by R. J. Jacobs
“I don’t really swim.” My voice sounded whiny as I said it. It was as close to an admission as I was going to come—even with him, showing certain vulnerabilities felt impossible. Without the life jacket, I would sink like a stone in the water.
He made an incredulous face. “You mean, at all?”
“At all. It’s not something I’m proud of. I worked summers, then started playing soccer. Everything was soccer.”
“Nothing at, like, a friend’s pool?”
I shook my head. My friends didn’t have pools, aside from public ones at apartment complexes.
“Or at the country club?” He covered his mouth and smiled.
“I’ll never understand your fascination with country clubs. Waiting tables in a clubhouse was the closest I ever got to the pool.”
He pushed again. “I thought they made everyone learn swimming in America.” He touched his fingertips, reciting a list. “Golf, tennis, swimming …”
“I had one or two swim lessons when I was really little but hated every second. Though I did date a lifeguard in eleventh grade,” I announced, only because he was asking for it. I folded my arms and added impishly, “But he wasn’t that interested in giving me swim lessons.”
Paolo clenched his jaw, the slow burn of a wound beginning, and returned his attention to the horizon.
I’d made peace with knowing that Paolo hadn’t just appeared the night I’d met him. I wanted to hear his exes’ names and their stories, despite the raw rub of listening. I was the kind of person who liked walking through the grass with bare feet, even if it meant getting scratched or stung occasionally. Paolo, on the other hand, found the mention of my exes intolerable.
Waves pushed against the side of the boat. My toes gripped my sandals as I stood. I uncrossed my arms and put a hand on his shoulder as a way of apologizing. He rubbed his cheek against my hand to say that we were okay, but his eyes stayed focused ahead. I sank into a warm plastic cushion and adjusted my new hat. When I glanced back, I noticed how quickly the pier had shrunk away.
Being on the lake smelled something like I imagined a cloud might smell—the opposite of dusty. The air told my body to fill my lungs, and my body did.
The boat rose and fell, rose and fell. I took off my tank top and let my skin absorb the sun. My eyes closed, but nausea found me instantly, and they sprung open again. As we slowed, I felt my toes uncurl. The breath I’d been holding finally escaped.
When I looked back to shore, I could barely make out the dock. The umbrellas at the campground looked like blue beetle shells dug into the stony sand.
Paolo took his camera case from the cabin and opened it, revealing a cushioned tray of black instruments. “I want to get these trees,” he said, nodding at the shoreline.
I looked over my shoulder. The shoreline was a jagged, sandy line, and the boat was rocking. “The trees? Won’t the boat moving kind of—”
“The light’s just perfect right now.” He knelt to steady himself and adjusted the lens. The camera clicked in his hands; there was no sound in the world like it.
“I was thinking,” he said after a moment, “does being bipolar have anything to do with it? You not swimming?” He always lowered his voice when he said bipolar, like it was a secret.
“Being bipolar just means I get a lot done,” I told him.
“Seriously,” he said. He squinted and scanned the shoreline with the camera once more.
I finished the wine in my cup, then reached to pour myself more. “I’ll tell you a story. The way you say that word bipolar makes me picture my grandmother on my dad’s side, who tried to kill herself just about every summer, usually by throwing herself in the Cumberland River. When I was maybe ten, my grandfather answered a phone call and said, ‘Yes, yes, okay, okay.’ Then he set the receiver down hard and told me Grandma Jane needed our help. He grabbed some frayed rope from his shed and a couple of pastel pool noodles, and we sped in his Buick down to where I could see her wading, waist deep through the current.”
Paolo clicked and adjusted, eyes still on the shoreline. He paused. “I’m still listening,” he assured me.
“He tied a knot around the bumper, then put the rope through his belt loops. He tucked a noodle under each arm and told me that, if they both went under, to shift the car into reverse and step on the gas.”
Paolo shook his head. “You were ten?”
“If that. I could barely see over the dash. Then he strode down the boat ramp into the water, calling her name. When he put his arms around her, she tried to wiggle away. I was positive they would both drown. She beat on his chest and kicked at the air as he carried her to the car, but when she saw me, she stopped like a switch had flipped. My grandmother smiled and kind of shrugged as she wrung out her hair and asked me if I could believe what an ever-loving mess she’d made. Then my grandfather put aside the pool noodles and the rope and told me to not worry about the seat getting wet. Ten minutes later, ice cream was dripping down our hands at Bobby’s Dairy Dip. So, when you ask me about having bipolar disorder, I don’t mean to brush it off, but I’m nothing like she was. I’m just busy. Focused.”
Paolo looked like he was trying to keep his eyes on me, but they kept getting pulled back to the images on his camera. The story was a little more intimate than I guessed he’d expected, and his posture was rigid and upright. “You think that’s why you don’t like the water? Because you couldn’t go in after your grandmother?”
“Yes and no.” If only it were that simple. “Her wading in the river didn’t help, but my fear wasn’t made in one place. I mean, my one swim instructor held my head under water until I started to panic. But I think I was afraid even before then.” My hand dropped onto my chest as I searched for a way to describe the feeling. “When I’m in water, I’m powerless. I feel pulled down.”
