No One Is Coming to Save Us

by Stephanie Powell Watts

  “We used to think about having a house up here. Remember that? We were going to live on the water,” Jay said.

  “Yours is better than all the ones we picked. Isn’t that amazing?”

  “I never really liked it here,” he said and looked around at the landscape as if he were confirming his original idea.

  Ava stared at Jay, not sure what to think, “Why didn’t you tell me that?”

  “I knew you liked it. It’s pretty, baby. I just never got it like you do. I want to take you to a desert. Have you been?” Jay had crossed into California for the first time years ago into the town of Needles and the Mojave Desert. He was not prepared for the rush of feeling he experienced seeing the starkness of the moonscape, the many shades of red and brown in the rocks and mountains. Generations of travelers looking for a new start or just a chance had passed through that town. That idea gave him hope. Years ago he’d gone there to get a message from his mother. He knew it couldn’t be true, he was not insane, but he couldn’t shake the idea that with the arrival of Hale-Bopp he would see her too. He did not know where to look in the sky for the comet to appear, but he waited for as long as he could. An idea can come to you with such force that it can stick, get stuck, get you stuck. That night standing outside his truck, he searched the sky, leaned against his truck, then behind the wheel, until he thought he would be too worn-out to drive to his rented room, if he didn’t get going. A few times he thought he saw a smear of a star in his periphery, but he couldn’t be sure. You can see in the natural movement of the universe a sign, a message, maybe even salvation. He did not see the comet that night, and months later when it was in its glory and millions of people watched for it nightly he looked along with them, but the message from his mother did not come.

  Ava felt like laughing and crying at the same time. “Did I ever ask you if you wanted to be here? I probably didn’t. I’m sorry. I thought this was our place.”

  “It is, Ava. It is.” Jay spoke too quickly to try to reassure her, but he knew he did just the opposite.

  “You were too nice for a teenage boy, Jay.”

  “I was just too stupid.”

  Ava had thought he was probably just too sad.

  “Do you feel lucky?” Ava said.

  Jay shook his head.

  “Lana told me I was lucky. Do you feel it, Jay? I mean for the most part.”

  “No, Ava, I really don’t.” Jay shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. Probably not. Luckier than some. I’m still here.”

  “You know why you feel that way?” Ava said as she stared at him. “Because you had too much hurt too early. That’s the reason. I don’t feel lucky either, but I should. I’ve had a lot go right.” Ava pressed her toe into the spongy sand and watched the water rush to fill the hole.

  “We should go, Ava. Let’s get away from here.”

  “Not yet, Jay.” Ava smiled and tipped her head up at him. The sight of her false cheer made Jay nervous. If he had not been sure that she was close to screaming he would have thought she was flirting with him.

  “Ava, baby,” Jay began. “I don’t feel right here. We’ve got to get out of memory lane sometime.”

  “Do you even listen to yourself? Memory lane is all we’ve got. Isn’t that why you’re even here?”

  “We can go anywhere we want to now,” Jay said, wishing he believed that they were still talking about locations and places that grown people can go.

  After Devon’s death he and Ava had talked for days in the dorm, exhausted themselves with talk. Jay rested on the roommate’s always empty bed, and tried to ignore the stucco nubs of the cinder block wall that dug into his back. Ava spread herself out on a blanket on the floor, her voice wafting up to him. Devon’s death still pulsed in their chests like they’d been kicked. She had wanted him to say everything he could remember about his mother, Donna Ferguson. He told her about his mother driving one-handed while she held him on her shoulder. His mother’s eyes were deep set and very dark but looked sunken and raccoonish in the light of cheap cameras. She had been the kind of woman pictures did not flatter. She’d pulled back her hair into a French knot, rarely wore it curled around her face, in the wavy, soft kinky halo that made him think of birds’ nests. She cranked up soul music every morning to help her forget that she had to spend eight hours on a factory line. But Jay could not see the picture of her in its entirety. He would always be too close to her to recount anything but the nuances, the gestures, the small stinging details of her.

