Emory
I thought I was ready to break Jay’s heart until I saw him standing there. I was sure it was what I wanted, and it wasn’t the girl at the bar or the money or even the acceptance to the only program that could make me going to college possible. It was the orca. It was death taunting me like a cat playing with its food. At some point, you’ve gotta face it or you’re just gonna starve.
If my life as I knew it was ending, in some ways had already ended, then that meant I needed to decide how I buried myself. Hold a funeral for what could’ve been me and then decide what my afterlife would look like. I wanted to be buried deep, somewhere where the sand was mixed with emerald and my corpse would be colored green. I wanted an afterlife among the ocean, not washed up and half eaten by birds.
It was graduation day, a week after my bachelorette party. This day I’d waited for since before Kai was even a thought floating in my mind, and now here I was. Cap and gown and child. And it was also the day I had to break my child’s father’s heart.
I would’ve done it yesterday, but when Jay showed up on the beach looking for me, he had a ring. A real one, with a tiny diamond and everything, and staring at the shiny circle that was supposed to be mine, I just couldn’t do it. Not in front of Simone. Not in the garage we shared with Kai sleeping right beside us.
I had to do it here, in the grass surrounding the picnic tables where I’d first officially met Adela, a hundred yards from the field where the stage was set up and the chairs were quickly filling. A stage that would be my ending and my beginning. Simone, Adela, and Kai were somewhere in the chairs facing the stage, waiting for me. But Jay was always two feet from where I was, always following me.
And now he was standing here, and I faltered. I wasn’t sure how I could do it to him.
“How’s my girl?” He was so happy. Always smiling since I’d said yes to him.
While my life collapsed, Jay was just happy to share a bed with me in a church lady’s garage, where he spent our evenings together talking about the place we were gonna rent in the fall and how bad he wanted Kai to have his own room. I hated to wreck his dream like Adela’d wrecked mine. But then I remembered she’d also revived it, somehow talked me into doing what Mrs. Simmons said, going to my teachers. So if all that hurt she’d caused led to this, to what I really wanted, maybe hurting Jay was only gonna help him in the end.
“I need to talk to you.”
He didn’t register my tone as serious, still smiled and said, “What’s up, Emmy? You want me to take a video of you up there?”
I shook my head. “Actually, I think you should go. Before it starts.”
“What?” Finally, his smile wavered. “I make you nervous or something?”
“No, I just don’t think you’re gonna wanna stay after I tell you this.” I inhaled, stared him directly in the eyes. “I don’t wanna marry you, Jay.”
The air swirled around us. People chattered at the picnic tables. Jay croaked a single word. “What?”
“I can’t marry you.” I tried to be blunt, make it easy to understand.
“I heard you. I just…why?”
I tried to think of a way to say it that’d hurt less, but every option felt frozen and heartless, so I decided to just tell him. “You don’t make me forget it all. I love you, but I don’t love you any way that lasts. It doesn’t consume me. It doesn’t comfort me. It’s a small love, Jayden. A short one. And I don’t want that.”
I watched Jay’s whole demeanor change, like a scared tortoise retreating to its shadowed cove. His arms crossed over his chest and his smile, which couldn’t seem to catch up to his feelings quick enough, remained taut and tilted upward, even as his eyes rolled and then fell to the ground.
“So what, you’re just gonna fuck around and find somebody who can buy you a million-dollar house and give you some pale-ass baby?”
“No.” I took a breath. “I’m leaving. To go to college. In Seattle. I accepted my offer yesterday to the University of Washington. They have a program for students with kids and they’re covering an apartment and childcare. They have whole groups just for whale-watching and there’s more orcas out there than anywhere else in the country. I’m gonna study them. We’ll be heading west a few weeks early so I can get a job and start saving. It’ll be good for us.”
Jay blinked at me and I watched him boil, take one step backward, shake his head, and step forward again. “No,” he said.
“What?”
“I said no. You can’t just take my son like that, not across the country. You don’t wanna marry me? Fine. But I’m not gonna let you keep me from being my son’s father. No, Emory.”
