All the Water I've Seen Is Running

by Elias Rodriques

  Then again, Aubrey was bad in high school. She cut class, smoked, drank. I might’ve expected her to get a DUI or a drunk in public. I might even have expected her to get arrested for fighting at a bar. But breaking into someone’s home was planned. I never knew her to go out of her way to hurt someone. What else didn’t I know?

  When I look at the clock, it’s almost four. School’s been over for an hour. If I keep this up, I’ll stay in my classroom staring at her all night. I gather my things, go to Virgil’s apartment, and let myself in, dropping my bag at the door. On the navy two-person couch in the living room, I watch a sitcom, trying to lose myself in problems so inconsequential that they have no bearing on the next episode. The screen’s blue glow and the bright square window, which looks out onto another building, barely light the dark room. The sun has almost entirely gone when Virgil comes home.

  I didn’t think I was going to see you today, he says. My eyes burn as the water comes and I blink quickly. What’s wrong?

  Aubrey passed.

  Who’s Aubrey?

  My high school girlfriend.

  I’m so sorry, he says, sitting down and stretching an arm around me. He tries to pull me into his chest, but I don’t budge, so he pats my shoulder. Were you close?

  She was basically my best friend in high school, but I haven’t talked to her in years.

  What was she like?

  Different. Probably wouldn’t be friends if we met today. But the first day I got to school after we moved to Florida, I didn’t know anyone. Sat at an empty table outside the cafeteria. Next day, she was just there. Asked her if I could sit down and she said go ahead. Figured she ain’t had no friends neither. Turned out she was arguing with her best friend so she was just looking for somewhere to be alone. Either way, we kept sitting together.

  I look at Virgil, expecting him to say something. He sits quietly, as if waiting for me to say more.

  To tell the truth, I continue, she was kind of mean. One time, she threw a pencil at a teacher and got suspended and told me she wished she had taken his eye out. But she was always nice to me. She was a bad girl and I was just this nerdy, poor kid who only cared about school and track.

  Was she white? I shoot him a look and he puts his hands up, as if backing away from a fight. No judgment. Just curious.

  Yeah, she was white, I say. But honestly, I don’t care about any of the fucked-up shit that she did or the ways I fucked up anymore.

  Virgil nods and watches me for so long that I look away. My knee is bobbing up and down. I don’t know when that started.

  Grieving’s hard, he says. You’re allowed to be sad.

  Am I really though? If I really cared, wouldn’t I have called?

  Maybe, he says, and then inhales audibly and looks around the room. I don’t respond and the silence sits for a little. Then someone stomps around the apartment above us, kids scream unintelligibly outside, and a car roars down the street. We never get even one quiet minute in this overgrown city.

  When’s the funeral? Virgil asks.

  This weekend.

  Are you going?

  I have work.

  They’ll find a sub, he says.

  Flights are too expensive.

  I can chip in.

  I don’t want to go, I say.

  Virgil scratches the back of his head and then says, So what you want to do?

  I don’t want to talk anymore.

  Virgil nods, goes to the kitchen, and begins preparing dinner. As usual, I halfheartedly offer to help and he tells me to relax. I can do the dishes. I consider watching more TV, but the thought bores me. Instead, I walk into Virgil’s bedroom, step around the clothes on the floor, and climb onto the rusty fire escape overlooking overflowing trash cans. Their sour scent wrinkles my nose for a moment and then dissipates. I sit and watch the occasional person carry out a large black bag of garbage and birds perched in a tree, taking flight every few moments and then returning to a different branch. After some minutes, my phone buzzes. Mom’s calling. I pick up.

  I was wondering when I was going to hear your voice, Mom says.

  Sorry I haven’t called in so long, I say, trying to think of the last time we spoke; it’s been about a month, maybe longer. I’ve been busy.

  I know, she says. Them kids driving you crazy?

  They’re all right, I say. Lost my temper today though.

  What happened?

  Usual stuff. I was in a bad mood. Got some bad news. Aubrey died.

