In This Moment (25 page)

    “I promised her that I wouldn’t leave and then I left anyway
,” I say gingerly. “I’ve asked myself so many times if I knew… Well, whether or not I knew that she was still breathing. I’ve tried to think back. Did I see her chest moving? If I had known, would I have still left her there? I don’t—Was I just trying to save myself?”

   
“Maybe you only
could
save yourself.”

   
The temperature plunges as memories of the accident—fighting to breathe against the pressure pinning my chest to the seat, the harsh jolt of the impact, the creeping inky water—batter me painfully and swirl behind my eyelids like a galaxy of hazy stars. I squeeze my hands into fists, clear my throat and try to think back. Back to before the grinding of metal on metal, and the faint, metallic smell of blood and salt.

   
My ear was pressed against the rough fabric of the seat. I burned hot and cold all at once. My legs felt heavy, like they had been weighted down with cement blocks at my ankles. I tried to turn my head but my hair was caught on something. It took me a second to realize that it was the seatbelt. Fumbling, I reached down and dug around for the metal clasp. My stiff fingers clawed at the button, working desperately until one of my nails caught, pulled away from the skin and snapped in one motion.

   
Jilly? My head swam. I tasted blood in my mouth.

   
Where was I?

   
The car.

   
The water.

    T
he angry groan of metal compressing assaulted my ears. I wrenched my neck forward and pushed through a blinding heat that stabbed at my head when a clump of hair ripped from my scalp.

    I needed to take stock
. The water was already at the bottom of my ribcage. Sucking in a fast breath, I brought my hands to my face to clear my eyes and I twisted to my left. “Jilly?”

   
The air moves around me as I struggle to sift through the images.

   
“Just relax,” Cole whispers from beside me. “I’m right here.”

   
The whirring in my head slows down and I relax my fingers. The images sink in around me, taking me to a place where I want to be.

   
Now, I can see Jillian smiling like it would go on forever. I remember her diving into the pool in the middle of a rainstorm—all knees and elbows and freckles. Sitting with me under the slide—rough dirt sticking to our thighs while she showed me how I should take a drag off a cigarette. Dancing around her bedroom sophomore year in her favorite purple bra and underwear set. Rolling her eyes at one of Katie McLaughlin’s stupid cheerleading stories. Laughing. She was always laughing.

   
Blues and blacks shift behind my eyelids and a picture of her the way that she was on that final night rises. Her coppery hair was down around her face and she was wearing ripped jean shorts and worn-in sneakers with no socks.

   
“We almost didn’t go to the party,” I say tightly. “That afternoon Jillian heard from one of our friends that this guy that she used to see might make an appearance at the party. She didn’t want to deal with him because he’d started to get pushy. He was leaving voicemails, driving by her house at random times… stuff like that. Jillian didn’t want to encourage him.”

   
“Come on, Aimee! Pretty please…” Jillian stuck out her bottom lip. “We’ll watch a cheesy movie and eat ice cream straight out of the container.”

   
I wrinkled my nose. “How many times do you think you can fool me with that pout?”

   
I pause to get my bearings. “I couldn’t even tell you why I wanted to go out so badly, but I did, and I convinced her to go with me.” As the words move off my tongue, the band wound snuggly around my chest loosens. It feels good to speak out loud. “I think it was the first time that I ever had to talk Jillian into going out. It was always the other way around with us.”

    Cole is still holding me. I can feel the steady rise and fall of his chest against my back.

    “To be honest, I don’t remember much about the actual party. I know that you don’t want to hear this part, but I was on and off with Brian at the time.” I feel Cole’s body harden, but he stays quiet and lets me continue. He knows that this is my story to tell. “We were never serious or anything like that, but we were in one of our ‘on’ phases so I stuck with him and I just… I lost track of Jillian. How shitty is that?”

   
A long silence stretches out. I think of Jillian the first time that I saw her—pigtails and round cheeks and huge golden brown eyes like pools of maple syrup. She told me that she liked my lunchbox and asked if I knew anything about roly polies. I didn’t.

   
I gather air in my lungs and push it out through my nose. “It got late and everyone started passing out or heading home. Brian wanted me to leave my car and let him drive us home. I was stupid drunk at that point so I blew him off.”

   
“
Give them to me,” she said as she took my keys out of my hand and stuffed them in the front pocket of her shorts. “You’re toasted my dear.”

   
I pursed my lips and cocked one eyebrow. “And you’re not?”

   
She smiled, pushed her bangs out of her face. “I’m fine.”

   
“I let her take the keys away from me and I didn’t even think.” I shake my head and feel tears roll down my cheeks to my hair. Cole touches my arm. He gently folds our fingers together and pulls our hands over his heart. “Actually, it’s worse than that. I did think. I just didn’t stop it.”

