And the area around the college was so pretty. Elba was a blight, even for south Alabama. Heartsdale, the city where Grant Tech was located, felt like a town you’d see on television. Everyone tended their yards. Flowers lined Main Street in the spring. Total strangers waved at you with a smile on their face. At the diner where she worked, the locals were so kind, even if they were bad tippers. The town wasn’t so big that she got lost. Unfortunately, it wasn’t so big that she didn’t meet Jason.
Jason.
She’d met him her sophomore year. He was two years older, more experienced, more sophisticated. His idea of a romantic date wasn’t sneaking into a movie and doing it quick in the back row before the manager kicked you out. He took her to real restaurants with cloth napkins on the tables. He held her hand. He listened to her. When they had sex, she finally understood why people called it making love. Jason didn’t just want better things for himself. He wanted better things for Allison. She’d thought what they had was a serious thing—the last two years of her life had been spent building something with him. And then suddenly, he had turned into a different person. Suddenly, everything that had been so great about their relationship was the reason it was falling apart.
And, as with her mother, Jason had somehow managed to make it all Allison’s fault. She was cold. She was distant. She was too demanding. She never had time for him. As if Jason was an affectionate saint who spent his days wondering what would make Allison happy. She wasn’t the one who went on all-night benders with her friends. She wasn’t the one getting mixed up with weird people at school. She sure as hell wasn’t the one who got them involved with that jerk from town. How could that be Allison’s fault if she had never even seen the guy’s face?
Allison shivered again. Every step she took around this damn lake, it seemed like the shoreline squeezed out another hundred yards just to spite her. She looked down at the wet ground beneath her feet. It had been storming for weeks. Flash floods had taken out roads, cut down trees. Allison had never been good with bad weather. The darkness got to her, tried to pull her down. It made her moody and tearful. All she wanted to do was sleep away the time until the sun came back out.
“Shit!” Allison hissed, catching herself before she slipped. The cuffs of her pants were caked in mud, her shoes nearly soaked through. She looked out into the churning lake. The rain was sticking to her eyelashes. She brushed back her hair with her fingers as she stared at the dark waters. Maybe she should let herself slip. Maybe she should let herself fall all the way into the lake. What would it be like to let herself go? What would it feel like to let the undertow take her farther to the center of the lake where her feet no longer touched the ground and her lungs could no longer find air?
This wasn’t the first time she’d thought about it. It was probably the weather, the relentless rain and dreary sky. Everything seemed more depressing in the rain. And some things were more depressing than others. There had been a story in the paper last Thursday about a mother and child who’d drowned in their Volkswagen Beetle two miles outside of town. They were within spitting distance of the Third Baptist Church when a flash flood cut through the street and whisked them away. There was something about the design of the old Beetles that made them able to float, and this newer model had floated, too. At least at first.
The church crowd who’d just left their usual potluck were helpless to do anything for fear of getting caught up in the flood. They watched in horror as the Beetle spun around on the surface of the water, then tipped over. Water flooded into the cab. Mother and child were tossed into the current. The woman they interviewed in the paper said she would go to sleep every night and wake up every morning for the rest of her life seeing that little three-year-old’s hand reaching out from the water before the final time the poor thing was pulled down.
Allison could not stop thinking of the child, either. Even though she had been at the library when it happened. Even though she’d never met the woman or the child or even the lady who spoke to the paper, she could see that little hand reaching up every time she closed her eyes. Sometimes, the hand grew larger. Sometimes, it was her mother reaching out for her help. Sometimes, she woke up screaming because the hand was pulling her down.
If she was telling the truth, Allison’s mind had turned toward dark thinking long before the newspaper story. She couldn’t blame the weather completely, but certainly the constant rain, the unrelenting overcast, had churned up inside of her mind its own kind of despair. How much easier would it be if she just gave in? Why go back to Elba and turn into some toothless, haggard old woman with eighteen kids to feed when she could just walk into the lake and for once take control of her destiny?
She was turning into her mother so fast that she could almost feel her hair going gray. She was just as bad as Judy—thinking she was in love when all the guy was interested in was what was between her legs. Her aunt Sheila had said as much on the phone last week. Allison had been whining about Jason, wondering why he wouldn’t return her calls.
A long drag on her cigarette, then, during the exhale, “You sound just like your mother.”
A knife in her chest would have been faster, cleaner. The worst part was that Sheila was right. Allison loved Jason. She loved him way too much. She loved him enough to call him ten times a day even though he never picked up. She loved him enough to hit reload on her stupid computer every two minutes to see if he had answered one of her nine billion emails.
She loved him enough to be out here in the middle of the night doing the dirty work that he didn’t have the balls to do.
Allison took another step closer to the lake. She could feel her heel start to slip, but her body’s automatic need for self-preservation took over before she fell. Still, the water lapped against her shoes. Her socks were already soaked. Her toes were beyond numb, to that point where a sharp pain seemed to pierce through the bone. Was that what it would be like—a slow numbing falling into a painless passage?
She was terrified of suffocating. That was the problem. She’d loved the ocean for maybe ten minutes as a kid, but that had changed by the time she turned thirteen. Her idiot cousin Dillard had held her under the water once at the municipal pool, and now she didn’t even like to take baths because she was afraid she’d get water up her nose and panic.
If Dillard were here, he’d probably push her into the lake without her even having to ask. That first time he’d held her head down under the water, he hadn’t shown a bit of remorse. Allison had thrown up her lunch. She was racked with sobs. Her lungs were burning, and he’d just said, “Heh-heh,” like an old man who pinches the fire out of the back of your arm just to hear you squeal.
Dillard was Sheila’s boy, her only child, more disappointing to her than his father, if that was even possible. He huffed so much spray paint that his nose was a different color every time you saw him. He smoked crystal. He stole from his mama. The last Allison heard, he was in prison for trying to rob a liquor store with a water pistol. The clerk had cracked open his skull with a baseball bat by the time the cops got there. The result was that Dillard was even dumber than before, but that wouldn’t have stopped him from passing up a good opportunity. He would’ve given Allison a good shove with both hands, sending her headfirst into the water as he let out his little cackle. “Heh-heh.” All the while she’d be flailing, working her way up to drowning.