All That Was

by Karen Rivers

  I wade in up to my knees and the cold water sinks into my jeans like it’s been waiting for me. I can’t hear her.

  I wade in up to my waist. It’s so cold. This time, I can feel the current, tugging at me.

  I deserve that.

  I should let it take me.

  Why not?

  I took his clothes.

  I humiliated him.

  I triggered something. It might have happened anyway, but also, it might not have.

  What if I’d fallen in love with him? I’m sure people do that all the time, save someone from becoming a killer by loving them before they kill anyone. Maybe everyone is capable of loving a murderer.

  I don’t know why I couldn’t.

  I could have saved her.

  I’ve been so stupid.

  My legs are aching from the cold.

  I turn around and face the house. I slowly walk back up to the beach. The sun is fading. The blue is bleaching away to a thinner gray. I start counting the jellyfish: one, two, three. Seventeen.

  Odd, unlucky. That’s what Soup would say.

  A splashing makes me turn around. Mr. Aberley. “Sloane?” he says. “I haven’t seen you for quite some time. I’ve had a lot of tea that hasn’t been enjoyed with company lately.”

  I cringe guiltily. “I’m sorry, Mr. A.”

  “Cold in there today!” he says. “Too cold for swimming. Go warm up inside! I’ve got to get rowing now. Keep my girlish figure.”

  “Looking good, Mr. Aberley,” I say. “You still look good.”

  I make my way up to the house. My legs are so cold I can’t even feel them. The migraine pills are making me feel spun out, thin, like the sky. I don’t even know if I have a migraine or if I took the pill because I wanted to feel less substantial, if only for today.

  I climb up onto the deck and go up to the old chair. It looks like it hasn’t been sat in for years. But it has. That’s where I was sitting when everything changed.

  Prosti menya. Anteeksi.

  On the arm of the chair, there’s a black burn from my cigarette in its elephant tusk holder. There were only seven people at Grandma’s funeral. There were hundreds at Piper’s. Maybe if you live to be old, you have enough time to alienate all your friends. Or maybe she just outlived them. Piper didn’t have a lot of friends, but she sure brought a crowd to her service. “Life is weird,” I say out loud.

  There are cobwebs everywhere. I hate the way they stick to me but I sit down anyway, feeling them in my hair, on my skin. Piper hated cobwebs. If she ran into one in the woods, she’d scream and scream, pulling it off her.

  “You sound like you’re being murdered!” I’d laugh, helping her wipe them away. “There’s no spider.”

  “I’m not scared of spiders,” she’d say. “It’s the sticking to me, the way I can’t get them off.”

  I look down at the beach, at the waves, at the same things that are always there but never the same. Only me and Mr. Aberley really exist here; he is in the background of so many scenes of my life, like parentheses around sentences.

  A seagull flies by, but there is no joke to be made.

  My phone plays the standard ringtone that it came with. I haven’t changed it to a meaningful song yet. I turn it off without answering.

  The sky is thickening now, with gray clouds.

  It seems heavier.

  It’s weighing down on me.

  Fall Fair will be chilly. There isn’t enough blue left in the day to last into the evening, to keep it warm.

  I have to go to it.

  I can’t miss her “memorial” even though I want to miss her memorial. I search my skull for a migraine but there’s nothing but the flat echo of the pills.

  I can do this.

  I can get through it.

  For Piper.

  “This will be goodbye, okay?” I say out loud.

  Nothing.

  “Tell me that it’s going to be okay,” I plead to a crow, but when the words leave my mouth, I realize that there’s not one crow, there are fifty, at least. A murder. They are perched on the roof, heads cocked, staring at me with their black marble eyes like they are trying to figure something out. “I’m not dead,” I tell them. “I’m not going to die. You’re safe.”

  Crows investigate dead bodies, looking for the danger so they can protect themselves and one another if they find the source of the risk. The crows understand that extinction is at stake.

  One squawks and the others rise as a group, wings flapping noisily, settling a few hundred yards away in a leafless tree, calling out to one another.

