_*_ 85 _*_
I am so not a thirty-six C. Not a thirty-six B, either, but I decided it was better to have the suit too tight than to have it falling off me, so I put on the B, tugging at the bottom of it until my butt was more or less covered. As long as I didn’t stand up straight I’d be fine.
Finn stood next to the ladder in the shallow end. “Looks good on you.”
“Close your eyes,” I said.
“So you can run away?”
“Just close them.” I stepped down the ladder quickly. The water wasn’t as warm as I thought it would be. I bounced, arms crossed over my chest. “Okay, I’m in. Can I get out now?”
He chuckled, “No, you goof. You’re going to learn to swim. We’ll start with floating on your back.”
“I don’t float. I sink.”
“All right.” He moved behind me. “I’m going to put my hands on your shoulder blades. Lean into them. I promise I won’t drop you.”
He put his hands on my back. I hesitated (What am I doing here?), then let my weight fall toward him. He took a step backward and pulled me along quickly, much faster than I was ready for. My feet flew up and it felt like my head was going under the water. I jackknifed, trying to stand up and get my feet under me again. I grabbed the edge of the pool and held on for dear life while coughing so hard, I expected both of my lungs to come flying out of my mouth.
“Told you.” I coughed some more and adjusted the mother of all wedgies. “I’m hopeless.”
“You’re scared, not hopeless. There’s a big difference. Don’t move.”
He hopped out of the pool, took a kickboard off the pile by the office door, and turned on the radio. Soft saxophone music filled the air. He hit a couple of light switches and most of the lights went out. A piano played under the sax, with a gentle drum in the background, but as nice as it was, it didn’t change the fact that I was in a swimming pool and I did not like it.
“Half an hour,” he said. “That’s all I need.”
“You’ll get five minutes if you’re lucky,” I muttered.
He dove in without a splash and popped up right in front of me. “I heard that.”
He maneuvered the kickboard under my back and, taking my shoulders, began to pull me across the water, slower this time.
“How deep is the deep end?” I asked, trying desperately not to think about the fact that my feet touched nothing.
“Three meters,” he said.
“I don’t want to go there.”
“Kick your feet a little,” he said. “Flutter them and they won’t drag you down.”
He was right, though I didn’t admit it. Couldn’t because all my energy went into keeping my face above water and breathing. Finn babbled on and on and on, walking me back and forth, back and forth across the shallow end, my feet fluttering, until my arms softened and I let them float out a little from my body instead of holding them stiffly at my sides.
Finn put his hand under the back of my head and gently lifted it a little so that I could hear him. “You’re doing great,” he said. “Now close your eyes.”
“Why?” I asked, immediately suspicious.
“Close them and picture something, maybe the stars we saw the night of the football game. Or the marching band. I don’t know, whatever makes you happy.”
I closed my eyes and pictured him swimming right behind me. “The stars will work.”
He kicked his legs and we were underway again. “You’re comfortable now, right?”
“I’m less petrified of dying in the next minute, if that’s what you mean by ‘comfortable.’”
“Who do you think trains the Navy SEALs how to get through the water? Me,” he said modestly. “I also spent a month teaching Antarctic penguins to swim.” He took another stroke and we flew across the water. “You’re doing great, but you’d be even better if you relaxed a little.”
“I’m not screaming,” I said. “Give me some credit.”
“You need a distraction.” Two powerful strokes. “Tell me why you haven’t been in school.”
It tumbled out before I could stop myself, everything that had happened from my mall meltdown to Roy’s death to the sight of the ambulance leaving. Talking made being dragged around the pool slightly less terrifying. I even told him about the holes in the living room wall, and combing the glass out of the carpet. He listened without saying a word.
We paused once so Finn could move the kickboard up, away from my butt. After that, I had to kick my legs harder and push up my hips to stay on the surface. I wasn’t going to tell him but he was right, keeping my eyes closed made it easier to focus on the feeling of floating instead of the feeling of drowning.
He stopped again. “I’m taking the kickboard away now, but I’ll keep holding up your head.” The board started slipping away. “Move your arms.”
“How?”
“Pretend you’re a bird. Flap your wings.”
I smacked the water with my arms, making massive waves.
