Breathing Underwater

by Sarah Allen

  Ruth’s therapy visits started soon after that.

  If I’m honest, I think those words have set up home deep under the ocean of my consciousness ever since. Ever since, I’ve known I needed to do whatever I could for my sister; to turn my volume down if things were too loud for her.

  I try not to be too happy now.

  It’s quiet in the RV, except for the rumbling of the road. For a long time, Ellie and I stay together, close and silent. Ellie’s eyes are closed again. My brain literally can’t imagine looking around and seeing only pointlessness. There are always too many exciting things possible in a day for it to be pointless. I want to know what to say, how to respond, but I don’t.

  Ruth would know what to say, I think.

  Ruth would understand.

  * * *

  Sometime in the middle of the night I wake up. I blink a few times until I realize there’s blue light coming from somewhere below me.

  Ruth’s awake too, and on her phone.

  Silently as possible, I climb down from my loft. When I sit on the side of her nook, there’s a creaking sound, and she jumps.

  “Oh geez, Olivia, you scared me,” she says. Then she gives a smile. A very tired smile.

  I want so badly to give her that meaningful something from my conversation with Ellie, but that something is deeper than words, and I don’t know how.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  “What else is new,” she says.

  In the light from her phone, I look again at her shelf. The tattoo, the feather, the program, now a ticket stub from the aquarium.

  “Hey, maybe we could add all that stuff to a new treasure box or something when we get to California,” I say. I think again about how, somehow, it’s easier to ask important questions and say impor-tant things in the middle of the night.

  The screen reflects in her eyes. “Maybe,” she says. “I’m still…”

  She hesitates. I wonder how much of my face she can see in the dark. I decide to prompt her forward. “Still…?”

  “I’m still looking,” she says.

  “Still looking?”

  “Yeah. I … I used to like things.”

  Maybe it’s the hope of the treasure we’re heading toward; maybe it’s being around Darcy or talking with Ellie; or maybe I’m just getting a little older, but for the first time, I think I understand what she really means.

  “You’re looking for something that’s like it used to be,” I say.

  She makes a sound that’s not quite a hiccup. She doesn’t say anything in response, and I sit there for a moment until I realize my hand’s on her foot.

  Her voice is soggy with effort when she says, “The feather is really pretty.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The sky swirls gray when I wake up in the morning. No rain yet, but before I’ve been awake for five minutes, I see multiple flashes of lightning far off. Thunder woke me, I realize. For a while I just lie there, watching the gray clouds come in.

  It’s Something Magic day.

  We are on the winding-down days of our trip, or at least the driving part. We have an eight-hour drive to Tucson today, and I text the information for the rattlesnake bridge to Ellie and Eddie.

  I lean over the edge of my loft. “Hey, I just text- ed you guys the link for this rattlesnake bridge in Tucson that I found. Do you think we’ll have time to stop there?”

  “Rattlesnake bridge?” Eddie says, keeping his eyes on the road. “That sounds cool!”

  Ellie checks the link I sent her. “Maybe we can stop there before we check into the hotel,” she says. She glances out the windshield and up at the sky. “Unless the bridge gets hit by lightning before then.”

  Get Ellie and Eddie on board with my Something Magic plan: check. This time things will work. Then tomorrow we’ll drive the last six hours from Tucson to San Diego. San Diego and Sunset Cliffs, where Ruth and I will dig up our Something Gold, our final treasure.

  Plus scuba tours start the day after that. I’m so electric with excitement that I feel like I’m going to be a target for that lightning. I want to pull my camera to me and cuddle it. I can see the underwater picture in my head, the glow of light above the water rippling through the waves to the moss-covered wood of a ship.

  I grin to myself and stretch. Maybe it’s the increasing nearness of Wreck Alley, maybe it’s waking up to a thunderstorm, but my veins are buzzing.

  Ruth is slouched against her pillow, her hood pulled low enough I can barely see her eyes from this angle. I send a thought her way, hoping maybe she’ll catch it and look up and smile, but she doesn’t. The white cords of her earbuds stream from the hood like IVs. Finally she does see me, and when she catches me looking, she turns onto her side, facing the wall.

  We go out for pancakes. Ruth comes to the restaurant with us, but I only see her stab at her food without taking any bites, and mostly she sits there looking like she wishes she hadn’t come. I pour a cup of orange juice and slide it to her.

  “Want to try some of my sausage?” Ellie asks.

  Ruth shakes her head.

  After breakfast Ruth is the first one to climb back into the RV. Ellie steps to the side and takes out her phone, and I stall long enough to hear her.

  “Hey, me again,” she says into the phone. It’s the voice she uses when she’s talking to my mom. “Yeah, she doesn’t seem to be doing much better … No, no, don’t cancel your conference lecture yet, but I’ll text you the website for this clinic in Tucson that Eddie found.”

  I climb back up into the RV.

  Doctors are a good plan. And my plan—my plan is a good one too. It hasn’t really gone like I wanted, that’s true, but maybe from now on it will, and if we can just make it to the treasure, make it to Something Gold, maybe it will be the kind of glittering treasure to lighten wherever the dark corners are in Ruth’s mind.

  Now Ruth’s back on her bed and I’m in my loft and we’ve finally left Fort Stockton. The rain has started. It’s coming in a steady sheet over the windshield.

  My mind is too buzzed and drizzly to focus on reading or taking good pictures. I’ve been attempting to read for almost an hour, but now I lay the book open on my stomach and put my hands under my head. I let my mind wander for a while. It goes to the normal things—treasure, pirates, pictures. Ruth.

  Maybe all these things are bubbling around in my brain like ingredients in a cauldron, coming together into a perfect Something Magic picture.

  Today would be a really good day to find some magic somethings, that’s for sure.

  My legs are jittery. I lie on my back, my knees bouncing off each other until I feel bruised.

  The rain is still pounding, making plinking noises on the roof.

  We’ve been driving for hours. I check on Ruth again. She’s sitting up in bed, earbuds in, a pencil hovering over the notepad in her lap. I see metered lines, scribbles on the page corners.

  She’s writing a song. Her face has a little more color. Maybe she did eat a few bites of pancake? Maybe they’re starting to do some good? The page is not quite half full.

  I climb down from my loft, going to the fridge as an excuse. Maybe she’ll still be up to talking with me, like last night.

  “Working on a song?” I say. I do my best to keep my voice casual, nonchalant. The surest way to shut her up is to make a big deal out of it.

  She nods. I get a plastic spoon and a yogurt and sit at her feet. She doesn’t roll her eyes or tell me to move. The eraser of her pencil rests between her lips and there’s a crease along her forehead. Her eyes are still pained and dark, and this close I can see beads of perspiration along her hairline. There’s something frantic about her scribbling and erasing.

  I want to ask her about Something Magic, but instead I say, “How much does it cost a pirate to get her ears pierced?”

  She lets her pencil drop to her lap and looks at me. “Huh?”

  “A buccaneer,” I say, and my straight face collapses into a grin.
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br />   She gives me a little shove with her foot and now she’s the one trying not to smile. “Weirdo.”

  Ruth puts the pencil tip between her lips again and goes back to glaring at her notebook.

  “What’s your song?” I ask. I’m risking overstaying my welcome, and I’ll leave her alone soon, but I want to take every chance I can get. Her eyes are wide and there are odd blotches of color on her cheeks. I’d be more worried, but she’s sitting up and talking. I don’t know what to think.

  “I need a word,” she says.

  “Starboard.”

  Roll of the eyes, but more friendly this time. “No, I mean like … um, I don’t know. Something about like, how unpredictable life is? Or not quite that. Like, that it’s bigger or different than we think it is? And love is like that too? I don’t know, that doesn’t make sense.”

  I think of my favorite vocabulary word from English class. It’d make a good Treasure Hunt word one day. “Chimerical.”

  She looks up at me. She’s biting her pencil now. She pauses for a moment, and I can practically see the word making its way across her forehead.

  “That means, like, whimsical, right? Or like, unreal?”

  “Yeah. ‘Unrealistic and wildly fanciful.’”

  She hovers her eraser over the page. “Then if I changed you to all…” She erases a few words, writes in something new, adds another sentence at the end. Her lips mouth the words as she reads through it.

  She looks up at me, and the smile on her face is wild, searching, sad.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  * * *

  The Christmas I was six, Ruth and I each got a stuffed animal in our stocking. I got Murphy. His black-and-white face and beady eyes peeked out over the white fur trim of my stocking. I scooped him up first thing. That year I hardly noticed any of my other presents.

  Ruth got a stuffed penguin with a slightly crooked left wing. She named it Yoko. (She was going through a Beatles phase. At age nine.) She also got a DVD with all the Beatles TV specials and Mom made popcorn and we watched them all. Ruth focused on the DVD and tried to act like she was a little too old for stuffed animals, but she brought the penguin to watch the movie with us and slept with it that night. I remember hearing her talk to someone and when I opened the door, she looked embarrassed and tossed Yoko to the foot of her bed. “Knock!” she yelled.

  A few weeks later I stayed home from school with a cold. Mom was sick too. The movie I was watching ended and Mom was sleeping, and I didn’t want to wake her up.

  So I pulled Murphy off my bed and took him on an adventure around the living room couches until I decided he was lonely and needed a friend. I opened the door to Ruth’s room and took Yoko off her bed.

  I took the killer whale and the penguin back to the living room and played Treasure Hunt. I wasn’t so good at coming up with the words myself, so I used singing, a word Ruth had used for one of our recent Treasure Hunts. I played that they were in a band together, a killer-whale-and-penguin duo. I took them all over the house, looking for all the Bluetooth speakers. I took them to the piano, to Mom’s round brush that looked like a microphone, to the mantel in the living room that was the perfect stage. I played until I was too tired to think of any more singing treasure. I took Murphy back to my room and collapsed on my bed for a nap.

  I left Ruth’s stuffed animal in the living room, and Ramses, our dog, got to it. Guess he couldn’t control himself when he saw the perfect chew toy lying unattended in the living room. When Ruth got home from school, her penguin was ripped and shredded across the whole main floor, headless, gutless, every limb torn off except the misaligned left wing. And it was my fault.

  Dad took Ruth to the mall that night and let her pick out whatever animal she wanted, plus a Ringo Starr poster. Ruth came back with a pink elephant that she never slept with, put the poster above her bed, and didn’t talk to me for a week. We didn’t play Treasure Hunt for even longer.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  An announcer on the radio interrupts a foot cream commercial to give a monsoon warning. He says we’re beginning the wet season for the southwestern United States. Which, at the moment, is us.

  We passed through El Paso about half an hour ago, and there are still four more hours until Tucson, but Eddie and Ellie are giving each other worried looks. The rain is coming down so hard that the highest setting on the windshield wipers can hardly keep up with it.

  The water is haunting. Hypnotizing. Magic, even. I sit with my nose inches from the window, looking at the world through a sheet of rain thicker than the glass.

  The trees and leaves, though sparse, are whipping and flapping like those inflatable tube people in front of car dealerships. There are fewer and fewer cars on the road ahead of us, which has turned into a black lake.

  “I don’t know,” Ellie says below me. “I’m getting nervous.”

  “Yeah, me too. How close is the next town?” Eddie asks.

  I peer over the edge, watching them upside down. Ellie pulls out the atlas. She runs her finger along the thick black line she sharpied in before we left.

  “Las Cruces,” she says. She opens the map app on her phone to double-check. “Twelve miles. Can we make it that far?”

  For the next ten miles, it feels as if the motor home itself is holding its breath. I climb down to the couch and watch the rain through the side window and trade anxious glances with Ellie. Eddie seems intently focused and, thankfully, calm, although I have a feeling it’s a very willful calm that will only last until we’re safely parked and he can stop driving. Ruth has her earbuds in and is watching the rain too, but she doesn’t exactly seem scared. She’s watching the storm like it annoys her.

  A tree branch flies across the road in front of us, missing our windshield by just a couple feet. Ellie gasps so loud it’s almost a scream.

  “How much longer?” says Eddie. His teeth are clenched now.

  The wipers are hardly keeping up with the deluge at all anymore, and we’re down to under twenty-five miles an hour. The radio announcer keeps making his monsoon announcement, telling everyone on the road to be careful, and telling everyone else to stay inside. Towns are beginning to lose power. We pass a line of cop cars and a rolled minivan on our left.

  We finally see the Las Cruces exit. Eddie pulls off the freeway and the street goes down through a ravine so filled with water I have doubts about whether the RV can cross it, but we do, and then Eddie points us uphill. I see a flock of crows diving into the swaying branches of a desert willow.

  “Where should we stop?” Ellie asks.

  “I don’t know,” says Eddie. Both of their voices are just a bit loud, as if the storm is inside the RV, and they have to shout to hear each other.

  We pass a gas station and a four-story stucco Holiday Inn. We pass several auto shops. Everything is so flat and treeless, except for a tall and jagged range of mountains to our right. And now it is all filling with water like a swimming pool.

  There’s a Walmart up ahead with a huge parking lot. “Let’s stop there,” Ellie says. “We need to get off the road.”

  Eddie nods. Just a few more yards. We turn into the Walmart parking lot and Eddie stops the RV. As he shifts into park and shuts off the engine, the pounding and swishing sound of the rain gets louder. For a full minute we all wait in silence, listening to the raging outside.

  There are tumbleweeds flinging themselves all across the parking lot. Tumbleweeds are the strangest thing to me, like nature wanted to create herself a toy. Every time a bush lands on the ground, a splash of rain follows it on its bounce.

  Now that we’re off the freeway, we can all breathe a little easier, and maybe even enjoy the crackling storm.

  After a moment Ellie looks back at me. “I’m not sure we’re going to make that snake bridge tonight, Olivia. I’m sorry. We’ll see if we can make it tomorrow.”

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  And it really is okay, because I’ve realized something. We’ve landed in Las Cruces
, the first place where we stopped on our original cross-country trip, the place where Ruth and I did our Something New Treasure Hunt and found those murals. So maybe this is a sign. Maybe this town and this storm are leading me to another Something Magic, even if it’s not the bridge. I look through the sheet of rain washing across the window and wonder if maybe our Something Magic, this time, will be a stormy pirate battle between Anne Bonny and Mary Read and the infamous Davy Jones himself.

  “You guys okay?” Ellie asks. “Anybody hungry?”

  “Did we get batteries for those flashlights?” asks Eddie.

  While they’re talking, I’ve climbed back up into my loft, and lean over the edge in time to see them glance at each other.

  Ellie looks outside at the ground between us and the store.

  “We need food and batteries,” she says.

  The two of them stand and move toward the door. “Okay,” says Eddie. “We’re going to make a run for it. We’ll be back in a bit.”

  As soon as they open the door, the rain and the crashing sound of wind sprays into the RV. They hurry out but have a hard time shutting the door. Finally they get it shut and we watch them splash their way into the store. The setting sun is obscured by swirling black clouds. The sky really does look like it’s sparking with magic.

  A flare of lightning illuminates the mountains, now straight ahead of us. They look more jagged every time I see them, jagged enough to make me think of sharks’ teeth. That’s what they should be called, the Shark Tooth Mountains. I’ll have to look up their real name sometime.

  I turn over onto my stomach, my chin resting in my palms, feet kicking like a metronome. It’s such a perfect storm.

  “Hey, Ruth,” I say. “Know any ghost stories?”

  “Nope,” she says.

  Back to her earbuds and paper.

  “Ooh, do you think I should text Ellie about water? We should get water bottles. Running out of water would be bad.”

  Ruth mumbles something.