Left Drowning

by Jessica Park

  Later, in the depths of my sleep, I dream. A new, unfamiliar dream this time.

  I’m on the shore somewhere. It’s a long stretch of pebbly sand, and I curl my toes into the little rocks until it hurts. Until I start to bleed. I look down and wonder why I’m doing this. It occurs to me to look around to see if someone will help me, but the rest of the beach is empty. Miles to the left and right are silent. Still.

  Then I look in front of me. There is a boy standing on a sun-bleached dock. I guess that he’s about … I don’t know. Twelve? I can’t quite tell. He is wearing swim trunks and a sleeveless shirt. Deeply tanned, the wind in his hair. A beautiful child. Then I see that he is skipping stones. The water is rough, so I can’t see if his stones end up skipping. When I try to call to him to ask if he will help me stop digging my feet farther into what are now shards of rock, I can’t make a sound. Nonetheless, he turns to me. As if he hears me despite the silence. The peaceful, content look on his face calms me, and I’m able to take a few steps forward and my pain eases.

  Without warning, fire erupts around him, and the boy is engulfed in leaping flames. I start to choke. I can’t move now; I can only watch and scream. I’m confused because he doesn’t struggle, he doesn’t jump into the water, he doesn’t do anything. I watch as his figure fades and then the fire subsides. The dock is now empty, as though he was never there. As though it never happened.

  But soon I’m smiling, and I throw my head back, laughing. The boy emerges from the water, unscathed by the fire, and climbs back onto the dock. He puts his hands on hips and looks at me, an unmistakably determined expression on his face.

  The boy is a fighter.

  He nods once at me, and I nod back with some sort of understanding that I can’t identify. I have no explanation for the clear connection between us because we are nothing alike.

  He is a fighter. I am not.

  And yet, we are unquestionably linked.

  CHAPTER SIX

  A Long Way to Run

  The workout playlists that other people listen to do not hold a whole lot of appeal, but I continue scrolling through the music app. It seems that the 80s are a great source of adrenaline for many people—alas, the era of neon leg warmers and stretchy terry headbands doesn’t seem to rock my shit.

  After settling on a song collection of remixed Top 40 hits that seems slightly less offensive, I start warming up. My neck cracks as I lean over my outstretched leg. Given that I haven’t done anything yet and my body is already producing audible noises, this is in all likelihood a very stupid idea. I am probably going to pass out about twenty feet from here. But I continue trying to coax my body into awareness by going through the handful of stretches that I can think to do. Because my calves already hurt after a handful of toe lifts, I do not feel confident.

  My goal today is to exercise for forty-five minutes. It just can’t be that hard. People do it all the time. The sun is out, the air is cool and sharp, and it is perfect weather for running. When my earbuds are firmly in, I look at the time. It is 8:17 a.m. At two minutes after nine, this will be over, and I will have accomplished something.

  After only six minutes, I am miserable. Trying to match my pace to the rhythm of the songs has only resulted in a fierce burn ripping through my lungs. Everything about my existence feels uncomfortable. My baggy sweatpants are chafing my thighs and my breasts are jostling uncomfortably since I didn’t think to change out of my regular underwire. Clearly, a good sports bra is going to be in order if I plan on doing this again.

  I slow down to a stride that feels more natural, even though it’s against the beat. The commitment to forty-five minutes has been made, and I am going to honor it, damn it. Even if my outfit sucks and the songs I chose aren’t right.

  Minute eighteen is not good. I am breathing too hard.

  Minute nineteen makes me near suicidal. A sharp cramp stabs continuously on the right side of my waist.

  Minute twenty. I stop and drop my head down while I rest my hands on my legs. My breathing evens out quickly enough, and the cramp dissolves. I stand up and put my hands on my waist, assessing the route in front of me. The grass-lined path ahead will take me to the lake. A good destination? Maybe. But I’m feeling too indecisive to move. It’s then that I realize what’s stopping me in my tracks is not indecision. It’s heartache. It is fucking heartache. Nonsensical, yet distinct. Today, without Chris, it would just feel lonely to see that rocky shore.