  “Piper,” they say. “Piper, Piper, Piper.”

  My documentary will be called Crows: Murders and Ghosts.

  The wind picks up, blowing noisily through the half-leafless trees, the evergreens, pushing waves up in the bay. Mr. Aberley hasn’t rowed back yet. I stand up and see if I can spot him. For a minute or two, I can’t see him, and I start to panic. Did he sink? Did he die? No one else can die. There can’t be any more blood on my hands. And then there he is, slowly making his way back across the bay.

  Just like every other time, heading back home, keeping his girlish figure.

  * * *

  I choose my clothes carefully. Going to Fall Fair without Piper feels unthinkable, but Piper is dead and I’m with Soup and James Robert Wilson is being held without bail and the sky hangs lower and lower over the house, grayer and heavier with each passing moment, and full of storms and judgment.

  In the mirror, my hair looks longer.

  I look in the mirror. It’s me. Just me. Sloane Whittaker, age seventeen.

  I imagine Piper, slipping deeper into the sea, reaching up to the sky, trying to get out. The sky is the future. Outside, the sea has risen in whitecaps. The wind whips the curtains against the walls, stirring up dust and feathers and the old nicotine smell of them from when they were in Grandma’s room.

  Soup will be here any minute.

  I’m going to tell him we can’t see each other anymore. We can’t keep kissing. We can’t.

  Slut and lust are really the same word.

  I’m wearing a heavy knit sweater, a thick scarf. My hair is almost fire-red now. Instead of fading, it seems to be getting brighter. My freckles stand out against my white skin. No matter what angle I look at myself from, I can’t see the phantom of Piper.

  She’s really gone.

  “I hope you die, James Robert Wilson,” I say out loud. “I hope they kill you in prison.”

  I have to think about what I’ll say to Soup or if I’ll say anything at all.

  * * *

  Soup honks once, twice, three times.

  “See you later, parents,” I call, passing through the kitchen on the way out.

  “Home by midnight!” Mom says.

  “Mom, no. Please, no curfew tonight.”

  “Twelve thirty,” says Dad. “You get a bonus half hour.”

  “Gee, thanks.” I give him a quick kiss on the cheek. His skin is as smooth as a girl’s. “Nice shave, Dad.”

  “Yeah, yeah, off you go, kid,” he says. “Have fun.”

  “But not too much,” says Mom. They laugh like she’s told a hilarious joke. They’ve done this routine for as long as I can remember, but recently, they haven’t had much of a chance to use it.

  “You look nice,” Mom adds. “Like a model in a catalog for fall clothes.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” I say. “Not high fashion enough for Vogue?”

  “Your clothes are too normal,” she says. “Maybe if you wore a cape?”

  “Do you have one?”

  “Nope. Guess you’ll just have to go as a normal person.”

  “It’s a good disguise,” I go. “No one will guess the truth.”

  “You’ll fool them.” She holds on to my hand for a second and smiles, then lets go. “Now get going! Dad and I are coming for the tribute. It starts at six, right?”

  “Right,” I say.

  Mom looks at my face. “It’s not l
ike the funeral,” she says. “It’s meant to be a celebration of her. Try to look at it that way.”

  “Trying,” I say. “Not understanding, but trying.”

  Soup honks again. “I’m coming!” I yell. I roll my eyes for my parents’ benefit. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do while I’m gone.”

  I run down the front path, the gravel crunching under my feet.

  The sprinklers come on. I pause for a second and look at the rainbows in the spray. I can feel the mist on my skin.

  In the distance, a seagull calls.

  I open the door of Soup’s car and I slide into the passenger seat.

  It feels like my seat.

  It feels like home.

  It feels safe.

  Soup reaches over and squeezes my hand.

  “We’re doing this thing?” he asks.

  “We’re doing this thing,” I say. It starts to rain as he pulls out of the driveway onto the road, big plopping drops of rain. The trees shiver in the wind.

  “So what are you going to say to your dad?” I say.

