Swear on This Life: A Novel

When I woke up the next morning, the sun was blasting me in the face. My eyes were caked shut and swollen from crying. I could hear Cyndi, Sharon, and Cara busying themselves in the kitchen. I slithered out of bed and snuck into the bathroom, undetected. Staring into the mirror, I wondered why I was avoiding the book. Maybe I was afraid once I finished it there would be nothing left of Jase and me.

I walked out into the kitchen and was greeted by a smiling Trevor, a derisive Cyndi, and Cara, who was trying to melt into the wall.

“Where’s Sharon?”

“She went to the store. You had no food here,” Cyndi said.

“Oh.” I leaned up and kissed Trevor. “Morning. What are you doing here?”

“I thought maybe we could take Cyndi and Sharon kayaking in the caves,” Trevor said.

“Okay.” I looked away from Trevor toward Cara and mouthed, Did you call him?

She shook her head no.

Sharon came through the door with a bag of groceries. “What’s up, kids?”

“We’re going kayaking!” I announced.

Cyndi and Sharon’s eyes darted between Trevor and me. “Am I missing something?” Trevor said.

“No,” I said. “Let’s get ready.”

Cyndi followed me into the bedroom. “Are you gonna tell him?”

“There’s nothing to tell. You’ve never been pushy with me, so please don’t start now.” She left the room without saying another word. Cyndi and Sharon always preached honesty in relationships, but she couldn’t expect me to blurt out in front of everyone that I had met with Jase the night before and that we had agreed to be friends. It seemed insignificant in that moment when I saw that Trevor was there, making an effort.

An hour later, we walked down to the beach and rented kayaks. The guy working the rental stand explained to us that we needed to paddle hard past the ocean break and then we could cruise south toward the caves where the water was calm. Trevor had done it before, but the rest of us were rookies.

Cyndi and Sharon were fit and strong and always up for adventure, so I knew they could do it. They made it look easy, paddling over the first swell and then turning their kayak to wait for us. I sat in the front of our kayak while Trevor sat in the back.

Just before we were about to make our attempt past the break, Trevor called out, “Remember, I can’t paddle, so you’re gonna have to work harder.”

I turned around and glared at him. “What?”

He was holding the oar across his lap. “My arm. I’m still rehabbing it. I’m not supposed to do stuff like this.”

“Then why the hell did you even grab an oar?”

He gestured to the oncoming waves. “Turn around, pay attention.”

It was clear and warm that day, but it was winter, so the water was too cold for swimming. The idea was to stay as dry as possible. I realized quickly that I would need to paddle much harder.

“This was your idea, Trevor!” I yelled, out of breath.

Sharon and Cyndi had made it past the break easily before a new set of waves came in, but we weren’t as lucky. They were waving to us, yelling, “Come on, hurry!” I almost started to laugh at how ridiculous I must have looked trying to paddle past the waves as Trevor sat back, taking in the sunshine.

“I’m so mad at you, Trevor! I can’t paddle your two-hundred-and-twenty-pound ass all the way out there.”

“You can do it, Emi. Put a little muscle into it.”

I growled and then began paddling fast, left then right, but we were too heavy and it was slow progress. The swells were getting bigger and bigger. The first wave came and I barely made it over before it broke. The kayak smacked down over the swell of the wave, causing water to fly up and splash me full in the face. “Oh god, it’s freezing!”

“Push, push, Emi! Hurry!”

“Oh, fuck you, Trevor, I don’t need a coach right now. I need you to paddle!”

“I can’t. Come on, you can do it.” He squeezed my shoulder and I almost hauled off and hit him with the oar.

“Paddle!” I heard Cyndi yell.

“Oh no!” I screamed. A huge wave was coming.

“Straighten out!” Trevor yelled. Our kayak was turning parallel with the wave, and I couldn’t stop it.

“Oh shit!” I was paddling as hard as I could but getting nowhere.

“Oh fuck!” Trevor said behind me.

The wave lifted the kayak and flipped it over like a hot dog on a rotisserie, except that it didn’t flip back the right way. It just dumped me straight into the freezing water. The heavy plastic kayak was on top of me. I swam out from underneath to where I could stand and found Trevor standing perfectly upright in waist-high water with his arms crossed. He didn’t look the least bit disheveled. I, on the other hand, had wet, frizzy hair sticking to my face and burning eyes from the salt water, my sunglasses floating somewhere among the waves.

Peering at him through my one unobscured eye, I tried to catch my breath. “Oh my god, we almost drowned.”

He shook his head. “We weren’t even out very far.”

“How did you get over here so fast?”

“I jumped out before the wave hit us. I could tell you weren’t gonna make it.” Trevor was completely impatient with people who were not as coordinated as him.

“Were you just gonna leave me trapped underneath that thing?” I yelled.

“What was I supposed to do? You know how to swim.”

Unbeknownst to me, the kayak was coming toward me on the white water of a small wave. It smacked me right in the back, forcing me into Trevor’s huge body. “Ouch!”

“Jesus, Emi.” He hitched one arm around my waist and stopped the kayak with his right arm. “Fuck!”

He spun me around so that I was in shallower water and set me down. I was shivering, so I ran up onto the beach and found our towels. I watched Trevor pull the kayak onto the shore, using his left arm and holding his right to his body like it was broken.