  Minute twenty-one. I decide to make a new path of my own. If I am not going to run, I am at least going to walk.

  So I walk hard for the next eight minutes, mapping out a circular route in my head that will loop me back to the dorm. I’m breathing hard and wanting distraction when I remember that exercising is when people like to “think.” I try to relax and see what turns up.

  As my legs churn and my heart thumps, I rack my brain, skimming through my life history. Images flash quickly through my mind. My mother chasing after me as I’m boarding the school bus, laughing and frantically waving my lunch box. My dad prepping me for the SATs by flashing index cards at me over breakfast. God, every memory is so tied to them, and it seems impossible to separate the memories from the grief.

  My thoughts move to Annie, my mom’s best friend, who fought the life insurance company that tried to buy off James and me with a paltry settlement. I have no idea if another lawyer would have brawled the way that Annie did. She made sure my brother’s college education and expenses would be paid for. I told her at the time that I didn’t care what my fortune amounted to. But Annie got us more than enough.

  Annie. Thinking about her is a sore subject for me because it’s just another way that I have failed. She is the one person who I can say unequivocally did not run from James and me when my parents died. Annie is the person who went to O’Hare Airport in a nightgown, flew from Chicago to Boston, and then drove over three hours to find us at the hospital in Maine. Annie is the person who drove James and me back to the house where we grew up in Massachusetts, although with our parents dead, the house no longer felt like home in the least. She made the service arrangements and probably dealt with more horrific details than I care to know. She got me dressed for the funeral, and she forced me to eat and even shower when I couldn’t handle basic life skills. For three weeks she kept James and me functioning in ways that no one else could have. Then we moved in with Lisa, my mother’s sister, and Annie went back to Chicago. After that, I couldn’t tolerate hearing her voice on the phone.

  Everything about her shredded my heart because she reminded me too much of my mother, and she reminded me too much of my mother’s death. I couldn’t handle it. And so I pushed her away, and even a loyalty like hers could only take so many unreturned phone calls and letters. But even while I was cutting her out of our lives, she continued to fight like hell so that we got the best possible financial result. Lisa eventually dropped her as our family attorney, solidifying the end of that tie. Our new attorney is perfectly good, but he’s not Annie.

  I start running again as I shake my head, but last only until I catch sight of my dorm, when I slow to a walk. I tuck my phone into the band of my sweatpants and retie my ponytail. Now that the horrid run is over, I admit that I actually feel good. Although my muscles hurt, and I am overall embarrassingly fatigued, I am alert in a way that I love. In fact, as I near the steps to Reber Hall, I wish that I’d sucked it up and kept going for the full forty-five minutes.

  The door opens before I reach it, and a stocky blond guy in shorts and a fitted shirt holds open the door for me. “Good day for a run, huh?”

  “What?”

  “Couldn’t ask for better weather.” He adjusts the armband that holds his small music player and smiles. “Cool, but not cold. I hate how the cold tightens you up when you run, you know?”

  He thinks that I’m a runner, like he is, and I feel false even as I embrace the lie. “Oh. Yeah, I hate that. It’s really gorgeous out today.” I step through the threshold. “You’ll have
a good run.”

  “Sweet. Catch you later.”

  Armband boy makes his way down the steps while he rolls his shoulders in circles.

  I roll my own shoulders as I make my way up the wide staircase to my floor. Shoulder rolls. I should have thought of doing those before, but at least I’m doing them now. In fact, I’m going to do more than this. I unlock my door, grab a towel from the top shelf of my closet, fold it in half, and set it on the hard floor. I get on my hands and knees and shift my weight forward. Twenty push-ups can’t be that hard. But even modified push-ups (I refuse to think of them as “girl” push-ups) leave my arms shaking by the seventh one. Ten will have to do for today. Now crunches. Twenty to the center, ten to each side. I may barf. I stand for lunges—fifteen forward, fifteen back. They are clumsy, shaky lunges, but they are mine.

