Chapter 26 Olivia
I lean out over the railing, contemplating the drop. The gray waters of Cape Fear River churn below me, mimicking the writhing in my stomach.
Cape Fear.
An appropriate name for my emotions, these days.
I recall an old horror movie of the same name, with Robert DeNiro going psycho on a boat, and shudder. That’s more Jake’s kind of film.
I pull myself up and take a sip through the tiny hole in the plastic cover of my takeout coffee cup. I close my eyes, concentrating as I chant to myself.
Mindfulness.
Live in the moment.
Feel the liquid in your mouth, taste the bitterness combined with sweetness.
Let it warm your throat.
Enjoy the hot sun on your face.
Listen to the chatter of the tourists, the strums of guitar from a busker in the distance.
Remember, it could always be so much worse.
I meditate for a while, getting out of my head, pushing negative thoughts away. Minutes later, I open my eyes. Do I feel different? Has it helped?
It’s another hot day, and Wilmington’s downtown Riverwalk is busy with tourists on vacation and local families on a day out. They’re eating ice cream, walking dogs, pushing strollers. Normal things. Things I’ll never have.
I’ve got the day off work, and I’d normally spend it reading by my mom and dad’s pool, or lying on the beach.
But I’ve been feeling claustrophobic at the house, with Mom’s well-meaning attention smothering me.
And at the beach, there’s too much of a risk of running into Jake or Savannah, even on a working Friday.
I’d even asked Dad this morning if I could take his boat out, as I’ve driven it dozens of times.
But you’d have thought I’d said something obscene.
He practically barked his refusal before storming out of the house with his golf clubs, leaving Mom startled in his wake.
I guess as far as he’s concerned, I’ve never been out on it before, and it’s his baby.
I apologized to Mom, even though he’d way overreacted, and left as soon as I could, slipping straight out on the bike, riding hard, with no particular destination in mind.
I found myself on the River-to-the-Sky bikeway, riding the full hour into downtown Wilmington where I locked my bike up near 24 South, and splurged on the takeout latte I’m enjoying now.
I stretch, taking in the iron bridge that leads to Eagle Island as it glints in the sunshine.
I stroll along the boardwalk toward it, past a little jewelry boutique, a touristy art gallery, and several packed restaurants.
It’s past lunchtime but I’m not hungry. The truth is, I haven’t been eating much or sleeping well.
I don’t know what I’m doing here. What to do next.
I continue treading the planks until I get to a quieter spot, away from the main drag, where big houses stretch down to the water. There’s a row of benches on the boardwalk in front of them. Choosing one, I take a seat, finish my coffee, and pull my journal and pen from my cheap canvas tote bag.
My journal has become the best way for me to organize my thoughts about what is happening. The only way. Without writing them down, those feelings are nothing but a nightmarish swirl in my head.
I pause for a moment, chewing the end of my pen, then begin to write.
I keep thinking about what I said to Jake on the beach that night.
About being rejected by this world, pushed out by everyone and everything, like a failing transplant organ.
A canker to cut out, a boil to lance. And as the pressure is getting more and more intense, the more I fail to find a place in this world.
Unable to have a real relationship with my family, unable to make friends, or get a legal job.
Unable to be with the man I love. I’ve tried it all, and nothing works here.
I don’t work.
Like that boil, it’s all coming to a head. Something’s going to happen, and soon. I just don’t know what that is, yet.
I’ve realized something, though, in the past week since I last wrote. What I truly want. And that’s a breakthrough in itself.
I thought it was Jake, that I secretly wanted him to leave Savannah for me.
I thought I wanted to find a way to live in this world as a fully functioning member of society, somehow, even if I was never able to get ID or Social Security.
That’s what I thought I wanted. But that night on the beach with Jake changed all that.
The thing is, the Jake in this world isn’t MY Jake. He’s a different version. A more messed-up one, because of my death and his relationship with his dad after that, although he’s just as wonderful a man. But not my man. He belongs to somebody else now. Somebody who even seems to deserve him.
The Jake I want is MY Jake. The Jake I left behind in the world I belong in.
It seems unfathomable to me now, but the truth is I’ve spent very little time thinking about that world as a distinct and separate place from the one I’m currently in.
I’ve been so anxious trying to make this world work for me, trying to find my place in it, that I’ve neglected my thoughts of the life I left behind.
If that reality is truly a separate place that exists in its own right, as I believe it is, then what about MY Jake?
What happened to him, in that world, when I fell into the quarry lake on the day, nearly three months ago?
Did I just disappear on him? Has he, have all my family, been looking for me? Am I a Missing Person?
I can’t bear the thought of it — my real family, my real Jake — frantically searching for me, with no clues to my whereabouts, no understanding of how I simply disappeared. The wedding day’s coming up in a couple of weeks. They must be devastated.
Or maybe I didn’t disappear that day. Maybe I died in that fall, smashed on the rocks below. Just as I did here when I was twelve.
They may have already buried me, and be processing their grief. Maybe this version of reality is some kind of purgatorial afterlife, where I have to give this version of Jake the closure he needs before we can both move on.
Yes, I know what I want.
I want to go home. To my real world.
And if I’m dead in that world, then I want to be set free.
I can’t keep doing this.
I can’t keep living this half-life.
I have to lance the boil.
But how?
There’s only one possible answer to that, an answer that keeps popping into my head over the past few days. If I can get home, and it’s a big ‘if’, then I’d presumably have to go back the way I came. Through my own personal parallel-universe soft spot.
The quarry lake.
I look out over the river. I haven’t been back to the quarry lake since the day I fell and was taken to hospital by, it turns out, Jake’s dad’s friend, Kirk. I haven’t seen any reason to go. Now I wonder why.
Why haven’t I returned to the place where all this started? Why have I been subconsciously avoiding it?
A family with two young kids strolls past me, the pretty blonde mom giving me a smile as the daughter skips ahead.
The father is very tall and sandy-haired, a boy with a shock of platinum-white hair sitting high on his shoulders, clutching a toy monkey.
They could almost be Jake and Savannah with their kids, in seven or eight years’ time.
I need to leave. I need to let Jake and Savannah be happy together, without me around to complicate their lives, or confuse Jake any further.
I know I’d be leaving Mom and the rest of my family all over again, and Mom would be heartbroken for a second time. But she barely has more than the ghost of a daughter now. It’s nothing like our real relationship. I’m not her Livvie. I can’t be.
I have to end this.
But how? By going to the quarry lake? Deliberately flinging myself off the highest point on the cliff and hoping I end back with my Jake in my own world?
There’s no way of knowing if that would work. And if not, it’s surely suicide.
What’’s even more alarming is that doesn’’t seem like such a terrible idea.
At least this would all be over.