  Which one’s Aubrey? Mom asks.

  White girl I went to high school with, I say.

  Don’t think I remember her, but I’m sorry, she says. I’m quiet for long enough to hear the birds chirp and cars passing by. Mom continues, A friend of mine died recently too. Went to school with him at St. Jago. Him and his wife were killed at home. He was fifty-five. Too young.

  When was the last time you saw him?

  Years ago. Lots of deaths these days in Jamaica. Always makes me think of Junior.

  Junior was my mom’s younger brother. He was found with a bullet in his head in an abandoned warehouse in East Flatbush before I was born, almost three decades ago. He was twenty-five.

  Been so long, Mom says, but I’m still thinking about him.

  Sorry, I say.

  It’s okay, you know. Just the price of surviving. We let the quiet sit a minute, and then Mom asks, When are you moving back to Jamaica?

  I haven’t lived there, I think to myself, since I was ten. I haven’t set foot on the island since 1999.

  I don’t know, I say. I have to go, Mom. I have something on the stove.

  Well, I don’t want to keep you, she says. I know you’re busy. Just make sure to take some time to rest.

  Thanks. I’ll call you soon.

  After we hang up, I sit on the fire escape until Virgil calls me in for dinner. As we eat, he asks questions that I respond to in a few words, leaving little room for conversation. The silences last too long. As he watches me, I can tell that he’s trying to think of the right thing to say, but I’m still thinking of Aubrey. After dinner, we do the dishes and watch TV until I feel exhausted and climb into bed. Virgil stays up for a little and then joins me. He kisses me. His hands roam my body, trying to pull us into something passionate, but I pull away, give him a peck on the forehead, and turn over.

  In the night, I dream I am lying in bed with Aubrey. The room is golden, sunrise or sunset. I’m sitting up on white sheets, back against a mahogany headboard, looking down at her, lying in pale ripped jeans and a white T-shirt, looking back up at me. In her light brown eyes, I see my reflection, the high school, short-haired Daniel wearing a shirt from the Bob Hayes track meet. I can see all of myself in her eyes. She props herself up on her elbows. She cracks a smile, wrinkling the corners of her eyes, and just watches me. We’re together. We’re finally together. We’re finally in love again.

  I open my eyes. Half-asleep, the glee lingering, I think for a minute that I’m still in high school, that the body next to me is hers, that she’s still alive. Virgil shifts and I look around my room and she’s not there. I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling for a little. When I fall back asleep, I’m in the dream again, lying with Aubrey. Part of me knows she’s dead, so I’m half-excited that she’s here, half-worried I’m having a psychotic break. Fear grips my chest, though I can’t move, can’t stop looking at Aubrey. Ecstasy and panic mix, until I wake with a start in Virgil’s room. It’s morning now. I don’t need to be at work for a while, but I get out of bed, get ready, and leave before he wakes.

  During the day, as the dream keeps coming to mind, the city blurs before me. None of the few trees catch my eye. The buildings all look the same, as do the small patches of overcast sky that I glimpse between them. I can’t tell one pigeon apart from another. Even my students, whose parents and voices and lives I once knew, start to look alike. I’m too lost in thought, in the dream that won’t stop returning. I felt so strongly about Aubrey when I was younger, I k
eep thinking. I felt so strongly this morning. Did I ever feel that way about Virgil?

  In the evening, I meet Virgil at a bar equidistant from our apartments. It’s new, so the bar is mostly empty. It looks like all the other tiny bars opening up around here that play anodyne, once edgy songs from the 2000s. Aside from the large window on the front wall, it’s barely lit. A white bartender with tattoo sleeves pours our drinks and then we sit at a corner table, dark beers between us. Virgil talks about the band practice he just came from. He plays the bass in a jazz ensemble. They’re booking some gigs, mostly weddings, but it’s not as fun as it used to be, he says. I nod along.

  You’ve been quiet, he says. What’s on your mind?

  I inhale deeply. A voice tells me, You don’t love Virgil, not like you loved Aubrey. You still love Aubrey.

