In This Moment(62)

We lie out on our towels and pass our phones back and forth to take turns choosing songs. I get her an ice cream cone because she saw some kid with one and started drooling. Two scoops. One chocolate and one strawberry. She lets me have a few licks and when I run my tongue from the cone to her wrist, she laughs and flicks ice cream at me. I lick all of the way to her elbow. She’s sweet and sticky and I’m getting caught up in all of it—all of this.

After awhile, the blue water starts calling out to me. I tilt my head and make a sound and it’s like she can tell what I’m thinking because she squeals and makes a go for it but I’m a lot faster. I run track for Christ’s sake. It would be pretty fucking disappointing if I couldn’t catch up to my girl.

Under a breezy sun-filled sky, I scoop her up by the waist and make a big show of throwing her into the surf. She sputters, splashes, swims out past me and resurfaces. If she was beautiful before, she’s unbelievable in the water. I go to her, lower my head to her skin. Her shoulders are salty and tipped with sun. Today she tastes the way that the air feels.

Later, when we’re back on the sand, our bodies warm and raw with dried saltwater, I thread my fingers with hers and I think about telling her how I feel. I turn to her, take her chin in my hands and kiss her deeply. That’s when I hear the scream.

There’s a lady at the shoreline yelling her head off and people are jumping up from their towels going apeshit. I quickly figure out that it’s because some little kid went under and didn’t come back up. Within seconds, I’m moving into the rolling water along with a bunch of others, my heart pumping furiously and my eyes scanning in every direction. And that’s when the fucking kid comes up and he’s waving and smiling and it’s clear that it was all a game to him.

“Holy shit.” I look at this guy who is standing to my right and we both sort of laugh nervously. When I get back to Aimee, I’m still shaky with adrenaline.

“He was pretending to be a dolphin,” I say in a can-you-believe-this-shit voice. That’s when I see her face.

She’s so white that she looks transparent and her eyes are wide and blank. I know in an instant what she’s thinking of and I can’t stand it. I pull her into my chest and I cup her head with my palm. I tell her it will be okay but I’m not sure if that’s what she wants to hear.



***



“I drove after Jillian died,” she says simply.

I look over at her and I wonder if I heard her right. We’re back in my truck and this is first thing that she’s said since we left the beach. I shift in my seat but I don’t make a sound.

Aimee continues to stare out the window so that all I can make out is the back of her head in the dying daylight. Her legs are curled up on the truck bench beneath her. “People just assume that I don’t drive because of the accident and I get that, you know? It makes sense because she died in my car.” She stops, catches her breath. “Did you know that it wasn’t the impact of the crash that killed her? Everyone thought so at first… but it was actually the water. That was what the coroner told us in the hospital.”

“Aimee…”

She twists her body around but her head is still bent to the door. I think about pulling the truck over so that I can look at her and see into her eyes. This feels important.

“I don’t drive because I can’t drive. I have a suspended license.”

My head is spinning in too many directions. But she wasn’t even driving the car that night. How would she have a suspended license?

Aimee sees the thoughts spilling out of me and answers them. “Last June,” she whispers. “I took a bunch of pills and crashed my car into the side of my grandparent’s house.” She pauses. “I tried to kill myself, Cole.”





Aimee



I’m not sure what to expect after my revelation. Curiosity? Disgust? Pity? All week I steel myself for the inevitable reaction and the questions but they never come.

Cole is just… well… he’s the same.

And that’s weird. Very weird.

“Pamela, you’ve met my daughters, haven’t you? Mara and,” my mother’s eyes dart to mine, “Aimee. They’re both in college now.”

We’re on the patio of the country club eating a late lunch. Dad is finishing up a round of golf with Mr. Frank, whom my mom revels in describing as “influential.”

I lean back, shading my eyes from the sun with my forearm. Green crowds my vision and sweat drips down my forehead over my nose. I feel like I’m in hell.

“Of course I remember Mara and Aimee,” Pamela says with a polite nod, her eyes lingering on me for a second too long. She’s a few years older than my mom and she’s so thin that I can see the bones of her shoulder joints through her pastel tennis shirt. I’m trying to place her in my parent’s catalog of completely boring, waspish friends and I’m pretty sure that her husband is some kind of attorney. “It’s lovely to see you both. What are you girls majoring in at school?”