Never Have I Ever(9)
“Oh, yeah. You would win.”
“That’s not true,” I said, but I was still leaning toward her, as if I wanted more. At the same time, her sentences ran through my mind in triplets, like the first movement of the “Moonlight” Sonata, played poorly in a minor key. You’d win this. You’d win this. You would win. Every sour chord telegraphed itself on my numb face. Guilty, and she saw it.
“Come by my place. Soon. We have a lot to talk about,” Roux said.
“Get out,” I repeated, and she brushed past me to the stairs.
I turned to watch her rise. Behind me I could hear Tate retching and Lavonda saying, “Oh, shit, grab that trash can!” and Panda crying out, “Oh, no!”
I wanted to run up the stairs after Roux, chase her to the front door and drive her out, bolt it, draw the chain. But it would do no good. She’d cracked open the past. I could feel it leaking into my bloodstream, spreading like a toxin through me. She’d brought interesting times. She’d let them loose inside me.
2
Tuesday. May 28. 1991. The moon peaked full at 1:36, bare minutes before a rock pinged off my bedroom window. I opened it and stuck my head out to see Tig Simms, hungry and shining with moon madness. He whisper-called, “I need a pork chop,” and I went down to meet him. The moon set us in motion, and we zoomed through its light-drenched hours, driving toward a darker morning.
I used to think about it all the time, this night that started every evil in my life. It led me down a chain of bad, black days and sickened me, left me unable to eat or sleep. I was on medication for high blood pressure before I could vote. It was, quite literally, killing me.
Junior and senior years of high school, it was like living with a tapeworm in my gut, a lithe and sentient foulness gobbling any goodness I might hope to own. I believed that no one could truly know me unless they knew my worst. I thought that in order to forge any new friendship, have any hope of love, I’d be required to lay the live, vile beast of my past upon an altar, belly-creep, and plead my case.
I couldn’t do it, so I kept to myself. When I graduated, I ran west to California like a million lost girls had before me. There I tried drinking too much, I tried a variety of drugs, I tried losing myself in the sun-browned bodies of surfer boys and boat rats.
It was diving that saved me. One of the boat rats offered to take me out for a “discover scuba” dive. I agreed, thinking it would fill a couple of hours, or maybe it would be an escape, or maybe danger. It wasn’t any of those things.
It was prayer. It was a meditation. It was a stillness and a silence.
Afterward all I could think about was getting certified so I could go back down into that wordless world. I stopped getting high, because no one would let me dive high. I cut my drinking down to a beer every now and again, maybe two. I started exercising, to build my strength and stamina, and I started eating food again. Healthy food, in healthy portions, so I stayed fit for going under.
Sixty, eighty, a hundred twenty feet down in the deep blue, weightless, my breath a thrumming, bubbling rhythm in my ears, I was emptied out, quiet inside. I’d hang suspended in schools of fish who wheeled in perfect tandem, like a living tide. Sea cucumbers and starfish crept blindly on their own slow business. Turtles sailed past, heavy with majesty. Ocean creatures had no eyebrows, no mobile mouths, so each face was set forever in a single shape. Every dolphin smiled, every eel looked faintly angry, every seahorse seemed surprised to see me. They all had such blank, unjudging gazes, and the deeper blues beneath me felt like an infinity. The truth was in the water with us, but it didn’t matter; the sea could swallow anything.
In that beauty, so vast and varied, I felt my own smallness in the wide, wild world. It let me forget myself and yet be wholly present. It let me stop trying to die. If I hadn’t ever stepped off that first boat, truly, truly, I would not be breathing now.
My life on land got better, too, though it didn’t come like a lightning bolt. It was more like the turning of a long, slow tide. I practiced letting any thought about the past sink out of my brain, slide down my spine, and disappear into my own deeps. My history lived below my words, under my thoughts, even lower than my knowing, though it was still as much a part of me as the red-meat organs in my abdomen. I never thought about my liver, but it was always there; it did its silent, dirty work in the dark of me, necessary, unexcisable, but not a thing I thought about. Not ever.
Now when I saw certain news stories, or sometimes on Ash Wednesday, I’d remember it was there, but that was all. I never went down deep enough for words or images. Not even when I found myself inside an echo of my past, like the night that we told Maddy I was pregnant.
Davis was anxious about it. Maddy’d been an only child for thirteen-plus years. Still, she said the right things and smiled. I don’t think he saw the worry flash across her face.
Afterward I couldn’t sleep. I went down to the kitchen for hot tea, and there was Maddy. She was framed in the open door to the backyard, her feet still on the righteous side, touching the tiles. The rectangle of night I saw around her was teeming with regrets that could last her whole life long, and she was walking right out into it, fearless and young-stupid and so dear.
She looked over her shoulder with the caught face of a small animal, frozen in the center of the road. But I wasn’t headlights. I was only her Monster, who loved her so. I went to her, took her hand off the knob, closed the door. I could feel my worst things, sunk deep, yet still alive inside me. I wanted to dredge it all up, show her, and then ask, Do you see how high the stakes are, every minute? But she was just shy of fourteen. She had every wild young animal’s faith in its own immortality. The only thing my history had the power to change was the way that she saw me.