scoot to the edge of the platform and drop forty feet through space, plunging deep into the pool. When I float to the surface, I find Livy treading water beside me. She splashes me playfully and says: “I really thought I could find it.”
“Even if you had, it wouldn’t make things like they were before. We have to talk about what happened.”
She looks off through the silver cypress trunks. “I can’t. Not yet.” She stops treading and lies back, half floating, gazing into the hazy blue sky. “I’ve thought about that bottle sometimes. Over the years.”
“Me too. During low times. Four o’clock in the morning, wondering if I ever made a single right choice in my life.”
She seems amused by this. “Not me. I thought about it during good times. Or times that were supposed to be good. I thought about it on my wedding night.”
“Your wedding night?”
She turns her head slightly, watching me as she floats. “There I was, supposed to feel some profound completion as a woman, and all I could think was that I was closing off forever an option I’d always thought I had.”
“And you did.”
Her eyes narrow. “You hadn’t exactly made me feel wanted the last time we’d seen each other.”
I look away, unwilling to explain my actions on the night of the ball without reciprocal explanations from her.
“We should have drunk that bottle twenty years ago,” she says. “The extra time it would have taken might have changed everything that came after.”
I shake my head, unwilling to grant her this easy revision of history. “Then I wouldn’t have Annie.”
For a moment she looks as though she might make some cruel remark, but her face softens. “I didn’t mean it like that. We’re here now. I’m not complaining.” She brings herself upright in the water, flips a wet strand of hair from her eyes, then reaches out and touches my nose. “Will you do one thing?”
“What?”
“Kiss me.”
Livy has given me nothing that I need, not a single answer. But I want to kiss her. Between the fatigue of treading cold water and the proximity of her naked body, I feel as though every capillary in my skin has dilated, magnifying sensation. She swims closer and slips a hand behind my neck. I lean forward and press my lips to hers, gently at first, then harder in response to her passion. Treading water is impossible now. I take a quick breath through my nose as we slide beneath the surface.
Undulating in the slow current of the spring, time is the oxygen remaining in our lungs and blood, but there is enough to remember her taste, the pressure of her breasts against me as we sink like a single creature, an incarnation of salt water, only slightly denser than the fluid surrounding us. As my chest begins to burn, I feel the soft roughness between her legs, pressing against my thigh, seeking more complete union, and I swell with unthinking eagerness. Then my lungs betray me, sending me fighting toward the shimmering surface. I smash through gasping for air, resenting the fact that I need it. Livy gently breaks the surface beside me, her neck and shoulders flushed the color of broken seashells. She pulls back her hair, then treads easily as her clear blue eyes search mine.
“I want you inside me.”
I shake my head.
“I love you, Penn. I always have. I just didn’t have the courage to choose you.”
Her words are like needles thrust into my heart, triggering emotions too intense to withstand, much less interpret. Caitlin’s warning on the plane sounds in my head: She could really mess you up—
“You don’t have any right to say that, Livy.”
“I know. I won’t say it again. But I had to let you know.”
I roll away from her and swim back to the fallen tree that leads to the shore. As I climb onto it, I turn and see her perched on the cypress knee where she left her bathing suit, slipping on the white lycra as gracefully as she does everything else.
“Where next?” she calls across the water, making no attempt to cover herself.
“I think it’s time we got back.”
“Home? But the day’s not half over.”
“I need to check on Annie.”
She nods somberly. “I understand.”
I turn and make my way carefully along the slippery log. For any other woman I would wait, but Livy Marston can take care of herself.
As I swing the Fiat back onto Highway 61, I realize with a dull shock that guilt is not among the torrent of emotions rushing through me. A moment’s thought tells me why: my past with Livy predates my life with Sarah. Intimacy with Livy is not a new experience. It’s like walking through a checkpoint to a country I visited long ago and to which I now return, older and—hopefully—wiser.
She doesn’t speak as the Spyder thrums northward in the afternoon sun, but I feel her eyes upon me, trying to penetrate my thoughts. What really brought her back to Natchez? Caitlin’s belief that Livy has returned to persuade me to leave her father alone is not impossible. But Livy would not declare her love for such a cynical reason. That is the one gift she’s reserved through the years, if indeed she has given love to anyone. She certainly must have said the words more than a few times, probably while trying to believe them herself. But why did she want this reprise of a perfect day twenty years past? And why does she think she loves me? Is it some strange analogue of a man wanting to marry the only girl who wouldn’t sleep with him?
As we pass St. Stephens Preparatory School and join the traffic heading into town, Livy touches my knee and says, “After you check on Annie, let’s do something else. We still have our picnic.”
Her voice is calm enough, but I sense anxiety beneath it. She is reluctant to let this day end. Tomorrow things will not be so simple. It’s one thing to pretend for a few hours that we can evade the past, as this town somehow evades the future. But it will be quite another when I insist on asking the questions she didn’t want to hear today. And what will happen after I tell the world that her father ordered the murder of Delano Payton? When I commence my campaign of attrition against him? How will she feel then?
“I think we’ve done a lot to think about already,” I say evenly.
She bites her lower lip and looks away.
The whine of a siren overtakes us from behind, and I glance at the rearview mirror. Traffic is parting on the highway behind us. We’re at the turn for my parents’ neighborhood, so I swing right off the bypass, clearing the way.
“Penn?” Livy says, her voice tinged with fear. “Look.”
A column of gray smoke is roiling out of the treetops in the distance.
“Penn, that’s a fire.”
I hit the accelerator hard, knowing that a neighbor could be in trouble. Most of them are older now, and it doesn’t matter whose house it is: I’ve probably known the family all my life.
“Where
