Never Have I Ever(35)

I knew what she was then. Too late, I understood her game.

Char’s footsteps were coming closer, down the hall, pausing by the stairs to call up, “Amy? Are you up there?” and Roux was running lightly to the back door. She slipped through it and was gone.

“Ahmamamama,” Oliver said to me, reaching for me, close to crying.

I sat up, groggy and sick, and I reached back. Of course I did.

But, God, what had I done?

Charlotte took one look at me, half lying on the floor, my back propped against the sofa, and drew up short, still safely in the kitchen.

“Oh, Lordy, is it flu?”

Ruby caught any stomach flu that came within a hundred yards of her.

“Just an awful headache,” I assured her, and Char, that saint, offered to watch Oliver so I could go to bed. She wouldn’t take no for an answer either.

“Do you know how many babysitting hours I owe you? I’m at least a million in the hole. And we like Obbiber, don’t we Ruby? Get a nap, but you have to pick him up by two, okay? Ruby has her checkup.”

I let her take him, closing my eyes while she gathered diapers and baby food and frozen breast milk. I was trying not to scream and scream and scream.

They finally went banging their awkward way out the front door, Char managing two strollers. Even before it closed behind them, I was scrambling to my feet. I went directly to the pantry, Roux’s voice an echo in my head.

You owe me. You owe me, and you are going to pay.

There, in a Tupperware container on the second shelf, were the stale remains of last week’s batch of blondies. Only four, thanks to Maddy and Luca. I pulled the lid off, let it drop, and ate them methodically, one after another, hardly tasting them. When they were gone, I tipped the Tupperware back and poured the crumbs into my mouth, then let it fall to the floor, too.

This was about money. She’d come at me, truth in her hands, wielded like a weapon. But she wasn’t Lolly, and she did not want justice. She wanted a check.

She’d seen the accident; she knew I was a Smith. We’re both one-percenters, she’d said, pretending she only meant scuba, when we were both from a neighborhood where the houses sold for multiple millions. As a child she’d seen Mrs. Shipley die, watching from a window. Too young for the police to question her hard, old enough to never lose the memory. Her expensive clothes and car and face, so at odds with the Sprite House, meant that something had gone bad wrong in what had begun as a very privileged life.

Now she needed money. She knew my family had it, so she’d come to find me, pretending to be someone I owed a debt that I could never pay. It was smart, and cold, and utterly amoral. What wouldn’t I give if Lolly Shipley asked?

I shook my head, sick and so dizzy. My past was loose, alive inside me, roiling in my head and in my guts like a thick, tangible howling.

I took down Maddy’s Saturday-only cereal, shoveled a handful into my mouth. It was like eating sugar-crusted Styrofoam, sterile and chemical. There was no pleasure in it, but I kept putting it away inside myself. It stopped me thinking. I ate it until my tongue burned from the sweetness, until my belly was a hard ball pressing at the band of my yoga pants. I thought that I might vomit. I leaned my head against the shelf, shaking.

I was not this girl. This was Amy Smith, and Roux had conjured her. Roux had pulled her out to play.

This was a game to her. When she first told me the rules, I’d been thinking small and personal. I worried about neighborhood politics, as if she were Tate trying to take over Charlotte’s book club. I’d worried what would happen if she gossiped. Then she’d come to me saying “justice” and caught me up in that moment. It had all felt so huge. The confession she’d peeled from me, incomplete as it was, had felt so freeing.

But this game was larger than a petty power play and smaller than real karma. You owe me, she had said. Twice. You are going to pay.

Sick from all the sugar, I looked at the almost empty box of cereal. I surely did not owe her this. I dropped the box on the floor, the last Froot Loops scattering out.

Thirty seconds later I was upstairs pulling on an old lime-green tankini, throwing a loose cotton dress on over it. I hurried to the guest-room closet, where I stowed all our dive equipment, and started packing up, gear checking as I went. I had two full tanks on hand. I knew they were nitrox, 32 percent, but I calibrated my analyzer and tested the gas content anyway.

This was good. This claimed my whole attention. Everything had to be right, because I was about to bet my life on these machines, these tubes, these frail connections. On the way to the car, I checked the weather and the tides on my phone app and then drove straight to the abandoned fishing pier. Here in September, midmorning on a school day, I was alone on this sunny stretch of beach. I hadn’t even called Davis or the shop to tell someone where I was. Smart divers did not solo, I told my students. Not even at familiar walk-in spots like this one. But I dropped my bag and peeled my dress over my head and kicked my sandals off anyway. I geared up and did my final checks, then walked into the green-blue waves.

The water rose around me, slowing my unwieldy steps, until the low waves were slapping at my upper thighs. It was enough. I fell forward, arms out, and the water caught me. It took me in. It let me under.

The ocean was thick with bits of green seaweed. Low visibility, but I was almost glad. I didn’t want to see too far ahead. I had no desire to look behind me. I wanted only to be in this now, the water a living world of green surging around me. The ocean had its own breath, and, suspended in the huge, relentless inhale-exhale of the tide, I matched mine to it as I slipped my fins on.