Black Water Summer

CW: Sexual abuse of a minor, incest, suicide or self-harm, substance abuse, physical violence

(Inspired by the music of Pearl Jam)

The first time Jimmy saw Heather, she was walking barefoot across the parking lot of the public beach with a surfboard under her arm and a cigarette tucked behind her ear like it belonged there.

It was early June, the kind of morning when the lake looked like hammered metal and the sky hadn’t decided what it wanted to be yet. Jimmy had just gotten off the night shift at the gas station. His shirt still smelled like burnt coffee and gasoline, and his eyes felt packed with sand.

She nodded at him like they already knew each other.

“You surf?” she asked.

“In this?” He looked at the gray water.

She shrugged. “Water’s water.”

She kept walking, then turned back.

“You look like you need something,” she said. “Coffee? Sleep? Or something stronger?”

Jimmy hesitated.

She smiled.

“Come on. I don’t bite.”

That morning they sat on the cold sand, passing a joint between them while the sun climbed slowly out of the clouds. Heather talked more than Jimmy, but not about anything important. Bad music. Bad teachers. How the beach felt different depending on your mood. How some days the water looked like it wanted you, and other days it looked like it would take you.

Jimmy didn’t say much. He didn’t need to. Being around her felt like standing in warm light.

By noon she was in the water, cutting through the small waves like she’d been born there. Jimmy watched from the shore, smoking and squinting, wondering how someone could look so alive and so tired at the same time.

That afternoon she asked him his name.

The next day she remembered it.

By the end of the week, they were meeting there every morning.

Summer settled in around them like a secret.

They’d meet at the same stretch of beach, just far enough from the crowds that no one bothered them. Heather would surf. Jimmy would try and fail and wipe out and come up laughing while she floated nearby, watching him like she was deciding whether he was worth saving.

Afterward they’d lie on their towels, passing smoke back and forth, listening to music through a cheap portable speaker. The Ramones most days. Sometimes Soundgarden. Sometimes nothing at all.

Heather liked the quiet.

She didn’t talk about her home life. Jimmy didn’t ask. He knew enough about people to understand that silence was sometimes a kind of agreement.

But there were signs.

She never wanted to leave early, even when the weather turned.

She flinched when her phone rang.

She never invited him over.

Once, when Jimmy joked about meeting her parents, she stared at the water for a long time before saying, very softly:

“You don’t want to meet my dad.”

Then she smiled like it was a joke.

Jimmy didn’t bring it up again.

He worked nights all summer.

The gas station was open twenty-four hours, and the overnight shift paid a dollar more. It wasn’t much, but Jimmy saved every extra bill in a coffee can under his bed.

At first, he told himself it was just in case.

Then, one night around mid-July, Heather fell asleep with her head on his shoulder, her hair damp with saltwater and her breathing slow and steady. She looked younger when she slept. Safer. Like whatever shadow followed her had finally lost the trail.

Jimmy sat there for nearly an hour, not moving.

That was the night he decided.

The coffee can wasn’t for emergencies anymore.

It was for a ring.

August came heavy and hot.

Heather changed.

Not all at once. Just little things.

She smoked more.

She talked less.

Sometimes she’d stare at the horizon like she was waiting for something to come out of it.

One afternoon she showed up with bruises on her arm. Finger-shaped. Yellow and fading.

“What happened?” Jimmy asked.

“Surfboard hit me,” she said too quickly.

He didn’t believe her.

That evening, after they smoked and the sun dropped low, she finally spoke.

“My dad comes into my room sometimes,” she said.

Jimmy didn’t understand at first.

Then he did.

The words came out flat. Like she’d practiced saying them without feeling them.

“He says it’s because he loves me,” she said. “He says it’s our secret.”

Jimmy felt something cold move through his chest.

“Does your mom know?”

Heather laughed.

“She knows everything,” she said. “She just doesn’t see anything. When she found a joint in my room, she was prepared to send me off to a boarding school. Her only actions are to throw me away.”

Jimmy didn’t know what to say. So he did the only thing he could.

He held her.

She didn’t cry. She just stayed there, very still, like someone trying not to move during an earthquake.

Two days later, Heather told her mother.

She went home early, determined, shaking but steady.

Jimmy waited at the beach.

She didn’t show up.

That night, his phone buzzed around midnight.

She was outside his house.

Her eyes were red. Her voice was hoarse.

“She said I’m dramatic,” Heather told him. “She said I’m high all the time and making things up for attention.”