“Argh!” He pushed me, so I stood up and wiped water off his face.
“Wrong kind of flapping?” I asked innocently.
“Brilliant deduction. Ready to try again?”
I was, to my surprise. I kicked my legs and flapped my arms under the water and I kept my own head above the surface.
He put his lips close to my ears. “Close your eyes again.”
I did and we moved across the pool like I was a sailboat and he was the wind. “Trust the water,” he said. “It will hold you up as long as you try. Can I take my hand away?”
I bit my lip and nodded.
“Kick and flap, kick and flap,” he said. “Eyes closed, kick and flap.”
Without his support, my head dropped a little, enough so that his words melted back into the sound of the water, and the saxophone sounded like a faraway whale. I could hear my heartbeat and maybe his, too. I relaxed and found the balanced place between the water holding me up and me staying on top of it. Finn took the fingers of my left hand and pulled just a little until they touched the side of the pool.
“Open your eyes.”
I held on to the edge and stopped kicking so that my feet could drift to the bottom of the pool. Only there was no bottom. My eyes snapped open and I looked down. “You brought me to the deep end!”
“You brought yourself,” he said, swimming closer. “You did great.”
“I did great?”
He grinned and nodded, his head bouncing up and down like a bobblehead doll on a dashboard.
“What?”
He gritted his teeth and drew in a sharp breath. “I really want to kiss you. But you broke up with me.”
“Maybe we were just a little broken up,” I said. “A little broken is still broken,” he said.
“But fixable,” I said. “Right?”
He smoothed the hair off my forehead. “How do we fix it?” “I’m sorry,” I said. “Will that help?”
He nodded. “I’m sorry, too.”
“We’re not going to be drama junkies like Gracie and Topher, right? I can’t do that.”
“Me neither.” He smoothed the hair off my forehead. “If I promise to always answer my phone, will you promise to call me?”
“Yes.” I let myself sink a little in the water then kicked hard. “If I promise to listen, will you promise to tell me when things are bad, without joking around or clamming up?”
“No joking?”
“Okay, just a little joking.”
“Deal.”
“I don’t want to shake on it,” I said.
Fifteen minutes later, three old ladies in rubber bathing caps decorated with plastic flowers shuffled out of the locker room and were scandalized by the sight of us fixing what was a little broken with an epic kiss in the deep, warm water.
I’d like to think that my grandmother would have understood.
_*_ 86 _*_
Trish brought Dad home around eleven that night. He went straight to bed without a word. She asked if she could come in for a while, long enough for a cup of tea. I made two cups and sat with her at the table. (I had no choice. It was the only way to find out what happened.)
The ambulance had taken him to the VA hospital in Albany. It took two units of saline solution to fix his dehydration. His blood work showed high cholesterol, sucky liver enzymes, and a lot of white blood cells, which meant he had an infection somewhere, plus his blood pressure was through the roof.
Trish filled out forms for him and waited and filled out more forms and waited longer until finally the nurse came with signed release papers and a note that he had an appointment in three months to see a doctor. The nurse was excited because the hospital had cut its backlog in half. Now it only took three months instead of six. But, she explained, “If you have a crisis, call your doctor’s office immediately and they’ll find a way to squeeze you in.”
“But he doesn’t have a doctor,” Trish said. “He doesn’t have anyone to call in an emergency. That’s why we’re here.”
The nurse repeated her line about the three-month wait. Trish told me that she’d pulled the nurse to a quiet corner for a conversation that no one else could hear, and after that, the nurse found a spot for Dad on some kind of priority list. His appointment was the second Monday in January.
“Andy wants me to move in,” Trish told me. “I told him no. A girl from work is letting me rent her spare bedroom. This way I’ll be around, but not close enough to irritate him. I think that would be better, don’t you?”
I cupped my hands over the steam rising from my mug. “I guess.”
“Are you mad that he wanted you to stay at home? Should I have taken you with me?”
“No. It was probably better for him having you help with doctors and stuff.” I blew on my tea, sending ripples across the surface. “Anyway, I didn’t stay here.”
I explained the bet with Finn, reminded her about my near-drowning, and gave a few boring details about my first swimming lesson. I’d expected a lecture about taking the pickup without permission or a license, but she surprised me.