  “Don’t tell Mama yet. Not yet,” Ava said.

  After a few days together in the dorm room, Ava had told him that he couldn’t stay. He had known all along that it couldn’t last and shouldn’t last, but for a few days they both had pretended it would. He had gotten them what food they needed, watched television with her. They had even managed to laugh together. If they could have lived in that room forever, they could have made it. But she would have to go back to her classes and march into her life. She would leave the stale little cinder block space and move into the unknown future. She would have to get on with it again.

  “I went to his school. Henry’s son. I drove up at the pickup time and waited.” Ava stared at Jay and waited for shock to register on his face. Jay looked past her into the water. “When he came out to the bus, I left.”

  Jay sighed, it had been a mistake to come here, but how could he refuse her? She’d seemed so sure seeing their place would help. After the horror of the morning, the awful scream about the blood she’d felt before she saw. She’d settled down, calmed quickly, too quickly, Jay thought. But that calm had been seductive and had scared Jay into doing whatever she asked. He’d known better. “You know you can’t do that. Don’t torture yourself, Ava.”

  “I didn’t scare him, Jay. I swear. I just wanted to see him again.” The boy had run out of the school like he’d been spring-loaded and was herded by a teacher into a line to the bus. The boy dragged his oversize backpack on the black top as his group crossed the parking lot. Ava could not make out his voice or hear the song he sang as he rushed past her car. She willed him to look in her direction, and for a quick, foolish moment she’d wanted to step out of the car and touch him. Nothing else, just touch his face and look at him with concentrated attention. Thank god, he hadn’t seemed to notice her at all.

  “I wouldn’t do it again. I felt crazy being there at all.” Ava said. “You know what, Jay? You’re the only person in the world I can tell.” Ava took off her shoes and socks and inched her toes into the water.

  “Good lord, the water is chilly. The sun’s been hot all day, you’d think it would be warm, wouldn’t you?” Ava asked like she’d wanted a real response. “Take off your shoes. Get in.”

  “No. Ava, please. I want to go now. This is not the place for us.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you hated it so much here? All the time we came and you weren’t even happy?”

  “I wanted to be with you, Ava.”

  Ava waded ankle deep into water the color of weak tea.

  Jay couldn’t have told Ava exactly what bothered him about the reservoir, the brownish murky water, the drive through the woods that always felt menacing to him. The scene unfolded then as it had now. But then he was dying to fold into her and let her envelop him, cover him up, like a kidnapped boy, sightless, helpless, letting her lead him anywhere but where he started.

  “If I’d gotten pregnant back in Raleigh our baby would be in college now or living in our basement.” The luxury some people had of children who stumbled into their lives, Ava thought. “Is that incredible to you?”

  “We loved each other. It was okay to do whatever we wanted.”

  Ava stopped her mincing steps in the water. “We were important to each other, Jay.”

  “Isn’t that the same thing?”

  Ava turned from Jay to look out at the water. Jay thought that there were turns of Ava’s face when he could see the age flowering and he could catch a glimpse of the older woman she would be
. He thought he could see the years developing on her face. She looked not quite like her mother in those moments, but a version of her, another artist’s interpretation. He couldn’t figure out a way to tell her what he saw that wouldn’t insult her or remind her that she was aging, but he loved the feeling that their eternity, his and hers, was built in their faces.

  “I used to park at the Ingrams’ house and stand in the ditch outside your house. I’d wait to see the light go on up in your attic. You took me up there a few times. Not with Sylvia around.” Jay laughed. “But we went up there.”

  “Can you believe that was us?” Ava had found one of her old diaries she’d kept back then. Most of what she’d written was teenage stuff, girl problem anxieties, but for a few pages she’d written about a girl who shepherded her mentally challenged brother on the bus. The girl couldn’t have been more than a couple of years older than her brother, but she was patient and uncomplaining. So much duty in love, Ava had written. She remembered the moment like she’d just lived it, like she had stepped off of that bus only minutes before. “We are all so lonely, Jay.”

