The Sea of Tranquility

by Katja Millay

“She says supposably.” If Drew Leighton were a woman, this would be his unforgivable thing.

I can lie to myself. I can lie to Josh. But it’s just that. A lie. I didn’t destroy any part of me when I slept with him, even if I did destroy everything after. I knew that it wasn’t true when I said it and I know it now. I don’t regret one minute I ever spent with Josh. What I regret is every single second after. I regret ripping his heart out. I regret sending us both straight to hell.

“I’m going to walk over to you,” I say, taking one step at a time in her direction like I’m talking down a jumper. “I’m going to put my arms around you and I’m going to hold you,” I pause before taking the last step, “and you’re going to let me.” “Why?” she asks, like it’s the most insane thing she’s ever heard and maybe, after tonight, it is. “Because I need to.”

“Leaving is the only thing you could have done to disappoint me.” I would have lived every day without the truth, to keep her, even if it was wrong.

“Enough with the cryptic, Sunshine! I’m sick of it. I’m sick of this!” I’m losing it all over again. I’ve done more yelling since I’ve known this girl than I have in the past ten years, and I can’t seem to stop. “You say things like that all the time that make absolutely no sense! Like you want me to know something, but you won’t tell me, so I’m just supposed to pick up random clues and figure it out. Guess what? I can’t. I can’t figure it out. I can’t figure you out and I’m getting sick of trying.”

“No one asked you to.” The words are fierce and bitter. Her eyes turn almost feral. “Everyone wants to fix me. My parents want to fix me. My brother wants to fix me. My therapists want to fix me. You’re supposed to be the person who doesn’t want to fix me.”

“I just wanted one person who would look at me and not want to see someone else.” “Who looks at you like that?” I lift my head up and lower my hands so I can see her face, and I can’t imagine anyone looking at this girl and wanting to see anything but her. “Everyone who loves me.” “Who is it they want to see? “A dead girl.”

“It’s about the dream of second chances,” he says finally. He hasn’t raised his eyes from the paper on his desk, and I feel him looking at me without looking when he uses his grandfather’s words. “The narrator doesn’t respect the beauty of life and the world around her, so it crushes her into the ground, and once she’s dead she realizes everything she took for granted and didn’t see right in front of her while she was alive. She’s begging for another chance to live again so she can appreciate it this time.”

“And does she get that chance?” she asks Josh while I desperately focus on the poster of literary terms on the wall and wait for absolution. When it comes, I barely hear it. “She does.”

I’m not sure how long we sit in Josh’s truck, holding hands, surrounded by darkness and unspoken regrets. But it’s long enough to know that there are no stories or secrets in the world worth holding onto more than his hand.

Everything in me turns on and shuts down at the same time. I am weak and strong. I am terrified and brave. I am lost and found. I am here and gone.

He turns to Aidan Richter, who looks haunted and stares at me like I’m a specter. Some spirit from the past, come to claim what’s owed.

There are so many things that can break you if there’s nothing to hold you together.

All the pieces of all the girls go flying and I’m holding the one who’s left.

She’s still standing, but she’s not. All of her weight is on me. All of it. The weight of her body and her secrets and her tears and her pain and her regret and her loss, and I feel like I’m going to break, too, because it’s too much.

No one made any attempt to stop me when I climbed in with her. I think they all knew they couldn’t prevent it. There was nothing in this house or on this earth that was going to keep me from being next to her.

“What did you call her?” she asks, but I don’t think it’s her real question. “Sunshine,” I say, and she smiles like she believes it’s perfect, and she may be the only person other than me who would think so. “What is she to you?” she whispers. The real question and I know the answer even if I don’t know how to say it. Drew’s muffled voice rises up from the floor before I can respond. “Family,” he says. And he’s right.

I tell him that I don’t want to know what’s in them either. But I do know and I need him to know too. So he reads it and his face tenses along with every other muscle in his body, and I can tell he’s trying not to cry. And when I show him the pictures, he shoves his fist against his mouth and I think he wants to hit something, but there’s nothing here to hit. When he gets to the one of my hand, the one with the bones coming through the skin in so many places it’s hard to believe they ever put it back together again, he does cry. And I don’t blame him. I show him videos of me playing the piano and photo albums full of pictures and introduce him to the me he never met; but we don’t say very much.

“You were really good,” he says, his voice faint as it breaks the silence. “I was fucking amazing,” I try to joke, but it just comes out sad. “You still are,” he responds with quiet conviction, piercing me with his eyes the way he does when he wants to make sure I’m listening. “Every way that matters.”

And maybe I’m a liar and I do need it, because being kissed by Josh Bennett is kind of like being saved. It’s a promise and a memory of the future and a book of better stories. When he stops, I’m still here, and he’s still looking at me like he can’t believe I am, and I want to keep that look forever. “Emilia,” he says, and when he does, it warms me to my soul. “Every day you save me.”