Jimmy felt anger rise like heat.

“What did your dad say?”

Heather stared past him.

“He said he wanted a boy,” she said. “That girls are just a pain in the ass.”

They went to the beach even though it was dark.

They didn’t talk much. They just sat, smoking, listening to the waves move in and out like slow breathing.

“I wish I could live out here,” Heather said. “Just the water and the sky.”

“You could,” Jimmy said. “We could go somewhere.”

She didn’t answer.

The ring cost three hundred and twenty dollars.

Jimmy counted the money three times before handing it over.

It wasn’t big. Just a small silver band with a tiny stone. But it shined when it caught the light, and when Jimmy held the box in his hand, he felt something like hope for the first time in months.

He planned to give it to her at sunset.

At their spot.

Where everything good had happened.

She was already there when he arrived.

Sitting on the sand.

Not surfing.

Not smoking.

Just staring at the water.

Jimmy knew immediately something was wrong.

He sat beside her.

“What’s going on?”

Heather didn’t look at him.

“My dad spent three hours today polishing his car,” she said.

Jimmy waited.

“He says it’s the only thing he owns that nobody ruins,” she continued. “He says people are disappointments. Machines aren’t.”

She laughed, but there was no humor in it.

“He loves that car more than anything,” she said.

Jimmy reached into his pocket.

Then stopped.

Heather turned to him.

“If I die,” she said, “I want my ashes out there.”

She pointed to the water.

“Promise me.”

Jimmy’s throat tightened.

“You’re not going to die.”

She smiled at him gently, like he was a kid who didn’t understand how the world worked.

“Promise me anyway.”

“…I promise.”

The ring stayed in his pocket.

They sat together until it got dark.

She left early.

She didn’t hug him.

That night, Heather took her father’s car.

He was asleep.

Her mother was watching television.

The keys were on the counter, right where they always were.

She drove without music.

Without a destination.

The speed climbed slowly at first. Fifty. Sixty. Seventy.

The road stretched ahead of her, empty and dark.

In the rearview mirror, her father’s face appeared.

Smiling.

Then another memory.

His hand on her door.

His voice.

The smell of his aftershave.

Eighty.

Ninety.

Her mother’s voice next.

Stop being dramatic.

You always want attention.

The mirror filled with faces.

Hands.

Closed doors.

Drawn curtains.

Locked rooms.

One hundred.

The engine screamed.

Heather pressed harder on the gas.

The headlights coming toward her didn’t slow.

Neither did she.

For one second, everything was quiet.

Then the world exploded into light.

Jimmy found out the next morning.

The police report used words like collision and fatalities.

They said she’d been going over a hundred.

They said the other driver died instantly.

They said Heather probably didn’t feel anything.

Jimmy stopped listening after that.

The memorial was held three days later.

Flowers.

Photos.

People whispering.

Her father stood near the front, shaking hands, accepting condolences like he was the victim.

Jimmy felt something break inside him.

He walked straight down the aisle.

Straight past the chairs.

Straight up to the man.

“You did this,” Jimmy said.

The room went quiet.

Her father’s face hardened.

“You don’t belong here.”

Jimmy shoved him and burst into tears, "Now maybe she can be the son, in someone else's sky!"

People rushed forward.

Someone grabbed Jimmy’s arms.

In the confusion, he saw the small urn near the photo display.

Before anyone understood what he was doing, Jimmy grabbed it and ran.

The beach was empty.

Gray sky.

Cold wind.

The same stretch of sand where everything had begun.

Jimmy didn’t stop running until the water hit his knees.

Then his waist.

Then his chest.

The cold stole his breath.

He kept going.

The waves pushed against him, pulling, resisting.

When the water reached his shoulders, he opened the urn.

The ashes came out in a soft gray cloud, spreading across the surface, then sinking, then disappearing.

Jimmy stayed there until his arms went numb.

Until the last trace of her was gone.

When he came back to shore, he collapsed onto the sand, shaking and crying and empty.

After a long time, he remembered the ring.

He took the box from his pocket.

Opened it.

The stone caught what little light there was.

For a moment, he imagined her sitting beside him.

Hair wet.

Feet buried in the sand.

Alive.

He closed the box.

Then threw it as far as he could into the water.

The splash was small.

The waves erased it immediately.

Jimmy watched the horizon until the sky went dark.

For the first time since summer began, the beach felt like just a place.

Not a memory.

Not a promise.

Just water.

Just wind.

Just the sound of something endless, moving in and out, in and out, carrying everything away.