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When your brain realizes that you’re dying, it sends a burst of adrenaline throughout your body, trying to convince you to kick into action, to run faster, to give you a final idea to save your own life, to scream loud enough for someone to hear you. Instinct rips through you, and you can find yourself clawing your way to the surface of the water, even though you had swam to the bottom on purpose.
My head breaks through to the cool night air, and I’m suddenly exhausted. I let myself slip back underwater, knowing I’m going to make my suicide so much more awful if I do it like this. I try to force myself to take a large breath of the water, but fighting the instinct is so much harder than it seems, and when I manage, the panic alarms go off in my brain again, sending me shooting to the surface.
I manage to whimper out a fuck, breathless and tired and so sick of the way my body fights me. I try once more, pushing all of the air out of my lungs and then swimming towards the bottom of the lake. Was it awful to kill myself in a lake? Was someone going to find my body, and be horrified, traumatized? Would there be an investigation? Or would they call for my body to be identified, and Cress would just know that I had killed myself, because of course I did.
A sob wracks my body at the thought of Cress, and water fills my lungs again. For the last time, I think mercifully, as my vision blurs. My head spins, and I realize my last thoughts are going to be of Cress, and how goddamn guilty I feel for leaving him like this.
But at least it’s all about to be over.
I cough up water, someone is pushing on my chest, and then rolling me over so I don’t choke. I’m confused, at first, and then I’m furious, and then I’m sobbing into my hands and hoping that whoever it is doesn’t recognize me.
“Fuck, dude,” he says, laying on his back and panting now that I’m sitting up. “Are you, like, okay?”
I don’t answer him. I’m far too busy crying, and even if I wasn’t, I’m too ashamed to look at him. I silently will him to get up and walk away, but he doesn’t. He just sits up after a moment and waits for me to finish crying.
When I don’t, he gently rests a hand on my shoulder and shakes me slightly. “Hey, you’re, uh. You’re gonna be okay, you know? Like… you’re gonna live?”
I nearly laugh, because he says it so genuinely, so sincerely, like I might not have been sure that I was going to be okay. Like I might have been crying because I thought my life was still in danger. He sounds like he’s not sure if I know that it’s over already.
So I rub my face as dry as I can get it, and I look up at him, and I gasp, because I know his face, even though he most certainly does not know mine. Malloy Sala is the spitting image of his brother, if Cress was muscular and tan and strangely cheerful all of the time, in an off-putting way.
“Hey!” he says, and he grins so largely that his teeth are in danger of falling out, and then punches my shoulder lightly. “There you go! You’re alright, see? I saved you!” Malloy leans back and rolls his neck, and then gives me a thumbs up, as if the problem is just solved now.
I stare at him, bewildered for a moment. And then I remember that I’m supposed to be angry at him, so I let out a strangled, “Why did you do that?” My voice is tight and I choke on the words. I want to start crying again, but the only thing worse than crying in front of a stranger, is crying in front of my brother-in-law, the first time I’ve ever met him.
“Uh…” Malloy hesitates, as if the question doesn’t make any sense to him. “Well, uh. You were drowning.” He runs a hand through his hair, yanking the ponytail out and letting his hair fall loose in front of his face. His hair is even about the same length as Cress’s, and it frames his face in the same way, even though it’s sopping wet.
“Yeah, you were drowning,” Malloy repeats. “So, I just, like… Got in there. You know? Uh. You really shouldn’t go swimming without a life jacket. Or at night. Or, like… alone.”
And then I do have to laugh, because I realize now that Malloy thinks it was an accident, that I stuck my head under the water and took a deep breath because I didn’t know it would kill me. I laugh, so hard my ribs hurt, and then my eyes fill with tears and I have to take a deep breath again. I stare at the ground, trying to decide if I should break his suspension of disbelief.
Malloy leans forward, resting his arms on his knees, staring out at the water. He’s gripping something tightly in his hand, and then I come to a quiet revelation.
“What are you doing out here, anyways?” I ask. Maybe I just want to change the topic away from myself. Maybe I genuinely am curious. Maybe I wonder why it hasn’t occurred to him that normal people don’t usually go to lakes, in the middle of the night, alone.
“Oh, ah—” Malloy jerks back slightly, and then flashes his blindingly bright smile at me. The moon reflects off of it in an annoyingly cartoonish way, as if Malloy was designed to be so stereotypically blond and handsome and charming. “I just… sometimes come out here, y’know? Like it’s… nice, uh. Sometimes.”
“At night?” I ask. I’m mostly asking to keep the conversation going, to keep Malloy’s mind away from thinking too hard about me, but Malloy’s cheeks darken and he looks at the ground between his feet.
I realize, then, that he must’ve had time to strip down before jumping into the lake after me, because he’s wearing just a pair of shorts and nothing else, and further up on the beach is a button up shirt, a pair of socks, and sneakers. And I wonder, for a moment, if he was just so self-absorbed that he saw someone drowning and took most of his clothes off first, or if he was already undressing when he realized I was there.
“Uhh… Yeah,” Malloy says, jerking me out of my thoughts. His voice shakes, just the slightest amount, on his words, and then he clears his throat and continues. “Sometimes, y’know. You gotta do what… what you feel’s right.” Malloy rubs his face absentmindedly, and then adjusts his grip on the item in his hand. I get barely a glimpse of it, and find that it’s just a rock. A smooth, flat rock, one that would be good for skipping. I don’t know why he’s holding onto it.
