How to Breathe Underwater

by Vicky Skinner

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  She glanced at me quickly. “Yeah. I’m not cold. Do you need more blanket?”

  “No, I just meant…”

  She looked at me more fully then, her eyes understanding. “Sweetie, I don’t want you to worry about me. You have a lot to think about, okay?”

  But I wanted to worry about her. My father and I had always worried about each other because we were together so much, but maybe it was my mother I should have been looking out for. She was the one who always got left behind, the figure in the doorway waving good-bye as we sped off someplace.

  “I won’t lie and say it’s been easy,” she finally said. “Nothing makes much sense right now. I don’t know that I…” She trailed off, tucking the blanket around her toes. “I don’t know that I would have been able to do this without the two of you here. I just want you to be happy. You’ve got the team, and Lily has—” She cut off, her eyebrows furrowing. “Lily has school, of course, and this new guy.” I could tell by the downward curve of her mouth that she couldn’t remember his name. “I’m not so sure about him. It’s great that she’s moved on, but I think I just miss Tom.”

  It was the first time I’d heard her mention Tom since the wedding. In fact, we hadn’t discussed the wedding at all.

  “I think she still loves him.” It was much easier to talk about it when I wasn’t talking about it with Lily.

  Her eyes flitted to the closed door. Lily and her date had gone out for “fresh air” half an hour ago. “You think so?”

  I shrugged. “I definitely don’t think she’s done with him yet. And I think maybe he’s not, either.” I didn’t really want to tell her that I’d spoken to Tom. I still wasn’t positive I had done the right thing by butting into their business.

  She eyed me for a long time, and I could see the doubt on her face. “It doesn’t always end like this,” she said. “People don’t always give up on each other. Your grandparents were married for sixty-five years before Grandpa died.”

  “Right.” But when I tried to imagine my grandparents, happily married for as long as I knew them, I imagined instead Michael’s parents, dancing and laughing.

  I turned to face my mom and put my knees up against my chest. “Why do you think it is that some people can be happy even when their lives are falling apart? And some people can’t seem to be happy even if they have everything they thought they wanted?”

  She blinked at me. “That’s a very serious question.”

  Across the hall, Michael was taking care of his extremely sick mother who had been sick for so long, and he still smiled at me. He still wanted to teach me to salsa and had a mural of a beach on his wall and brought me ice cream on the roof. How did he do that? How could he be such a comfort to me when his life was so hard?

  And here I was. I’d been given the chance to start over, to quit the swim team, to get out from under my father’s thumb, and I just felt … numb.

  She pondered for a moment. “Being happy is a choice. It’s not a destination as much as it is a state of mind. No one can be happy all the time, but you can let yourself be happy in certain moments. Hold on to what’s good in your life and try to let go of what’s not. I know it sounds easier than it actually is, but you can always find something to smile about. Even if it’s something small.”

  I had things to smile about. Michael and Patrice and Marisol and Ben had all been so kind to me when they didn’t have to be. I’d lain at the bottom of the pool and watched Michael swim for the first time in his life. I’d watched Harris swim in a way he had never been able to before. He’d worked hard and motivated himself enough to push ahead of everyone else who’d told him he wasn’t good enough, and I’d been happy when he’d crossed the finish line.

  None of these things was perfect, but they were good enough.

  “Do you have things to smile about?” I asked.

  She reached over and pressed her hand to my knee. “I’ve got you.”

  *   *   *

  Mom went to bed, and Lily was still off with the hunk, so I went to my room. I was supposed to read a book for Lit, The Crucible, but my eyes kept drifting closed.

  Then the sound of my door creaking open woke me up. Lily was just a shadow in the room that was only partially lit by my bedside lamp. She was still wearing the clothes she’d worn to class, her pants rustling in the silence as she came in and shut the door. She stopped for a second, and I didn’t think she knew I was still awake. She walked over to my window and put her hand against the glass.

  She turned and saw me watching her, and she came over to get into bed with me. I scooted over to let her in, and she curled her hands up under her chin the way she had when we were kids and we’d shared a bed because she’d been watching scary movies.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” she whispered to me.

  “Me neither,” I whispered back. It was probably the most honest thing I’d said all week.

  “I miss him.”

  I had a lot of things I wanted to say, but I let her fall asleep without saying any of them.

  *   *   *

  When my phone rang loudly on the bed between us, it made us both jerk awake. It was still dark out, and I didn’t know if it was late at night or really early in the morning. My bedside lamp was still shining down on me. Michael’s name flashed across the screen.

  “Who is it?” Lily mumbled, her eyes already halfway closed.

  “No one,” I told her, and put the phone to my ear. I turned over so my back was to her. “Hey,” I said quietly.

  He didn’t say anything at first, and I thought maybe he’d pocket-dialed me. “I really want a cigarette,” he said finally, and I was surprised by how intimate it felt to have his voice in my ear.

  I tucked my arm around myself, like I could hold my emotions inside my skin. “Michael, you’ve been doing so well. Why don’t you have ice cream instead?”

  He chuckled. “Not quite a nicotine kick.”

