by LJ Evans
Your mama was crying too. “Cami.”
Her voice was deep with emotions and tears, and I could just catch a hint of you in it even though she was a woman. “Cami, he wouldn’t want to see you like this. It would break his heart. He’d be beating something to a pulp trying to get you out of here. He’d drag you down the stairs and throw you into the lake himself.”
I knew she was right. I knew you would be so pissed at me for acting like this. For coming to a complete stop. For not living a life that you’d want me to live just like you’d wanted me to have a full high school experience. But, I couldn’t go on without you. I didn’t how to go on without you. Since I was born, I’d been looking for your eyes on me. Later for your touch on me. I didn’t know what to do without those things. Without the prospect that someday you’d be there looking at me again.
“I know,” I sniffled so that she didn’t think I was ignoring her which was my normal protocol when anyone tried to talk to me about you. About what you’d want for me.
“Live your life for him.”
“I was,” my voice cracked as I said it, and she put her arm around me. It wasn’t you. But, it was in your room. Our room. And it was as close as I was ever going to get to you again.
***
After that, they made me go see a shrink. A “therapist” who helped people with grief and traumatic experiences. So, for the first time in a while, I showered, but I put on another of your shirts that still had your scent. The smells were fading faster than a summer sunset, but I was keeping them as close to me as I could.
The shrink asked me how long I’d been with you. I told her twenty years. She looked puzzled. As I was only twenty. See. It’s just hard to explain to someone who hadn’t known our story. That’s what I told her. That she couldn’t understand our story.
So, she told me to write it down. To write it all down. That maybe somehow it would help me both be with you and to get on without you.
***
So. That’s what I did. I wrote this story for you. Yet another thing I’ve done in my life for you. She says it’s not for you whenever I tell her that. She says it’s for me. But, I don’t see that. I want you to know out there wherever you are that this is still about you. Nothing in my life can be about anything else but you. Right?
***
That fake smile I’d learned when you left me to go to college became handy again. I knew that if I didn’t do something soon, somebody would commit me to an insane asylum. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad because then nobody would interrupt my thinking about you.
***
I rode my bike to the lake the other day. Passed the Quick Stop, and it made me think of that day I’d started my period and you’d found Brittney. I rode to the lake and threw my bike under our tree and lay down looking up at its branches reaching towards the sky like I imagined I was reaching out for you even now.
Sometime in those last few months, when we’d come down here and you’d had to stay on the beach while I swam, you’d carved our names in the trunk. I’d never noticed it till now. It was a big heart with Jake and Cami. Not Cam. Cami. It made me smile weakly and also want to cry, but I was fighting the tears these last few days. Trying hard to choke them back in.
I stared out at the other side of the lake and the cliff. I marched around the lake, dug my fingers and my bare toes into the earth and reached the top. I stared down into the water from the edge. I remembered how angry you’d been the first time I’d jumped. Could almost feel you shaking me and bruising my skinny arms. I also remembered how irate you were the second time, when Seth had pushed me, and I stopped talking to you and you came to find me and picked me up when Seth hit me. And I thought about how furious you’d be out there wherever you were if I jumped again.
Then I thought, “Good!” Maybe you deserved to be pissed off. I was pissed off. I’d broken one promise to you in my whole God damn life. One measly damn promise. And I was so very angry that you’d broken the biggest promise you could have made to me. You’d promised me we wouldn’t be apart again. And you hadn’t kept that promise.
Across the way, there were some kids partying. I flashed back to thoughts of Wade and Blake. Later you and Amber. Later you and me. I remember the thrill of the water and racing you to the dock. And instead of jumping, I climbed down, and raced your memory to the dock, and pulled myself up, tired and breathing hard. I was out of shape from weeks of inactivity. I tried to warm up in the weak spring air that was threatening to bring on summer. A summer I didn’t think I could do without you. Summer had always been some of our best times.
***
What else do I say? It was a tough time. Those words seem so trivial. So understated, but I’m not sure I could find another word to explain it. Hell? Maybe. Living hell? Closer. There were times where I just wanted it to end because I kind of figured we’d be together again that way. There were times that I knew you’d kick my butt all the way to the lake and back if I didn’t get going. But I was stuck. You’d always been my path out, and I couldn’t see those eyes leading me anymore.
***
My therapist said I needed to move out of our room. That it was holding me back. When I refused, Marina and Scott had my mama take my things out and bolted the door shut. I just gave them all the evil eye, went out to the garage, grabbed a screwdriver and a hammer and headed back up the stairs. All four of them, my parents and yours, stood in front of the door.
“I’m not going to let you keep me from him.”
My mama was crying. “We’re not, honey. He’s gone. We want to keep you from becoming him.”
I lifted the hammer and tried to shove her out of my way. My daddy got as furious as I’d ever seen him get. He tossed me over his shoulder like you used to, threw me into the shower and turned on the cold water. It was so something that you would have done that I was stunned.