I find I don’t care.
I rest my head on my knees, and suddenly want to go home. I want to go curl up next to Cress, and let him run his hand through my hair, and up my back, and then cry into his shoulder until I fall asleep. I want him to do that thing that he always does, where he wakes up early after I’ve had a particularly bad day, and makes me a full breakfast and a mugful of hot chocolate.
Malloy stirs next to me, and I don’t care. I want to go home, but I’ve parked my car up against the road and walked here, and I don’t have the strength to walk back. I left my phone at home. I want to lay down and die, but with Malloy here, with Cress’s brother here, it felt so much more in my face about how horrifically guilty I should feel.
I want to kill myself. Is that so much to ask?
I’m crying again, and it comes from much deeper inside me, this time. I don’t want to kill myself. I know that. I’ve known it every time I’ve tried to end my own life. At this point, though, it was inevitable, wasn’t it? I was doomed to die by my own hand from the start.
Malloy sits back down next to me. I don’t look at him. He takes a deep breath, and then lets it out slowly.
“You’re, uh. You…” He fidgets with the rocky beach below him, and then tries again. “You’re, like, here on purpose, huh?”
I try to rub the snot off of my face, and look up at him, confused. “Of course. What, did you think I– I sleep walked here, or some– something?”
Malloy doesn’t look at me. “No, no. I mean, like, uh. The lake. You, um.” Malloy does something odd with his face, and then I realize what he’s asking.
My words die in my throat. I want to tell him that Yes, of course, I’m here on purpose, you moron. Of course I’m trying to kill myself. Of course that’s what you stopped. Of course of course of course.
But I don’t say any of that. I just look out, at the moon reflecting off of the lake, and I take a deep breath of my own.
“What about you?” I ask. “Are you… here on purpose?” I tried to keep my tone light, but I mean it, now. I’m curious. Why was he out here, in the middle of the night, stripping down his clothes before he ever knew I was here.
Malloy sucks in a deep breath and leans back. He looks up at the sky, and then at me. I tilt my head to watch him, and he just stares at me, for a moment. His face does the same thing Cress’s does when Cress is trying to make a decision, and it really hits me, in that moment, how little I knew about Malloy, beyond what Cress was always saying about him. Everything I knew of Malloy was that he was difficult, and rude, and awful, and yet Malloy had done nothing but remind me of Cress the entire night. What did that mean?
“Eh,” he says after a moment. “Not exactly. I think about it, y’know.” He runs a hand through his hair again, pulling it back and out of his face. “But, uh. Iunno. I don’t think I wanna… do that. I mean, not if I can’t come back.”
“Come back?” I ask.
Malloy stretches, and then shrugs. “You know. Like as someone else. Or maybe as me, but, like, uh… Different.”
“Different… how?” I ask.
Malloy gives me a strange look, and then laughs, and somehow it’s beautiful and terrible, and I don’t know what that means, either. “I dunno why I’m telling you this, man. It’s nothing. But, uh… Shit. Iunno. Guess if you don’t get it… you don’t get it, y’know?”
I lean forward and look at Malloy’s face. He blinks, and then lets me look, and examine his features.
“I get it,” I say after a moment.
Malloy scoffs and turns his face away from me. “Nah, dude. It’s, like…”
“Like there’s something wrong with you, but you don’t know what it is? Like… you feel like everyone can tell that you’re performing something, but you don’t know the script?”
Malloy swallows hard. I watch his throat bob up and down in the moonlight. Then he stands up, and laughs, and it’s different this time, like he’s forgotten what his real laugh sounds like. He stretches his arms up, way over his head, and then walks over to his pile of clothing and picks it up. After a moment, I stand up, too, finding that I don’t want to be left alone on the beach, if Malloy is going to leave.
But he doesn’t leave. He waits for me, and then says, “D’you need a ride home, or anything?”
I shake my head. My car is waiting for me, along with some cash for fuel and breakfast. I hated that I had already put those things in there, knowing that I was going to end up back in the car, going home. I knew before I left the house that I would be back in time for breakfast. I always was.
“Mkay, then,” Malloy says. He shoves my shoulder lightly. “Stay safe, won’tcha? And, like, uh… hey, man. I think you’re… Um.”
I look at Malloy, watch him try to find the words he’s looking for.
“Like… you’re too hot to die, y’know?”
And I laugh, a short, loud burst of genuine laughter from my chest, and then I shove Malloy’s shoulder back. “You’re really bad at this, you know,” I say.
Malloy grins. “Yeah, well. It worked, didn’t it?”
I smile back. “Yeah, it did. Thanks, M— man,” I say, nearly forgetting that Malloy has never met me before, and probably never will again. I wonder if he would have treated me different if he knew I was married to his brother. I wonder if Cress knows that his brother is… well, like this.
Malloy offers me a fist bump, and I return it, and then he’s opening his car door and pulling away from the lake, and I stare after his car lights until they turn around the bend, and there’s nothing to do but go home.
I crawl into bed at 4:34 am, according to the wall clock. Cress would take me to the doctor in the morning, again, like he always did when I confessed to the harm I did to my own body, but until then, he pulled me closer, half asleep, and he was warm, and I was home, and I was safe.