  “We’re okay. You don’t waste feelings loving somebody. I believe that, Ava.”

  Ava closed her eyes and imagined the water around her filling her up in an inhalation.

  “Feelings go away, Jay. You know how I know it? Look at Mama and Don. Now they can’t stand the sight of each other. I’m not nineteen, Jay. I’m not the girl in the dorm room.”

  “They don’t go away, Ava,” Jay said.

  “Don’t joke with me. How much has happened? God, Jay, we’re old people now.”

  “And we’re still here. Right? Here we are, Ava.”

  “I’m not stupid and you’re not either, Jay. You can’t just decide to erase everything, your whole past. You have to fill in the gaps.”

  “What for? Who cares about gaps? Do you? I don’t give two fucks.”

  “You do some, don’t you? I know you care some,” Ava said.

  “Probably,” Jay said. “Probably one fuck.”

  “Don’t joke around. This is your life. Why wouldn’t you care about it?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Not to me.”

  “It does to me. Where have you been? Who have you been all these years, Jay?”

  “Do you really want to know? I can tell you, if you do. I’ll tell you year by year.” Jay said.

  “Have you been in jail?”

  “One time.”

  “Don’t you want to talk about it? I thought it didn’t matter,” Ava said.

  “You can. I can tell you about it. What’s to tell?”

  Jay’s posture stiffened. She had hurt him though she hadn’t meant to. She was just making a point. A stupid point. Ava glanced at Jay’s embarrassed face and bent to roll cuffs into her already wet jeans. She wouldn’t ask about the particulars. Something terrible happened and he lived through it. How much more complicated was it than that?

  “You remember that boy who killed himself up here? When we were in high school? I knew him. I had homeroom with him.”

  “Don’t, Ava. No more, baby.”

  “How does that hurt you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about that kid. He’s not here, Ava. We are.”

  Jay couldn’t have been more wrong, Ava thought. The two of them were surrounded by ghosts they nudged out of the way just to get up in the morning. Ava waded deeper into the water. She’d read that drowning happened so quickly and silently that most drowning victims died with no thrashing or screaming out for help like in the movies but were gone in minutes before people noticed they were missing. “It’s pretty cold,” she said as she marched up and down, mostly to keep from crying. The jagged rocks bit the soles of her feet as she walked through muddy swirls of water. In seconds she was underneath the water too full of sand and mud to see her hand in front of her, so she closed her eyes. She was ten or so in a hotel room in Raleigh. The room was a cheap one with a burgundy bedspread flung over the double bed like over a cadaver. She and Devon had looked out the window at the buildings much taller than the ones at home. They had loved the particleboard built-in desk and the swivel chair, the television perfectly positioned for viewing from the bed. They even loved sleeping on makeshift beds on the floor. It was years before Ava knew that Sylvia was seeing a specialist because of a cancer scare. Years before Ava understood that one of her fondest memories was one of the most trying days of her mother’s life.

  Debris swirled around Ava, the sloughed-off bodies of animals, dirt and twigs and now Ava, all part of the soup, the graveyard. She couldn’t shake it that her own body was a graveyard too. Jay’s faraway voice sounded into the water, curling into the folds of the water’s ripples like the sound was coming from another time.

  In her journals Ava had written about Kim, the friend she despised when she was young. Ava was sixteen and her friend Kim was seventeen. Though they spent a lot of time together, they both knew that their arrangement was not permanent. Still they spent hours and hours together, full of glances over their shoulders (is anyone else coming?), ticktock on their faces, sighs disguised. What enormous capacity for boredom people have had. Maybe it’s not such a marvel. Every kid knows it is far better to be bored than lonely. Better to be anything but lonely. What a great flood of relief when Jay had come to town and became her new and much improved best friend.

