Walker looks at me for a long moment, his eyes unreadable. “Sometimes.”
My mouth goes dry, and my heart pounds in my chest, and for just a second I picture us, here together on this boat. “So we . . . ?”
I don’t need to finish for him to know what I’m asking. Walker’s eyes run over my face, and he leans closer. Close enough so that I can see the little flecks of gold in his eyes. “No,” he says. “You had your boyfriend, and your life, and everything else.”
He pauses, and I can almost see that wall of his come back up.
“This was . . .” He shrugs. “Just a place you came to get away from it sometimes.”
He doesn’t look at me when he says it, and I know it’s not true. I know that, just like everyone else, he’s not telling me everything. So I risk trusting myself. I reach into my back pocket for the picture of me, and I unfold it between us.
“You took this picture, didn’t you?”
He looks at it but doesn’t say anything, and that’s how I know I’m right. “I was really happy when you took it, wasn’t I?”
His eyes linger on the image of me for a moment longer, and then he looks at me. “Yeah. We both were.”
“Why?”
“Because we’d finished the boat, and we took it out for a sail.”
“Do I know how to sail?” I ask. “Did you teach me?”
Walker laughs. “I tried.”
“And we went to Vista Island together.”
Hope rushes into his face. “Wait, you—”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t remember it. There was another picture. With this one.”
It leaves just as quickly.
We’re both quiet a moment, but I have another question I need to ask.
“When did you take this picture?”
Walker stands up and paces, like he doesn’t want to answer.
“When?” I ask softly.
He stops. “On the day of the accident.”
“We were together that day?”
His jaw tightens before he answers. “Yeah.”
He walks to the bow, and I’m starting to get a knot in my stomach, but I have to know what happened.
“Was I with you when Matt called me to come get him?”
Walker is quiet, like he’s thinking about what to say. Then he takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly before he answers.
“Yeah. Sort of.”
“What do you mean?”
He comes back over and sits down next to me. “When we brought the boat in, you said you wanted to go back to your house to get something you’d been working on to show me.” He pauses. “You said it was important. So you left. Said you’d be quick.”
I feel nervous as he talks, knowing that we’re getting closer and closer to the accident, and to him having to save me.
“And you were,” he says. “You came back, and you were walking down the dock smiling, carrying this big portfolio, and then you stopped to answer your phone. Your whole face changed, and you said something back like you were arguing, and I figured it was Matt.”
“He broke up with me the day before that,” I say. I tense at the memory of our conversation earlier.
“I know. That’s why I thought . . .” He shakes his head.
“What did you think?”
He looks at me for a long moment. “I thought we . . . I don’t know. Anyway. You hung up and came over to the boat with your stuff and said you had to go. I didn’t ask where or why, but I knew it was him because you were so upset.”
“Did you . . .”
He looks at me. “I didn’t try to stop you. Wasn’t my place.”
“And then what? Did I say anything else? Did we . . . I just left?” I’m trying to piece it together in my mind, trying to match up Matt’s story with Walker’s story.
“You said you’d come back,” he says. “And then you left your stuff here.”
We sit there quiet for a long time, and I add Matt’s story to where Walker’s leaves off. I left here to pick him up, put him in my car, and that’s how we were on the bridge, in the path of that truck when it lost control. The video footage tells the next part of the story. I see it in my mind, from its shaky beginning to those last words before it cuts out. “There’s no way that girl’s gonna live.”
I look at Walker. “Did you know it was me when you dove in?”
“When I saw him yelling like that, I knew.”
I think of him dragging my body onto the boat and doing CPR while Matt panicked. I think of the punch, and the interview, and the way he’d acted toward me after, and now I understand.
“You came to the hospital, didn’t you?” I ask. “You brought my camera.”
He nods.
“Why?”
“It was important to you.”
I try and sort it all out in my head, try to fit everything together so it makes sense. “And then you said yes to the interview?”
Walker exhales slowly. “That reporter told me that you did.”
“And then Matt and I showed up together, and . . .” Puzzle pieces are locking into place almost too fast for me to keep up. “You thought . . .”
“That you’d changed your mind.”
The boat bumps gently against the dock, and a buoy clinks from somewhere in the inky darkness of the harbor, and Walker and I sit there next to each other, not saying what we both know. That that’s the end of the story. The end of our story.
I look at Walker. “I wish I could remember being out on the boat with you that day.”
He smiles, but it’s sad. “Yeah. Me too.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be,” he answers.
We look at each other, and I think for a second that he might lean in, might bring his lips to mine and kiss me like he didn’t get the chance to do before. And I know that if he does, I will bring my hands to his hair, and kiss him back the way I want to now, in this moment.
But he doesn’t, and neither do I, and I understand why.
Our moment has passed.
I don’t remember him.
I don’t remember us, or this.
It’s a story I’ve been told.
That I believe it but don’t remember is not enough, and we both know it.
TWENTY-FIVE
I SIT ON my bed the next morning, staring at the blank chalkboard wall, with no idea what comes next.
My mom knocks and tells me there’s breakfast downstairs if I’m hungry. I say I’m not and she kisses the top of my head, then leaves. My dad comes in with a piece of mail, sets it on my desk, and asks if I want to “taco ’bout” anything. I laugh for his benefit but say I don’t, and he puts his big hand on the back of my neck and squeezes before he goes. Sam comes in to tell me that I can take the day off. I say thank you and ask him to leave. He does.
I feel drained. Heavy with the weight of the things I’ve both lost and found. And so sad.
Sad that I had this whole relationship with Walker that I don’t remember, that started with this thing we did together. Fixing a boat, of all things. And I’m sad that we missed our chance. But it’s not just that.