“You didn’t fall in the pool at that party,” she said.
“Yeah, I did.”
“It was Fourth of July, at the Bigelows’. The docs had discharged Andy too early, but we didn’t know it then. He should never have been in a swimming pool by himself.”
the impossible knife of memory
She shook her head. “We were all watching Jimmy and his girlfriend dance; they were good enough to be pros. The music was really loud and everybody was feeling good.”
“Was he drunk? Did I fall in because he wasn’t paying attention?”
She put her mug down. “He wasn’t drinking at all. He was showing off for you, I think. Must have had a tiny stroke or a seizure in the deep end. You were the only one who saw what happened. You didn’t fall in, Lee-Lee. You jumped in to help your father, but you couldn’t swim. You were, what? Seven? The Bigelows’ dog went nuts and someone went see why he was barking and oh my God.” She teared up and looked out the dark window. “Ten guys must have hit the water at once. One plucked you out, laid you on the deck, and started CPR. Your lips were this awful blue, but you came around fast. It took longer with Andy. Damn good thing there were medics at the party.”
“Did Dad go back to the hospital?”
“You both did. They kept you one night for observation. He was there a couple of weeks.” She cocked her head to one side. “You sure you don’t remember this?”
“I remember falling in and I remember opening my eyes underwater and seeing Dad. He had on red swim trunks with baggy pockets. Did he have a shirt on, too?”
She nodded.
“I always thought I was looking up through the water and seeing him on the deck.”
“No, you saw him on the bottom of the pool,” she said softly. “Do you know what he remembers?”
“He never talks about things like that.”
“I know.” She looked out the window again. “The last thing he remembered before he passed out was seeing you fly through the air like a little bird. Must have been the moment you jumped in.”
“So he knew I was in the deep end and I couldn’t swim?”
“He couldn’t move. Whatever it was, seizure, stroke. I don’t know if they ever figured it out for sure. But he said it was peaceful. He said drowning is not a bad way to go.”
I drained my tea. “I’m never getting in a pool again.”
“I think you will, as long as the right lifeguard is on duty.” She finished her tea, stood up, and put her jacket on. “Helluva day, huh? The docs gave him something to sleep. I’ll call to check on him tomorrow, before and after work.”
Spock followed her to the door, tail wagging. He whined a little when she closed the door behind her and nosed aside the curtain to watch her walk to her car.
“Wait!” I ran to the door and opened it. “Wait!” The light from the house barely reached the driveway. I could see where she was standing, but I couldn’t see her face.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Thanks,” I said. “Thank you for helping us.” The day after his hospital visit, Dad woke up at the same time I did. As the coffee was brewing, he lined up his new prescription bottles on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. He took his medicine with the first sip, then he went back to bed. He did the same thing the next morning and the day after that.
“Are you doing this to prove to me that you’re taking your medicine?” I asked.
“Something like that,” he admitted. “What’s-his-name is waiting in the driveway. Get going.”
I reached for my backpack. “What are you going to do today?”
“Thought I’d write some letters.”
“Letters? Like, on paper?”
“Old-school, that’s me.”
“You’re okay?”
“Get going. Stay out of detention for a change.”
Trish came to our house for Sunday dinner three weeks in a row. We ate, watched the late game, and then she’d go to work. When she got switched to the night shift, Dad switched, too, going to bed after I left in the morning and waking up in time for dinner. In those weeks, our house never smelled of greasy biker creep or weed. Daddy was down to one bottle of Jack every three days. He didn’t explode or cry. He spent his nights writing letters at the dining room table.
It was tempting to let my guard down, but I couldn’t, not until he started seeing that doctor.
The swimming lesson changed things with Finn and me, took us to a new level that was hidden from the rest of the world, one that made us laugh more and required a lot more kissing. Besotted: that was the word of the month. I went to class, did enough homework to keep me off the naughty list, counted the minutes until I saw him again (praying that he was doing the same thing). I learned to love the smell of chlorine because every day after school, I’d change into a T-shirt and shorts, sit in the visitor’s gallery that overlooked the pool, and read while Finnegan Braveheart Ramos valiantly guarded the lives of the Belmont Boys Swim Team.