I looked up at him with a tear-stained face. “That was for, Jake,” he said.
Then he stomped out of the bathroom.
I lay there for a long time. Under the cold, cold water. No one came to turn it off. No one came to save me. The only person who would have, was gone. And truth be told, you would have left me there for a long time before you came in to get me. But you would have. You would have brought me towels to wrap up in and hugged me and made it all better by just letting me breathe that scent of you. That chocolate cookie, grassy, boy scent of you that I could hardly smell anymore.
Eventually, my teeth were chattering so hard, I had to climb out. I wrapped some towels around me, kicked off my soggy shoes, and went to stare at the bolted door. No one was there blocking my way anymore. I could have unscrewed the bolts and gone in.
I stared at it for a long time fighting my inner self.
Then I marched down the steps, across our yard, into my old house, and climbed the stairs to my old bed. The bed I hadn’t slept in, in almost two years.
But now I did sleep.
I slept for a long, long time. Longer than I had since you’d gone because for all those weeks, I’d still been waking up every hour or so reaching out for you in an empty bed.
***
When I woke up, I continued to work on this story for you. But, I finally knew my therapist was right. It was also for me.
A Place In This World
“I'm alone, on my own, and that's all I know.
I'll be strong, I'll be wrong, oh but life goes on.”
- Swift, Orrall, Angelo
I listened to this song for a long time the other day. On repeat. Because I was heading down a path with no direction. An airplane on autopilot. I couldn’t see through the tears. The grief. I hadn’t known what I wanted before you died. I really didn’t know what I wanted now that you were gone. I was alone in the world. I know you’d yell at me and say I wasn’t. I know my family would protest. That includes your family… my family… our family. So, what did I do? I let Wynn force me into a direction, a path. It wasn’t one I chose, but it was movement.
In the fall, I joined Wynn at Tennessee State. It was far away from the memories of you. It was some place that you and I had never gone or done things. But the best part of it was that it was a place where I could go through the motions of living without anyone over-analyzing it like both our parents and my therapist had done for months.
Wynn had joined a sorority her freshman year, and was living in the sorority house to which I was granted access because of my sob story. There was no hazing. No rush week. I guess they felt like I’d already been through enough. Or maybe they felt like my tragic love story was good drama. Gave them points in the sorority race to be the best. You and I would have laughed at it just like we did all the ABC tween dramas.
Regardless, I had a room with Wynn, and she kept me going. She always had a list of things for us to do. Football games were off limits, obviously. But, there were plenty of other sports to go to and watch muscled boys that she would flirt with mercilessly. She wanted me to go swimming at the pool and maybe start diving again, but I didn’t have any desire to swim anymore. Or dive anymore. I didn’t have anyone to show off for. I didn’t want the adrenalin rush anymore. After that one swim at the lake, when I’d pulled myself back from the cliff, I hadn’t been swimming since. It was gone. I’d left it at the docks. It was my past. Just like you.
I had classes. I honestly don’t know what they were or how I passed them. Do they have some non-stated rule about not failing someone who’d just watched the love of their life die before their eyes? Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, but somehow, I passed. Not with As, but I passed. I was still undeclared because I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Hell, I could barely get through each day at a time. The rest of my life seemed impossible. But, as mama pointed out whenever she texted me, at least I was going through the motions.
I had some boys flirt with me in a class or two. But, they were repulsed with a glare that would have only made you laugh. It was kind of funny. And inside, that made me smile. Knowing that you would have laughed at my glare while they were scared away. That you would have simply pushed my shoulder and started a wrestling match that I wouldn’t have been able to stop from smiling at.
Slowly the fake smiles would sometimes turn into real smiles when someone made me laugh. Wynn or Mia. Beautiful Mia who had graduated and moved to UTK and would send me goofy videos from all over the school with “Jake was here” signs. They were funny in a bitter sweet way. She’d grin and wink, your wink, and it broke my heart but made me smile too. No one would really ever talk to me about you. They were afraid I’d break. Or maybe I was afraid I’d break, and they sensed that, but Mia felt somehow safe enough to text me something about you or send me those pictures, but she’d never say anything about you in person. Not to me.
Sometimes, when I’d smile, I’d feel guilty. Like a real smile was somehow betraying you. But then, I realized, it was just betraying my loss of you. I know that you certainly wouldn’t have wanted me to stop laughing or smiling or living. I knew that. And I was trying. Trying to find my old self or some semblance of it if only because I knew that that was what you’d want. There were moments, when I thought I couldn’t do it that I’d shout up at you, “God, Jake, I’m trying, okay?” wishing for a sign that you’d heard.
But the deep-down truth was that I just didn’t want to be happy without you. I didn’t want anything without you. I wasn’t anything without you.
***
I don’t know how long one can write about the same thing. The misery, the unhappiness. The going through the motions so the people who love you will think that you are okay. But, I think that’s how I survived that first year in Nashville.
