much more complicated was it than that?
“You remember that boy who killed himself up here? When we were in high school? I knew him. I had homeroom with him.”
“Don’t, Ava. No more, baby.”
“How does that hurt you?”
“I don’t want to talk about that kid. He’s not here, Ava. We are.”
Jay couldn’t have been more wrong, Ava thought. The two of them were surrounded by ghosts they nudged out of the way just to get up in the morning. Ava waded deeper into the water. She’d read that drowning happened so quickly and silently that most drowning victims died with no thrashing or screaming out for help like in the movies but were gone in minutes before people noticed they were missing. “It’s pretty cold,” she said as she marched up and down, mostly to keep from crying. The jagged rocks bit the soles of her feet as she walked through muddy swirls of water. In seconds she was underneath the water too full of sand and mud to see her hand in front of her, so she closed her eyes. She was ten or so in a hotel room in Raleigh. The room was a cheap one with a burgundy bedspread flung over the double bed like over a cadaver. She and Devon had looked out the window at the buildings much taller than the ones at home. They had loved the particleboard built-in desk and the swivel chair, the television perfectly positioned for viewing from the bed. They even loved sleeping on makeshift beds on the floor. It was years before Ava knew that Sylvia was seeing a specialist because of a cancer scare. Years before Ava understood that one of her fondest memories was one of the most trying days of her mother’s life.
Debris swirled around Ava, the sloughed-off bodies of animals, dirt and twigs and now Ava, all part of the soup, the graveyard. She couldn’t shake it that her own body was a graveyard too. Jay’s faraway voice sounded into the water, curling into the folds of the water’s ripples like the sound was coming from another time.
In her journals Ava had written about Kim, the friend she despised when she was young. Ava was sixteen and her friend Kim was seventeen. Though they spent a lot of time together, they both knew that their arrangement was not permanent. Still they spent hours and hours together, full of glances over their shoulders (is anyone else coming?), ticktock on their faces, sighs disguised. What enormous capacity for boredom people have had. Maybe it’s not such a marvel. Every kid knows it is far better to be bored than lonely. Better to be anything but lonely. What a great flood of relief when Jay had come to town and became her new and much improved best friend.
Years after Ava had not spoken to Kim anymore she’d heard that her child had been attacked by a tiger. All it took was the trainer’s lapsed attention as he strolled alongside the tiger, holding the puny leash in his dominant hand. The trainer seemed arrogant, waving and preening like he was the star attraction in the animal parade before the circus proper began. The tiger walked in slow motion, lifted up red dust clouds in front and behind him, the crowd hushing as he passed them like a king or god. People said the same things, the tiger came out of nowhere, one minute, dull-eyed and bored-looking, the next his paws on a tiny girl, a five-year-old, one he seemed to have memorized in the crowd, since his aim was so true on her fragile chest. How Kim’s child survived was a miracle. The girl, now a teenager, said she remembered nothing but the humidity of the tiger’s breath, not his sharp yellowed teeth, not the weight of his face-size paws, but the breath that seemed to suck up her own. If she didn’t have the scars on her chest, she would be willing to believe the whole thing never happened at all. Ava hadn’t heard this story from Kim, but through the grapevine. She hadn’t contacted Kim when she found out. That sounds callous and maybe it is, but she didn’t think it at the time. What would make a difference? When the miracle, the catastrophe, the unexpected event that ruptures our lives into meaning, foul or ecstatic and forever changed, flashes back to us, how comforting to catch glimpses of the faces of people who love us enough to say “I’m here.”
“Oh my God. Oh God!” Ava screamed as she plunged back up, her head out and treading water. She swam as fast as she could toward the middle of the reservoir.
“Ava! Ava!” Jay yelled.
Ava turned around to Jay in time to see him kicking off his shoes, rolling up the legs of his jeans. He was ready to come in after her. He probably thought she was fighting for her life. “I’m coming. Stop, stop,” she yelled. It was wrong to hurt him. Jay stopped undressing and watched her approach.
“Get out of the water. Let’s go!” Jay yelled.
Ava turned back to the shore. She was farther out than she had imagined. People can’t drown themselves on purpose. Your body won’t let go of life even when your mind tells you it is the best thing to do.
Ava swam to the shore and dragged herself out of the water. “I’m sorry.” Ava panted and held her hands on her knees to try to catch her breath.
Jay put his arm on her back, waited for her to stand upright and led her to the car. “Come on, Ava, come on.” Ava sat in the passenger seat with her eyes closed while Jay started the engine. “Do you want heat? Are you cold?” Jay turned the heat on low.
“Look at me.” Ava shook her head at her reflection in the passenger mirror.
“No, baby, no,” Jay said. He grabbed her hard, kissed her face, her head, her neck. “No, no, no.”