Undertow

by Elizabeth O'Roark

  Neither of us are the people we were then. Five years ago, he was sweet and earnest and loyal and ambitious, like me in every way that mattered. Now he’s angry and reckless, and as far as I can tell his only goal is to sleep with as many women as possible. Somehow, in five years, everything I loved about him has evaporated, and our lives and dreams are so far apart it almost feels like we are different species.

  That I’m with Ethan now comes to me almost as an afterthought. It might not be the most exciting relationship I’ve ever been in, but you only get to be a 17-year-old in love for the first time once.

  We ride home in silence. I can’t stop myself from sneaking glances at him, looking into his profile for the boy I knew. Can I still find him there, even a little bit? I look at his mouth and think of the way he kissed me last weekend, the exquisite torture of being pressed against him, the way I responded.

  He walks me to the back door, and I flush, because I’m still thinking about it. I want to relive that kiss. Just once more. We have both changed, but in this moment that doesn’t matter to me at all. I want to step back toward him, into him, and forget that five years have passed.

  He looks in my eyes, his own gray and cloudy and inscrutable, hesitating, as if he wants to say something. “Let me know what she says,” he finally tells me, and he walks away.

  CHAPTER 24

  At night all of the small, terrible pieces of this story entwine in ways that don’t make sense. I dream that I’m watching Mary fall to the kitchen floor while I talk on the phone, but I do nothing; I dream that my grandmother has caught Nate and I together in her room and she is telling us both we can never come back. And the worst – that I’m still 17 and I see him leaving, but when I try to shout for him no sound will leave my throat.

  It’s a relief to wake up from it. There’s no sign of my grandmother when I go downstairs. That may be for the best. I don’t think I can have a rational conversation right now.

  I go swim, trying to clear my head, burn off the fog that lies there. I can’t stop reconstructing the past, wanting to create a different outcome as if it’s a puzzle whose pieces I can shift to create a prettier picture. I want to go back in time and beg him to shout for me, throw gravel at my window, insist I come downstairs and set things right. I ask myself, again and again, why my grandmother never asked me about it, how she could have jumped to the ridiculous conclusion that she did.

  When I finally hear the creaking of her floorboards, I go upstairs. It’s not a conversation I really want to have in front of Rebecca and Stacy.

  “Yes?” she snaps when I knock, already annoyed.

  I open the door. “I need to talk to you,” I say.

  She sighs her irritation. “Can’t it wait? I was just about to bathe.”

  “No it can’t,” I say, feeling my temper flare. “I talked to Nate last night.”

  Her mouth draws together. It’s a subtle movement, but it tells me that she’s disturbed. I wanted to be wrong about this, to discover that this was all some vast misunderstanding, but with that small change to her face I begin to lose hope. “Yes?” she asks, placid again.

  “Did you accuse him of raping me?” I ask, my voice growing angrier, more appalled, with each word.

  “I was trying to protect you,” she says coolly, without remorse. Her chin raises, just a hair, in defiance. “You were a little girl with a crush, and he took advantage.”

  “Where are you getting your information, Grandma?” I cry. “Because I was 17, which isn’t so little, and let me assure you, I didn’t do anything I didn’t want to do!”

  “It doesn’t matter where I got my information.”

  “Then tell me, did your source tell you I was ‘forced’ or did you just decide that on your own?” I spit out, wondering how it’s possible that she feels no guilt about this.

  “It doesn’t matter. You were too young to be making those kind of decisions for yourself, and he was an older boy who used your crush to his advantage.”

  “What about the note?” I hiss. “Were you behind that too?” Her lips close tightly, as if holding a pin right in their center, telling me all I need to know.

  I remember my grandparents together when I was little, how she was always more formal, less approachable. But she still loved me. I’d never doubted that underneath her crisp surface there lied good things. Now I can only stare at her, knowing that I will never see her that way again.

  “I guess you’ve answered my question,” I say, walking out and slamming the door behind me.

