Freshwater Page 9

  One night, Ewan turned to Ada at the pub. “We have unfinished business,” he said, his eyes wrinkling as he smiled. If she didn’t know what he meant, I did. I know how to recognize my cues. But Ada didn’t mind. She liked him and I liked him, so it all worked out. Except that Ada was still Ada and I was still me, and this was where we overlapped. She didn’t have a capacity for desire that ran deep enough for fucking, she never did. Ada has been consistent. When it came to things like that, she came to me. We are the same person, you get? So that night, when Ewan took off her clothes, me, I took my place under her skin. I had made her a promise. I do not make exceptions.

  She fell in love with him weeks later. I get annoyed just remembering it. I had been having a fantastic time with Ewan before that because, as it turned out, he had a dark side too, one that looked like me, a cruel and ruthless thing. I saw it one night when his eyes were cold and his voice was flat, when he covered Ada’s mouth with a rough hand as he fucked me. When he was done, he got off the bed and tossed a towel at Ada, lighting a cigarette. Ada didn’t say anything and Ewan turned away from her on the bed, closing his eyes. “Come on,” I told her, and I had her put on her shoes in the heavy dark and leave quietly.

  It was Halloween a few days later and Ada showed up to the party at Ewan’s house dressed as me, wearing a black corset, a tiny black skirt, knee-high boots, and shining skin. Her friends leaned in, laughing.

  “And what are you supposed to be?” they asked.

  I grinned back at them with her teeth. “Whatever you want,” I said.

  I had Ada walk straight to Ewan’s room, depositing her body on his lap. He wrapped a freckled arm around her as people flowed in and out of his doorway.

  “I’ve been feeling bad about what I’m doing to my girlfriend,” he confessed.

  Oh fuck, I thought, feelings. I wonder how the conversation would have gone if he could have reached Ada in that moment. She probably would have reciprocated; she always responded to honesty and vulnerability, she was sweet like that. But I had her body that night, and so he had to deal with me and I really hate when people talk about feelings.

  “Is that why you were all fucking weird the other night?” I asked. He made a face and I shoved my finger into his ribs. “I don’t need that nonsense. Next time you’re in a mood like that, just don’t fuck me at all.”

  Ewan stayed serious and looked into Ada’s eyes, his voice matter-of-fact. “What you and I have, it’s more than fucking,” he said. “I’m basically in a relationship with you.”

  I swore to myself when he said that—I could already feel Ada’s heart pounding. Stupid, stupid girl.

  I turned inward for a moment, just to deal with her. She was twisting her hands together in the marble room, his words still ringing against the walls. “No,” I said, before she could get a word out. “Don’t even fucking think about it.”

  “But, Asụghara, he just said—”

  “No!” I glared at her and she fell silent. I could see I was crushing her, but there was no other option. I couldn’t allow her hope any room to breathe; I had to choke it out. I was protecting her.

  “Allow me to handle this,” I told her. “Stay here.”

  I turned back out and gave Ewan a sharp look, keeping my voice loose but cutting. “That’s too bad for you,” I said. “Because I’m not in a relationship with anyone.”

  Ewan laughed and shook his head. He looked tired. It was not the last time he would look for Ada only to be met with me.

  “So, what do you want to do?” I asked him. “You want to stop?”

  He looked up at me and shifted his face, locking away his emotions, returning to the way I liked him. “It’s Halloween and I’ve got a horny nineteen-year-old in a slutty black costume sitting in my lap,” he said. He was twenty-seven then. “What do you think?”

  “Good,” I answered, and kissed him with Ada’s mouth. I wasn’t done playing with him. It was ideal—Ada didn’t have time to think about Soren or what he’d done, even though she was back on the same campus where it happened. I had barely thought about my own birth myself. I was busy trying out new toys, like getting Ada drunk for the first time. Had I known earlier how useful alcohol would be in lubricating my relationship with Ada and bringing us together, I would have stocked her life with bottles. But that first time happened completely by accident—she drank too many Smirnoff Ices on an empty stomach, because I was still having her starve herself, and she was already halfway drunk by the time she agreed to try some margaritas at the club.