  Finally, I say, I think we should break up.

  What?

  I can’t do this right now.

  You don’t want to break up, Daniel, Virgil says, reaching across the table, putting his hand on mine, which lies limp. You’re just sad. I look down at the table and sit quietly for a while. So that’s it? You don’t have anything to say to me?

  Virgil, I told you what I want.

  Fuck you, Daniel, he says, getting up and walking out of the bar.

  I sit until I finish both beers and then leave. The buzz numbing my face and loosening my limbs, I walk toward my apartment past indistinguishable people. About halfway, tired of the old brownstones abutting boxy new buildings, I text one of my closest friends from high school, Twig, who always kept me laughing, who dropped me off at home every day after track practice and who I spent many days riding around with, looking for something to do. I ask if he’s going to the funeral and if I can stay with him if I go. He replies, Of course. He’s always got a bed for me. I look at flights. They’re even more expensive than before. I don’t know if I should spend the money. I call Mom.

  Two days in a row, she says when she picks up. Lucky me.

  After we tell each other how we are, she says, Did I ever tell you about Granville?

  Your cousin, right?

  Yeah. He was always working. He’d bag groceries during the day and then run to whatever restaurant he worked in at night. Always said he wanted to be a chef. He was getting close too. Think he was about to get a loan when he had that stroke while he was driving and crashed.

  Mom talks for a little longer about Granville and then about her day. I tell her I have to go when I get to my apartment. Later that night, as I’m washing dishes, Twig texts, asking about my flight. I look again and the prices have risen even higher. I don’t text back.

  I call Mom again the next day and then every night after that. She keeps talking about our family, about whom she has learned more since returning to Jamaica. She tells tales she whispered to her sisters when I was young and they thought I could not hear, tales of ancestors enslaved or indentured, of men getting women pregnant and then fleeing their partners, of childhood squabbles that turned to adult fistfights and finally years without talking. She sketches the lives of relatives who appeared and disappeared from her stories. In time, she begins to piece together patches of histories that once went missing without explanation. She tells me these things, she says, so I can keep our story alive. So we are not forgotten.

  As the nights pass, I feel like a child again, listening to Mom tell me fables about Anansi, the trickster spider who lied to keep himself alive. (Anansi, Mom said back then, stole the stories the Sky God hoarded to preserve our history.) I’m doing as Mom did when she was young and sitting in the shade of a lime tree in New Monklands in Jamaica, listening to her grandfather’s family history. As the stories accumulate, the similarities between my family’s experiences and my own make me feel like I am living parallel lives, at one moment my own and at the next my kin’s.

  Since returning to Jamaica, Mom has learned so much about our people by talking to the folks she knew or who knew our relatives. She has remembered moments long forgotten by revisiting the places where she grew up. She has heard the other sides of stories that made her life what it was, what it is.

  If I go home like her, if I try to learn more about what happened to Aubrey after we fell out of touch, I’ll have to face Brandon. My stomach clenches. I imagine asking him why he got in the car that night and him deflecting, claiming it wasn’t his fault. Then I picture my hands around his throat, shaking him until his eyes roll back and his neck turns limp. Though the image only ever riles me up, I never let it go; I keep picturing myself dropping him to the ground. Finally, when the airline prices drop two weeks later, I book a flight home.

  Names

  I land in Jacksonville, rent a car, and drive south. I have some time to kill before meeting up with my friends, so I head to the beach. I exit the highway into Bunnell, equidistant from St. Augustine and Daytona. A sign names it the Crossroads of Flagler County, a relic from when railroads made it a boomtown. Its high school was one of the last to be desegregated in Florida.

  Today, this four-lane road divided by a grass median is flanked by strip malls, cleared lots, and wild clusters of trees. There are more empty parking spaces than I remember. I wonder if anyone I know is in those buildings, shopping or working, and if they would recognize me if I stopped by.