Engulfed, I’d almost said. Or immersed, like I’m surrounded by feelings I can’t control.
I realized my pulse was racing. “Let’s talk about something else. You get so serious about stuff like that. I’m fine, and she was fine. She lived to a happy, kooky old age.”
But I’d intentionally left my own terror out of the story—springing off the soft carpet of my grandparents’ house when the call came, seeing the water’s surface as a mirror that reflected a second grandma. The apron tied behind her back carried in the current while her peroxide hair blew around her head like a blonde tornado. When my grandfather extended his hand, she’d cried out in a voice that sounded nothing like her. In the stillness after her shrieking subsided, I’d heard the car engine and the wind rustling the oak branches, maybe a barge horn from somewhere. On the drive home, my grandma sang along with the crackly radio as the sky dimmed to a color for which there was no name.
I touched my chest, my hand cold from holding the cup. “And my bipolar isn’t even that bad,” I assured Paolo.
But it was, really. Even if, most of the time, I’d learned to function well enough. I was that bad—or much worse—in ways I never wanted him to know.
TWO
Paolo looked downward, his expression pensive for a second. Then he stretched his arms over his head and reached for his cup. After a sip, flirtation returned to his eyes. “Want to see how to find the fish?”
He reached inside the camera case and passed me a round piece of plastic the size of a soy sauce dish. “That’s a filter.”
I squeezed it between my thumb and forefinger. “What does it filter out?”
“It makes colors brighter, cuts out haze, things like that. That one’s a polarizer, maybe the most important type. Some stuff you can make look better on the computer, but this one changes what the camera can catch—things you can’t really add or take away.”
I liked it when he sounded like a scientist. “Like the opposite of a flash.”
“Yeah, in a way. It basically eliminates reflected light, which, for your camera, makes blue skies bluer, clouds pop. Look at the water without it and you just see a sheen on the surface, a reflec
tion. But with the filter …” He snapped the filter in place, then pointed to the water and handed the camera to me, watching my expression.
The display was a wide rectangle, big enough for us both. Through it, the water was transparent, like looking into an aquarium.
“Not bad, right? It’s why fishermen wear those polarized sunglasses.”
After a year together, he was still teaching me things. My legs wobbled, but I had to hand it to him, spotting the fish was more exciting than I’d expected. I sat again and pushed up my sunglasses, which kept slipping down my nose.
“That top doesn’t have to stay on.” He raised an eyebrow, no doubt knowing I was one more glass of wine away from really taking it off.
I might have, too, if it hadn’t been for the sound of another boat approaching. The throaty mumble of an old motor, hints of kids’ voices—word fragments and exclamations, the rest of their sentences lost in the breeze. Paolo leered at me comically, then squinted at the oncoming boat, which slowed nearby. I sat up a little.
On the boat was a family—two Midwest-pale parents and three grade-school-aged kids streaked with sunblock, stepping over each other, gently arguing as they came to some decision. The father waved to us. Paolo’s eye roll toward me was almost imperceptible; he was never rude. He leaned toward them.
“Do you like one place better than another for fishing?” the father called.
“Not at this time of day,” Paolo said. “Better around the edges in the morning, but now there’s no difference.”
“First trip to the lake,” the father said, shutting off the engine.
I spoke to the oldest boy, who’d propped up his foot and stood proudly beside his father. “How about you? Enjoying your summer?”
He nodded shyly as his two younger siblings tangled behind him, a sudden squall.
Then the mother shrieked, and kid voices rose in blame.
“You!” one said.
“I didn’t!” the other insisted.
They crowded onto the bow and studied the surface of the water.
“Did something go over?” Paolo called.
“The keys!” the mother hollered, in almost a pantomime of worry, hugging herself. For a second I thought she meant the physical place off the coast of Florida, but she meant the ones that started their boat, of course. The youngest of the kids began laughing.
I glanced at the orange float hooked to our set.
“This’ll be fun.” Paolo slipped off his white polo shirt and dropped it on the seat beside me. He flicked open the console and pulled out a dive mask.
“What’ll be fun?” My voice sounded shrill, even more worried than the mother on the other boat. “What do you mean? What’s going to be fun?”
He spit lightly into the mask and rubbed flecks of his saliva over the plastic surface. He moved eagerly, ready for the challenge. Like me, he could find a thrill. I realized I was gripping the handrail, and that the part of me that had adjusted to being on the water had retreated. I felt helpless again. I couldn’t imagine doing what he was about to. “That’s going to be freezing,” I said.
The mother looked grateful as Paolo slipped his legs over the edge. He shook his head at me. “Don’t worry,” he said, pulling the mask over his eyes, “I can swim better than your lifeguard.”
Then, all at once, he dropped, vanishing beneath the surface.
I reminded myself that I’d probably, hopefully, laugh about this later. I grabbed his camera and stood, pointing the lens at the sphere of his dark hair. The depth seemed unfathomable, like there was no bottom, the rolling waves flexing like muscles.
