Swear on This Life: A Novel

I was breathing hard as I lay the book on my chest, right over my throbbing heart. I remembered that moment when everything started crumbling down around us. There was nothing we could do; we were just a couple of powerless, poor kids, so desperate to find a way to be together . . .

It was the middle of the night by that point, and I was too frustrated to keep going. I didn’t want to wake Cara, so I took a bath, got back into bed, and texted Trevor, but he was already asleep. I went into Cara’s room to see if maybe she was burning the midnight oil on her next story, but she was sound asleep as well. I wasn’t ready to go back to the book, so I spent the next three hours lying in bed, thinking.

When I was eighteen, I saw a therapist who convinced me to go back to Ohio to look for Jase and see where we grew up to try to work through some of my issues. Cyndi and Sharon, being the amazing women that they were, dropped everything to take me there. We found the dirt road right at the five-point-five-mile marker, right where it had always been. There were just two lone wooden posts and a memory of the battered mailboxes. We couldn’t drive down the road because there was a locked gate and a sign that said NO TRESPASSING, but that didn’t stop Cyndi. Sharon had tried to talk her out of it, but Cyndi insisted that we climb the fence and make the half-mile journey down the road to where the two dilapidated houses once stood.

When we arrived at the end of the road, there was nothing. The houses had been torn down. All that was left were two concrete foundations and a couple of wooden beams. I was happy they were gone.

“Say good-bye, Emiline,” Sharon said. “Say good-bye to the horrible things that happened here.”

I cried and cried in Cyndi’s arms. Echoes of Jase were everywhere. I could see a twelve-year-old Jase as he stood on a rock with his arms in the air. Look at me, Em, I’m the king of the world! And there I was, a skinny mess of a kid with my arms crossed, laughing. Well, you’re no Leonardo DiCaprio, that’s for sure.

I laughed through my tears as Cyndi asked, “Are you having a good memory or a bad one?”

I smiled. “This one’s a good one.”

We walked past the gravel toward the tree line and spotted the small structure still standing in the distance. It was the toolshed-turned-fort that Jase and I had made our own.

“Is this it?” Sharon asked. I only nodded.

We tried to pry open the plywood door, but it was so weathered and warped that it was jammed shut. Sharon, a fairly petite woman, came at it with the broad end of a thick wooden stump.

“Watch out!” she yelled as she pummeled the door, busting it open.

After the dust settled, Cyndi patted my back. “You go. We’ll be right here if you need us.”

I stepped in, legs shaking, heart pounding. It was empty except for a few twigs and a lot of dust. On the back of the door, I could still make out the fading orange paint where Jase had written the rules of the fort when we were eleven.

NO PARENTS

NO HOMEWORK

NO FIGHTING

Somehow, those three rules had meant heaven. I looked around, remembering our last night there. Beyond the window, I could see the tree line, more sparse than I remembered it. I could almost make out the little dock on the creek, where we used to swing ourselves off and into the water. An image of Jason’s brother, Jeff’s floating body popped into my head uninvited. That’s when I knew it was time to go.

Managing to hold it together, I found Cyndi and Sharon outside and said, “I’ve had enough, I’m ready.”

We left Ohio and never spoke of my childhood again. Jase was long gone. I didn’t know where to look, and he hadn’t left me any clues, so I filed him away, like everything else. I thought I had gone back there to say good-bye to my mother and father and to find Jase, but none of those things happened. Instead, I said good-bye to Jase that day because he hadn’t come to find me like he said he would. It was the hardest thing I had ever done.

IT FELT LIKE ten minutes later, but it was morning when Cara shook me awake. “Did you finish the book?”

I yawned dramatically. “No, not even close.” Every page was sending me on a long emotional journey that felt both painful and necessary.

“Well, what are you waiting for? I want to take it to have him sign it.”

I grumbled, “Um, why?”

“Because I just want to,” she whined. “And I want you to go with me.”

“What time is the signing?”

Her face lit up. “Are you gonna go?”

“No. I just want to be able to give you the damn book so you can have it signed.”

“Come on.”

“I don’t think I’m going. If he wanted to see me, he would have contacted me by now,” I said.

“You. Read that.” She pointed to the book. “I’m going to play tennis. I’ll be back in an hour. The signing’s at three.” She looked at her watch. “You need to speed-read, but I’m pretty sure you can finish it in four hours.”

“Whatever, you can take it if I’m not done.”

“You guys grew up together and you obviously went through a lot. I’m not going to pretend I understand everything, Emi, but don’t you at least want to say hello?”

“We did go through a lot,” I said absently as I wondered again, for the hundredth time, why he hadn’t tried to get in touch with me.

“What part are you at?” she asked.

“When he comes to pick me up from the foster home.”

“It’s so weird to hear you say it like that.”

“Imagine how I feel reading my own thoughts that I didn’t write.”

“I could see how that would be strange. You must have shared a lot with him.”

“Everything.” It was true. In real life, we talked for hours at night while I was hiding up in that attic room of the foster home. I’d told him every detail like I was reading him a story.

“Well, get back to it,” Cara said, interrupting my thoughts.

Her ponytail bounced as she walked away. I knew it was my own issue, but her perkiness irritated me. I wasn’t ready to get back to the book, so I did the other thing I needed to do: I called Cyndi.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Aunt Cyndi.”

“How’s my girl?”

“I’m okay. So, um, I hate to spring this on you out of the blue, but . . . Jase wrote a book,” I said, coming down hard on that final consonant.

“Oh my goodness! Are you serious?” she said excitedly.

“Yeah. He wrote a freakin’ book about our childhood and got it published. And it’s a huge bestseller.”

“Oh dear god.” That was Cyndi’s expression for something catastrophic—she wasn’t even a smidge religious.

“Have you heard of All the Roads Between by J. Colby?”

“That book. Wow!” She cleared her throat. “I mean, yes, I’ve heard of it. It’s been criticized by some.” She always tried extremely hard to make me feel better in every situation. It was just one of the many things I loved about her.

“Oh, don’t give me that. Don’t think I haven’t googled every single article about this book. It got one bad national review. Otherwise, it’s a critical darling.”

I could hear Cyndi cover the mouthpiece and whisper-shout Sharon’s name. She came back on the line. “Okay, Emi, we’ll figure this out.”

I shook my head. “Hi, Sharon. I know you’re on the line.”

There was a pause, and then a “Hiiiii, sweetie. I’m so sorry you’re going through this, but try to think of it as a cathartic experience that you can use in your writing.” This was classic, sensible Sharon. “Have you read the book yet?”

“I’m reading it now. It’s basically a roman à clef, except that he wrote it from my point of view. Can you believe the nerve?”

I could hear them both sucking air through their teeth, and then there was more off-phone whispering. Cyndi came back on the line. “We’re taking tomorrow off. We’ll be in the car, on our way to you, in less than an hour. Expect us in the early evening. Our girl needs us.”

“No, you guys don’t have to come down for this.”

“You bet your ass we’re coming down, and we will all work through this together.”

I sighed—partially from resignation, partially from pure relief. “Thank you so much you guys.” I felt pathetic after I hung up, but there was no use fighting the combined forces of Cyndi and Sharon.

Five seconds later, Cara walked by my room on her way to the kitchen and yelled, “Keep reading!”

I looked at the book on my bed, grabbed it, and headed for the living room. I didn’t want to be alone for what I knew was coming next.