  * * *

  The music on this ride is too loud. It’s deafening and it’s inside me, churning my guts around, and I’d throw up if I’d eaten anything, but luckily I haven’t. Soup’s leaning on my shoulder in a way that is making it hard to breathe, so I hold my breath, which makes it worse.

  The music is too loud. I don’t belong here. I don’t want to be here, the music beating through me like a pulse. I don’t know why I haven’t gone home, climbed into the familiarity of my bed with its entangling sheets that Elvis has probably pressed flat and smooth again, safe and cool.

  The ride speeds up and speeds up, spinning me around and around. Spinning me through the life I had before and the life I have now and the way that I’m here with Soup and how much I miss Piper and then, when I think I can’t stand it, the ride slams to a halt. The music is so loud now, and the sound of it is making me dizzier and dizzier. The ride grinds into reverse, faster than I’d imagined possible.

  My eyes are tightly shut and I think about the antelope, dropping dead on the savanna, corpses rotting in the sun for ages before anyone realized, before someone found them, all dead.

  People die on fair rides, even the ones that feel safe. Just last week, a family of four died in Australia on a slow-moving river ride that slowly turned over and slowly trapped them against the conveyor belt, slowly but surely killing them.

  Everyone dies.

  When the ride finally stops, I can hardly stand up and walking feels impossible but there’s the announcement. “PIPER SULLIVAN,” it says. I catch the words “memorial” and “asteroid.”

  I lean hard on Soup. “Hey,” he says.

  “Hey, yourself,” I murmur. “This is it. Piper Sullivan’s Memorial Asteroid.”

  “You’re such a weirdo,” he laughs. “But I like it. Piper Sullivan’s Memorial Asteroid makes as much sense as a title for this show as anything else.”

  “She’d like it.”

  Mr. Stewart is already talking but the speakers aren’t working properly. I can’t really hear him. Someone shouts, “LOUDER!” He keeps talking. The words “children’s hospital” come through. And then “cancer.” He’s conflating all the deaths into a charity grab. It’s terrible and amazing at the same time.

  I lean over to make a comment to Soup but then the screen suddenly fills with a huge version of Soup’s birthday portrait of Piper. It’s so beautiful. It’s like fireworks. It’s like flowers. It’s like everything. I gasp. “It’s amazing,” I say.

  “You’d already seen it!” he says.

  “I know,” I say. “But look at it. It’s really amazing.”

  “Thank you,” he whispers, right into my ear, and I feel a shiver go all the way to my feet. A good shiver.

  “This has been a really difficult time,” says Mr. Stewart. Soup pokes me in the ribs and makes a face. I giggle.

  “Don’t make me laugh!” I say. “We can’t laugh at Piper’s Memorial Asteroid!”

  “She’d want us to,” he says gravely.

  There’s a smattering of applause. Mr. Stewart waves a donation box that’s shaped like an enormous piggy bank. Behind him, four guys come onto the stage with instruments. A drum kit appears. There’s some shuffling. I look around for Mom and Dad. They must be here somewhere, but it’s so crowded, I can’t see them.

  “PIPER SULLIVAN!” the lead singer shouts. “THIS ONE’S FOR YOU!”

  They start playing, but with the misfiring speakers, it sounds like screaming.

  It sounds like a cry for help.

  I catch Soup’s eye. I point at my ear.

  He makes a face.

  Shrugs.

  “That’s my dad,” he shouts into my ear.

  “What?” I ask. “Where?”

  He points at the stage.

  “The drummer?”

  “Yes,” he yells.

  “He looks like you,” I shout.

  “You think?” He smiles a little. “Yeah, he does a bit. They’re really loud!”

  I wait for a break in the music, then say, “What are you going to do? Are you going to introduce yourself?”

  Soup drapes his arm over my shoulders. “Not tonight,” he says. “I want to show you something.”

  He leads me through the crowd by the hand. He walks me down to the edge of the water. This is not my beach. This is not the island. This is not where she died. This memorial has almost nothing to do with her.

