“There she is!” cries Mrs. O’Reilly from behind me. I can hear her fumbling around with her camera.
“Where’s Jake?” Jessie sighs impatiently. “I want a photo with my two favorite guys before we leave. Jake!!”
“I’m coming!” we hear Jake yell from upstairs and Mrs. O’Reilly laughs. A minute later Jake appears at the top of the stairs. He’s wearing a black tuxedo, and his hair has been slicked down to the side like he’s in an old movie. He’s definitely getting laid tonight.
“Oh,” sniffs their mom as their dad comes up and throws a thick arm around her shoulders. “You two look so grown up.”
“Yuck Mom!” laughs Jessie, “it’s just prom.”
“It’s your last prom,” she sighs and lifts her camera to take a photo of us all standing in a row with Jessie in the middle looking pleased with herself.
“The limo is here,” Jake says and steps down to kiss his mother on the cheek. His dad slaps him on the back and shakes his hand. I watch them for a second and Jessie must notice the look on my face because she takes my hand and gives it a squeeze.
“Love you,” she whispers.
“I love you too.”
The gymnasium has been transformed with silver glitter and streamers and a big backdrop of the moon. We’re meant to be in Outer Space. The whole thing is kind of lame, but since Jessie was on the Prom Committee, I’m going to say it all looks fantastic. There’s a band that no one has heard of playing up the front and a few bored looking teachers standing against the wall. Jake is already slow dancing with his date, a cheerleader named Marie who he’s been seeing for a couple of months. Jessie tugs on my arm and even though I don’t like dancing, I’m out there holding her and swaying back and forth to the music.
“This is pretty cheesy,” she laughs as I spin her around and pull her into me again. “I think I’d rather be out in the waves.”
“You only get one Senior Prom Jessie-Girl,” I say as I dip her backwards. “The surf will be there in the morning.”
We dance a bit more and then eat some of the crappy food laid out on the tables. A group of girls are kicked out for drinking vodka in the bathroom and a couple of idiots from the football team look like they’re about to start a fight.
“Want to head off soon?” Jessie smiles up at me. We’ve booked a hotel room for after the Prom, and I’ve been waiting for her to say we can leave ever since we arrived. She looks around for Jake so she can tell him we’re leaving but he’s nowhere around.
“I’m wearing something special for tonight,” she whispers in my ear.
This won’t be our first time, thank God, but I’m looking forward to it like it is.
I take her hand, and we walk across the dance floor, weaving our way through people dancing and teachers’ pulling apart couples who are getting a little too close. Jessie has her head thrown back; she’s laughing and dancing as she walks. Her long blonde hair whips from side to side as she shakes her head in time to the music.
As we get closer to the doors, I can hear some kind of commotion happening outside. At first I think the football guys are finally going at it but then I hear Jake’s voice rising above the rest. He’s telling someone to go home. Jessie hears him too, and she breaks away from me, heading for the doors. She’s trying to run, but my surfer girl never wears heels, so she’s wobbling everywhere and has to lean on the wall to stop herself from toppling over.
We make it outside, and Jessie is screaming, “No! No, you don’t get to do this tonight. Go away. Call him a taxi Jake! Get him out of here!”
I push through the crowd of kids sniggering and holding up their phones to film the whole miserable thing. Standing in front of Jake in a black tuxedo covered in his own vomit, is my father.
“Get Crew out here,” he slurs as he stumbles backward and hits the door of a waiting limo, then slides down to the ground. “Tell him I’m sorry. I’ll make it up to you Crew,” he says when he sees me standing over him. “I’m here to be a chap.. chap.. chaperone.”
Jessie is crying. She’s not embarrassed. She’s crying for me.
“You’re an asshole!” she screams in his face. “Can’t you give him one night? Just one fucking night!”
Jake steps forward and pulls Jessie away.
The Principal comes over and tells me that if my father doesn’t leave she will have to call the police. Then she says she’s sorry. Like that’s going to change anything. Everyone who comes in contact with my father is always fucking sorry that they ever met him.
