“You weren’t at school; you weren’t at home. I started to get a bad feeling,”
Mike’s black raincoat was dripping when he took it off and tossed it on the ground. Outside, the hoot owl flew the coop.
“You shouldn’t have come here,” I said.
Mike sighed and crossed his arms. He was leaning against the stone slab on the other side of the alcove. He felt too close to me, too stifling, and at the same time, too far away.
“Nat, I got a call today,” he said, looking everywhere but at me. “It was from your dad.”
“That’s impossible,” I said, and even then my mind began to race to come up with a quick explanation, a way out. But I was so tired. It was over.
“I’m not mad,” Mike said. He sat down next to me and reached for my hand. “It sounds crazy, but a lot of things finally make sense. I even understand why you lied.”
I shook my hand away. “You don’t know anything about why I did what I did. You don’t know anything about me.”
“Your dad told me a lot more than you ever would have,” he said. “He said he’s been trying to reconnect with you.”
For a second, I wondered how exactly my dad would have summed up our sordid past. Would he have told Mike about the two years he pretended to go to work every day at the wharf and ended up slumped over at the bar? Or how far he’d come since the day his buddies at the station slapped a pair of handcuffs on his wrists? Mike might be a novice when it came to being conned by my father, but I’d believed his apologies and vows to change too many times to walk into one more letdown.
“You don’t know my father,” I said resolutely. “He’s a con artist, Mike.”
“He’s worried about you,” he said. “I guess we have that in common.”
I stood up, pacing the small stone ledge. I couldn’t believe we were even having this conversation. It was almost a shame that I was never going to see my dad again, that I was never going to have the chance to chew him out for this.
“Mike, you can’t just believe everything everyone tells you. He didn’t call you because he was worried about me,” I said. “My guess is he called when he caught wind of your trust fund.”
Mike shook his head. “You’re upset,” he said. He tried to put his arms around me. “You’re just tired and upset.”
I pushed him off. “You’re
Now Mike’s face flushed, and he stepped forward, towering over me.
“I’m ‘unconscious?’ ” he asked. “I was the one who wanted to own up to what happened from the beginning. I’m not the one who spent my whole life running away from my past.”
“Why should you?” I spit. “You’re Mike King. You have no idea what it’s like to need to run away.”
Speaking of whichIt was time to go. I had wanted to leave Charleston on some sort of a high note. I’d wanted one peaceful parting gesture at the waterfall, but now that Mike had shown up and made that an impossibility, I just wanted to get out as soon as possible. I reached down and picked up my backpack, stuffing the scrapbook inside.
“What’s this?” Mike asked, pulling it out of my hands. The album fell open to a picture of the two of us in this very spot at a much more innocent time in our relationship. He looked up me. His eyes started to water. “Why did you bring this here?” he asked. “What else do you have in that bag?”
“Nothing,” I muttered. “Just leave me alone.”
“Natalie, what’s going on?” He grabbed for the backpack at my shoulder, but I kept a firm grip on the straps. After a split second of tug-of-war, I felt the zipper give way. It split down the middle, exposing the gaping insides of the bag like a purple Venus flytrap. About twenty packs of Juicy Fruit ricocheted in all directions, and I gasped as the one thing I really hadn’t wanted Mike to see floated through the air and landed at his feet.
He reached down to pick it up. I held my breath. He swallowed hard as his eyes ran over my one-way bus ticket to New York.
His brow furrowed. He looked at his watch and said, “Cutting it a little close to departure time, don’t you think?”
“Mike.”
I stepped toward him, but he pushed me away. I stumbled backward, up against the wall. His hands felt so rough on my chest.
“Let me guess,” he said, with a venom in his voice I’d never heard before. “I don’t get it, right? Tortured, complicated Nat and her gullible trust-fund boyfriend. Is that what you think?”
Once, I would have fallen on him and begged for his mouth on mine so we’d stop saying things we didn’t mean. The awful thing was, by now, we meant everything we were saying.
“Leave me alone,” I said. “Just put my things down and leave me alone.”
“No,” he folded up the ticket and stuffed it in his pocket. “You think you can just disappear and what we did will disappear, too? I won’t let you leave me, Nat. Not with all of this.”
“You’ll be better off without me,” I said, knowing that what I meant was that we’d both be better off. No one would pin this all on Mike alone, and maybe somewhere, far away, there could be a fresh start for me, too. “Give me my ticket,” I said, holding out my hand.
“No.”
Mike crossed his arms over his chest. I had no other choice. I came at him one last time. And one last time, he shoved me back.
Only this time, he was just forceful enough to make a difference. This time, I didn’t stop stumbling backward until there wasn’t any more ground to stumble on. My foot clipped over the edge of the waterfall, and Mike and I locked eyes.
We knew. Right then, both of us knew exactly what was going to happen.
His hand reached out for mine. It was too late.
In a way, hadn’t it always been too late for Mike and me? Sure, I had tried to make a fresh start when I crossed over to Palmetto, but I guess some pasts are just too powerful. Mine had a way of creeping up on me. I could only fight it for so long before I fell.
When it came, I let it happen. You could say I even welcomed it, falling backward with as much grace as I could muster, through the sheet of ice-cold water, then down with it. Down into the still, black pool below.
Some say your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. For me, it was just one moment. Same water, different fall.
I was thirteen years old and about to go skinny-dipping for the very first time.
“Hurry up,” Sarah called from the other side of the hemlock patch. “It’ll be warmer once we get in the water.”
She’d already left her clothes in a heap next to me. I looked down at her flimsy pink bra, her cut-off shorts, the white wifebeater tank top she’d bought in a three pack at the drugstore. I pictured what she must look like on the other side of the bush, naked except for her flip-flops and the shark-tooth necklace she always wore. The tattoo on the small of her back would look bright against her pale skin in the moonlight. She’d be shivering and hugging her arms around her chest. You could hear it in her voice: She couldn’t wait to get in the water with the boys.
I was nervous. I didn’t know these guys whom she’d met in the movie theater parking lot on the other side of town when she’d been on a date with someone else. The way she told the story, one of them rolled down the window of his red Camero, and she was sliding through it before he even finished suggesting that she ditch her date for someone with a faster ride.
“We’re talking about guys from Palmetto,” she’d told me later that night on the phone. “They drive fast, they talk fast, and they move fast. They’re not like anyone we know.”
It wasn’t long before she convinced me to go with her to meet them behind one of their houses on the Cove. Whoever it was, it wasn’t even his main house, Sarah raved to me; it was an extra weekend house, like something only movie stars had.
We had to hitchhike to get there, our bathing suits and our cuter clothes tucked in a beach bag so no one from our neighborhood would think anything of it if they saw us on the street. It was one thing to sneak out and