  Ewan wasn’t out with her that night, so Ada’s friends dropped her off at his house after the club. It was winter, but she was wearing a flared miniskirt and black boxer boots. It was three in the morning and Ewan’s door was bolted shut from inside his room. His housemates were still awake, but Ada didn’t want to talk to any of them; she just wanted to sleep. It was too cold to walk up the hill to her dorm, and their living room was filthy, so she couldn’t crash on a couch. She banged on his door and called his name, but Ewan didn’t answer.

  “You know he’s drunk and passed out,” I told her. “Biko, just kick the fucking door down.”

  I liked drunk Ada because instead of arguing, she actually agreed with me. She needed to sleep, his room was the solution, and the door was an obstacle that needed to be removed. Simple. She’d also taken karate lessons all semester, so it was perfect. The alcohol made her more like me, cold and steady, and Ada timed her roundhouse kicks to land with precision on the painted wood of his door.

  The noise brought Ewan’s best friend downstairs. “What the fuck’s going on?”

  Ada waved her hand at the door. “Ewan’s passed out and I need to sleep, so I’m kicking it down,” she explained. I giggled inside her.

  The best friend looked from Ada to the door, then nodded. “Okay.” He held out one of the McDonald’s sandwiches he was holding. “Want one?”

  They ate and talked, and Ada excused herself to smash her heel into the door every few minutes. I am still not sure how much of her was me that night, to be honest, but I can tell you it was a lot more than usual. We were synched and it was beautiful.

  The bolt to Ewan’s room went into the wall, so when the door finally broke, it did so at its hinges, the doorframe cracking and shuddering as it gave way. Ada squeezed through the small space and climbed into bed with Ewan. He cracked open sleepy blue eyes to smile at her.

  “Unbelievable,” I muttered at him. “Breaking down the door doesn’t wake you up, but me climbing into bed does.”

  In the morning, Ada woke up sober and with her first hangover. When she realized what had happened, she was so horrified that she couldn’t stop apologizing to Ewan. He thought it was hilarious. So did all his friends, but for different reasons. They spread the story that Ada had been so desperate to fuck Ewan that she broke his door down. Ada found it humiliating, but I took some of that feeling away for her. The rumors didn’t matter. Those people didn’t matter—shit, barely anyone mattered. The broken door stayed propped up until Ewan moved out of that house. No one ever fixed it.

  Everything wore down into a cycle. Ewan drank and smoked like he was dying. Ada drank tequila, now that I’d discovered that it made her sink deeper into me. She and Ewan fucked and partied and rinsed and repeated. I started to come out more and more. On the porch of Luka’s house, sitting with Malena, I discovered that I could put out a cigar on Ada’s palm and a blister would rise. Malena just shook her head at me. She was the witness—she was the only person who saw me through Ada’s skin—and I loved her for that. I had Ada switch from Malena’s cigars to thin chocolate cigarillos, and she would smoke them as she walked down the hill to Ewan’s house, leaving a faint taste of cocoa on her lips. He woke up one night to find me standing in his room in the darkness, watching him in Ada’s body, a dark silhouette with a glowing red light at my mouth.

  He called me the devil. I didn’t mind. I’d heard that before. I wondered if he noticed when he lost her and got me instea
d.

  “It’s scary when I make all your fantasies come true, isn’t it?” I told him.

  He should never have touched her if he wanted to keep her, but how could he know? Humans. Still, I shouldn’t have been surprised that Ada fell in love with him. She read the stories he wrote, he kissed her hand on their nights out and told her how lucky he was to have her, how lucky he was that she chose him. I didn’t disagree—he was right, he was lucky to have us. Ada cooked dinners for him and his housemates, and they sat around the dining table, loud and lovely, eating dhal and Malaysian parathas. It felt like, between me and her, we knew both sides of him—the bright and the dark, the kind and the cruel, one for each of us. We knew what he was capable of, something his faraway girlfriend didn’t. Anyway, Ada went and fell in love and decided to tell him, and I didn’t stop her because she would have quarreled with me about it. Love does people like that. It was easier to just let her go ahead—I could shield her from whatever the outcome was.