“Take my car, dude,” says a kid I barely know from my English class. His face is white as he holds out the key. I take it.
Jake and I push my dad into the front seat, and he climbs into the back. I can hear Jessie get into the seat behind mine. Her dress is rustling as she tries to push the fabric in around her legs in the small car. She’s sniffing and whimpering a bit, and Jake is trying to get her to be quiet.
I pull out of the school car park and look over at my dad. He’s leaning on the window, and I think he’s crying too. He smells of whiskey, stomach acid and piss so I wind down the driver’s window. Even though I’m used to the smell, I know it must be making Jessie sick. We head out along the main road and then up the hill in the direction of the beach. My parents live up at The Point, and my plan is to drop Dad back home first and then see if I can convince Jake and Jessie to go back to Prom. I don’t want them to remember tonight this way. I don’t want this to end up like most of my memories.
We go around the bend in the road and slowly climb higher as we head to The Point. Cold, salty air is blowing through the window, and it’s woken my dad up a little. He’s sobbing now and looking out the windscreen to the cliffs and the waves churning below. Behind me, Jessie is whispering something to Jake, and I’m about to ask her if she’s ok but I never get to, because my dad suddenly lurches sideways and pulls on the steering wheel. It takes me a second to realize what he’s doing, and I try to pull the car back onto the road, but it’s too late. The wheels have slipped onto the grass along the edge and then we’re sliding sideways down the bank. Behind me, Jessie is screaming and screaming and when I throw my head around to look at her, I see that Jake is out of his seat and is covering her with his body. The car picks up speed and hits a rock before rolling a few times down the bank towards the cliff. I don’t think that I’m about to die. Everything they say about your life flashing before your eyes is bullshit, anyway. All I can think of is Jessie Jessie Jessie. Her hair, always tangled and salty from the sea. Her eyes, more turquoise than blue and lined with lashes that are almost black. Her laugh, loud and childlike. The cookies she makes for my birthday every year. The acceptance letter to pre-med that’s sitting on the desk in her room. We roll one last time, and then the car comes to a stop with a sickening crunch of metal and smashing glass. We’ve hit a boulder jutting out of the grass at the bottom of the bank, and it’s stopped the car from going over the cliff. My head is bleeding, and I think my leg is broken but I know that I’m alive, and I’m ok. I try to turn around in my seat to look for Jake and Jessie, but when I move my leg a surge of white-hot pain shoots through me and my head swims. I rest my head back on the headrest and take a couple of breaths. And then it hits me. The screaming has stopped.
“Jess, Jake.. are you ok?”
I can hear a gasping sound from the backseat and something else, too. It sounds like the bubbles Jake and I used to blow into our milkshakes when we were kids. Next to me my dad is slumped forward with his head resting on the dashboard.
“Jessie…”
I start to cry, quietly at first and then with deep, wracking sobs. My leg is pinned under my seat, and I know without a doubt that I can’t get to her. The car is silent now except for something dripping in the back seat and the roar of the waves at the base of the cliff next to me. I wonder if I could rock the car and send it on its final journey, taking all of us over the edge and down to the bottom of the sea.
I close my eyes, and will my heart slow
, slow, slow then come to a stop because I know in my soul that Jessie is no longer with me, and I can’t bear a life without her in it. In the distance, a man is yelling and then someone is shining a flashlight in the car. I have just moments to finish dying before someone will try to help me but my heart is still thudding stubbornly in my chest, and now suddenly there is pain, too. I’m coming closer to consciousness than away from it and I want to scream because damn it, I don’t want to be alive. A paramedic leans in the driver’s window and touches my head, and I reach down to grab my broken leg with both hands. As the sound of sirens and running footsteps gets louder, I grit my teeth and jerk up on my leg, hard. And then mercifully, finally, everything around me goes black.
