Breathing Underwater

by Sarah Allen

  Whether or not it’s New Treasure time, my mind still settles back to photography. There’s a sunburned man in a Stetson by the beer and a couple of girls with big, curly hair looking through magazines, and sometime I want to try one of those Portraits of Strangers projects I’ve seen. Projects where photographers go around interviewing random strangers, taking incredibly open and precise photos of someone they’ve barely met.

  Ruth isn’t really looking at the food, but wanders around looking at her phone. She stops and eye rolls at it.

  “Friend drama?” I ask, risking the eye roll being redirected at me.

  But Ruth holds up her phone. “Mom,” she says. “She’s already bugging me about making sure I take my meds and putting GIFs like that’s going to make it less annoying. Also she’s terrible at GIFs.”

  Of course Mom’s worried. When Ruth started taking daily medication for her depression, my parents reacted kind of differently. My mom made a spreadsheet and set alarms on her phone and Ruth’s, plus reminders twice a day that said Time to hydrate! Dad made a box shaped like a skull, the top half hinging upward like a doorway to the brain, and a slot inside perfectly shaped for a pill bottle. Mom groaned when he brought it out, but Ruth thought it was hilarious.

  I don’t tell Ruth I watched to make sure she took her pills that morning.

  Not that she’s in the habit of skipping or forgetting, but with a brain or a sister (or a sister’s brain), you can’t be too cautious. Instead I casually show Ruth where the granola bars are. The ones with the cherry filling. She’s always liked cherry. Getting enough food is always a good thing, right? Not that food is something that automatically cures Ruth’s bad days or anything like that, but it helped when Ellie did it. Ruth picks up one of the granola bars and after we pay at the register, she drops it into her purse. I hope she doesn’t forget about it. Ruth losing her appetite is not a good sign.

  * * *

  That night we stop at a Waffle House for dinner. We’re all fans of breakfast dinners, even Ruth. After we eat, Eddie gives me a couple quarters for the machines in the front lobby that spit out stickers or plastic rings or washable tattoos in little plastic carriers. I go for sparkly tattoos, because I’m pretty sure that’s the one Ruth would go for.

  My perfect Instagram shot hasn’t happened today yet either. I try a few shots in the Waffle House parking lot on our way out, but nothing quite works. I don’t get discouraged, though, because the sun is going down and even though night photography is super hard, it can be the coolest stuff when it works out well.

  We park for the night, and I knew my hopes weren’t in vain because across the street is a streetlamp and a giant oak tree.

  Perfect.

  Being out there alone with my camera and the nighttime breeze is my happy place. Happy in the peaceful sense. Happy in the sense that my head can finally stop buzzing about like a hyped-up bee.

  I close my eyes for a few moments before I start shooting photos. It smells like cut grass and tar out here by the road. Sometimes I feel like smells can be important for getting my mind in the right place for a good picture.

  I get a very atmospheric light-through-the-branches-type shot that will work just fine for a travel photo. I tend to go for the closer-up macro shots rather than the sweeping landscapes. That’s becoming part of my signature style. The aesthetic I’m developing on this trip.

  The screen door of the RV claps shut from behind me.

  “There you are,” Eddie says. “Everything okay?”

  “Oh yeah, just getting a picture of the tree.”

  “Ooh,” he says, grinning. “Can I see?”

  I flip on the display screen and angle it toward him. He leans in, squinting.

  “Wow, wow, wow.” He puts his hands on his waist. “You have some serious talent. This is what you post on your Instagram?”

  I nod.

  “Wow,” he says again. “This may be the thing that finally convinces me to sign up for social media. You’ve gotta show Ellie.”

  We climb up into the RV. Ellie and Ruth are both in PJs, flossing and brushing their teeth at the sink.

  “Hey, El, look at the picture Olivia took.”

  My face is in danger of heating to a blush, and though I’m not really sure how to handle the attention, my skin buzzes with shy satisfaction as I turn my little camera screen toward Ellie. She stops flossing and leans in.

  “Whoa,” she says. “I love the angle here—that’s so cool! And the contrast … you’re really good at this, Olivia. You should show us all the best pictures as we go … ooh, maybe at the end you could do some kind of, like, road-trip-recap slideshow too!”

  “Definitely,” Eddie says.

  My laugh is awkward, but real. “Sure,” I say.

  Ruth’s still brushing her teeth at the sink, looking in the mirror. Ellie heads to the back room, and Eddie steps up to the front of the RV to get his phone.

  I pull the tattoo out of my pocket. It’s a glittery silver-and-blue manta ray. I hold it out to Ruth, who spits toothpaste into the sink and looks over at me.

  “I thought this was cool. I mean, I thought it was sort of you.”

  She tilts her head to look at it. “Cool. Thanks,” she says, then scoops a drink of water in her hands. After she’s rinsed and dried, she takes the tattoo square and sets it on her shelf.

  I use the tiny bathroom to change into pajamas. Before I climb up into my loft, Eddie walks by and nudges me with his elbow.

  “I think I’ve figured out what your superpower is,” he says.

  “My superpower?”

  “Yeah, everyone has one. Yours is finding pretty things to show other people. To try to make them happy.”

  Red lights of an ambulance rush by. “Ha, that’s not a superpower,” I say. “I wish it was.”

  “Believe me, it is,” Eddie says. “Not everybody thinks that way, and you’re really good at it.”

  If I was really good at making people happy, I think, then the people around me wouldn’t be sad. But I tell Eddie thanks.

  In my loft I upload the day’s pictures onto my laptop. I sit cross-legged and spend a long time scrolling through the small moments of the day. Blurry trees, an aerial shot of Ruth with her earbuds in and eyes shut. (Not a New Treasure shot, but still a pretty good one.) That’s what pictures are. Like a diary times three thousand.

  The RV is dark except for the light from my computer. One of Ruth’s legs is dangling off the side of her bed and her black-and-blue hair is mussed in every direction. A snore gets caught in her throat and she moans and rolls over. She looks so peaceful when she’s asleep.

  I get pretty in-the-zone when I’m going through pictures, especially now that I’m picking the very best ones to post. So it startles me a little when my phone buzzes.

  Ruth: You okay?

  I look down to her alcove and in the blue glow of her phone screen, I can see her looking at me. I must have woken her up. She looks back at her phone.

  Me: Yeah, just looking at pics.

  Ruth: Weirdo.

  Then she sends a blurry, low-light photo of herself. The camera is just under her face and she’s pressed her neck backward so it looks like she’s got five chins. Her nostrils are flared and her teeth are settled on her upper lip in a ridiculous overbite.

  I have to slap my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing and waking everyone else up. I don’t care if Ruth gets mad at me tomorrow. That blurry picture will be a happy thought for a long time. It’s the healthy, vivacious, laughing, pirate-ship, Treasure-Hunt-creating version of Ruth.

  Me: Your new profile pic.

  Ruth: Get some sleep, you dork.

  Me:

  Before I shut down my laptop, I e-mail Ruth’s selfie to myself. I download it and save it on my desktop in a new folder I name “Sisters.” It’s not a picture for my secret Treasure Hunt, but it’s still a good one. Definitely a good one.

  Then I close my laptop and put it in my bag. I find Murphy and lie down, pressing my f
orehead against the window. I scroll through the photos I’ve just uploaded to the cloud and find my favorite of the tree-streetlight shots.

  One of the most boring parts about travel accounts, I’ve realized, is the captions. They’re all so Here we are at this gorgeous place blah blah blah. I want to do something unique with my captions, give my photographs epic titles. I just haven’t found the right idea. I look back down at Ruth and then it hits me. I know exactly what my caption strategy is going to be.

  It won’t even be hard. I already know all of Ruth’s favorite songs.

  And I remember a lot from our playlists.

  In the caption space, I write: “Moonage Daydream,” David Bowie, 1972.

  Shared.

  I don’t even know if Ruth will see it. Maybe she’ll think it’s dumb. But I can’t think of any other way to tell her what I want to say, to express it accurately. To tell her what I see. I don’t know how to tell her that when I look back, I measure my life in Treasure Hunts.

  So I’ll do what I can to show her. Show her in pictures.

  As I finally start drifting off, I imagine being the youngest photographer National Geographic has ever hired. I imagine professional travel photographers liking my work. I imagine them sending me a DM saying something like, Hey, your work is great! or Hey, you’ve got a good eye! or Hey, you want to come photograph penguins in Antarctica with me? And then being shocked when they realize I’m only thirteen.

  I think about the Something New photo from last time, the one where Ruth’s jumping high in the air under the sign, and I imagine how easy it’s going to be to find something similar in New Or- leans.

  I imagine taking a picture that makes Ruth smile.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Our Something Gold picture from last time—the one Mom took of Ruth and me holding our boxes, standing in front of our glowing new house—isn’t quite the last Treasure Hunt photo I have. There’s one more, from our last Treasure Hunt that we did only a few months after we moved. On my birthday.

  We moved in the summer, and then in November I turned eleven. Ruth and I had only been in our new schools a few months. I was much too nervous to have a party that involved inviting kids in my class who I didn’t know that well. So it was just the four of us: Mom, Dad, Ruth, and me.

  The night before my birthday, Mom had tucked me in and told me she was sorry I wasn’t going to be able to have a party with all my friends from back home, and I could tell she was worried. She didn’t need to be though, because that zoo trip we did the next day became one of my favorite birthdays ever.

  Ruth seemed tired, but when we walked through the gates, she grinned at me and said, “Geometric!” She pulled out her small flip notebook. I already had my camera.

  At the zoo that day, sometimes we ran from exhibit to exhibit, and sometimes we sat for a long time and watched. Especially the gorillas. There was a new baby gorilla, and we watched it roll around and pull its mother’s arm and chuck straw in her face.

  I got a great shot of the shapes on a giraffe’s neck. I took pictures of fish scales and polar bear noses and even the perfectly circular sewer cover. My best shot from that day, from that Geometric Treasure Hunt, was a close-up of the diamond-shaped scales on the crocodile’s shoulder. Ruth jotted down song ideas and lyrics in her notebook. Sometimes her eyes got a little glazed and I had to remind her to keep going, but she didn’t complain or grumble or snap at me or anything.

  She didn’t even get upset when, that night, I chose Boggle for our game. Ruth and I had already gone through my pictures and listened to her short “Geometric Treasure” playlist (with epic songs like “Turning Circles” by Judas Priest), and then we all sat up to the table. Mom had made a German chocolate cake, and we laid it in the middle of the table while we played and ate straight from the pan.

  Halfway through round number five, I realized Ruth had put her pencil down and she was staring blankly at her paper. Mom noticed too.

  “Hon?” she asked, so softly I barely heard. “If you want to go lie down, that’s okay.”

  The words seemed to take a moment to get through Ruth’s haze, but when they did, she blinked and shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I can…”

  She picked up her pencil, but her grip was so weak it dropped to the floor. She didn’t even have the energy to bend down and pick it back up.

  The sand in the Boggle timer ran down.

  I put my pencil down too. “I know! Let’s go watch Edward Scissorhands!”

  Dad cleaned up the game and Mom got the movie set up. Ruth and I flopped next to each other on the couch. She’d been having some trouble sleeping, and I had a faint hope that she would doze off during the movie and get some rest, but my guess was that she probably wouldn’t. She would stare at the screen the whole movie, like usual, so wide-eyed I wouldn’t know if she was seeing every tiny thing that happened or seeing nothing at all.

  I’d noticed Ruth’s bad days for a while, even for a short time before the move. I’d started trying to learn the signs. But that was the first day I saw the real battle with herself deep in her eyes, in her shoulders and hands. That was the first night I saw how desperately hard she was trying.

  I can’t know what kind of effort it took, but as the movie started, Ruth nudged my side with her elbow. “Happy birthday, punk.”

  * * *

  The RV smells of oranges when I wake up, and I can feel the rumble of the road underneath me. Through shut eyelids I register the brightness and I can hear the murmur of Ellie and Eddie’s quiet conversation. There is a line of sweat along my sternum where I’ve clutched my stuffed killer whale all night.

  A Journey song comes on the radio, so soft I can barely hear it, but I lie and listen and let myself keep my eyelids shut. I once heard a professional photographer on YouTube say that she spends some time every day with her eyes closed so she can keep her mental lens fresh. So I do that too.

  And then I’m ready to find the perfect picture.

  I roll away from the window and look out from my loft. Ruth is in her bed, with her iPod and a magazine.

  We’re going to be getting to New Orleans later today.

  Something New, here we come.

  Last time, our Something New day was in Las Cruces, New Mexico. We found murals that had recently been put up at Lions Park, with a big banner across the top that said, NEW INSTALLATION SPONSORED BY LAS CRUCES PARKS AND RECREATION. I pointed to the sign and said, “New! That’s perfect!” Then I took pictures of Ruth jumping as high as she could right under the big green letters of NEW, her arms flung up high in the air. Throughout our day at the park, Ruth jotted down song ideas and built up a “Something New” playlist. That night we huddled on her motel room bed and listened to the songs—songs like “Brand New Key” and “New World Man”—and I showed her all my pictures, especially the jumping shots.

  Later on, I printed out the best one. I wonder if she knows I still have it.

  I don’t think it’s going to be hard at all to find cool new street art of some kind in New Orleans. Plus New is right in the city’s name, so it probably won’t even be hard to find somewhere for another jump shot of Ruth right under the word, just like before.

  I roll onto my side and the loft creaks and Ellie looks up at me. “You awake, Olivia?” she says. She leans back and smiles. “How’d you sleep?”

  “Great!”

  “We got more oranges and yogurt,” she says.

  “Sweet!” I say. I hop onto the back of the couch and down onto the floor. Eddie turns the radio louder and I hum along.

  I look up and realize Ruth has been watching me. “Great,” she says. “Miss Perky’s up.” She rolls her eyes and goes back to her magazine. Oops. But Ruth’s late-night obnoxious selfie is enough to keep me going all morning. Even if she’s snippy now, that picture has to mean she’s at least sort of okay. That the worst stuff isn’t happening again. I’ll keep on keeping tabs, of course.

  Curled up on the little couch, I eat a quick breakfast,
toss my yogurt carton away, then look out the window at the glorious day. The brush is thick on either side of us, but the land is flat and the sky is open and bright and cloudless. I watch out the window for a while, looking for picture inspiration, then climb back into my loft.

  My phone battery is getting low. It’s time for my turn with the car charger again. But I have a text from Mom that says Call me.

  “It came,” says Mom immediately.

  “Oh, good!” It is a photography book I ordered that didn’t come in time, a book with tips from real National Geographic photographers. “So you’ll bring it to San Diego?”

  “Yes! How’s everything going so far? You guys okay?”

  “We’re all doing great. We’re past Tuscaloosa now.”

  “Oh wow! And you guys slept in the RV last night?”

  “Yep. It was cool. I miss you, though,” I say.

  “Oh, Olivia, I wish I could be there.” She clears her throat, and I know what she’s going to ask next. “How’s Ruth?”

  I knew she was going to ask that, and for maybe the first time I wonder about why. There are tiny questions beginning to whisper from opposite corners of my mind. Mom asks me how Ruth is doing because she knows I can handle the responsibility, right? That she can rely on me to keep the upbeat going. And that feels good, and feels like me. I want to be that person. But if that’s a real, honest answer, then why do I also feel like I could truthfully say that I’m worried? How heavy a load on her shoulders would it be if I told her both answers? What would she do if I said I wanted her to know that yes, I, Olivia, am a happy person, but also, very frequently, anxious?

  I glance down at Ruth. She’s not curled into a ball. That’s something. The tattoo square is still on her shelf, peeking out from under her notebook.