  “You’re right. Ice cream is way better.”

  After a long silence, he said, “Meet me in the hallway.”

  He hung up before I could answer, and the screen blinked his name at me to let me know the call had been disconnected. I sat up in bed, feeling jittery even through my sleepiness.

  “Where are you going?” Lily asked, her hand coming up to rest on my arm.

  “I’ll be right back. Go back to sleep.” I was glad I’d never changed into pajamas so I didn’t have to worry about Michael seeing me in another pair of superhero boxers. I turned off the lamp and hoped that Lily wouldn’t remember a thing in the morning.

  I walked as silently as I could through the apartment, praying that my mother had been able to sleep and wouldn’t be sitting up in her bed listening for sounds the way I sometimes did when I woke up too early in the morning.

  Out in the hallway, there was a bowl of chocolate-chip ice cream on the floor waiting for me. Michael sat with his legs stretched out and his back against his front door, a bowl in his lap. I sat opposite him, next to my apartment door, my legs straight out beside his.

  “Thanks for distracting me.”

  “Thanks for the ice cream.” I ate a large spoonful. I was taken by how quiet it was in the hallway. It felt like the whole world was in a snow globe, water pressing in on our lives until everything was artificially peaceful.

  “Wasn’t sure what flavor you wanted.”

  “This is great.” Something about the air between us was strange. He didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, but it wasn’t because we didn’t have anything to say. His blue eyes refused to meet mine.

  “Michael.”

  He looked up.

  “Talk to me.” Other than that one conversation in his bedroom, he almost never talked about himself. But I could see the need behind his eyes. I could see the way things were building up inside him.

  He sighed and dropped his spoon into his bowl. He shook his head, as if what he was about to
say was the dumbest thing he could imagine. “I have this fear that in the middle of the night, Mom is just going to stop breathing, and I’ll be sleeping and I won’t have any clue, and she’ll be gone by the time I wake up.”

  I gripped my spoon tightly. “You can’t torture yourself like that.”

  “And yet, I do.” He sent me a weird close-lipped smile. “Tell me I’m not crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy.”

  The corners of his mouth tipped up. “Tell me something you’re afraid of.”

  I let my head fall back against the wall behind me. “Sometimes I’m afraid I’m going to wake up and everything’s going to go back to the way it was, that my father will be waiting outside my room, ready to go on our morning jog.”

  He was already done with his ice cream, and he set the bowl aside. “Was it really that bad?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t really think so at the time. It just felt normal. But when I got here and I realized I didn’t have to do it anymore, it was a relief. Like I could breathe. I miss the pool, but I don’t miss him.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time, but he had that look in his eyes that he got when he was waiting to see what I would do next, like he was trying to figure me out, all the way down to my DNA. “Tell me something good about him. Your favorite thing.”

  I stared at him, watching the way his fingers moved absently over the ridges in his spoon. My own bowl sat half-empty on the floor beside me. I set my head in my hand and watched him, taking in, just for a second, how beautiful he was. “When I was a kid, we would take these road trips every summer out to California and spend, like, two weeks at the beach. And every time we went, Dad and I would be at the beach from sunup to sundown, riding the waves and letting them pull us back to the shore. It was always so much fun, and I just remember loving it because it was the only time he ever really got in the water with me. He was always just a spectator, not a swimmer. It was nice to have him beside me instead of yelling at me from the sidelines.”

  “You’re a beautiful swimmer,” Michael said, his voice transparent, like it wasn’t quite whole.

  “You’re not so bad yourself.” I meant it completely. Michael had learned really quickly for someone who’d only known how to dog-paddle.

  “Tell me something about your mom.”

  His face lost a little of its ease, but he spoke anyway. “She has this obsession with the aquarium downtown. We used to go all the time to visit the fish. She was always so fascinated by this idea that we could be so different from them and that they could breathe underwater, like it was some secret to the beauty of the universe.”

  “What fish is her favorite?”

  This time, he smiled all the way. “Jellyfish. She likes that they light up.” His eyes lost their focus, and I let him wander off without me.

  We were quiet together, and it felt nice to have someone I could just be silent with.

  “You should go back to bed,” he said when my eyes started to fall closed. There was still ice cream melting in my bowl, but I had had a few too many sleepless nights and couldn’t seem to stay awake this time.

  “I don’t want you to smoke.”

  He laughed. “I won’t. Now go get some sleep.”

  I nodded, not really in a position to fight him. He helped me to my feet, and I gave him the white porcelain bowl before opening my front door.

  “Hey, Kate?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  I looked at him standing behind me, bowls stacked and mouth pulled down solemnly. I didn’t say anything else; I just went inside and crawled back in bed beside Lily.

  *   *   *

  Patrice, Marisol, and I spent almost an hour in her parents’ two-car garage, locating boxes of her brother’s old jerseys. At first, I thought for sure that nobody owned enough sports jerseys to make an entire table of elements from, but when we started opening the boxes in the middle of Marisol’s living room, I found that I was wrong.