That first year without you was the worst. Then, the fog started to clear just a little. I didn’t always feel like I was under a rain cloud. I started looking about me for something to hook onto, to get myself involved in, hoping that it would pull me back to life.
Coach Daniels knew some folks with dive schools in and around Nashville, and he said he’d make a few calls for me if I wanted to go back to coaching kids, but the truth was that diving was still too painful. It still reminded me of you too much. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do that again.
Wynn and I got our own apartment. She was almost finished with school whereas I was a couple years behind her. I’d lost a lot of time. She was getting her nursing degree and wanted to work in an OB ward, or, preferably, a neo-natal ward. She was interning at Vanderbilt University Hospital. She wasn’t working with patients yet, but was working on the administrative side, checking in patients, that kind of stuff. One day, she asked if I wanted to tag along just to see if anything peaked my interest because she knew I was still floundering around for a direction.
I went with her. She left me to go to work, and I wandered around the hospital a bit. I came across a sign that said, “Diabetes Support Group”. I don’t know why I did it, but I ended up following the arrows, and coming upon a conference room with a small group of people of all ages sitting around a table.
I stopped at the door. A pretty, dark-haired woman, obviously the leader of the group, in a pencil skirt and glasses asked if I was looking for the diabetes group and would I like to join them? I certainly didn’t have diabetes. But I wanted to join them. And I did.
For the first few minutes everyone was just introducing themselves and talking about whether they’d been newly diagnosed or had been living with diabetes for a while. They were talking about the life style change and how it was impacting them positively and negatively. I just sat there for a long time. Quiet. Listening.
Finally, the leader turned to me and asked if I’d like to introduce myself and share my story.
I froze for a second. It wasn’t my story. It was your story. Our story. But, then I started. I told them my name, and I told them about you. I told them how mad I was at you and myself for not forcing you to get your condition diagnosed earlier and to take care of yourself sooner. How mad I was that you and I had both let a game come between you and your health. I blamed myself. If I’d thrown a fit, you would have done something, earlier, for me, right?… Maybe.
I hadn’t realized that I was harboring that anger. Towards both of us for screwing around with your life. But. I guess, when your ten and thirteen, it doesn’t seem like those things are so very critical. You feel like you’re going to live forever. We didn’t understand that not taking care of yourself then could end your life in just a few short years.
I have to say, the group was really nice. I mean. Here they were for their own support, trying to find a way to make themselves feel better about this disease that they had been diagnosed with, and here I was dumping on them the most painful realization of the worst that could happen to them.
After I’d blurted the story out, with no tears shed, just anger and tears in my eyes, the group remained quiet for probably a whole minute. Then, the woman next to me hugged me. And then they were all surrounding me and telling me how brave I was to share that story and thanking me for reminding them that the small choices they made every day were making a difference, if not to them, to the ones they loved.
They broke up to get snacks. Veggie tray. No cookies for this group. The leader Anne, Anne Pavilotti, came over to me and introduced herself with a handshake.
“I’m sorry I ruined your group,” I told her honestly.
She stared at me in a way that reminded me a little of your stare. “I think that must have been a long time coming. How long has Jake been gone?”
“Eighteen months five days six hours.”
She stared at me a while longer.
“Would you be interested in sharing that story again?”
I laughed in a very sarcastic way. “God, you’d want me to torture more people with that?”
She smiled. “I’d especially like you to come and talk to our juvenile diabetes group. I think your story could really make a difference for them.”
“Really?”
“Really.�
��
***
It’s funny. Because, in a way, you had found a path for me again. It was like you’d shown me the way one more time. I was moving in a new direction. Anne set me up volunteering with the diabetes and endocrinology department and talking with groups. I wasn’t leading groups, but I was sharing our story… a briefer version of our story, and I was listening to kids and teens talk about their struggles. I got to keep reminding them about the importance of taking care of themselves right then.
I realized at that point that I wanted to continue to do this. I didn’t want to be a nurse or a doctor. I wanted to be a counselor. Not a psychiatrist. I wanted to be Anne. I wanted to lead groups through life’s ups and downs. To help them make better choices. Better choices than the ones we had made.
Anne told me about the coursework that I should take as an undergrad and recommended a graduate program. She became a mentor. It was good to have someone to direct my energies again. To keep me on a path going in a right direction. Like you had. Like Coach had tried to.
It meant more college than I would have ever have expected me to have the patience for. But, my mama and daddy were glad to pay for it because they were relieved I’d found a road to go down again. And somehow I know that you’d be happy too. That our story would lead me somewhere.
***
Wynn graduated, passed her nursing exams, and got a job at Vanderbilt. We’d commute together if our schedules overlapped, but that wasn’t often because as a newbie nurse, she often got the worst shifts. She was dating a guy who was getting his PhD in philosophy. He wanted to be a professor. I laughed at that. You would have enjoyed Grant. He was funny but so serious. I guess that was good because Wynn was sort of serious too.