  I go to the carriage house. In the years since I was last here, the yard has gone wild. Mary’s rose bushes still bloom profusely, but they’re lost in a jungle of weeds and plants that have managed to flourish without care. I knock on his door, and watch so many things cross his face – surprise, hope, grief, resignation. They pass so quickly I’m not certain any of them were there at all. I wonder, with a hopefulness I shouldn’t have, if he sometimes looks at me and forgets the years have elapsed. If he looks at me and just for a single second, wants me again.

  He steps aside to let me by and gestures to the kitchen. “Do you want some coffee?”

  “No thank you,” I murmur. He hasn’t changed anything here. I sit at the kitchen table and trace the pale green boxes laid out on the orange vinyl tablecloth, the same one that was here when I was a little girl. Nate and I played board games here when it rained, and sometimes Mary rolled out dough for us and let us make Christmas cookies in mid-summer.

  He sits across from me, and I slide him the battered note that I’ve kept all this time.

  He opens it and I watch his face fall as he reads. He looks at me in horror when he finishes. “Maura, I never … ”

  “I know,” I tell him. I choke on the next words I will say, feeling all of my sadness welling up in my throat. “It was all my grandmother. She knew you didn’t force me. She said I was a little girl with a crush and you took advantage.”

  His eyes glitter with anger. He looks over at my grandmother’s house and draws in a breath. “It wasn’t even that we slept together,” he says, pressing his fingers to his temples. “It’s just that I wasn’t good enough.”

  I shake my head and begin to argue, but he cuts me off. “Tell me she would have done the same thing if someone caught you with Ethan instead of me,” he says.

  My stomach lurches, because he’s right. I rest my face in my hands to breathe through it. My grandmother did a terrible thing – to him, to me , to Mary – and it wasn’t even out of misguided concern, but something far uglier, and less forgivable.

  “Are you all right?” he asks, and when I look up there’s concern in his eyes. It’s the Nate I knew, as if he never left.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whisper, and then I begin crying in earnest, covering my face again.

  “Don’t,” he says helplessly from across the table. “Don’t apologize for her.”

  “Who’s going to if I don’t?” I ask, taking a deep breath and willing myself not to fall apart in front of him. The last thing he should have to do right now is console me. “She’s not even sorry.”

  “Her being sorry wouldn’t change anything anyway.”

  “She owes you, Nate. I don’t know what, but something. She can’t just get away with it.”

  His face is grim, and he looks down at the table. “That’s not how the world works, Maura. People like your family and Ethan’s, they get away with whatever they want.”

  “That’s not true,” I argue, a little surprised that Nate, of all people, seems so defeated.

  “And they take whatever they want, even when it doesn’t belong to them,” he adds, looking at me with sudden despair. “And the rest of us have to sit back and watch them take it.”

  His eyes hold mine. The way he is looking at me makes me feel boneless. I want to launch myself across this table at him, and that’s something I absolutely can’t do.

  I will myself to push away from the table, to stand. I can’t sit three feet from him in a
n empty house when he looks at me like that. “I should go.”

  He walks me to the door. I have no reason to be here anymore, but I wish I did. It feels as if no time has passed at all.

  I step back into the blinding sunlight, and he makes no move to stop me.

  “See you around,” he says quietly, and I hear the door shut behind me before I’m halfway down the path.

  **

  With a bouquet gripped in my left hand, I bike to the far end of the island, where my grandfather and my great-grandparents are buried. Ethan’s too. I pass those graves and keep walking, until I find one of the newer ones, the marble unblemished and shiny. I sink to my knees and place the bouquet in front of her grave, tears streaking down my face before I’m even fully to the ground. I look at her year of birth and her year of death. She was only 38 when she died. She always seemed so much older than us, but she was only 38.

  “I didn’t do it Mary,” I whisper hoarsely. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t do it. I hope you can hear this. I hope you know I would never do that to him.”