  After I pass the park and one of many identical housing communities, I ascend the bridge over the river that Aubrey and I traveled down years ago. Running parallel to the ocean, it was dredged up and widened, we were told, by the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II. Its waters still separate the beach towns from the mainland. I roll my windows down, hoping to smell the ocean, but it’s still too far. Instead, an earthy, oily funk flares my nose. I glance left and right. Boats travel downstream, leaving white wakes. People stand on docks and cast lines. Then the river disappears around a bend. Its name changes depending on the region. Around here, maps call it the Matanzas, named for the sixteenth-century Spanish massacre, but we called it the Intracoastal.

  When we were in high school, everyone had a nickname. Aubrey had at least a dozen for me. When I first met her, I introduced myself as Daniel, but she called me Dan. I didn’t correct her.

  About a month later, when my hair grew unruly because I had not yet found a barber, she called me Bum Head. When she found out I was in honors classes, she called me Einstein. When I talked about how I could not wait to get out of Palm Coast, she called me Big-Time. When I took her tinfoil gum wrapper and put it on my teeth, pretending I had a grill, she called me Muckmouth. And my junior year, when I became captain of the track team and she overheard my teammates call me TC, she repeated the nickname with a sneer.

  Now that you leading the troops and whatnot, she said that day, you going to get all full of yourself and start bossing me around?

  Even if I did, you wouldn’t listen.

  You don’t know. I could be a good soldier.

  You ain’t got the discipline.

  Oh, so I’m soft? she said, eyebrow creeping up. She leaned over the table, her hair drawing forward with her, as if waiting to pounce.

  I ain’t say all that, I said, leaning back, hands up.

  You think you tougher than me. Is that it, TC? she said, lightly punching my arm. Think you can beat me up?

  Aubrey, I was just playing.

  No, if you think you tougher than me, then prove it.

  Aubrey hit me again. I put my hands between us and she boxed them. I weaved my head back and forth, mimicking the boxing scenes I saw in movies. Aubrey stood up and I did too. She exaggerated leaning into her jabs and I backpedaled, pretending to give her instructions. Jab. Jab. Right hook. Uppercut. She swung harder, her fist and my palms connecting in louder and louder claps, until one of the teachers told us to stop horsing around. Not wanting to be punished, I dropped my hands. Aubrey’s left hook connected with my arm, drawing pain along the bone. The teacher yelled again, Aubrey rolled her eyes, and we returned to our table. Though I pretended I didn’t feel anything, my b
icep stung for a while.

  For real though, Aubrey said, her voice quiet as she caught her breath, I’m proud of you, Daniel.

  On the few occasions she said my full name in her Southern accent, the syllables drawling into the surrounding words, she always looked me in the eyes, made me feel like no one else was around. Thinking about the times that her voice got so low that I had to lean in to hear her call me Daniel brings me back to that cafeteria where we ate lunch together every day. The memories are so strong that, somehow, it feels like I could knock on her front door and Aubrey would answer. We would look like we were both in high school, her looking at me straight-on and me looking at the floor. Before I could say anything, she would jokingly complain—You must think you’re mighty special, she’d say, to show up here after so long—and I would apologize until she shrugged it off and let me in.

  But she’s not here. I never came back to see her when she was alive. I haven’t returned in seven years. Since I moved to New York, I lost myself in a new life and fell out of touch with my old friends and much of my family. Maybe if I hadn’t, I would have a right to grieve. Instead, I’m feeling sorry for myself.

  My hands are shaky as I park in the ten-car lot just south of the pier. I turn around to see if anyone is behind me, but on this late March day the lot is empty. When a single car passes by on A1A, it almost looks fake.

  My mind wandered for longer than I thought. I drove over the bridge and through an intersection without paying attention. I could’ve hit someone.

  I step out of the car, knees creaking from overuse on the track. It’s colder than I expect as I cross the street onto the walkway above the beach and peer down. Scattered green brush grows at the top of the hill and thins as the shore slopes. The sand is orange. The shore is short. High tide. A film of skim rolls back into the inky sea. A riptide, I think, hides where the water turns opaque.