  They were lying in his bed as she stammered it out, her sentences breaking as she tried to remember what he’d told her recently, that it didn’t matter what anyone else thought, that they were the only ones who mattered. Ewan was patient, his face close to hers, breathing in her exhalations, holding her against him as she looked for the courage to break her own heart.

  “If you ever make me feel stupid for saying this, I will kill you,” Ada said, her eyes stinging. Ewan smiled a little and she squeezed her eyes shut, taking a deep breath. “I love you,” she whispered, and then the sadness rushed in. “I’m sorry. I know it’s not what we agreed, I know I only asked you to never lie to me and never make me feel cheap, and you’ve kept your side of the bargain and I haven’t and I’m sorry. It’s just that I don’t want anyone who’s not you.”

  “Hey, hey. It’s okay.” Ewan brushed his fingers over the side of her face. “I already knew you were going to say that, and I know it took a lot of courage. When you feel strongly about something, it’s a good thing to let it out.”

  He didn’t say it back. Of course he didn’t say it back. This isn’t that kind of story. But he held Ada for a long time, lying on his back with her head on his shoulder. The night grew deeper. I sat alone in the marble and let her have this with him.

  “You can turn to your side,” Ada whispered. “I know that’s how you need to sleep.”

  Ewan kissed her forehead. “Shut up,” he said. “Stop trying to take care of everyone else.”

  Everyone left for Christmas break soon after. Ada went to Saachi and Añuli and said nothing about Ewan because there was nothing to say. When she came back to Virginia, she ran into him at Gilligan’s and his eyes lit up. They stood by the bar and caught up, leaning toward each other to shut out the rest of the noise.

  “I wanted to get you this CD I saw, but I thought it was too cliché to give the African girl a CD with African music on it,” Ewan told her, and she laughed. They stayed in the club until they’d both missed their rides.

  “Let’s just walk,” he suggested. It was three miles back to his house and he held Ada’s hand the whole way as he told her about his girlfriend, how much he adored her, that they’d talked about breaking up.

  “You told me once that you’re more honest with me than you ever were with her,” Ada said.

  Ewan nodded. “Probably true,” he said.

  They kept walking and Ada looked up at the largeness of the sky. It was strange, she thought, to be here in Virginia, with this man, inside this bubble they’d built.

  “What kind of parents do you think we’d be?” she asked.

  Ewan thought for a moment. “I think if a guy came up and said outright, ‘I’m fucking your daughter,’ we’d probably just look at each other—”

  “—and shrug—” added Ada.

  “—and say, ‘You know what? Fair enough.’” They laughed as they crossed a road and cut through a parking lot. “Can you imagine what our kid would look like?”

  “What, brown skinned with freckles?” said Ada, giggling.

  “And a ginger afro.” Ewan bent over laughing, and I watched them both from inside her head, amused. It was cute. They talked about how their families would receive them—they talked as if things weren’t impossible, as if choices hadn’t already been made. I didn’t interfere, not yet. When they got to his room and got into bed, Ada hesitated.

  “We don’t have to do anything,” she said. “Things have changed, you know, we can step back and just be friends. Nothing would get broken.”

  Ewan smiled. “You’re beautiful and you’re lying next to me.”

  He reached out to her and I entered his arms. I can only be what I was born to be.

  Trust me, I wanted things to go back to the way they were, free and easy, but Ada couldn’t do it. It was too late, now that she loved him. She started feeling guilty all the time, imagining how it would feel for his girlfriend if she knew about their affair. It was easy to imagine the pain of betrayal—after all, Ada loved him too now. She and the girl were basically on the same side. He and I were, for all purposes, the villains in this.

  Also, Ada had gotten the Depo-Provera shot, a load of hormones that made her bleed for eight weeks nonstop. It threw off the fragile balance she and I kept in her mind, and there were terrible mood swings, a gutting depression. Ada owned a bokken, a wooden Japanese sword, and one night she used it to smash the mirror in her dorm room, screaming tears as glass flew across the hardwood floor. The shards glinted in her fingers as she drew them down the inside of her arm, watching the bright red bubble through brown skin. I moaned inside her, greedy for the mother color she was feeding me. We were pulling apart. Ada sat on the floor surrounded by a hundred mirror pieces and cried.