  And then I cry, openly, for the way her life ended, and my life too, and for all the ways my family is responsible for both.

  CHAPTER 25

  I collapse on the sand the next day after a long swim, and fall into a deep sleep, worn down by all the drama and two nights straight of terrible dreams. When I wake the sun is going down and the beach is clearing.

  Nate is sitting next to me, fully clothed.

  “You snore,” he says.

  “I do not,” I argue, groggily pushing up onto my elbows. I look at the heavy boots kicked off in the sand. “Were you at work?”

  “Yep.”

  “What do you do?”

  “Carpentry. It’s been pretty steady, so that’s good.”

  “What happened to your scholarship?” I ask tentatively. I almost don’t want to know. Odds are my family had something to do with it.

  He shrugs. “I blamed you the other night, but it was my own fault. I went back to school and did a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I lost my scholarship, and I deserved to lose it.”

  “The Mayhews wouldn’t … ?” I begin, hesitating. It would have been so easy for them to help him.

  “No,” he says angrily. “Do you really think I’d take a dime of their money?”

  “I’m sorry,” I reply. I can’t stop wanting to fix this for him. “You could get loans,” I venture.

  He sighs. “Maura, it’s over. I’m 24. I’m not going back. You look down on me for it. In your world it’s unthinkable not to go to college, but I make a decent living and I don’t mind the work. That’s more than most people can hope for.”

  “I don’t look down on you,” I murmur.

  “Yes you do. Or have you forgotten calling me a stupid townie last week?”

  “I was just mad. I wanted to hurt you and it was all I could come up with.” And now I’m remembering his response to my words, remembering the way he kissed me, his hands in my hair, his body pressing hard against mine. How, in that moment, I would have done anything for him. His eyes darken. He’s remembering too. I scramble to think of something else.

  “I don’t understand why you’d ever want to come back here after what my grandmother did,” I say.

  “Well I own the carriage house, so it was kind of the logical choice,” he says.

  I gape. “You own the carriage house? How is that possible? It’s on our land.”

  “Your grandfather bequeathed it to my mom in his will. When she died, it went to me.”

  “But why would he do that?” I ask. “I mean, that house, the land — it’s got to be worth a fortune. How did I not know this?”

  He pauses. “Maura, I don’t want to offend you, but I think your grandfather had a pretty good idea of who your grandmother is.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If she’s the kind of person who would have lied about you being raped, then she’s the kind of person who would turn my mother out with nothing if it suited her.”

  I’m tempted to argue with him, but in light of what I’ve learned about her in the past day, I think better of it. The picture of my family keeps shifting, and each movement makes it uglier. I hate the person I see in my grandmother, and I hate that my grandfather may have known it all along.

  “Why not just sell it?” I ask. He could do anything with the kind of money he’d get out of that land. “I’d think you would never want to see my family again after what happened.”

  He’s slow to reply. “Well, first of all, I can’t sell the house,” he says. “The way it was written into the will, the carriage house can only be sold if the main house is sold as well. I guess I could have rented it, but I just … ” he glances at me and stops himself. “It’s complicated.”

  I nod, and let it drop, unsure how to proceed. I don’t know how to be with a Nate who is neither my enemy nor my friend. Every question I ask him seems to imply that he’s done something wrong – by dropping out of college, by staying here – so I just stop asking.

  “Come on,” he says, pulling me to my feet. “Let’s see if you still know how to bodysurf.”

  I laugh. “You’re not really dressed for it.”

  He takes a quick, slightly heated glance at my bikini. “Neither are you, but I bet you’ll still do it.”

  He pulls his shirt off and it takes me an extra breath to regain my ground. God, he’s beautiful. I already understood why girls threw themselves at him, but seeing it firsthand is another matter entirely. There is nothing about his body that isn’t defined, skin pulled taut over hard curves, the way his broad shoulders taper to narrow hips. I force myself to look away as we walk into the water.