I waved to Cyndi and Sharon. “Just go!” I yelled. They turned and went paddling toward the caves.

Trevor approached me, looking disappointed. I threw a towel at him. He caught it and began drying off. We didn’t speak. There was only the sound of the waves hitting the shore and my chattering teeth.

I plopped down onto the sand, wrapped in my towel, and tried to soak up some sun to warm my freezing body.

“Are you a good guy?” I asked, finally.

“What do you mean?” He turned and scowled.

“Why are you so hard on me?”

He threw his hands up defensively. “I’m not, I just thought you could do it.”

“Well, I can’t . . . You should know me better by now. By the way, in case you haven’t noticed, I’m shaking, freezing, and stunned, but you’re sitting five feet away from me?”

He scooted toward me and reluctantly draped his arm over my shoulder. “After I left you last night, I went to the Spot to watch the end of the USC game. I stayed and had a couple of beers.”

My stomach dropped. I knew where he was going with this. “Okay . . .”

“I saw you walk by with him.”

I felt crushed that it appeared to Trevor that I was sneaking around. Had I told him I went to meet Jase last night, it wouldn’t have come to this. I’d made something innocent seem deplorable by keeping it from him. “Yeah, I met him for a drink. Nothing happened. We just talked a little bit about the book. He’s leaving on a twelve-city book tour. I don’t even know how long he’s gonna be gone.” I was rambling nervously, feeling a twinge of guilt for not being up-front with Trevor. I had gone to meet another man just after he had asked me to marry him. “I’m sorry, but we’re just friends. What are you worried about, Trevor?”

“Nothing. As long as I know you’re not gonna throw a seven-year relationship away because your childhood crush came back into town.”

I wasn’t even going to address how he was reducing what Jase and I had had. “Trevor, I feel like the only reason you’re trying so hard now is because you feel challenged. I mean, you’ve never cared to hang out with Cyndi or Sharon. You’ve never shown up at my house on a Sunday morning to go out and do something when there are a thousand football games on.”

He didn’t respond. We just sat in silence until Cyndi and Sharon came back. I thought about how Trevor basically treated me like a dude. We’d had sex on the first date, and he had been respectful and charming. He couldn’t keep his hands off me . . . in the beginning. Now we were just buddies, but I didn’t even know if I could call us that. Yes, we still slept together, but it was purely physical—nothing transcendent about it. Most of the time it was over in five minutes, and usually I did all the work because of Trevor’s damn throwing arm. With Jase, it had been the exact opposite. We’d started with friendship and then added layer after layer on top of that.

I hated comparing Trevor to Jase because they were different. I had to keep reminding myself that Jase had sent me away all those years ago, and Trevor was here with me now.

Once we returned to the apartment, Trevor didn’t stick around, and Cyndi and Sharon headed back up to the Bay Area. Cara was out with friends, so I was alone when the book started calling to me . . .

From All the Roads Between

The year I turned fifty, my husband, David, died in a car wreck. Suddenly, my unremarkable, ordinary marriage was over, and I was left alone in my unremarkable, ordinary life. I had spent my adult life taking care of a man I wasn’t sure I had ever really loved.

Ever since David and I had graduated from high school in the Bay Area, we had moved around from city to city, following David’s long career in the military. He was gone a lot, and since we never had children, I was alone a lot. I would think of Jax often—his sweet face and the hope he had in his eyes as he pleaded with me to leave it all behind that night in Ohio. I walked through life with that guilt, wondering if he had ever forgiven me. I prayed he had moved on and that he had found peace out there on the long dirt road.

I couldn’t bring myself to call or write to him because I was afraid that he hated me. If I knew he hated me, I wouldn’t be able to go on. All I could do was hope he understood that I did what I did for him . . . so that he could rise to his potential without me weighing him down.

Later that same year, my father died in jail. The bill I received for his cremation costs was my only notification that the whiskey monster had been laid to rest. I didn’t even know what he had died from, and I didn’t attempt to find out. I sent a check and breathed a sigh of relief. It’s easy to let yourself become the burden of your own life, especially when you were given the label of being a burden by your parents before you could even reject it. I was technically free—of the husband I had settled for, of the father who had sent me down this life path. But I didn’t feel free. My adult life wasn’t tragic, but I could never allow it to be extraordinary either. My self-imposed penance kept me from the bliss that Jax and I dreamed about finding together as we lay in the fields near the creek all those summers ago.

I regretted not looking for my mother, Diana, and making peace with her, but more than anything, I regretted a life without Jax. I would have taken the hardships on the dirt road just to be with him.

Three years after David passed away, I moved back to Ohio, to New Clayton. I didn’t have much to retire on, so I had to get a job at a diner in town, waiting tables. I was at the Salvation Army looking for a pair of comfortable shoes to work in when I passed the used books section. There, front and center, almost placed purposefully for me, was a book with a couple embracing on the cover. The title was First Love Never Dies. But what really caught my attention was the author’s name. Jackson Fisher.

Suddenly, I was fifteen again. It had been thirty-eight years since I’d said his name out loud. “Jackson Fisher,” I whispered. My hand shook violently as I reached for the book. It had an old picture of Jackson on the back, maybe in his twenties. It had been published more than twenty-five years ago. I felt gutted—