   
How can I explain the rest?

   
How can I describe that it seemed impossible that anything bad could ever happen to Jillian Kearns? If people were colors, the rest of us were greys and greens while she was electric orange. She was a
force
. A world of promise captured inside of one body. I never—not for a second—considered the possibility of that promise being broken.

   
She leaned her head back against the headrest and flexed her fingers over the steering wheel. I felt hot. Too hot. Groaning, I propped my leg on the dashboard for balance and opened my window. Moonlight and humid night air rushed in and streamed through my brown hair. My ears were charged and my vision was blurry. I gulped at the oxygen like I couldn’t get enough.

   
“Are you okay?” She asked, craning her neck to me.

    I grunted
. A sick feeling churned deep in my gut. “I feel like I’ve been stuffed full of cotton balls.”

   
Jillian laughed, blinked a few times. “I have no idea what that means but it sounds bad.”

   
“It is.”

   
“If you have to puke, just say the word.”

   
“Will do.” I adjusted the volume on the stereo so that the sound of David Guetta lifted over the uneven howl of the wind. “Hey, did you see that Tam got highlights?”

    “Yeah, they looked good with her skin tone.” She glanced over
at me. “You should consider it. You could pull a lighter color off.”

    “What about you? You’ve been talking about dy
eing your hair for years.”

    She picked up a lock of hair and scrunched it between her fingers. “I don’t know…”

    “I will if you will.” It was our battle cry.

    Jillian laughed.

    “Let’s do it at the end of the season,” I continued, thinking suddenly of the pool. “That way we don’t have to worry about the chlorine killing the color.”

    “Speaking of swimming…” Jillian’s voice dropped and she rubbed at her cheeks. “If I oversleep tomorrow and have to do laps at practice because we’re late then I’m blaming you.”

   
I closed my eyes against the intense pounding in my head and let myself fall into darkness. “Bring it on,” I whispered.

   
The despair of the memory spills over me—harsh and unsteady and terrible.

   
“One minute we were on the road talking about swim practice, and the next... we were…” Piercing sounds and turbulent images surge through me.

   
Tires fighting with asphalt, the impossible crunch of glass, and the rush of salty water coming in through the open window. Jilly slumped unnaturally over the steering wheel—her hair tangled and dark with water and blood, her wrist braced on the dashboard.

   
I pulled on her shoulder. I tried to get her to move but her body was weighted down with water. I screamed. My neck burned. Blood dripped down my arm.

   
“Wake up! Please!” I begged. “I’m not going anywhere. I just…” I looked to my right through the dark to where the water was getting higher. “I just need to get help. I promise I’m not leaving you.”

   
Like static on a TV screen, my mind pushes through the images. What if this is all that I am? Chaos and shadows. Confused memories desperately seeking out the light. What if all the bits of me that meant something good are still trapped in that mangled car? What if I was able to crawl through that window, but I never really got out?

   
“It took the ambulance seven minutes to reach the site of the accident,” I say. “And by that time it didn’t matter anymore because Jilly was already gone.”

   
Cole’s voice is earnest, determined to find me over the void stretching underneath my skin. “But you weren’t gone.”

    It feels cold, floating inside my own body like this. I turn to him and tell him the truth.
“Maybe I was.”

Cole

I hold her against me while she tells me what she knows for sure: Jillian Paige Kearns drove a 2009 blue Honda Civic off of Beatty Pass at 1:29 AM. The time can be nailed down precisely because a woman—a forty-one year old grocery store cashier named Angela Sharpe—was on her way home from the night shift and witnessed the entire thing. By the time that Angela reached the scene of the accident, the Honda was almost completely submerged in water. Later, she told police that she helped Aimee—barely conscious and bleeding—climb up the steep bank out of the water but had no idea that there was a second girl trapped in the car.

   
In a small, steady voice, Aimee strings together a series of memories so painful for her that I can hardly bear to listen. She tells me about the panicked moments after the car slammed through barrier and went off the side of the pass. Then she describes the intensity of the impact and the water and the thick flashes of pain and the blood that burned through her vision.

   
“I still don’t know exactly why the car swerved off the road that night,” she says. “The police asked me about the details of the accident a hundred different ways but I couldn’t tell them anything that made a difference because I didn’t know. All I could say for certain was that we were listening to music, talking about our hair… I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second and then—like I’d blinked myself into a nightmare—the car was skidding off the bridge into the water.”

   
“The thing is that it doesn’t really matter if Jillian missed the curve and overcompensated, or if she thought she saw something in the middle of road, because she never should have been driving my car in the first place. If I had kept my keys or let Brian take us home… Every single thing would be different. Jillian would be alive. She’d be at college now and she’d fall in love and she’d travel and she’d get married and have babies. I took that from her. And if I could just do it all over again… I—” Her words break off, collapsing into her mouth.