  It is a start. More physical activity than I have even considered in a long time. Not that I have ever been much of an athlete at all, but I’ve done a number of classes with my friends at the gym back home. Before. James is the real athlete of the family. Or he used to be. He is obviously never going to forgive me for ruining that, and I can’t blame him. I deserve his hatred.

  Stop, stop, stop, I order myself.

  My e-mail chimes, and I groan as I roll over to check it. I am probably being alerted of an impending disaster that will require the transfer of my bank funds to an exotically named prince. Instead it’s from my aunt Lisa, who James and I have lived with for the past four years. Her place has been our home base because the house we grew up in was too full of painful memories of our parents after they died. When were unwilling to sell it, Lisa rented it out to strangers.

  I skim the e-mail in disbelief; it is cluttered with falsely cheerful exclamation points. I ignore the bullshit pleasantries. The e-mail informs me that since James and I are now both in college, we are technically adults, so we “get to move back” into our parents’ house. Apparently, the renters’ lease is up, and Lisa sees the chance to get us out of her hair; that much is clear by the way her e-mail also explains that she’s shipped all of our things to our old address. The icing on the cake is that she’s going to New Orleans with friends for Thanksgiving and leaving us out of it. So that’s that.

  I want my mother right now. I want her so desperately that I physically ache to have her hold me, and it’s absolutely bullshit that I have no one. In the past, I’d tried to trick myself into thinking that I could connect with Lisa and that she would fill that maternal void. But Lisa never made much of an effort to conceal her lack of interest in housing her niece and nephew. Maybe James and I were too much of a reminder of her sister, or maybe it was just that Lisa is in her early thirties, single, and with no desire to domesticate her independent life.

  Still, our “home” is—or was—Lisa’s house. It’s where both James and I have rooms. Guest rooms. It is by no means a place we love, but it’s what we’ve had.

  My legs burn as I walk out of the room. My aunt is a bitch. I have made so many excuses for her near-total indifference to us, but I refuse to do that anymore. Her grief, her loss, also belongs to James and me.

  I clomp loudly down the dorm stairwell in the midst of a mental tirade. I’m so sick of Lisa and her craptastically awful attitude. Not that I’m one to be complaining about someone’s attitude necessarily, but if my sister had died, I’d be a lot damn nicer to her children. I’d cling to them and smother them with too much love. Instead, Lisa has done the bare minimum. I hit the landing and continue to the basement of the dorm while I fume. It’s not like we’ve been a financial burden to her.

  I enter the lowest floor of the dorm and turn left. If the basement numbers correspond to the ones on my floor, his room is directly below mine a few floors down.

  Selfish. She’s inexcusably selfish. Fuck that. Fuck her.

  Without hesitating, I knock on the door. I need help.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It’s Just Pain

  “Hey, neighbor.” Chris smiles up at me. He’s sitting at his desk with a book in one hand and a pencil in the other.

  “Hi.” Of course, now that I’m here, I feel like an asshole, hit with the clear understanding that my showing up in this frazzled state is totally inappropriate. Yet I do not turn and run. The fact that he is using a pencil distracts me for second, because I find it totally adorable that in this technological age, he is still a pencil kind of a guy. “Sorry, you’re obviously studying. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. It’s just …” I struggle to catch my breath, partially from taking the stairs so fast and partially from my emotion. I put my hands on my hips and look down.

  “What is it?” he asks softly. His voice is calm and patient.

  “I tried to go running, and my playlist sucks, and it didn’t go well. Every song felt wrong and stupid. I felt wrong and stupid. And my aunt is just horrible. And …” I look straight into those intoxicating green eyes. “And why can’t I get over everything? My parents died four years ago, not a month ago, but it infiltrates my entire life. I can’t make it stop. I can’t be happy. I didn’t used to be like this. I used to be vivacious and fun. I used to be me. Your mother died, so you know what it’s like, yet you manage to have a life. I want a life, too. How do you have that? And … and … and my playlist sucks.”

