I find Ivy in the pool, just after dawn. She is floating on her back in her bra and underwear. The water is clear. The glass walls are still standing, uncharred. The fire is somewhere close, but it is not here. Not yet.
Someone has died, but it was not Ivy. We are back at the beginning.
“You shouldn’t be outside,” I tell her.
Her arms lift lazily above her head and then back down again. Her body glides through the water. She makes such small, pointless waves.
“You know about the giant redwoods?” she says.
“What about them?”
“You know how they propagate?”
“What are you talking about?”
“They need forest fires to grow. The pinecones—that’s where all the seeds are—they only open after they’ve been burned. And the seedlings can’t grow unless a fire comes and wipes everything else out, because they need lots of space, and lots of sun. Without fires, they get too crowded and they suffocate.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Maybe some things just need to burn down.”
“I’m going to call the cops,” I say. “I’m going to tell them it was Ash who killed Vaughn.”
Ivy laughs. “They won’t believe you. No one’s going to believe your word over his.”
She glides over to the stairs in the shallow end and gets out of the pool. She coughs as water drips off her body.
I pull out my phone as she walks toward me.
“His life is worth more than mine,” she says.
“How can you say that? How can you not want justice? He used you. They all used you. They used both of us.”
“Oh darling,” she says. “You’re so naïve.” Ivy’s wet hand closes over mine and squeezes, hard. I feel my bones getting crushed. “Don’t you know you don’t even exist?”
I push her away and she nearly falls backward. Something changes in her face, and I see myself reflected in the mirrors of her eyes, distorted.
I have become the enemy. I am a substitute for Ash, for Tami, for her mother, for all the men in those offices in the sky, for everyone who looked the other way. She needs someone to hate, and they are all too big, and I am the only one here.
My only job was to love her, and I have done my job well. But now she has given me another job.
She lunges for me and I fall back on the concrete patio. I feel the skin on my shoulders scrape as she tackles me, as she reaches for the phone and grabs it out of my hand. I manage to push her off. I grab her hair as she tries to crawl away, still clutching my phone. She is on her hands and knees, painting a trail of blood to the edge of the pool.
“Why are you protecting him?” I say. “People like him get away with everything. You can’t just let them destroy you.”
Ivy has reached the water. She turns around and faces me. Her hair is a tangled wet mess. Her knees and forearms have been scraped raw. She is wet with a pink cocktail of pool water and blood.
“But that’s what they do,” she says. “They can’t help it. They don’t know how to do anything else.”
“But you still get to decide what you do. You have choices.”
“I’m done making choices.”
“But if you let them win, they get me too.”
Ivy looks down at the phone in her hand. “I’m so much stronger than you,” she says. “I always will be. You don’t even have a name.”
And that’s when I lunge for her, and she falls back into the pool, the phone going with her and sinking to the bottom. But I don’t care about the phone. There are more phones. Ivy’s in the water and I’m on solid ground, and my hands are on her head, and they are pushing her down.
“I have a name,” I say. “Tell me my name.” But she cannot speak.
You are not stronger than me, Ivy. You will not let them win. You will not let them destroy us. Again and again and again, they destroy us. Because we let them. Because we let them into our minds, because we let them fracture us from the inside, in the only place we have any real power to keep them out.
They broke the world, but they will not break us.
It is my job to protect her. To protect us.
I hold Ivy under the water. Her arms thrash and grab but there is nothing to hold. Her heart is not in it. She’s done fighting. She’s done making choices. She said it herself.
Sometimes peace requires a fight. Sometimes you have to push and pull before you can agree.
“I love you, Ivy,” I say, and even though she’s underwater, I know she can hear me.
For a moment, there is silence. Ivy is weightless under my hand. There is no smoke. There is no history. There is no story. There is just Ivy’s face, under the water, looking up at mine.
We can speak to each other without words. We are in each other’s heads. We always have been.
She tells me, “It’s your turn now.”
She tells me, “Thank you.”
She is smiling, finally at peace. I look into her eyes and watch as her sparkle fades, as her lights go out.
She is gone, but she is not dead.
We are free.
There is a world outside and a world inside. One is on fire. The other is submerged, underwater. Sometimes it is dark. Sometimes I can’t breathe.
We are parts and pieces. We are whole. We are a tapestry. A mosaic. A stained-glass window.
I emerge from the water, gasping for air.
We are reborn.
I crawl out of the pool, like those creatures at the beginning of time. The first webbed things that decided to have feet. How many lives did I live to get to this one? How many first breaths have I taken?
The thin fabric of my bra and underwear clings to my skin. My lungs are full of smoke and water. I cough up everything I can. I empty myself. I make myself new.
Who are you when half of you drowns?
Who are you if you are the one who pushed her under?
Who are you when you merge and become whole?
I look down at the water and nothing is there but a thin reflection of Ivy’s face staring back at me. My own face.
This is what really happens.
This is my story now.