   
“You can’t…”

   
Aimee moves. Her hand comes up to cup my cheek. “She was my best friend, Cole. They did tests after the accident and determined that she’d taken a bunch of pills—Vicodin, Valium—I don’t…” Aimee’s voice teeters and she shakes her head. “I don’t know how she got the pills or why she took them. I had no idea. They told me that after… after the accident they found a stash in her room. She never said anything to me about it and I still can’t understand that. I thought that I knew
everything
and it turns out that I knew
nothing
! I-I feel like if I could… I don’t know… If I could understand why she was taking the pills then maybe things would make more sense.”

   
She keeps going. “You know that they told us that she probably could have lived. I mean, they didn’t say it like that. They just said that the official cause of death was drowning.
Drowning
. I know what that means. It means that she was alive after the car crashed and I—I left her there, Cole. I saved myself and left her.” She shudders. “Jillian was the best swimmer that I knew and she drowned in the dark all by herself. Every day…” The last word cracks as it leaves her mouth. “Every single day of the rest of my life I have to think about that and wonder if she woke up and knew what was happening to her. I have to wonder if she called my name or cried or tried to save herself, and I…”

   
“That’s not fair. You can’t blame yourself.” I hesitate. Aimee’s guilt is tangible. It pulses beneath her pale skin and seeps out through every pore on her beautiful body.

   
“I don’t even remember the lady that found me. The doctors told me that she saved my life and that I was incredibly
lucky
.” She laughs, but it’s humorless. “Lucky was their word, not mine. They said that if Angela Sharpe hadn’t called for an ambulance then I probably wouldn’t have made it. I was in shock—losing blood from here,” her finger touches her scar, “and my spleen was ruptured. After I was discharged from the hospital, my mom wanted me to meet Angela in person. When I said no, she tried to get me to at least send her a note. I agreed to it but every time I tried to write the words, I couldn’t finish… Do you know why?”

   
“No.” I squeeze her, not sure that I want to hear the answer.

   
“Because I didn’t feel lucky at all, Cole. I didn’t want to thank the woman who saved my life because secretly I hated her. I hated her for saving me because I wished that she had just let me die along with Jillian.”

   
“Is that what happened last summer when you… when you—”

   
She finishes for me. “When I tried to kill myself?”

   
I nod into the darkness.

   
“I don’t know really. I’m not sure that I meant it.” Aimee sucks in her breath and holds her hands up in front of her face. “Th-there was this guy at school that I knew would have pills… I got them but I wasn’t sure exactly what I planned to do with them. And for a long time, I just kept them sort of like a backup plan that I promised myself I would never use. It’s not like I—it’s not like I planned it out really. It was a moment.” She pauses, holds her breath uncertainly. “Just a single moment when everything slipped away from me. And even though I knew, somewhere in the back of my head that it wasn’t okay—that my parents and my grandparents and my sister all loved me and were counting on me to be okay—I… it was just like none of that stuff mattered enough.”

   
“What about now?” I’m not sure how to ask this question but I need to know. “Do you still feel that way?”

   
She’s doesn’t hesitate. “No.”

Aimee

Once my story is purged, I feel so raw that I can hardly breathe. Cole is staring up through the muted darkness toward the sliver of clear, bright moon. His face is faintly creased with concentration.

   
He glances at me. “It wasn’t your fault that Jillian died,” he says. We are so close that even in the dark, I can see the detail of color in his luminous eyes. A thousand shades of green. “It wasn’t.”

   
“Maybe,” I say, letting my heart float just outside my body. “Maybe not. We were both stupid. She was too out of it to be driving and I should have known it. But I… I can’t think like that anymore. I can’t go back and change it. All I can do is go forward, right?”

   
Cole is quiet for a long time. When he finally fills the silence, his voice is low and steady. “The day before my mom left us, we had a fight. I called her a selfish bitch right to her face. Sometimes I think that our fight was the last straw—the thing that pushed her out the door. I wonder if she decided that if her own kid thought about her that way, what did she have to lose?”

   
I crawl over him, no longer worried about the fact that my skin is salty with dried sweat from my earlier run, and I gather his hands between our bodies. Gently, I press my lips to his and slide my tongue into his parted mouth. His stubble scratches my skin as I absorb the taste of him—faintly charged and electric like the air right before a storm.

   
Cole tips his head and feathers his lips right above my temple where my hair meets skin. “You’re so amazing,” he whispers as his hands skim my waist and grab at my hips. “You know that, yeah?”