When I was with Finn, the world spun properly on its axis, and gravity worked. At home, the planet tilted so far on its side it was hard to tell which way was up. Dad felt it, too. He shuffled like an old man, as if the carpet under his feet was really a slick sheet of black ice.
A tree turned up in our living room the morning of Christmas Eve, the base of its trunk jammed into a bucket of rocks. The bucket sat in the middle of an old tire. The tree leaned toward the window, shedding needles whenever Spock’s tail thwacked against it.
Finn and his mom were heading back to Boston that night, so we exchanged gifts in the afternoon. He gave me a coupon book. All the coupons were for swimming lessons.
“Okay, now I really feel like an idiot,” I said, handing over his gift. “In my defense, I haven’t had an art class in years.”
“Ah,” he said, ever the diplomat, when he’d removed the paper. “It’s an original. I love original things.”
I cringed. “You need me to tell you what it is, don’t you?”
“Sort of.”
“It’s a candleholder, see? No, turn it the other way. That thing at the bottom is supposed to be an owl, but it’s not supposed to have a giant tumor growing on its back.”
Finn tried to keep a straight face and failed. “My first thought was that it was Dromedary Man, the camel superhero. But you’re almost right, it’s definitely an owl. But that is not a tumor, that’s a backpack, loaded down with overdue library books. I love it.” He grinned. “It’s very you.”
I tried to decorate the tree after he left. I found a small box of old Christmas lights in the basement, but the thought of a flaming tree-sized torch in the living room made me put them back. I baked round sugar cookies and put a small hole in each one so that after they cooled, I could thread yarn through the holes and hang them on the tree. The trick was to hang them close to the trunk and high enough so the dog wouldn’t eat them. Too much weight on the end of a branch would snap it off, then Spock would eat the cookie, the yarn, and start in on the branch.
An arctic cold front rolled down from the North Pole Christmas morning. Our furnace ran constantly, but frigid air seeped in through the cracks around the windowsills and overwhelmed the crumbling insulation. I spent the day in suspended animation wrapped in a sleeping bag on the couch, sipping hot chocolate, watching Christmas movies, and waiting for Dad to wake up.
Long after sunset, he came down the hall coughing hard, his nose running. “No hugging,” he said. “You don’t want this cold.”
After a bowl of chicken noodle soup and a lot of Kleenex, I gave him my present.
“You didn’t have to get me anything,” he protested.
“It’s Christmas, duh.”
He blew his nose again, carefully removed the wrapping paper and folded it, then flipped the gift over so he could see the front.
“A map of the United States,” he said.
“Our map, see?” I pointed at the red lines that squiggled all over the country. “I traced as many of our trips as I could remember. There’s a hook on the back so you can hang it on the wall.”
“Thank you, princess. I suppose you want a present, too,” he teased.
“That would be nice.”
He went out to the kitchen, opened a cupboard, and returned with a long thin box, covered in reindeer paper.
He hesitated, then handed it to me and walked away. “Hope you like it.”
“Where are you going?” I asked. “Don’t you want to watch me open it?”
“No, it’s okay,” he said, already halfway down the hall.
“Really? You’re really going to do that? What is it, a pair of chopsticks from an old take-out order? Did you wash a pair of my socks for me?”
I regretted the words as soon as they were spoken. He turned around, coughing, and shuffled back to the living room. Sat on the couch without a word.
“I didn’t mean that to sound nasty,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Just open it.”
Under the paper was the kind of box that fancy pens come in. “A pen? That would be way cooler than clean socks.”
He pressed his lips together and raised an eyebrow. I lifted the lid, unfolded the white tissue paper, and picked up a pearl necklace.
“Daddy?” I whispered. “Where—”
“That’s from your grandmother. Found it in the basement. I doubt the pearls are real, so don’t think you’re going to get much if you sell it. She wore it all the time.”
I rubbed the pearls on my cheek, smelling lemon and face powder and ginger cookies and hearing bees humming in her garden. “I remember.”
“Well, good.” He stood and patted my head. “She’d like that.”
For three days and three nights after that, it snowed. Our town had giant snowplows so the roads were more or less clear, but poor Spock grew so grumpy about having to stick his private parts in the snow to do his business, I finally shoveled out a potty patch for him and added it to the growing list of things I never thought I would do but did, anyway.