  Her friend Catia, a military brat who hung out with her and Malena, came by to get Ada for lunch. She saw the mess and the blood and sighed.

  “Oh, Ada,” she said. “Let’s clean this up.”

  I liked her for that, for how she never made Ada feel damaged. Ada loved her. Catia was quiet but forceful, a pastor’s daughter. On a night run to Taco Bell once, when Catia was driving and Malena was sitting in the back with Ada, they stopped at a liquor store and Malena bought her usual bottle of Johnnie Walker, tipping some of it to the ground before getting back in the car. She offered some to Ada, but Ada refused. Now that she drank, I preferred her to stick to tequila. Malena looked at Ada and knew she was thinking about Ewan.

  “He loves you, Ada. He just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Ada made a face. “Yeah, whatever,” she said.

  Malena shrugged with half-lidded eyes. “You’ll see, mi hermana. You’ll see.”

  Catia smiled slightly at us through the rearview mirror, and Ada looked out the window, her heart hurting. Ewan had started cleaning up his life after a bad Salvia trip he had one night, when he said Ada came to him in a vision, sent by the devil. He said it was her, but if there was anyone a devil would send, we all know by now—it would be me. Ewan just couldn’t tell the difference.

  “Clearly, we’re both way too Catholic,” I joked, but he was serious. He stopped smoking weed; he cut back on the drinking and focused on his classes. Ada was so proud of him. I was alarmed.

  “I’ve given up all my vices,” he said. “Except you.”

  “You’re going to give me up?” Ada whispered. I could taste the grief in the back of her throat. She didn’t want to be just another drug polluting his life, and she wasn’t, she really wasn’t. It was me, but we were one, so I didn’t know what to tell her.

  Ewan looked at her sadly. “I don’t know if I can,” he admitted.

  The whole thing became a loop, as these things often do. Ada stopped sleeping with Ewan, so I stopped fucking him, and instead they cooked together at his new place, making nasi goreng in a smooth dance across the kitchen floor, with knife and cutting board, onions and meat, oil and spices. He tossed the wok and washed the dishes, and Ada was so happy. I left her alone that night—it had been so long since she could
be this happy. She made him watch Sarafina! and they ate Cadbury chocolates and fell asleep and nothing happened. But then, eventually, I fell back into bed with him and the cycle started again and the guilt was everywhere, greasy and thick, and Ada couldn’t get away.

  Eventually, Ewan was the one who ended it.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” he said. “I can’t be with you anymore. She makes me happy.”

  For the first time, I let Ada cry in front of him. I watched her sob into his shoulder, into the soft cotton of his T-shirt. She didn’t beg him; she didn’t ask for anything. Ewan held her and touched her face gently.

  “Why do you have to be so beautiful?” he whispered.

  Ada cried herself to sleep, her face pressed into his chest. She woke up briefly to see Ewan watching her sleep, his hand playing in the curls of her hair, his eyes soft.

  Ada graduated college a few weeks later with Catia and Malena and Luka and most of her friends. Saachi flew up for it with Añuli and Chima, and the whole time, Ada was unsettled and shaking. I had to keep her face smooth so that her human family wouldn’t see any of the storm within. Saachi was demanding her time, too much of it, considering that Ada was about to lose all her friends and there was barely any time to say good-bye.

  “We came all the way here,” Saachi told her. “The least you can do is spend time with us.”

  None of it fucking mattered, honestly. Ada and I had lost Ewan. Since the night he’d rejected us, I’d slept with him once, a final time before Ada’s graduation. He and I were in her room, on the raised bed, moonlight spitting through the glass of her window. Ewan was drunk and high, back from a night of bad decisions that ended, as usual, with him looking for Ada and fucking me. He wrenched her hair until her neck and spine cracked loudly, and when we were face to face, I found myself opening Ada’s mouth and saying the same words Soren once told her.