Page 53 of A Love Letter to Whiskey
I remember the next sixty seconds like a slow motion car wreck.
Me, staring at my reflection in the mirror, planning out all the words I would say. Jenna, sprinting up behind me with my phone in her hand. Her voice, panicked. Her hair, wild. My mom’s cries on the other end, loud and jarring, pounding against my head that the ibuprofen had yet to help ease. It happened all at once — all of those things — but I remember them singularly, morphed, almost as if I’d dreamed them.
I had everything planned out — what I would say to Ethan, what I would say to Jamie — but I never got the chance.
In that moment, everything in my life shifted focus. What I thought was important was trivial, what was last on my mind became first.
My dad died on the day I realized I loved Jamie Shaw.
Love pulled my soul one way and grief yanked it another, and so it ripped in two, split into jagged, irreparable halves. One floated high, calling me up with it, while the other sank into a bottomless black hole.
But I was too weak to fly.
The heavier half dragged me with it and I didn’t cry, I didn’t scream, I didn’t fight. I drowned easily, staring at the floating half on the way down, wondering if we’d ever meet again.
• • •
I felt everything alive inside of me slowly slipping away as I stared out at the choppy water. A storm was rolling in, the gray clouds lurking off in the distance as the sun began to fade. It wasn’t as cold as the night before, and I stood where the water met the sand, my board under my arm, wetsuit zipped up high to my neck.
It was as if each time the water rose high enough to lick at my toes, it stole a little more of what was left alive inside of me, leaving dead driftwood in its place. My eyes grew hollow, my breaths grew steady, and my heart grew weak.
I could still hear my mother’s words, and they still didn’t make sense. A freak accident, she’d said. It sounded like a horror movie, or a newspaper article about a distant human being whom I didn’t know personally. It didn’t sound like my life. But it was.
My dad’s parents had a house on a lake in Central Florida. We used to drive up on the weekends to ride the wave runners and go swimming. Every memory I had there as a child was filled with joy. Mom said Dad was there for Nana’s birthday, swimming just off the dock like we always used to. He was just swimming, just enjoying a weekend at the lake, and then his life ended. Cords plugged into the dock and house boat had slipped into the water, electrifying it, and he’d suffered from electric shock drowning. I didn’t even know that was possible, and maybe that’s why I couldn’t process it.
Maybe it was a combination of everything in that moment — the guilt from what I’d done to Ethan, the ache of what I felt for Jamie, the shock of my father’s death. Everything had been thrown into a blender, dial set to shred, and now it was all I could do to stand near the edge of the ocean and not wish to drown in it.
I left Jenna in my room, packing my bags because I couldn’t, and caught a cab to the beach to try to feel. I just wanted to feel something — anything. I wanted it to sink in. I wanted to cry. I wanted the numbness to go away, but it was only plunging deeper, seeping into the cracks between my joints, settling into its new home.
“You can’t go out there.”
His voice was steady, low and oaky like always. My lip quivered at the sound of it and I nearly dropped my board. Fastening my grip, I hiked it higher, not turning to see him for fear of a completely different emotion sinking in. “I’ll be fine.”
“It’s about to storm, and it’s getting dark,” Jamie warned, and I felt his arms hook around my board from the other side. I gripped it tighter at first, but then my shoulders fell and I released my hold, letting Jamie take it away. I instantly felt empty as he set it easily in the sand, and I kept my eyes on the swell to avoid looking at him.
He stood beside me, gazing out at the water with me, and for a moment he let the wind and the waves be the only sound. His hand reached out, just barely, his pinky brushing mine before I slid my palm into his and held on tight.
“Jenna called me. She… she told me what happened.” I didn’t respond, but my thumb rubbed his.