Chapter Sixteen
Hartley
Crew’s body takes up the length of the bed, and he’s bent his arm under his head, so he’s using it as a pillow. He tells me about Jessie slowly, quietly, sometimes closing his eyes when it becomes too painful. We’re lying on our sides facing each other; our faces close so that I can feel his breath on my lips when he talks. When he tells me about the accident, his voice isn’t much more than a whisper. I don’t even notice I’m crying until he reaches over and wipes a tear off my cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and it feels so ridiculously inadequate. He looks at me and takes a deep breath.
“That’s not the whole story. I have to tell you what happened after the accident.”
I sit up slowly and crawl down the end of the bed to the blanket that I’ve left folded there. I open it up and lay it over us, right above our heads, so that it feels like we’re back in our cubby house.
“My dad died instantly, but Jessie lived for two more months on life support. I sat with her every day trying to get her to wake up. First I pleaded with her, and then I bullied her, then I just prayed.”
He reaches over and traces a finger over my palm, making wiggly lines as he talks.
“After my dad died, my mom had a complete breakdown. She’d been getting worse leading up to the accident and then when he died I think the stress of it kind of broke something. She was never the same after that. I came home from visiting Jessie in the hospital one day and found her in the bathtub. She’d slit her wrists with a razor blade, but thankfully, not deep enough.”
“Oh God, Crew,” I whisper and reach over to grab a handful of his t-shirt. I need something to hold onto it while I hear the rest of it.
“I moved into the O’Reilly’s house when mom was admitted to the Psychiatric Hospital in Seattle. But I hated being there. Everything reminded me of her. I insisted on sleeping in her room so I could smell her and be around her stuff. It was like I was torturing myself on purpose, but I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to let her go.”
He rolls me over so that we’re both lying on our backs and then tucks the end of the blanket between the headboard and the wall so that we’re in a little tent.
“She was gone when we hit that boulder,” he gasps. “I felt her leave. But we kept hoping she’d wake up. Then after a couple of months I overheard her mom and dad having this huge argument in the kitchen late at night. And they never argue. He was yelling at her saying that Jessie wouldn’t want to live like that, and she was crying. But it wasn’t normal crying, Hartley. It was wailing. She was moaning and throwing things around the kitchen, and I couldn’t take it anymore. There was so much pain in that house. I felt like they were looking at me, blaming me for Jessie and wishing it was me instead of her. So I went to the hospital in the middle of the night and convinced a nurse to let me into her room. I stroked her hair and kissed her and told her how sorry I was. Then I left. I didn’t come back until the first anniversary of the accident.”
“Was Jake ok?”
I reach between us and find his hand. He threads his fingers through mine and holds on tightly.
“He broke his shoulder and some ribs and smashed up his hand really bad. He’d been trying to get between Jessie and the side of the car so he could protect her. His hand got caught. He’s had twenty one reconstructive surgeries over the last eight years. But it’s still busted.”
“You were lucky,” I whisper, squeezing his hand. But next to me he shakes his head.
“I wanted to die with Jessie. That would have been lucky. Living with the guilt for the rest of my life, that’s no prize, Hartley. There were no winners.”
For a second, I can’t quite understand what he’s saying. I roll onto my side so that I can see his face better and prop myself up onto my elbow. He’s lying back on my pillows, one arm under his head. In the shadows, he looks gaunt, haunted, and very, very tired.
“Why do you feel guilty?” I say, keeping my eyes trained on his face. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. It shudders through him, all the way to his feet, and my eyes fill with tears. His pain is so tangible I feel like I could reach out and touch it.
“Jake had a scholarship to play baseball. He had scouts from all over the country after him. He had his pick of colleges, and he would have been great if he hadn’t smashed every bone in his hand. And now he’s rolling ice creams.”
He opens his eyes and looks up at me.
“And Jessie died.”
“But Crew,” I say as I reach down and rest my palm on his cheek. “None of what happened was your fault. Your dad was drunk, and he pulled the wheel, you couldn’t have predicted that.”
A single tear pools in the corner of his eye and slowly slides down his cheek.