Dad was a dimly seen shadow, only leaving his room to use the bathroom or to make a sandwich or to dump more dirty dishes in the sink. I’d say “Hey” or “How you doing?” or “Want a cookie?” He’d grunt or say “Fine” or “No.” His cold was no better, no worse, and he snored so loud that paint was flaking off the walls.
Trish stopped by in the middle of the night on the twenty-eighth and left a card for me that contained a gift certificate for the mall. She scribbled a note on the envelope telling me she was flying to Austin in the morning to visit her sister and that she’d be back right after New Year’s.
I had baked her an apple pie for a present, but nobody told me when she going to stop in, and nobody told me she’d be spending the rest of the week in Texas, so I split it with Spock and the ghost of my father.
_*_ 89 _*_
Why did I voluntarily wake up at seven o’clock in the morning on the fourth day after Christmas? Love messes you up and makes you do strange things, that’s why. Finn was guarding at a massive all-day swim meet and had bewitched me into saying I’d spend the day at the pool so we could hang out on his breaks.
It was still dark out, snowing even heavier than it had been the day before. Frost was etched on the inside of my window, another sign that we needed to re-insulate the house. Finn had promised that the viewing section above the pool would be in the nineties. The thought of being that warm was the motivation I needed to get me out of bed.
I almost collided with Dad, freshly showered, in the hall.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, waving at the steam that poured out of the bathroom.
“It’s all right. Why are you up?”
“Swim meet, remember?”
“When do you leave?’
“Ten minutes. Don’t worry. He’s going to have his mom’s car. She just got new tires.”
“You’ll be back for dinner?”
“I think so.”
He leaned against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. “You’re getting used to all this, aren’t you?”
Something in his tone of voice made me suspicious. “Define ‘this.’”
He rubbed his hand over the scraggly beard that was beginning to look like gray-speckled moss on his pale, worn face. “This school. This house. This what’s-his-name.”
The shower dripped loudly. He was laying the groundwork, getting ready to tell me that when Trish got back, he’d definitely be going on the road again and leaving me with her.
“You seem happier,” he continued.
“Maybe,” I said. “A little.”
The combination of the beard and the fatigue in his eyes made me uneasy, but we were miles past the place where I could ask how he was feeling or even what was wrong.
He startled me with a quick, fierce hug. “Get in the shower. I’ll make a classic peanut butter and banana you can eat in the car.”
The swim meet was delayed one hour, and then two as the buses from other districts crawled through the storm toward Belmont. It was finally canceled when state troopers shut down the Thruway. The blowing snow turned the fifteen-minute drive back to my house into almost an hour and shook Finn up so much I thought I’d have to pry his fingers off the steering wheel with a crowbar. His mother called while I was making hot chocolate to tell him that the snow would stop soon, but he should stay at my house until the plows got caught up.
We settled in on the couch with our hot chocolate, a bag of marshmallows, the game controllers, and the unzipped sleeping bag spread across our laps.
“Who are those presents for?” Finn asked as we waited for the game to load.
“What presents?”
“Under the tree.” He pointed. “Look.”
Two small boxes, wrapped in the reused Christmas paper that we’d thrown out days before, had been hidden deep under the tree in the drift of pine needles. One had my name on it, the other was addressed to Finn.
“Those weren’t here this morning,” I said.
“From your dad?”
“Must be.” I shivered. Even with the furnace running, it felt like the house was getting colder. “Let’s open them.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for him?” Finn asked.
“There’s a good chance that he’s given us something weird. We’ll take a peek and rewrap them.” I carefully slid my finger under the tape to loosen it. “That way we’ll know how to act when we open them in front of him.”
The paper on my gift fell away easily.
“Your father gave you a box of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese?”
“Of course.” I shivered again. “Doesn’t your dad do that? Your turn.”
Finn’s small box clunked when he shook it. The wrapping paper practically fell off to reveal a box that used to hold four sticks of butter. The tape holding the ends together popped opened. A metal star made of bronze tumbled into his lap.
He picked it up. “What’s this?”
My shivering turned into shaking. I ripped open the top of my box and pulled out a faded blue bandanna that held two gold rings, one man-sized, the other a little smaller, and one Purple Heart.