  He waves me into his room. “Sit.” Chris points at the bed, so I sit and watch as he gets up from his desk smoothly, despite the cramped quarters of his single room, and moves his chair so he can face me. “Give me your phone.”

  “What?”

  “Give me your phone. Let’s see this ineffective playlist of yours.”

  “Oh. Okay.” I pass it over. The back of my hand brushes against his as I slide my phone to him. Some people describe certain physical connections as being like electricity. Sparks flying. When Chris and I touch, it’s different. I think of the feel of water. The way it is when you wade into the ocean and a small wave cascades against you, swirling sand over you and awakening every pore.

  Slow motion, I think decidedly. He can make things happen in slow motion. The rest of the room grows blurry while Chris stays sharply in focus, and I watch him silently as he taps the screen. He has beautiful hands. Strong, deft, exacting.

  Suddenly I notice that he’s been talking. “… impossible to run to this shit. You need an entirely different tone.”

  “Hair metal? Oldies? Orchestral?” I suggest with a smile.

  “Funny, funny. You’re trying to run at the same pace as these songs, I bet.”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “You’re competing. Don’t compete. The music has its own pace, and you have to make yours. Be in charge. Find a zone. A holding space.”

  “Holding space?”

  “Give me a few minutes. I’ll show you.” Chris pushes some papers around on his cluttered desk until he finds a set of earphones to put on. He stays fixed on the screen as he starts scrolling through options, only occasionally pausing to look out the small basement-level window behind me.

  I lean back on my hands and wait. Save for the hint of sound that comes from the earphones that Chris has in, it is quiet. He swivels lazily back and forth in the chair, and I like that he is so engaged in whatever music he is listening to because it allows me to look at him closely. To take him in. I try not to squirm. He hasn’t shaved in a few days, and it’s a good look for him. For me. Since he keeps brushing soft waves from his face, he could probably stand to get a haircut, but I like his gently scruffy look. And the way his hair falls against the back of his neck… . God, I find the tanned skin between his shirt and his hair almost intoxicating. What would it be like to have that skin under my lips, to slowly inch my mouth across his shoulders, to touch him lightly with my tongue… .

  I’ve gone insane. At least I am not drooling, though. Or moaning.

  “The music has to be the background, the mood. Once you’re in that safe place, then you run, push your body. You need songs with meaning, and mood, and heart. Not this pop crap.”

&nb
sp; He has brought me back to the real world, and I shake my head. “I don’t know. I don’t like meaning. Or mood or heart.”

  Chris kneels in front of me as he takes one earbud out and moves his hand to my ear. I place my hand under his to adjust the fit in my ear, and he brushes back my hair for me. His hand stays on the side of my head as he tilts my face so that I am looking into his eyes. “You need songs that make you feel. Some make you strong, some make you weak. Some build determination, some tear you apart. But you need all of those.” Music begins to play. Slow music. Soft and rhythmic, layered. “Run through the pain.”

  I shake my head again and look past him. “No.” I want to concentrate on the tan on the back of his neck instead.

  He nods. “Yes. Run through it, feel it, let it happen.”

  “No,” I say more adamantly. “I do that too much already.”

  “I don’t think you do. I think that you dwell on parts of things and then brush them away. Stop fighting it.”

  “How do you know that?” Damn it. I can feel that familiar sting in my eyes again. It’s so easy for my emotions to be played with, flipping erratically from one extreme to the next. Lust, then anger, then pain… . It is never ending.

  And Chris seems to make the extremes much worse. Why can’t I stay away?

  “You scream it in everything you do. You’re holding on to what happened because you think that’s all you have.”

  “It is all I have.”

  “Find more.”

  I shake my head. I don’t know how to do this.

  “Look.” Chris looks around the room as if trying to find a way to convince me. He thinks for a minute. “Your parents died. Your world fell apart.”

  I nod.

  He puts his hand on my cheek. “You were left drowning.”

  I nod again.

  “And you’re struggling to breathe.”

  I am. It’s a constant struggle to stay near the surface. I have just enough air to stop me from totally going under, but not enough to thrive.