If none of this had ever happened, she would be still be here in Brighton where she belongs—the beautiful, talented, unattainable girl. And I’m a bastard, because I know the truth of her now, but I don’t know how to regret it. Because to regret it would mean to regret that I ever met her and I can’t make myself do that.

“Maybe one day you’ll come back. Maybe you never will and that’ll suck, but you can’t keep doing this. The blame and the self-loathing and the bullshit. I can’t watch that. It makes me hate you for hating yourself. I don’t want to lose you. But I’d rather lose you if it means you’ll be happy. I think if you come back with me today, you’ll never be okay. And I’ll never be okay if you aren’t. I need to know that there’s a way for people like us to end up okay. I need to know that there even is such a thing as okay, or maybe not just okay, maybe even good, and it’s out there and we just haven’t found it yet. There’s got to be a happier ending than this here. There’s got to be a better story. Because we deserve one. You deserve one. Even if it doesn’t end with you coming back to me.”

I don’t know how to say it—after all this time, I’m not even sure that I can—but I have to break her last rule, because if she knows nothing else, I need her to know this one thing. “I love you, Sunshine,” I tell her, before I lose my nerve. “And I don’t give a shit whether you want me to or not.”

One afternoon Josh calls, and in the understatement of the century, I tell him that I’m tired of being angry. “Then don’t be,” he says, as if this is the most logical thing in the world. And maybe it is. “But if I’m not angry, then isn’t it the same as saying it’s okay? Doesn’t it mean I’m condoning it?” “No. It means you’re accepting it.” He takes a breath and exhales. “I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t be pissed. You should be furious. You’re entitled to every ounce of anger you have.” He stops speaking for a moment, and when he starts again his voice is quiet, and I can hear the tension coiling around his words. “I hate him too. You have no idea how much I want to kill him for what he did to you and if I thought it would make any part of this easier for you I would do it. So don’t think that I don’t believe your hatred is justified. But you always want choices and you have one now and I’d rather you choose to be happy. And I know that that sounds stupid. Maybe it sounds like the most impossible thing in the world, but it’s still what I want. He took the fucking piano, Sunshine. He didn’t take everything. Look at your left hand. It’s probably clenched in a fist right now, isn’t it?” I don’t need to look. It is. He knows it. “Now open it up and let it go.” And I do.

My name is Emilia Ward. I have a list of nevers I started when I was fifteen. I will never be the Brighton Piano Girl again. I will never carry a child. I will never walk down the street in the middle of the afternoon without wondering if someone is waiting to kill me. I will never get back the months of my life that I spent in rehabilitation and in and out of hospitals, instead of in recitals and in and out of school. I will never get back the years I spent hating every last person in the world, including myself. I will never not know the meaning of the word pain. I understand pain. I understand rage. You gave me the gift of that understanding. You understand it, too. I spent the past three years despising the person who did this to me, the person who stole my life and took my identity. I learned to despise myself in the process. I spent the last three years fortifying my rage, while you spent the last three years healing yours. I will never forget what you did to me. I will never forgive it. I will never stop mourning what you stole from me. But I realize now I can’t steal it back and I’m done spending every day trying to. I will never stop hating you, but I don’t need to hurt you anymore. I think I can believe in spite of you; or maybe I can believe because of you. If you can heal your life, then maybe I can, too. I don’t know how they’re going to punish you. I’m not even sure if I care. You and I both know how much was destroyed that day and nothing they do to you will...

I haven’t gotten better. I’m not even close to okay. The only thing I’ve done is to decide to get better. But I think that may just be enough. I’m trying to see the magic in everyday miracles now: the fact that my heart still beats, that I can lift my feet off the earth to walk and that there is something in me worthy of love. I know that bad things still happen. And sometimes I still ask myself why I am alive; but now, when I ask, I have an answer.

“Yes,” I say, and it’s as if I’m saying a thousand yeses. Yes, I came back. Yes, I love you. Yes, I want you to love me. Yes, I will be okay. Maybe not today or tomorrow or next week. But yes, one day, I will wake up and I will be okay. Yes.

He stops when he tastes my tears. Just looking at me as if my face alone will tell him where they came from and what they mean. And maybe it will but I’m waiting for him to ask. Waiting to see the look of confusion or reticence in his eyes, but it never comes. Instead he wipes the last tear away with the back of his fingers. “No black shit,” he says. And I smile.

“What did you see when you died?” He has that tentative half smile, like he’s almost embarrassed by what he’s saying. “Because I’m guessing it wasn’t the Sea of Tranquility.” And when I look at him, I’m not so sure it wasn’t. “Where did you go?” His voice drops just slightly, and he loses even the suggestion of a smile. He’s watching me like he’s not sure he’s allowed to ask the question, and he’s not even sure he wants the answer. I can almost see his grandfather’s words and Josh’s doubts about them swimming in his head. On every side of me are the lights and the tools and the wood and the boots and the boy I want to see forever. And if my Sea of Tranquility were real, it would be this place, here, with him. I don’t say anything right away, because I just want one minute to look at his face before I give him my last secret. And then I tell him. “Your garage.”