Before Janis drowned, I told her I wanted to come back as an eagle after I died. To build a nest high in the mountains and to hover over lakes. Eagles mate for life. This, the first thing, I already knew.
Janis told me the second thing. That the male and female soar to dizzying heights where the male eagle folds his wings to the side while the female wraps hers around him. They lock their talons together and plummet, tumbling to the earth. Mere feet before they hit the ground they pull up and soar to the sky to do it all again. This time the female folds her wings to the side and the male envelops her. They fall together to the earth as an expression of their life-long commitment. If done imperfectly, the couple dies upon impact.
Imperfectly. There was that chance it wouldn’t work.
But water.
You can’t kill it. You can’t squash it or smash it. It doesn’t burn or break. It takes on forms and changes function. It is the ocean. The clouds. It turns into rain. It absorbs into blood. Sweat. It steams away, rebirthed into the atmosphere.
“I changed my mind,” I said to her. “When I die, I want to be poured out like water.”
She didn’t hear me. She was already gone.
***
All my life I was thin and frail. My torso slimmed as it approached my waist and then flared out at my hip bones. My midsection was so small it made my hips look womanly. My metabolism was so high that simple carbs didn’t do anything to keep fat on my bones and weight gainer was just another testimony of false advertising. I started drinking beer to put on weight, even though I hated it. It was like swallowing my own vomit. It worked, and I expanded to a healthy one hundred and eighty pounds as a six-foot-two man. Somewhere along the way the beer went from tasting like vomit to tasting like life itself. Once I crashed a wedding reception at a hotel where I was drinking. I was arrested after I wrapped my hands around the groom’s father’s neck. Poor guy. He probably didn’t even deserve it.
Afterward, I started going to meetings at St. John’s Catholic Church. I met Janis in that church basement. It smelled wet and brown and had accordion walls dividers, chipped linoleum floors, rusty folding chairs, translucent coffee, Styrofoam cups, powdered creamer. That beautiful basement.
She did this thing with her feet. When she sat in the chair, she situated her hands under her thighs and shuffled her feet like a little girl’s dangling over a ledge.
Janis.
She said “G’bless you,” when anyone sneezed. She smiled when other people were giving testimonials. She keyed into what people were saying, and did little things without thinking about it, like cracking all the joints in her hands and fingers or blowing at the wisps of red hair that constantly crowded her eyes.
After her first meeting, I went home feeling great. Spectacular. Her beauty cured me. I drank some mouthwash to be sure. It hit the spot, but not too hard. I had to see Janis again. Maybe I could just call her up and ask her over for coffee. Maybe she would kiss me.
I would sneeze.
“G’bless you.”
She would lean in, a wisp of red hair falling from behind her ear. I’d put it back with my fingers. She’d touched her lips to mine. She wouldn’t mind my dirty fingernails and my bristled chins. No. She wouldn’t mind takeout three to seven times a week.
I kept going to the meetings so I could keep seeing her, and one night I asked if she would like to go out for dinner. She reminded me that a restriction on dating other users is part of the program.
“I’ve got a secret,” I said. “I’m user anymore.”
“You mean you’re not using right now?” she asked.
“No. I mean, I’m cured.”
“People like us are never cured.”
I loved that there was an us.
“I am,” I said. “I can feel it. I feel it in the center of my heart. I feel it behind my eyes and between my toes.”
“If you’re really cured you wouldn’t come. We still come because we know we’re never cured.”
We.
I pushed a finger against my mouth, felt the ridges of my teeth behind my thin lips. “Maybe I just like being around the people. There’s Lenny and Susan. Dr. Mellon’s laugh—”
“I wish I didn’t have to come. I hate how many empty chairs there are. Every empty chair is like a person missing a soul.”
“Maybe an empty chair attacked you as a child,” I said.
“Maybe.” She cracked her knuckles.
“So, you want to go to dinner?” I asked.
“No. You’re a liar. Or a user. Or both. Either way, I don’t date either.”
Janis reached behind her neck and swept her red hair, so it lay over one shoulder.
“What if I stopped coming?” I asked.
“What then?”
“Well, I wouldn’t be a liar.”
“I guess.”
“Then you wouldn’t have any more excuses not to see me.”
“You would have to stop coming for a while.”
“For how long?”
She gave me a timeframe. It was all vague anyway. She took out her phone and asked for my number. A few seconds later my phone buzzed.
I faked a sneeze.
“G’bless you.”
I waited for the agreed upon timeframe before calling Janis. She wore a yellow dress to dinner. I wore a red sweater and I underate. I was too nervous to stomach a full plate of sesame chicken. She slipped her shoes off. When she rubbed her feet together under the table, they made a dry swishing sound.
“Why did your parents get divorced?” I asked.
“My mom was crazy.”
“Oh yeah?”
“No. Like, seriously crazy. I was only eight and I knew it.”
“How did you know?”
She didn’t answer but instead said, “My baby brother died, too.”
“You have a brother?”
“Had.”
“I’m sorry.”
We started this thing where I kept her accountable with her drinking. Kind of like our own personal program deal. I was her unofficial sponsor. At the end of each day, I would ask her if she drank. Or if she had the urge to drink. And she would tell me if she did or not. She would tell me when it happened and what she was doing when it happened. Of course, I had to do the same for her, but since I wasn’t an addict anymore, I never had anything to tell her.
One night we threw watermelons and cantaloupes off the train bridge that stretched across the James River. The water level was low, so the river swam around small rock islands. I suggested we camp out on one of the rocks for the night.
“We don’t have tents.” Janis dropped a cantaloupe, and it smashed open seventy feet below. “Or sleeping bags.”
“It’s summer,” I said. “The nights are warm enough.”
“Don’t the tramps hang out down there?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think they do. Freight-hopping hobo gangs.”
