Page 38 of Keep Me

Eight months he stood at the edge of this water, and never once told me he was wading in. I would have told him not to. I would have warned him how no one survives in the salt water. He filled a feeder every morning for a woman who had been dead for eighteen years, and he never once told me that either, not until the boxes, not until the very end when there was no more after left to bet on. He had thirty seconds of consciousness left in his whole entire body, and I have stopped pretending I do not know how he spent them. He asked for me first. The nurse told me that, and I let it slide off me in the hallway like something that did not matter, because the truth underneath it was worse than the lie I built instead. He asked for me first, and then, when there was only room left for one more word, he did not choose the daughter standing at the door of his life. He chose the wife who had been gone almost as long as I have been alive.

I did not think that makes him a bad father. It made him exactly like everyone else who has ever come near this water. He held on for as long as a person can hold on to something that does not refill what it takes. And in the end, the sea got the only thing it is ever good at getting.

So here it is, the whole equation, laid out plainly for the first time in my life, instead of dressed up in pretty porch-light language, turned slightly romantic by vodka and cigarette smoke and skin too bare to be seen: a mother, a boy from the graveyard, a monster who taught himself to mistake my silence for love, and now my own father. All of them, every single one. Gone, in the water, under the water, because of the water.

I used to think I was unlucky. That was a comforting story when you tell it right. Unlucky girls get to wait for luck to turn like the tide, it will eventually. You just have to wait until the moon is in the right mood. Unlucky girls get to keep loving people, keep letting people near, because next time, maybe, the luck holds. I did not think I was unlucky anymore. I was the common variable.

I think every single person who has tried to exist inside of me has done the same math I was doing right now and arrived at the same number, eventually, whether they died doing it or just disappeared one day from a graveyard with no goodbye. I have spent twenty-one years being the body of water everyone insists on swimming into, weightless and lethal in the same gesture, and I would no longer be surprised by the casualty count.

The water had not claimed Zane. And I did not know why. Perhaps he had a life jacket. Or maybe he had been lucky, and it will all be fine until the day it is not, because time hates me and she is waiting in the sand ready to ruin my life. She will drown Zane when she wants to, she is only taunting me.

The water had not claimed Austin, because he did not live inside of me. He lived beside me, and he formed his own poisonous salt water that killed people, too. And maybe that was why fate brought us together, because we were both cursed to sit here and watch people drown inside each other.

So here is what I decided, sitting in my father’s house in clothes I had not changed since the funeral, watching the hummingbird feeder go dry one slow inch at a time because nobody alive remembers it is their job now.

Nothing else gets to come near me long enough to matter.

I was not doing this to punish anyone. I was doing it because I had finally read the data correctly, after years and years of insisting on a different conclusion. Some water just is not safe to live in. It was time I admitted I was that water and stopped asking people to swim. I must exist alone, the way the Dead Sea should. Fully, and empty.

The house was quiet when I came back down from wherever my head had taken me. It was always quiet now. Zane was in the kitchen. He was always in the kitchen, or the doorway, or some careful middle distance that let him watch me without crowding the air I needed. He had made eggs nobody was going to eat. He had made coffee that would go cold in the same mug it always went cold in. I loved Zane more than I thought I could ever love someone. Zane was my sun and that was the problem. He is the sun and the sun cannot help the Dead Sea. The salt water is too heavy to be lifted.

“Kal called again,” he said, not looking up from the pan he was scrubbing for the second time. “While you were on the porch. He wants you to come by the office, whenever you’re up for it. Something about finishing the estate transfer.” He paused. “He said there’s no rush.”

There is always a rush. Everyone just keeps lying to me about it in different, gentler accents. Time is going to kill us.

“Okay,” I said.

Zane drove me to the office that afternoon, because staying in the house with the quiet that was not quite quiet felt worse than coming here. Kal’s office smelled like leather and printer toner, and he had the kind, but awkward gentleness that men develop when their job requires them to hand grieving women paperwork for a living.

“I just need a few more signatures,” he said, sliding a folder across the desk. “And I thought you should have this.” He set a slim manila envelope beside the folder. “Your father’s financial advisor sent it over. Insurance correspondence, mostly. But there is a letter from the oncology office in here too, confirming the original consultation date. Some families want that for their records.”

I looked at the date. September tenth. I looked at it more as if the longer I looked at it, it would change and stop lying to me.

I sat with the date for a long moment before I let myself do the thing my brain had been begging to do since the hospital lobby. I counted backward, then forward, then backward again, the way you check a math problem you already know the answer to but can’t quite believe.

September to May. Eight months and change. Eight monthly dinners. Eight times I sat across from him eating potatoes from the market on Fourth, and he already knew. Christmas, he already knew. The night he hugged me for the first time in years and said love you like the words cost him something, he already knew. Every single one of those dinners, I had been sitting across the table from a man counting down, and I had been so busy not noticing the watch sliding down his wrist that I never once thought to ask what time it was actually telling.

I did not cry in Kal’s office. I had used up whatever the crying was for, days, weeks… or months or years ago, in the dirt of a different room entirely.

“Thank you,” I told him, and I signed where the yellow stickers told me to sign, and Zane drove me home, and the whole way back I did the math again, just to make sure it still came out the same number.

It did. Time was not lying to me now. She was telling me the truth, at last, because she knows the truth is what is needed to bend the final structures in my mind.

Austin had gone to grab something from the pharmacy. Zane was upstairs, the water running, the pipes groaning like they, too, felt the sting of grief and wanted their turn to cry.

My dad’s phone was still on the counter. It had been there since he died, face-down, untouched, a small black rectangle that had somehow become the loudest object in the entire house by virtue of staying so completely silent. I did not know what made tonight the night. Maybe it was the date Kal handed me. Maybe it was just that I had finally run out of other surfaces to inventory.

I picked it up. The passcode was my mother’s birthday. Of course it was. I typed it in with hands that did not shake as much as I expected them to, and the screen came alive. It did not just come alive, really. It was a book that fell flat and open, right to the page it wanted me to see. There it was, sitting in the message thread between us, right below the words I had sent that I would never be able to take back.

Tell them I’ll come say hi soon. After finals.

Below that, an attachment. A small red exclamation point beside it. Not delivered.

I opened it. It was the hummingbirds. Four of them, caught mid-blur around the feeder, the afternoon light gold and heavy across the porch railing, exactly the picture he’d promised me on the phone two minutes before I told him I had to go, two minutes after he tried to tell me something about my mother and the afternoon sun and I cut him off for a school assignment that doesn’t exist anymore in any version of the world that matters. He took it. He kept his promise. The world just never let it arrive.

I sat down on the kitchen floor with his phone in both hands and I looked at four hummingbirds that never made it to me, and I understood completely, what I already knew the math added up to.

I heard the water shut off upstairs. I heard Zane’s feet on the floorboards, the weight of him moving toward the stairs, toward me, the way he always moved toward me, the way he had moved toward me for years without once being asked to stop.