I tried not to think of the impossibility of what he was doing—looking for a set of keys in a lake so big and deep. But I loved him for trying. Through the camera lens, it was like watching a movie, and I thought back to the stripes of sunlight on the curtains that morning and the warmth of our bodies against each other. On the other boat, the family stared at the water’s surface while the shadow of a cloud passed over. My pulse throbbed in my neck.
A minute passed that felt like ten. Then the kids started shouting, and the father clapped his hands over his head as Paolo’s face appeared beside their bulky engine. When Paolo propped the mask on his forehead and tossed the keys into their boat, my stomach began to unclench. I drained the rest of the wine from my cup.
“Thank you, thank you,” they called, voices overlapping.
He waved to them, then looked at me for some recognition, as if to say, What did I tell you?
Once he was back on our boat, I raised his camera, pressing my elbows into my ribs to steady my hands. He wiped at the water running down his face and at the jagged strands of hair on his forehead.
“I’m going to take your picture,” I told him. “So look triumphant.”
He raised his hands and bowed, like he was accepting the adoration of a crowd, then took a long drink from his stainless water bottle, eyes closed with self-satisfaction in the fading sun.
I closed one eye and captured his image with a click.
An hour later, the sun had nearly set. A pair of birds glided high overhead, black boomerangs across the tincture of yellow.
I poured more wine.
Later, he took a fishing pole and tested the hook against the soft center of his thumb until I thought he might draw blood. He pulled a bait fish from the bucket and pushed the metal through.
I couldn’t not look at the fish’s blank eyes as he did this, and I needed to laugh at the kind of basic horror of it all. “So, the concept here is that we stab hooks through these little fish, and hope that the bigger fish down there will eat them?”
Paolo’s laugh was like music. “Well, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so good, especially for the little fish.” He cast his line and turned his back to the darkening sky. “Actually, for any of the parties involved. The little fish, the bigger fish, or us. But yeah, that’s basically the idea. Those big fish are going to eat something for dinner, and if we didn’t have our cooler with us, we would need to have something for dinner, too. Besides, it’s more fun than you’re making it sound.”
It was the logic my uncles used around the wooden table at my family’s cabin when talking about fishing or hunting. I flipped the switch in my mind that lets me observe what I’m doing from a distance, where my actions are just a machine doing things. That switch let me play half the season my junior year with a torn rotator cuff. “All right,” I agreed. “Let’s do it.”
Paolo’s eyebrows rose playfully. He grinned at my bravado as he took hold of one of the poles. “Okay then, Miss Fisherman, I’m assuming you want me to bait this for you.”
“Nope,” I told him, the word coming out impulsively. “I want to do it.”
Paolo put up his palms and stepped back.
I tried to think of the last time I’d voluntarily done something so disgusting. I couldn’t. I’m a piece of work, I know, and was glad, in that moment, that Paolo seemed to be able to put up with it all.
“Just push it right through the middle. In one side and out the other.”
My shadow darkened the surface of the water in the bucket, and even though I knew it was a little crazy, I was aware that I was about to end a life. The baitfish were silver streaks in different directions, but when I reached my hand in, they scattered as a school.
“Need some help?”
I shook my head, closed my hand around one, but it slipped away. Then I closed my hand around another and pulled it from the water, where it wiggled against my skin, terrified.
Paolo seemed to sense what I was thinking. “Doesn’t hurt,” he assured me. “No nerves.”
He placed the hook between my thumb and forefinger, the fishing line catching the sun like a spider web at dawn. The fish’s tiny mouth opened and closed, urgent and spastic, maybe trying to bite onto my thumb, or anything it could. Then Paolo put his hand on my shoulder and started to say something, and like I was in a dream, I tossed it into the lake. It hit a small wave wit
h the broadside of its body, making a little splash before it disappeared with a grateful wiggle of its silver tail.
“You changed your mind?” Paolo asked. He was squinting, amused.
The capture and killing had suddenly seemed monstrous, but I was reluctant to say so, to make too much of the feeling.
Paolo squeezed my shoulder before withdrawing his hand, laughing gently. “Luckiest day of his life.”
* * *
That night the water turned still. For dinner, we ate soft French bread with a sharp cheese I’d bought that morning, finished the rest of the wine, and opened another bottle. I’d hoped for a full moon, but clouds made the sky dim, distant. The cabin light caught the water a few feet from the boat but lit nothing further. I leaned my back between Paolo’s legs and he put his arms around me, whispering in my ear.
I remember thinking that, when I laughed, the sound vanished the way the cabin light did. Nothing to reflect it back, no echo. The sound just disappeared.
Memory is an interesting thing. It’s woefully inaccurate. People think they capture moments perfectly, but they don’t. Images fade and change over time. When a person remembers something, they remember the last time they remembered it, a copy of a copy. Then the next time is a copy of that. Each time, a little less of the original.
I don’t remember anything more from that night. Everyone asked me later, of course, in one way or another. My mom tried to jog my memory with specific questions, mining for irretrievable details. As if I hadn’t thought of everything possible. As if I hadn’t asked the same questions myself.
As if a small prompt would make me remember.
There was nothing to find.
THREE
Right away I knew I would throw up.
My head rolled into the wooden paneling as the boat rocked. It was hot already, my chest and back dewy. My tank top, which I’d slept in, clung to my back.