  Every jersey that I pulled out had the last name of an athlete with their number on the back. The boxes seemed never ending, and when Marisol’s mother came into the living room, her long, dark hair in a low ponytail on the side of her head and a bottle of water in her hand, she just shook her head, sighed, and left the room again.

  “I think your mom needs to let go of her golden boy,” Patrice muttered.

  Marisol scoffed. “Yeah, like that’ll ever happen. Speaking of golden boys, what’s going on with Michael? He went over to your place last night, right?”

  My mind shot to last night, sitting in the hallway with Michael, eating ice cream.

  “Yeah, he came over. It was nice. We had a good time. Watched TV. I don’t know. You know how Michael’s been lately. I feel like he can’t concentrate on anything.”

  It felt like she was talking about some stranger and not Michael, whose eyes were always so focused, so intense.

  I separated jerseys into two piles, one that I could use and one that didn’t have anything that I needed. A printout with the table of elements sat in the middle of our circle.

  Marisol rolled her eyes. “What I really want to know is, has that boy divested you of your virtue yet?”

  I felt sick to my stomach, and I kept my eyes glued to the jersey in my hand, pretending that I was paying attention to it when my hands were frozen. Perhaps I’d just died and this was rigor mortis.

  Patrice smacked Marisol on the shoulder. “Michael has been a perfect gentleman.”

  “Sure, but after four months, even a gentleman tries to get him some.”

  They both giggled, but I couldn’t see what was so funny. I could feel my face getting hot, and tried to remember that Patrice was my friend and not some rival to be jealous of. I decided to start cutting out letters with a pair of sewing scissors we’d found in Marisol’s junk drawer.

  Patrice kept talking. She must not have noticed that I was dying. “To be honest, I’m not really sure what he’s waiting for. I’m sending him all the signals. I’ve been waving him home for almost a month now.”

  As if the hands of fate would prefer I didn’t hear such a scarring conversation, I ripped through a patch of fabric too quickly and cut myself with the scissors.

  “Ouch! Shit! Son of a—!”

  Both the girls gasped and reached out for me, but Patrice got to me first. She stared down at my hand, which was stinging and throbbing at the same time. And bleeding.

  “How deep is it?” Marisol asked as she scrambled up off the floor.

  Patrice examined my hand. “Not too deep. Not stitches deep.”

  “Okay, good,” Marisol said, rushing down the hallway. When she reappeared, she had a first-aid kit with her, and to my relief, Patrice passed me over to her. Marisol used an alcohol swab to clean away the blood, applied Neosporin, and covered it with a bandage.

  The doorbell rang.

  Marisol sent me a devious grin. “I’ll get it.”

  I narrowed my eyes at her and watched her disappear around the corner.

  “Did she invite Roger?” I asked with a laugh, but Patrice just smiled at me as we listened to Marisol open the front door. And then Marisol was back, and Ben was trailing behind her.

  “Hi,” Ben said.

  “Hey.” My stomach rioted with nerves, and it only took one glance in Marisol’s direction to tell me that she had invited Ben over because I was here.

  “I was out for a walk,” Ben said, pushing his hands into his pockets. “I live just down the street. I don’t know if Marisol told you.”

  “Nope.” I sent Marisol a wide-eyed look, but she pretended not to notice.

  “I was just stopping by to see what Marisol was up to, but maybe if you wanted to finish my walk with me?” Ben smiled, and there was so much confidence in it. He knew I knew that this was all a setup, and he was clearly fine with the fact that I knew. And he was certain of success.

  I stumbled over my words. “Actually, we’re kind of working on this project.�
��

  “We can finish without you,” Marisol jumped in quickly.

  “Besides,” Patrice went on, “you’re injured. You should take the rest of the evening off.”

  “Injured?” Ben asked, his smile fading and his eyebrows creasing.

  I lifted the hand with the Band-Aid pasted in the center. “Scissor accident.”

  He made a clucking noise with his tongue. “You shouldn’t be careless with scissors, Kate. Don’t you watch horror movies?”

  “I saw Child’s Play when I was a kid, and that pretty much did it for me.”

  He smiled but didn’t respond to my comment. “Walk with me?” he asked, reminding me that I hadn’t actually given him an answer. A glance at the girls told me they were waiting patiently as well.

  “Sure,” I finally conceded. It wasn’t like it would be difficult to spend time with Ben. I liked him, and he made me laugh.

  “Great.” Ben’s smile got bigger, and he helped me up off the floor and into my coat before leading me out into the night.

  “Have a nice time!” Patrice called from the doorway, looking as excited as if it was her going out with a cute boy.

  Marisol catcalled, and I sent her a horrified look while Ben laughed.

  “You know,” I said when we were out on the sidewalk, “you could have just asked me out. You didn’t have to plan this whole elaborate ‘I was out for a walk’ scheme.” I made quotes with my hand, and he nudged me with his elbow.

  “I know. But Marisol was having fun with it, so I just let her. But I would have asked you out eventually.”

  I smiled up at him, surprised by how comfortable I was with him. It felt like we’d known each other forever.

  He stared down at me while we walked, until we’d reached the end of the street and turned onto another one. “I really like hanging out with you,” he said.