“I should have put him in the back seat. Or called the cops. Or a taxi. I shouldn’t have taken the cliff road. Jessie wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. I knew she didn’t put one on and I forgot to remind her.”
He rolls onto his side, facing me, and puts his hand on my hip, just under the hem of my t-shirt. His palm is warm against my skin.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I whisper. But even as I say the words I know that he’s heard them thousands of times before, and he hasn’t believed them yet.
“When I left I knew I would never see Jessie again. But I still went. I couldn’t be in Twin Heads anymore because everywhere I looked all I could see were memories of her. I took some money from my dad’s safe and traveled around for a year. I worked odd jobs and kept moving, always moving. Then I went down to Mexico and eventually to Costa Rica to where my dad’s family are from.”
He takes another deep breath then and lets it out slowly as if he’s not looking forward to telling me the next part of the story.
“Hartley, what you need to understand before this goes any further is that I was a really bad guy for a few years after the accident.”
I open my mouth to tell him that I don’t believe that could possibly be true, but he puts a finger over my lips.
“I’m not just saying it. I drank a lot. I slept with a lot of women and Hart, understand me when I say that I didn’t treat them very well. I got into fights and spent some time in jail in Central America for it. I lived hard for a few months, then tried to straighten out and go to college like other kids my age, then I’d get into trouble or drop out, and then I’d take off somewhere and live hard again.”
He’s talking with a hint of wariness in his voice. Like he’s half expecting me to be angry, or jump up and demand that he gets out of my house and my life. Now everything Eleanor was worried about is beginning to make sense. She must have heard about the accident from her friends and family, even if she was away at college at the time. And Twin Heads is a small town so there must have been rumors going around about Crew, especially if he made enemies of some of the local women on his visits home. The girl from the café at The Point pops into my head, and I begin to understand why she gave us such terrible coffee.
“What made you change?”
I realize a little too late that I don’t actually know if he has changed. This could just be a ‘straightening out’ phase. Or maybe I’m one of the women he’s about to treat badly.
“When my dad died he left me some land in Costa Rica. He’d bought it
back in the 80s and was planning on building a tourist resort on it, but he was too much of a drunk to do anything about it. Four years after Jessie died I went down there and looked at it. She would have loved it. She was an amazing surfer. She loved being in the ocean more than anything. Being down there, looking at the waves and the forest, it made me want to do something positive for once. If Jess could see me from wherever she was, then I wanted her to be proud of how I was living my life. So I took my inheritance money and built the first Ondas Eco Village in her memory.”
“Ondas,” I murmur, tracing my fingertip over his eyebrows. “That means ‘waves’.”
He nods. “You speak Spanish?”
I smile, and he laughs a little.
“Of course you do. Wait – how many languages do you speak?”
When he sees the look on my face, the corner of his mouth lifts in a smile.
“Forget I asked. I don’t want to know.”
“It’s more than six and less than fifteen,” I say and lean over to place a soft kiss on his lips. He pulls back, surprised, and then reaches over to thread his fingers through my hair.
“You know, you can be quite intimidating.”
He kisses me softly back.
“So I’ve been told. And are you intimidated Crew?”
I say it playfully, but I’m shaking on the inside. This is something that’s followed me around my whole life. And I’m sick of having to choose between being a freak show and hiding who I am to make other people feel more comfortable. He smiles at me and shakes his head.
“Don’t ever dumb yourself down, kid.”
I lean in and try to kiss him properly, but he takes his hand out of my hair and pulls away.
“Hartley, I need you to understand what I’m trying to tell you. Part of me is still that guy. I’m not the kid I was before the accident. There’s a part of me that’s dark. I’m pretty good at keeping it under control, but it’s always going to be there. I’ve spent the last few years of my life being a selfish asshole, and that’s a habit that I need to get out of. I want to be a good guy for you Hartley, and I’m going to try really hard. But you need to know that I can’t make you any promises.”
Still Waters Page 8