  Years after Ava had not spoken to Kim anymore she’d heard that her child had been attacked by a tiger. All it took was the trainer’s lapsed attention as he strolled alongside the tiger, holding the puny leash in his dominant hand. The trainer seemed arrogant, waving and preening like he was the star attraction in the animal parade before the circus proper began. The tiger walked in slow motion, lifted up red dust clouds in front and behind him, the crowd hushing as he passed them like a king or god. People said the same things, the tiger came out of nowhere, one minute, dull-eyed and bored-looking, the next his paws on a tiny girl, a five-year-old, one he seemed to have memorized in the crowd, since his aim was so true on her fragile chest. How Kim’s child survived was a miracle. The girl, now a teenager, said she remembered nothing but the humidity of the tiger’s breath, not his sharp yellowed teeth, not the weight of his face-size paws, but the breath that seemed to suck up her own. If she didn’t have the scars on her chest, she would be willing to believe the whole thing never happened at all. Ava hadn’t heard this story from Kim, but through the grapevine. She hadn’t contacted Kim when she found out. That sounds callous and maybe it is, but she didn’t think it at the time. What would make a difference? When the miracle, the catastrophe, the unexpected event that ruptures our lives into meaning, foul or ecstatic and forever changed, flashes back to us, how comforting to catch glimpses of the faces of people who love us enough to say “I’m here.”

  “Oh my God. Oh God!” Ava screamed as she plunged back up, her head out and treading water. She swam as fast as she could toward the middle of the reservoir.

  “Ava! Ava!” Jay yelled.

  Ava turned around to Jay in time to see him kicking off his shoes, rolling up the legs of his jeans. He was ready to come in after her. He probably thought she was fighting for her life. “I’m coming. Stop, stop,” she yelled. It was wrong to hurt him. Jay stopped undressing and watched her approach.

  “Get out of the water. Let’s go!” Jay yelled.

  Ava turned back to the shore. She was farther out than she had imagined. People can’t drown themselves on purpose. Your body won’t let go of life even when your mind tells you it is the best thing to do.

  Ava swam to the shore and dragged herself out of the water. “I’m sorry.” Ava panted and held her hands on her knees to try to catch her breath.

  Jay put his arm on her back, waited for her to stand upright and led her to the car. “Come on, Ava, come on.” Ava sat in the passenger seat with her eyes closed while Jay started the engine. “Do you want heat? Are you cold?” Jay turned the heat on low.

  “Look at me.” Ava shook her head at her
reflection in the passenger mirror.

  “No, baby, no,” Jay said. He grabbed her hard, kissed her face, her head, her neck. “No, no, no.”

  Ava closed her eyes. If they drove the car into the water, how long would it take to fill up to the roof, drop, and sink like a stone. A mother and her two children had disappeared into a pond when Ava was a child. Days had passed before anyone thought to look there or maybe it was the silver of the hood of the car, a glint of sparkle peeking above the surface of the green pond slime. Ava never passed that pond without remembering.

  “I’m okay now,” Ava said and fastened her seat belt, readied herself for the ride back to Jay’s house. She would have to go to the doctor eventually and take off her clothes and lie back on deli-style paper, tilt back into the squeaking vinyl chair. As she stared at the ceiling she would hear the crab click of instruments, she would not witness it but the monitor of the ultrasound would flicker pale blue in a darkened room like she was in an eighties arcade, the screen graphic barely more complicated than Pong. There would be no movement, no pulse on the screen. The tech would purse her lips and would not say, but her silence would signal the need to start over, rev up, and try again. But not before the sadness, the terrible days that turned her inside out, her organs exposed and sensitive to the slightest hurt. But not today. No doctor today. No more. No more. No more. No more. She would go to Jay’s house and she would recuperate there. She would stay with him as long as she could. So many black people stay somewhere. Where do you stay? They’d say. I stay with my friend; I stay with my mother. Don’t you live anywhere?