“Sounds menacing.”
“Lots of people have been murdered.”
“Right here?”
“Yes,” she said. “Well, below us.”
Janis shivered. Made a noise.
“Did you know that eagles mate for life?” I asked.
“I did,” she said. “Did you know that their courtship entails intimate acrobatics and free-falling from hundreds of feet in the sky?”
“No. I didn’t.”
We followed the tracks to a path that led to the river’s edge. We hopped over small streams onto the tops of the boulders and pretended to ride on the backs of great turtles. In some parts we had to take off our shoes and wade through the current. We stepped from the rocks into the water and braced ourselves when the pull tried to drag us downstream. The bottom was soft with moss and weeds. In some places, twigs clogged the river’s crannies to make miniature dams where yellow foam collected in swirling pools. We reached a rock large and flat enough where we could rest. Vegetation decorated our rock, and a patch of trees gathered at the opposite end. She laughed when I tried to scare her with stories about drunk hobos stumbling upon us. “One flash of his blade and our blood flows with the current.”
I asked Janis if she had ever floated downriver, under mighty stone trestles that stand against the starry canopy of a stretched-out sky. She said no. And then told me that she was pretty sure her mother deliberately pushed her little brother on his tricycle in front of a car, killing him.
I understood what she meant when she said her mother was crazy. No. Like, seriously crazy. Janis asked me what I thought about getting involved with a nutcase like her. I answered with a kiss.
She laughed and our teeth rattled together.
“What?” I asked.
“Why do you want this?” she asked.
“Because I want you. Why are you laughing?”
“Because I have you.”
She came home with me that night. While she slept, I fact-checked the thing about eagles. She hummed something almost like words, rubbed her feet together, and pressed her body against mine, filling all the empty spaces between us.
The night Janis drowned, she went through my fridge looking for eggs. We wanted pancakes for dinner.
“What is this?” She held a blue and silver can.
I usually don’t have any beer in my fridge. It usually didn’t last. I got nervous. “That’s my beer,” I said.
“What’s it doing here?”
“Sometimes I have one with dinner.”
“One with dinner?” It’s like she was angry.
I was silent. I was sweating.
“Why haven’t you told me about this?” she asked.
“About what?” I raised my voice to sound shocked.
“Accountability. That’s our thing. You never mentioned this.”
“I never mentioned it because I don’t have to.”
“What do you mean you don’t have to?”
“You have the problem. Not me. I’m not an addict.” I turned my back, dismissing her anger as an overreaction.
“If you’re not an addict, why do you have it?”
“If I’m not an addict, why wouldn’t I have it?”
“Because if you weren’t, you wouldn’t need it. That’s why.”
“I don’t need it.”
She slammed the can on the counter. She walked out of the kitchen.
“Where are you going?”
I followed her, my audible heartbeat matching the cadence of my steps.
She walked to the closet by the laundry room and pulled open the door.
I don’t know how she knew where to look. Maybe I had said something one time. I felt like a kid whose mom went rummaging through his bedroom and found porn under his bed, cigarettes in his sock drawer.
Liquor bottles behind the dryer.
I don’t know how many there were. Couldn’t have been many. I deposit them in the dumpster in batches when I think about it. What she saw was enough. What I saw was a controlled rage. She whipped around. Under the light in my hallway, she looked demonic. Her rusty and hanging in her face.
Janis wasn’t angry. She was worse than angry. She was giving up. Her eyes disappeared behind the shadows on her face.
She walked from the laundry room, through the kitchen, and out the door.
I asked where she was going. I followed her to the car, repeating her name with every voice inflection possible, even after she drove away.
Janis. Janis. Janis.
That night she went to the river alone, dove off the great stone turtles, and died. I imagine it went something like this: It was late. Intoxicated and upset, Janis staggered to the river’s edge and sloshed into the icy water. The rush disoriented her, and she stumbled and fell two or three times before managing to get even a few feet into the water. She managed to crawl to a smooth and rounded boulder and sprawled upon it. After passing out, she rolled off the rock and split her head on one of the many jagged stones that booby trapped the riverbed. This would account for the cracked skull when the police recovered her body. She floated downriver, if not unconscious, then too weak to fight the current. She choked on vomit and her lungs turned to water balloons.
Something like that.
Boulder diving. If done imperfectly, the diver may die upon impact.
I was sure it was an accident. I guessed people aren’t ever really cured. This is one story I told myself.
The other story was about accountability. In AA we pressed into being responsible for our own choices and the consequences that come from them. How we can’t control other people, only ourselves. This is where it got fuzzy. When I went deep into this story, I often wished it would finish me off. There have been times when it has come close. As close as your face can get to the water before getting wet.
The night I kissed Janice for the first time at the river, her mouth was yielding, her lips pressed behind the weight of mine. In feeling the structure of her fragile face, I also felt the delicacy of our relationship. I imagined us on the bridge above, and going over together, attached, falling as the eagles do, tumbling to the earth, then smashing onto the rocks. The sky was clear, the train bridge was magnificent, and we were endangered. I thought about eagles a lot and wished that I could see them every day, cutting across in the dirty dish-rag sky.
To be water, though. Forever swallowing Janis and carrying her through rapids, over rocks and under the bridges where the train hoppers sleep.
After Janis drowned, I went to the river almost every day. After a heavy rain, the water covered the boulders, and floating downstream was like underwater caving. I moved in slow motion, Zen-like, and meditative. The water spiraled and rolled where the river poured over a family of stones. It was forgiving. If I let my body go limp, I could get caught in the current and it moved me like a dance. If I curled up into a fetal position, it shot me out like a cannonball. After swimming I was calm and centered. I was cured and I was high, as if someone emptied her hidden stash of whisky and gin into the irresistible current.