  We push out into the surf, diving under the small waves to get to the bigger ones farther out. It’s hard not to stare at him – as he dives, as he stands and shakes the water out of his face. Everything about him, every movement, makes me feel more vulnerable. I focus on the waves with an intensity they couldn’t possibly warrant.

  But just as I did when I was a lovesick 14-year-old, as we talk I can almost forget about the response he provokes in me. Each thing I learn, each thing I tell him, eases the strain away from the situation until we become something like our old selves with each other.

  He asks why I gave up studying architecture, what kind of law I want to practice, why I chose Michigan, if I’ve got my class schedule already. Ethan has never asked me a single one of these questions, and the realization doesn’t surprise me much. Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t even see me as an individual, but some kind of placeholder for the things he wants, with all of my interests and quirks an unfortunate handicap he’s forced to overlook.

  I like hearing Nate talk about his company, seeing all the ways that the little boy who loved to build things got his wish. And it makes me sad too, because the fact that he should have been an architect couldn’t be clearer as he discusses the parts of his work he loves the most.

  The last sliver of sunlight slips away and we watch as the sky comes alive with faint stars that will soon grow bright.

  “It’s getting dark,” he teases. “Remember how you used to worry about sharks?”

  “Yeah, until you told me they don’t feed at night.”

  He grins sheepishly. “I vaguely remember telling you that.”

  “Why do you have such a weird look on your face, then?” I ask suspiciously.

  “Because it was a complete fucking lie,” he laughs. “They totally feed at night. Why would you believe an eight-year-old anyway?”

  I feel a sudden clench of fear in my stomach, and look down as if I might find fins circling as we speak.

  “Time to get out,” I say briskly, and begin wading to shore. I hear a splash behind me, and before I can even turn to find him something is grabbing my ankle, pulling me under. Teeth sink into my skin lightly before they let me go. I know it’s him but that doesn’t entirely quell my panic.

  I come up gasping for breath, and he is laughing hi
s ass off. He grins. “I couldn’t resist.”

  My glare reluctantly gives way to a smile. “You never could,” I say. The words, so innocent when they were in my head, do not sound innocent when they come out. Our eyes meet and there’s a moment, friction, a muscle low in my abdomen tightening as I watch something shift across his face. Something that looks like desire.

  **

  It’s odd that so much has happened, and yet I can’t really tell Ethan any of it – he’s not going to want to hear how I had sex with his cousin on the beach, and that our resulting breakup was just a terrible mistake. I return his call reluctantly after my swim with Nate. He sounds tense, and my own silence can’t help.

  “I’ve got to ask you something,” he says, his words clipped.

  “Okay,” I say, trepidation stretching the word out an extra beat.

  “Graham called today.” He waits, as if this should tell me everything I need to know. When I remain silent he continues. “He said you went home with Nate on Saturday night.”

  My laugh is half-humor and half-exasperation. “No, I didn’t ‘go home’ with Nate in that sense. He just gave me a ride back. I can’t believe Graham freaking called you about it.”

  He is quiet for a minute. “I thought you hated Nate.”

  I sigh. I so don’t want to tell him this story and I get the feeling he’s going to force the issue. “We had a misunderstanding, and it’s resolved.”

  “So you’re what – friends with him now?” he snarls. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him openly hostile.

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know.” I stutter. “Probably not. But we don’t hate each other. I’d like to be his friend again.”

  “Well I’m not comfortable with that, Maura,” he says.

  “Ethan, you’re being ridiculous. I have guy friends. I see Teddy and Robert and Graham almost every night.”

  “The difference is that they aren’t trying to sleep with you.”

  “Neither is Nate!” I argue, astonished that he’s so jealous of someone he hasn’t seen me friendly with in years.

  “Bullshit,” Ethan snaps. “He does nothing but stare at you when we’re out. We get on the dance floor and he’s immediately right there next to us. And he’s sleeping with the one girl he could find who looks anything like you.”