Blood and Water

Today is Olivia’s birthday. I took her out for tai food and when we got home she let her birthday dress drop to the floor and we had the kind of sex you only get after you buy a girl expensive food. Afterwards the two of us lay in her bed covered in the warm glow from her bedside lamp and my eye is drawn to the horses on the shelf on her wall. Engulfed by shadows, they seem to be frozen in a moment of desperate flight, porcelain limbs rearing, trotting and galloping away from the black emptiness of the room’s darkest corner. I have been thinking about them a lot for some reason. 

“Do you ever miss your family?” I ask, passing a hand over Olivia’s soft shoulder.

“Hm? No, why?”

I could smell the lie on her breath. “I don’t know, it’s just that you could have thrown those horses out, or left them packed away in boxes, but you didn’t.”

There is a pause, “Well, even if I did want to see them, they don’t want to see me.” Her voice is unexpectedly heavy. 

“How do you know that?”

“I just do, okay?”

After that I let it go, I don’t want to make Olivia angry for fear she might slip out of my arms and sleep on the other side of the bed, like she does when she’s mad at me. So I pull her closer and enjoy the way her body feels after an orgasm, quivering and content, warm perfection.

By morning I have forgotten my questions about Olivia’s family until she leaves for work and I stumble across an old birthday card in her nightstand while I’m looking for batteries. It was from her Godmother, wishing her a “terrific tenth birthday” with a pink and blue cartoon cake on the inside with ten candles. My eyes locked onto the address scribbled on the outside of the envelope.

I might have left it alone. I might have known this wasn’t my place. But after that I started to read into things. There was this commercial for smartphones, which featured a father video chatting with his daughter who has just left for college, and it always made Olivia cry, even on good days. Sometimes she would tell me stories about her parents, how they would argue about stupid s**t and how her dad used to take her fishing and lecture her about concealed cary laws. And I would watch the light die in her eyes when she finished telling me about it and turned her thoughts back to the present. 

November was rough for her too. Some mornings I would crawl into bed and tell her that breakfast was ready and she would ignore me, and I would gently touch her face and she would roll over and tell me to f**k off. I think if she dies tomorrow I will still hear her voice in the back of my head, for years to come “F**k off, Jimmy.”

So I went ahead and did the dumbest thing I have ever done, and I contacted Olivia’s parents. 

“Hello?”

“Hi. . . Mrs. Reed?”

“Yea, that’s me.”

“Hi, uhm, my name is James Morgan, and I’m a friend of your daughter. . .”

“Which one?”

“Uh, Olivia.”

“Oh. Are you calling to ask for bail money?”

“Uh, no, I. . .”

“What do you want then?”

I explain that Olivia is very sick, and I thought they might want to see her before. . . “Well, you know.”

She agrees to come, but there’s something peculiar behind her voice. We set a date a week out and when the day comes I make dinner and when there is a knock at the door I shrug and Olivia answers it, and the silence that fills the air when the door opens is icy and terrifying. I come to the threshold in the kitchen and watch Olivia and her mother stare each other down. Mrs. Reed has dirty blond hair, a long thin nose and droopy eyes. She looks Olivia over, from top to bottom, and says, “Well, aren’t you going to invite me in?”

Olivia turns to look at me, her hand still on the doorknob, I can read the unpleasant shock in her eyes and I know I have made a mistake. I invite Mrs. Reed in and take her coat, Mr. Reed is along shortly, carrying a cake they bought on the way over. He is short, and soft faced, and he is wearing birkenstocks. 

We ate in relative silence. Olivia’s mother asks about her work, and nods, lips pursed, when she answers. 

“And who’s this?” She asks, smiling across the table at me.

“I’m Jimmy. We spoke on the phone.”

She laughs, “Yes, but are you a boyfriend? Fiancé? Cute gay friend?”

I blush.

“Jimmy is, was my neighbor.”

“Oh.” Her eyes flick around the room, alighting on different objects briefly, then moving on. 

When the table is cleared and Mr. Reed is serving the cake, Mrs. Reed leans back in her chair and says, “Well, I must say, I was expecting this to be some kind of con, but you appear to really be sick.”

When the two of them finally leave, stiff, obligatory hugs are exchanged, Olivia and Mr. Reed simply nod to each other, as he shuffles along behind her mother out the door. 

Olivia shuts the door behind them and there is a moment of silence, as she stands, with her back to me.

“Olivia. . . I am so, SO sorry.”

She takes a deep breath and turns, “It’s okay. You didn’t know.”

“I just thought--”

“I know. Just drop it Jimmy.”

On some brighter day, it would be explained to me that Olivia’s father had died when she was a pre-teen. He had a heart attack. The man in the birkenstocks was her stepfather, George. Without her father to mediate, Olivia’s relationship with her mother became very strained. They hated each other. That changed things, I guess. I always thought Olivia was so brave and free, because she got up and left, and she fucked a different guy every day for a year. Nothing could hold her down, she was free and unattached. After that, though, after I met her mother, I wondered. Are you free as long as you’re running? People run just as often because they’re scared. 

Eager to make up for this blunder, I became a wishing well Olivia tossed pennies into when she was bored. She would say, “I wish I had a chocolate donut” and I would drive to the store and buy chocolate donuts. Raspberry carbonated water. Cheesy popcorn. I even rented Tron one night: anything to make her smile, even if it was just for a moment. 

One night Olivia said, “I wish I could see the ocean one more time.” So I loaded up the car and we drove six hundred miles to the ocean. 

It was dark by the time we got there. I packed a picnic, which sounds romantic until you remember that it has been in a cooler for eleven hours and the bottle of carbonated water leaked all over the bedspread I packed to serve as a picnic blanket, during the ride up. 

Olivia dragged me down to the water, naked and shrieking and laughed at me. “It’s not that bad.” She said. Waist-deep in the ice cold water she kissed me to warm me up, but even with her soft, bare breasts pressed against me and that sexy, comefuckme half smile, I was relieved when we were finally back on shore. I wrapped us up in the soggy bedspread and felt her laughter and shivering send vibrations down her spine. 

She sighed contentedly in my arms and looked up at me. I took a moment to study that look because I knew I had seen it somewhere before, but never directed towards me. I realized that it was the way people look at babies, you know, when they’re doing cute baby things. Like, in that moment, that creature could do no wrong, even though in another five minutes it will probably be screaming and vomiting all over the place. 

“I love you.”

She says, “Shut up, Jimmy.” But that look doesn’t leave her eyes. 

When the sun came up, I wrapped Olivia in the sandy bedspread, gathered everything together and drove us back home.