   
Maybe it’s strange after all that has just passed between us, but desire, fresh and hot, pumps through every nerve ending in my body. Cole’s mouth is on mine, his tongue winding me senseless until my entire world is reduced to the sensation of his hard, strong body pressed into mine.

   
Cole groans approval. He wheels his hands greedily up my bare back over the fabric of my sports bra to rest on my shoulders. He fingers the tiny hairs at the nape of my neck and rotates his thumbs along my jaw, drawing me closer, his lips clinging, sucking, sending a spiral of heat down my back.

   
The salty breeze pushes in from the water, coaxing me, rousing a ripple of tiny pinpricks over my exposed flesh. Cole rocks me against him and slips his mouth to the side to brush that tender spot just below my ear with the edge of his teeth.

   
“Aimee… Can I? Do you?” His hot breath teases my skin.

   
I’m quivering, caught up in the storm surging beyond his eyes. My breath is fast and hard, keeping time with my heart. “I…I… yes, I want to.”

   
Cole sits up quickly, bringing me with him so that my knees straddle his hips and his arms twine around my thighs. He shifts his back against the rigid metal of the truck and maneuvers the thin blanket so that it’s carefully bunched around my lower half. Watching my eyes closely, he reaches up and frees my hair from its ponytail. I drop my head to one side, feeling my loose hair fall damp and cool against my flushed skin.

   
With the moon and stars as our only spectators, Cole clasps my face within his strong hands and drives our mouths together. As his tongue sweeps over mine rhythmically, I realize how much I want to remember this moment. I want to write it down in black ink on a sliver of plain white paper and keep it in my pocket forever. I’ll write about the sound of our kiss, the coarseness of his face rubbing against my cheek, and the sensation of his hands mapping my body, memorizing every curve and depression of bone and skin.

    “Aimee.” My name is a moan and a plea
. He pushes his tongue inside my mouth and glides his fingers underneath the elastic waistband of my athletic shorts to where my upper thighs meet my torso.

   
“Ahh!” I close my eyes and tip my chin down toward my breast.

   
Considering that this is a public place, I should be more worried about what could happen if someone were to find us, but I’m too distracted by what Cole’s fingers are doing to me and how his hot tongue feels moving against my neck.

   
Panting, I shift so that my ankles are hooked in the middle of his back and we kiss like that until we’re both out of our minds with wanting. Cole breaks away, digs a condom out of his wallet and looks back at me with an intensity that has my body practically begging.

   
I draw in a breath and skim my hand under his shirt across the expanse of his muscled chest. I wonder if he feels it too—this huge sensation like the sky opening up and swallowing us both.

   
He grins sheepishly. “I wish I could give you more than the back of my truck.”

   
“I’m pretty happy with the back of your truck if that’s where you are.”

   
Cole’s smile deepens until I can see the shadow of his dimples. He kisses my shoulder and runs his fingers down to the small of my back and around my waist. As he removes my shorts, his blunt nails scrape across my bellybutton creating a delicious friction.

   
Holding his eyes with mine, I tighten my legs around him and pull him inside of me. Cole goes very still then he kisses me hard and presses his palms deep into my skin.

   
It’s hard to say how it happens. How all of the bits of me—even the broken ones—start to tumble. I think it’s my toes that go first. Next—my legs and the hollow spaces behind my ribs. And then my arms all the way down through my wrist bones to the tips of my fingers. My lips part and I realize that this is what it feels like to
fall.

   
We move with the low rumble of the waves as our soundtrack and I live again and again. His fingers trace letters on my flesh. He’s handing me back my own words.

   
This is real.

Cole

I never used to think about things like death and life and all the hundreds of thousands of seconds that get stuck in between. Back then I didn’t know the way that a person can crawl so far inside of you that your organs voluntarily shift to the side to make room for the shape of them.

   
Her smell is all around me. I clutch her head, my knuckles brushing the smooth line of her jaw, and I tilt her chin back so that I can see her eyes better. Clear blue pools swimming beneath a flutter of dark lashes. She makes a faint sound as her body gets closer and then she cries out and buries her face in the skin of my neck.

   
Damn. I close my eyes and give in to the feeling swelling hard and fast under my flesh. It intensifies with each ragged beat of my heart until I think I might explode. She’s everywhere—grabbing at my skin, pulling my hair through her fingers, clenching her muscles tightly around me. I bite back the primal sound scratching at the back of my throat, and all at once I’m erupting, breaking free, coming apart from the inside out.

   
That was…

   
The damp heat of her breath exchanges with mine as she fits her mouth over my lips and collapses her weight against my chest. I wish I could describe this. This moment. If only I could… fuck. For the first time in my life I want to tell someone how I feel and I don’t even know how to find the words—solid and honest—to do it. Isn’t it considered a chump move to tell a girl all the ways that she rocks your world right after sex?