Say This

I
Everything Has Already Happened

The fog and its clearing. The fog again, a clouded mirror. Eva’s cousin. His slender back.

Eva’s cousin, his slender back. She washes it twice. The first time, the bathroom steams. She applies the worn terrycloth to the mole near the base of his spine, as best she can make out. Just above his crack. She drips water along his neck. Exactly as his dead sister did. The knobs along his spine seem to flex as he speaks. Eva stops. She hadn’t known about a dead sister. Exactly the same. Eva dips the cloth again into the tub. She strokes his forearms and chest. Am I hurting you? Rain hisses against the roof. Eva’s cousin falls asleep in the cooling water while she crouches on her heels. His long lashes, full lips. The rain stops. A car crunches on the dirt drive. A car door slams. Eva closes the bathroom door behind her.

The second time Eva washes her cousin, she is high from the bowl he’s offered after parking his own car. Which makes her fourteen. Or twelve. Or eleven, same summer as the first time.

Sixteen would be right—when on a cloud-jammed July afternoon her cousin sweeps aside his curtain of long hair, leans across the kitchen table and plants a swift kiss. He is twenty-one. He still lives in this old house on a hill with his stepmother who works and works. His nose upturns to a point. He is slight, not tall. It is the house that is tall and taller that afternoon in the kitchen. The ceiling shoves up and the air thins and Eva and her cousin grow tiny, turn into small amazing children. His laugh foams. Outside the kitchen window, the steeply serried streets of Astoria, Oregon. Whitecaps curl on the river below town. Freighters and distant forests bear crowns of mist. If she’s sixteen, it’s 1993. Let’s go for a drive.

She’s sixteen, sure. The songs he’ll write about her when he gets famous, providing he can sweet-talk his stepmother into buying that red guitar. His collection of seven silver dollars he’ll split with Eva once their value jacks. Loopy grin each time he takes his gaze from the wet road. Clogs her throat so hard it’s like dying except probably better. It’s raining hard when he turns onto an old logging road and the car shudders into the woods. Trees splash above. He brakes and turns off the engine. Smokes, pops the top on a brew. The windows glaze. The air thick. He hikes her thin skirt and lifts the band on the leg of her underwear with an inquisitive finger and hunches over her. Spilled beer pools on the floor mat. His cat tongue makes sticky sounds. So much rain. Eva comes hard. Really hard. He kisses her bare, beer-sticky soles. He rubs himself on her, all over her. He gentles her head down.

The clouds haul off. Purple sky. Eva’s cousin drives along the river. Just drives. The radio busted. For once Eva feels loose in herself. A new sensation. She is someone she can admire. Really something. Big girl.

After, Eva’s cousin sits propped in the tub like a pale boy-king tired from a long day of chasing puppies and tying ribbons in girls’ hair and chewing meat soaked in milk.

The white-flower cups of his knees. The bathroom window wide open, a fat moon. Eva covers her cousin’s face with the ratty washcloth. As if admiring her handiwork, she takes in his narrow chest, the delicate neck. Slick with water, his thatch of brown hair resembles the fur of a sleek animal that changes with ease. She wonders if she can. Is she already? In a strangled voice he says, Still like me?

Do you? Eva thinks, though not often, over the course of the next twenty-five years. Or twenty. Or twenty-two. She can never be sure. Her mind blurs. She only knows the affair was their last summer together, before she flew back east for the last time. Left for good. Still like me? Miss me. Think of me.