  But unlike at the funeral, I can really feel her. I can’t explain it, I just can.

  “Piper?” I whisper.

  “Look,” Soup says. “She’s here.” He takes a stick and drags it through the water, and like magic, the water lights up in the moonlight.

  “Oh!” I say. “Oh.”

  In silent agreement, we sit down on the sand and take off our shoes. We roll up our jeans. The rain has stopped and a cold wind is whipping against the water, making ripples. It’s hard to remember the heat wave now, how even at night it felt like it would never cool down.

  We wade into the water up to our knees, our feet sinking in the soft sand. We’re kicking up huge sprays of phosphorescence, making arcs of magical light with every step, with every move that we make, with the way our bodies move together in the moonlight.

  “Goodbye, Piper,” he shouts, his voice soaring over the water like wings, like a bird.

  “Goodbye,” I yell. “See you later, alligator hater.”

  And I know it can’t be true, I know she isn’t here, but I swear I hear her, faintly, behind the driving beat of the music; I think I hear her say it. In a while … vile … crocodile.

  It could just be a voice from the crowd behind us. It could be a bird. It could be anything, but I know it’s her. We’re connected that way.

  Always.

  Forever.

  That’s how it is with us.

  That’s how it will always be.

  EPILOGUE

  I’ve lost track of me, blown free from myself, yet I’m still in the water and not in the water. I’m in Sloane and in Soup and in my mom and in everyone who I ever breathed on and touched and hung on to, each time leaving tiny bits of me with them, like they left themselves with me, too. So in the water, there are parts of Sloane also twirling in the light, different colors of blue and green and white and Soup and Mom and everyone everyone. We’re all in the water: me and James on the island where he said I love you, you know. I felt so strange and I laughed and I laughed and I said no to him, no you don’t and no I don’t and no, and do you ever stop taking yourself so seriously. And he said love is serious. And I said do you see the whale? The fin of a humpback rose up in the moonlight.

  And now I am the whale and the moonlight and the sea but then I was just me and I turned my back on him and then there was the feeling of him behind me and then something around my neck. There was the lace around my neck.

  And his whisper in my ear, all the molecules of that wet whisper of that one word,
“Monster,” which was also one of the last words that I said to Sloane, the slap of that one word, which is still in her and will be in her forever. I regret. I regret. I regret.

  Fault is impossible to find. A crack in his brain, an emptiness in my heart, a nothingness in all of us.

  And I’m slowly and quickly forgetting how words are letters joined in sound to make a feeling, which is that lace tightening around my neck in such a way that I didn’t have as much time to be afraid as to be surprised. And I thought about how he had a choice, everyone has a choice, and the part of me that I left with Jimmy, the word no, that I put inside his ear and his brain will one day turn into a tumor that starts to grow behind his left ear and eventually will cost him his face and his mind and only then his body and he will die and his cells will drift apart in this same way and each bit of him will become a bit of something else.

  And in this way, in this way we are all lovers and loved and murderers, too.

  And from here I can hear just the sound of the fair that echoes through the surface and makes a vibration that’s shifting the last of my cells apart.

  And Sloane is with Soup is with me and us and we and I am not here not anymore and none of it was important.

  Only that word no.

  And I want to go back and to say no for Sloane and for all the girls who need to know they can say no and should say no and all of us are saying no.

  And I’ve forgotten I’ve forgotten I’ve forgotten everything that was anything but love and I love you Sloaney and I love you Soup and I love you Mom and I’m sorry anteeksi.

  And now I am anteeksi spread out in the waves being pushed gently on to the shore leaving white bubbles and froth and I’m here and I want them to see me to drag a stick through the water and see me glowing no and I was right to say no because sometimes no is the only answer, say no, Sloaney. Tell them all no or tell them all you love them.

  Tell them all I was here and I loved you and you loved me and we were us.

  And goodbye Sloane and all that was and all that never is going to be and goodbye I never really liked you goodbye I love you forever and forever goodbye.

  ALSO BY KAREN RIVERS

  Before We Go Extinct

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR