Breathing Underwater

by Sarah Allen

  “Yeah, maybe,” she says absently.

  “Your hair looks super cute today,” I say.

  She doesn’t respond.

  I swing my camera bag over my shoulder, slide my shoes on, and we’re out.

  We cross the asphalt jungle, pass all the RVs, and start passing shops and apartments. Ruth keeps walking. I see some fast food places, but Ruth doesn’t stop.

  It takes me one block to realize that Ruth knows where she’s going. Without any discussion, I am following her somewhere. I have no choice because I’m supposed to stick with her. I don’t ask, because I know that she will do what she wants no matter what I say. How nervous do I need to be about this? She keeps an eye on her phone’s map and maintains our forward heading.

  After several more blocks, I finally say, “Want to stop for food somewhere?”

  “Let’s keep going,” she says.

  I follow her farther and farther away from the RV park. I so badly want to ask her where we’re headed, but she’ll just tell me again to keep going. I’m starting to get scared.

  But we’re on a walk, technically. This could be my chance, and I still have my camera. That is something happy that my mind can hold fast to.

  I follow Ruth but keep my eyes open for Something New photo ops. I look down side streets and around corners of buildings, and the search takes some of the edge off my nerves.

  New Orleans doesn’t disappoint. Down the far end of a street to our right I spot a wall with a giant pink NEW ORLEANS sprayed in bubble letters across the bricks.

  Absolutely perfect.

  “Hey,” I say, nodding toward the sign. “Look, let’s go take pictures.”

  My chance for a matching jumping shot, I think. Or at least something close.

  Ruth is looking at the map on her phone.

  “No, we’re going straight,” she says.

  “We can come right back. I just want … that big pink sign over there, see? It’ll be quick, just a few pictures.”

  “No, we’re going this way.”

  “Ruth, come on, it won’t…”

  “No.”

  The intersection is empty, and she crosses the street. Away from the sign.

  I stand there for a second, alone on the curb, while Ruth walks away, a boiling bubble of frustration threatening to pop inside me. I want to scream her name. I want to grab her by the wrist and pull her to the perfect picture. But if I pulled her, she’d pull right back, and only break free of my grip even harder. If I screamed, she would scream right back, or possibly ignore me, and I don’t know which would be worse.

  Do I go to the sign on my own, without her, when she’s the point of the picture in the first place? And if I did, would she just keep walking away?

  What can I do but follow?

  We pass a Walgreens and a bank, then a mattress store and a row of fast food places that all smell like onions. I don’t want Ruth to roll her eyes at me for being dramatic, but I’m starting to get really nervous.

  Maybe it’s good I’m nervous, because otherwise the mad would take over. Those big New Orleans bubble letters could have been my one chance for the perfect Something New picture, and now we’ve missed it. We’ve missed it.

  I find the voice in my head telling me that I’ll have other chances, and it’ll be okay. I try hard to hold to that thought because that’s the one I want to believe, and Ruth will talk to me even less if I get mad at her. I focus on that positive voice, try to put a lid on the anger, and keep walking.

  I see a cemetery ahead of us, and I wonder if that’s where we’re going. For some reason that makes me feel better. Short of the zombie apocalypse, I think cemeteries are pretty safe places to be, especially in the middle of the day. They’re peaceful and full of history and good photo ops. There are trees there too, and benches.

  We stop in front of a white clapboard building with another green awning. The neon sign in the window says INKY GIRL. Ruth swipes out of the map and starts scrolling through something on her phone.

  “No,” I say. “No way. I am not going in there.”

  “So don’t go in,” says Ruth.

  “This is … you can’t do this.”

  “Oh, please,” she says.

  “But … but you’re not eighteen. It’s not legal.”

  She gives me a raised eyebrow and I know she figured her way around that one weeks ago.

  “Mom and Dad are going to kill you.”

  “I’ll survive,” she says. “And if you tell them or Ellie or Eddie, I’m not going to the cave with you.”

  What?

  Not go find our treasure box?

  My hands clench, and my shoulders feel tight with panic. How long has she planned this? I just keep thinking, She can’t do this, she can’t do this. Do I sacrifice our box and call Mom? That would only make Ruth hate me, and besides, what could Mom do? But if I don’t call, that’s only putting off the really difficult, painful conversation that will inevitably happen when they see whatever Ruth is about to do to herself. And what am I supposed to do while she’s in there?

  Ruth’s found whatever she was looking for on her phone, and for a moment I imagine stealing it and running. She looks up at me, hesitating. For a moment I think I see a flash of guilt in her eyes, but she shrugs and says, “I’ll text you when I’m done,” and walks through the glass doors.

  I stand there, blinking, trying to decide what to do. I watch Ruth through the window and glass doors. After a moment at the counter, a girl with tiny pigtails and ink up both arms takes my sister around a wall to where I can’t see her. This isn’t something I want to watch anyway, and I turn around and start walking.

  I feel my breathing quicken, which is not easy when the air you’re breathing is completely saturated with moisture. But I can’t help it, and the hairs on my neck start to bristle. My stupid, ridiculous, stubborn big sister. How could she do this to me?

  I look around. I am alone in New Orleans.

  A quick shot of adrenaline pumps from my sternum to my fingertips, but I try to shake it off. I can handle myself. I’ll be all right. I could ignore what Ruth said and call Ellie and Eddie, but they can’t really get here in time to do anything either. I can be smart and safe on my own. I just have to make it through today, make it through the Treasure Hunt and finding our box, until everything can be happy again.

  A few blocks down the street is the cemetery, and beyond the fence, a stone bench. I will go there and wait, in sight of the road, in sight of the tattoo shop. I won’t do anything stupid. I will be okay.

  I walk a few blocks, trying to stay calm. I take a few steps into the street, crossing toward the cemetery entrance. There is a loud screeching, scraping sound and a wide black truck careens around the corner so fast and so sharp it’s almost on two wheels. The mud-splattered fender avalanches toward me. I can’t scream. I can’t even swallow. The horn honks and it’s so near I can almost feel the sound waves.

  I am going to die.

  Some instinct kicks in and I roll onto the grass on the other side of the street just as the truck screeches past. My left arm scrapes against the gritty sidewalk. I lift my head in time to see the muddy truck tear around another corner. For a few more seconds I can still hear it, and it takes some time to understand that the truck is gone without my body splattered across it like an insect carcass.

  For a second everything comes in gulps—my breath, vision, heartbeat. The injustice of my situation fills me up and threatens to spill out my eyeballs. I’m ditched, alone, in a who-knows-where part of a magical but strange city, and I nearly got turned into truck-paste.

  A new worry pops between my eyeballs like a slung stone. “My camera,” I manage to squeak.

  I look around, and I see the camera bag behind me. I pull the strap toward me, pretty sure that I actually will die if anything is wrong with my camera.

  There’s a small scratch across the front of the case, but the heavy-duty bag did its job. The bag somehow got flung off my shoulder and landed on
the grass and my camera is still flawless.

  I have my camera. I can take my travel photos and Treasure Hunt photos. Something New hasn’t gone quite like I planned so far, but I can figure something out. I have my camera. I will be fine.

  Eventually my breathing begins to calm down. I start to stand up, but my knees are so jittery I sit down again. My arm from my left shoulder down to my elbow is scraped and gritty. I feel the pain beginning to seep in, dull like a slow squeeze, but at the moment it doesn’t hurt too bad.

  Now that my panic and adrenaline levels are starting to normalize, I go over my situation again. My heart is still fluttering, but my thoughts are slowly coming back to me, and I shake my hands at my sides like I can shake my brain back into focus. It also helps hold back the wet heat starting to sting my eyes. If Ruth hadn’t abandoned me, I wouldn’t be sitting here, scraped up, by the side of an unknown road. I slap the concrete under me—how dare she leave me like this—but it only adds a hurt palm to my injuries.

  In and out, I tell my lungs. In and out. I’ve got some scrapes, but I’m not seriously hurt. And Ruth … There are plenty of worse things she could be doing to herself. I sit there for a moment, just breathing, trying to remind myself of that. But Mom … Mom is going to feel hurt like she was the one getting jabbed with needles. It’s the deception and sneaking that’s really going to sting. Even from across the country I know how Mom’s face will look. Dad will have the iron jaw, but Mom will look at her hands like they’ve failed her, like they’ve been bitten. How can Ruth not understand that?

  And I will know even less what to do except watch Ruth more closely and stay right by my mom, trying my best, as always, to keep the upbeat.

  So I pick up my camera and hold it to my chest because that is something I know how to do. I’m right next to the cemetery gates and now that my legs are starting to work again, I stand and walk through into the wet, wet green, and the garden of aboveground vaults of white stone. Many of the graves come higher than my head and I start snapping pictures. Pictures of graves shaped like pyramids, and one covered over with stone-carved angel’s wings.

  Behind the lens I lose my fear and all sense of time. I take a picture of the grave of someone named Ruth Pendergast, who’s got Sassy and classy to the end written across the front of her vault. I think my sister will like that one.

  I keep walking deeper into the cemetery. The part of me wishing my mom and dad were here right now is still pulsing loudly over my whole body. Maybe I can text them. I could find the funniest name here and send it to Dad, and the oldest grave and text a picture to Mom.

  Under one of the trees I find a sleek black crow’s feather. It’s long, all its bristles in perfect shape, and it glints in the sun, even more metallic than Ruth’s hair. With a blue tip it would pretty well match Ruth’s hair, actually. I scoop it up and set it carefully in my camera bag.

  My meandering leads me toward a gigantic knobby oak with long, mossy, bony-looking limbs coming off in all directions. It’s seriously like something out of The Twilight Zone. There is sap oozing through cracks in the bark and I see a trail of ants crawling up through the tree like a maze. The ground has flattened out some, or at least it looks that way, since in this small corner of the cemetery, the graves are underground.

  Through my viewfinder I see, on the other side of the tree, an old lady with white hair in a bun kneeling over one of these underground graves. She’s clucking her tongue and wiping her hand across one of the stones, and her hand comes up wet and muddy. It’s hard to tell from this distance, but I can just make out the layer of water covering the stone and I realize why most of the cemetery is aboveground. I think the water levels in New Or- leans are high enough that it makes digging graves a problem. I think the ground here is just that wet.

  Something about the old woman seems familiar. The angle of her chin, the slope of her forehead or maybe it’s her narrow shoulders that make me think of someone I can’t quite name. I look through my camera again and zoom in on her face. Her look of concentration. That’s when it comes to me. Maybe I’ve got Ruth on the brain (like usual), but it’s my sister the old woman reminds me of, like these are the lines that will be on Ruth’s face when she’s old. Through my lens I watch how carefully she tends the grave, and I wonder whose it is. Her husband’s? Her mother’s?

  Her sister’s?

  I zoom out slightly to catch the woman on her knees, hand across the stone like a benediction, a jagged tree-branch shadow cutting across her face, and I click. Maybe she wouldn’t want me taking pictures. Maybe there are rules about that kind of thing. I don’t know, and in that moment I don’t care.

  “Echoes,” Pink Floyd, 1971.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I photo shoot my way back to the entrance of the cemetery. I exit the cemetery, passing under the stone arch and back onto the street. I’m thinking about later that night when I will download all these pictures onto my laptop and post my favorite of the white-haired lady. Lyrics and captions run through my head.

  A few blocks away I see the green awning of the tattoo shop. It’s a reminder that hits me like ice water.

  “Oh crap.”

  I slip my phone from my back pocket. I have three missed calls and a message. All from Ruth. I hit CALLBACK and start pacing.

  She answers after one ring. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?”

  At least she’s okay.

  “I’m sorry, I was … distracted.”

  How could I have gotten distracted?

  “What if you’d been abducted?” she says.

  “Like by aliens?”

  “Olivia! You know what I mean.”

  In my frustrated distraction I’m about to step onto the street but remember the truck and stop. “Hey,” I say into my phone. “You’re the one who ditched me.”

  “I did not ditch you,” she says. “And I would have at least answered my phone.”

  My breath is coming out in angry spurts. I’m so used to shoving a lid on the angry pot until the boiling stops, anything to avoid spilling over and making Ruth feel any worse. But I want to tell her how unfair she’s being. She did so ditch me. She’s free to go get a tattoo, but I can’t take a walk without her yelling at me?

  “Where are you?” she says.

  Then in the distance, I see Ruth emerge from the tattoo parlor, pacing back and forth with her phone up to her ear. She doesn’t see me.

  “I…” I hesitate. I suddenly don’t want to tell her where I’ve been. Photographing the cemetery feels like mine. Like a Treasure Hunt I came up with all on my own, that I’ll be ready to share only at the right time. Maybe I’ll be ready to tell her more when I give her the crow’s feather later tonight. I step back into the cemetery, behind the arch and gateway. “I’m just a couple blocks away.”

  “Ellie called,” Ruth says. “I told her we’re at the cemetery and they’re coming to pick us up.”

  I sigh. “Fine.”

  “Meet me there right now.”

  “They’re going to be upset,” I say, thinking of whatever she’s just inked on herself.

  “Just freaking get there, okay?”

  “Okay, okay.”

  I hang up. It feels unsatisfying, and for a second I wish I had one of those old flip phones so I could at least have hung up with a snap.

  She was worried about me. She was a brat about it, but at least she was concerned. That’s something. But she shouldn’t be able to talk to me like that, should she? So much of it feels unfair. Anything I might say back would just make things worse.

  A couple of blackbirds land in the tree above my head. I stand at the cemetery entrance, waiting for Ruth.

  * * *

  We all got scuba certified the summer I was ten, right before Mom got offered a job at the University of Tennessee and we learned we were leaving California. Despite weeks of lessons and practice dives in the training pool, we never got the chance to go diving at Wreck Alley before we moved away from the ocean.

&nb
sp; The lessons were toward the end of the school year, right at the beginning of summer. Those weeks were the beginning of Ruth’s really bad days. When I look back, that’s when I think the depression first started showing itself, though she wasn’t officially diagnosed until a short while after our move. That was the summer I first started noticing The Pit.

  Even with everything happening, getting certified was still amazing. And it was something we all did together, Mom, Dad, Ruth, and I. Ruth was thirteen and we hadn’t been playing Treasure Hunt pirates as much lately, maybe because she was focused on friends, maybe because she’d recently started having more bad days, or maybe simply because she was getting older. Whatever it was, I was excited to be back in the water with her, in a sense. Plus, Ruth decided she and I were going to teach ourselves a few extra signs, not just the scuba ones, including memorizing the alphabet in sign language. She’d look up tutorials on YouTube and we’d watch them and practice together. Sometimes in our practice dives in the training pool, I’d sign H-I R-U-T-H while we were underwater, and she’d sign H-I back.

  Our scuba instructor’s name was Anne Reed. If Ruth noticed the piratey name, she didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything to her about it either, because I was trying to learn how to be watchful. I was trying to understand this trench-deep hurt my sister sometimes had and trying to learn what I could do to help. I’d learned at that point that on her bad days, my being overexuberant was not helpful.

  I meandered over to Ruth’s side of the pool, but stayed far enough away that she wouldn’t think I was following her. She’d been distracted and a bit snippy that morning, but she was swimming and participating, so it wasn’t the worst kind of day. She was wearing a white-and-red wet suit. Mine was blue and brown.

  The indoor training pool went down to twenty-five feet. There were steps that went down and down under the water until the last big drop-off. I hooked everything up like I’d been taught, and slipped on my mask and regulator. I waded farther in, trying not to trip over my fins. I hated using them, but I did anyway, because Ruth did.