His voice had never been this low, this firm, and so I think the words slipped out of my mouth before I’d even thought them through. “Okay. You take him.”
He looked at me with disbelief. “What?”
I nodded, growing more sure by the moment. “Kai can stay with you while I’m in school and then he can come out and be with me on my breaks, and during the summers I’ll come home and stay with one of the Girls.”
“You wanna just give him up like that?”
I shrugged. It hurt, but it also sounded like the only way. Almost selfless. “I want to make a life worth living. For him. For both of us.” I knew in the back of my mind that leaving him would be a steady torture, but I also knew it made sense. I would study. Kai would be taken care of by somebody who loved him as much as I did, and I wouldn’t scar him by resenting all he’d ripped from me. I could do this. If I’d survived these last nine months, I could do anything.
Jay nodded. “Okay. But you gotta know I’m done, Emory. Don’t expect to come back to me changing your mind about us or nothing. I’m done.”
And when he turned around and walked away, I knew it’d be the last time. Not ’cause he wouldn’t take me back, I knew he would, but ’cause I wouldn’t ask him to. This was a death that shouldn’t be undone, no matter how easy it’d be to reverse and find him mine again. Kai deserved to have a mother that wouldn’t do that to him. And some days I wasn’t sure I could be that mother. But I would try, and when I failed, I would try again.
I was number forty-three to have my name called in my seventy-six-person graduating class. I’d been waiting in line for an hour, as they cycled through names, looking out at the chairs and seeing all these people I’d known my entire life. Parents and uncles and great-grandmas who waved to me when I used to walk home from elementary school, who fixed the plumbing when Grammy and Pawpaw’s pipes burst, who glared at me when I slept with their cousin’s son.
It was a mind fuck to be from a place so small, so insular that you could never be anonymous, that you could have every seat at your high school graduation filled with someone who’d seen you, thought about you, applauded or despised you.
As Mrs. Simmons called my name, I felt a rush of home, the feeling of hot breath on cold skin, at the same time as I felt suffocated by the squeeze of this place. How my name itself was known and owned by so many in this town, it was impossible to hear it and think of myself.
“Emory Reid.”
I walked, heel in front of heel, dress hem bouncing at my ankles, and I heard Adela’s high-pitched squeal and Simone’s howl above all else. Kai laughed and his giggle rang through all the noise. When I looked down and saw them there, it was an overwhelming pride that made my feet stop just before I reached out to shake the dean’s hand and accept my diploma.
There they were. My proof I could do this. That there wasn’t no limit or barrier that could hold me from my big life. That it was possible for me to be it all. Maybe the only reason all these people believed otherwise was ’cause they were so scared of who they’d been when they were my age, so young and afraid, that they couldn’t imagine living a life that demanded so much of them and building something worth having in it when they were just starting to think of their little selves in a world this big.
But me, the Girls, us together, we knew more than that. We knew risk and failure and worry. We knew release and reckonings and all kinds of regret. But we also knew what it was to expand beyond what you believed of yourself. And on that stage, looking at Adela holding Kai and Simone taking pictures and all those faces of folks who’d judged me but would never understand, I knew I’d never unwish myself as Kai’s mother.
Even as I wished I knew enough to know he couldn’t fix me, even as I wished I could’ve been better for him nine months ago, realized all it required to be his mother, my biggest wish was to grow. Beside him, before him, because of him. And I hoped that all those stretchings would lead me to a life full of moments of alive. Moments like this one.
I turned back to Mrs. Simmons and shook her hand, took the diploma, thanked her sincerely for the first time all year, and right before I walked down the steps and back to my seat, I took one more look out, this time over the chairs, over the picnic tables, into the distance where I could see the ocean.
Right there past the school and the highway and the beach, the sea glistened, and I could’ve sworn, way in the distance beyond me, an orca soared from the water, flashed its black-and-white body, and disappeared again under the glittering turquoise, as if emerging just to watch me, on this day, transcend myself.