Swim Back to Me

by Ann Packer

  He stopped in front of Sasha and held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Cal. What’s your name?”

  She took his hand. “Sasha.”

  “That’s really beautiful. Beautiful name for a beautiful girl.”

  She smiled. She seemed about to speak but didn’t, which surprised me; she was not usually quiet or shy.

  “I’ll sponsor you,” he said. “What do I have to do?”

  She gave him her clipboard and showed him where to write his name and address, then the amount he was pledging. She said nothing about splitting the pledge between us, and I figured that with her trip to Redwood City it was too late, anyway.

  “Thirty cents, that it?” Cal finished writing and handed the clipboard back to her. He asked my name, and when I told him he said, “Well, Sasha and Richard, you’re welcome to join us for a smoke.”

  I’d been around pot before, had smelled it, had even seen a joint in an ashtray at a party my father had taken me to. But I’d never smoked it. Sasha hadn’t either, but she was on record with me as ready to try.

  “Want to?” she asked me, that same bright smile on her face.

  I thought of my father, his lecture notes spread out on the dining room table. After dinner he’d produced a small box of See’s Candies and told me we’d crack it open when I got home from the Walk tomorrow night. “Hand packed,” he’d said. “Heavy on the chocolate butters.”

  “I should go,” I told Sasha. She didn’t reply, and I said it again. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said at last, and she flicked a glance at me before turning back to Cal.

  “OK,” she said, and I didn’t know if she was talking to me or him.

  The next morning, Dan drove us to the starting point of the Walk, the playground of a Palo Alto elementary school. In the car I cast glances at Sasha, raised my eyebrows to show I was curious about the rest of her night, but she was slumped in her seat, her knees up in front of her, preoccupied. In the front, Dan talked idly to Peter, who’d come along for the ride.

  “Isn’t that funny, Richard Appleby?” Dan said over his shoulder to me.

  I’d been staring out the window, thinking I’d been chicken to leave SCRA. “What?”

  Dan maneuvered the rearview mirror until he caught my eye in it. “I said, isn’t it funny how Sasha, the queen of the Walk for Mankind, had to be reminded this morning why she needed to get up?”

  I looked at Sasha.

  “You’ll like this,” he went on. “I said to her, ‘It’s the Walk,’ and she said, ‘What walk?’ ” Dan laughed a short, mystified laugh, then turned around and looked right at me. “Funny, you have to admit.”

  I shrugged.

  He faced forward but caught my eye in the rearview again, and I saw that he was genuinely puzzled.

  “I was tired was all,” Sasha said. “I reread To the Lighthouse last night.”

  Dan chuckled. “ ‘And he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not.’ Well, you missed a great dinner—right, Peter? The Cohens served cracked crab and asparagus and this incredible ice cream laced with Kahlúa. We all kept saying, ‘Too bad Sasha and Richard Appleby didn’t come,’ but we knew you were busy working for mankind.”

  Sasha slumped lower, and I looked out the window again, relieved when Dan let it drop.

  We had to wait in line to register, and then Dan and Peter stood at the starting point and saw us off as if we were embarking on an ocean liner, Dan waving a white handkerchief back and forth over his head, Peter humming on a kazoo, a tune I recognized after a moment as “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music.

  Sasha muttered something under her breath as we headed away from them.

  “What?”

  “I said, I wish Daddy would do something in a normal way for a change. And Peter’s shirt was really nerdy.”

  I tried to remember Peter’s shirt: striped, like most of mine. I turned and looked at her. Her hair was up in a bun, held in place by a leather hair thing she’d made in art class. Usually she anchored it with a little wooden stick, but today she’d used a gnarly pencil, tooth marks up and down its yellow sides, the segment of metal at the end bitten closed. Her face was pale, the blue of her eyes grayer than usual, doused somehow.

  I said, “What time’d you get home last night?” I had turned as I left the SCRA parking lot and seen that the guys had made space for her against the bike rack, and that she was leaning back, Cal on one side of her and Eric Rumsen on the other.

  “Ten-thirty.”

  In my hearing, her parents had said they wouldn’t be back until eleven, and I took some comfort in the fact that she’d gotten herself home with time to spare. “So what happened? Did you smoke?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you get high?”

  She held her hand out, palm parallel to the ground, and tipped it back and forth. “Next time I probably will more.”

  “Next time?”

  “Come on, Richard—we’re not just going to let the parade go by, are we?”

  I shrugged, but I was relieved she’d used the word “we.” I decided then and there: next time for sure. “Did you cough?” I asked, and she gave me an embarrassed grin.

  “I couldn’t help it.”

  Soon we were walking through a part of Palo Alto I didn’t know very well, full of large old houses and great, leafy shade trees. Palo Alto was our marketplace, our office building—it was where we shopped, went out for pizza, took karate, and saw doctors and dentists—but until Malcolm and Bob I’d never had a friend who lived there, never had a friend whose father wasn’t connected to Stanford.

  There was a check-in station every mile, where refreshments and first aid were available, and where you had to get your sheet stamped to prove you’d been there. By the third station I was hot and tired, and my water bottle was heavy. I said, “Want to stop for a few minutes?” There was a bench under some trees and near that a lemonade stand.

  “Why?” she said.

  “To rest.”

  “Let’s rest after five miles, then we’ll be a quarter of the way done.”

  We rested after Mile Five and then again after Mile Eight, sitting side by side on a curb and drinking our warm water. I had a piece of beef jerky each time, just because I could, but Sasha only picked raisins from her gorp, ate three or four, and put the bag away.

  The other walkers near us were mostly adults, balding guys with beards, fattish women with tie-dyed T-shirts and hairy legs. Occasionally we’d come upon a group of kids our age and we’d talk to them for a while. At Mile Ten a bunch of high school kids were standing around the check-in station drinking Gatorade, and without talking about it Sasha and I arranged ourselves close enough to them that we could eavesdrop on their conversation. A girl was telling a long story about someone named Cappy, and for the entire time she was talking I tried and failed to figure out if Cappy was an adult or a kid. Then another girl said that someone named Paul was being a real asshole, and a short guy with a big nose said, “That’s ’cause he’s not balling Kathy anymore.”

  “Ready?” Sasha said, and though I wanted to hear more I said yes.

  “Hang on one sec,” she said, and she moved to a low stone wall, sat down, and took off her shoe. “Ewww,” she cried. There was a blister the size of a pea on the end of her toe. “Shit, now what am I going to do? I have to pop it. You have to pop it for me. Get a rock or something.”

  “I’m not going to bang your toe with a rock!”

  “You’re so scared of everything.”

  I turned and walked away from her. One of the high school girls wore a purple tank top with no bra, and I let myself stare at her breasts for a moment, almost wishing I’d get hard. Malcolm and Bob had boners all the time and laughed at each other for holding their binders over their crotches and wearing loose, untucked shirts. I had hard-ons in my sleep and frequently woke with one, but that was about it. I’d never even had a wet dream.

  The girl caught me staring, and I looked away and th
en went back to Sasha. Over at the check-in station, two adults sat behind a folding table, and I said, “I’ll go ask them what to do.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “They might make me stop. You saw that man.”

  A few stations back we’d seen an older man on a stretcher, his face bright red: a little later we passed someone who told us that the check-in woman had taken one look at him and made him lie down.

  “It’s a blister,” I said. I remembered having one when I was seven or eight, and how my mother had pierced it with a needle and drained it. “If you want to pop it, you need a sterilized needle.”

  She pulled her sock back on, then her shoe.

  “You’re just going to walk with it?”

  “We’ll ask in there.”

  “Where?”

  She angled her head across the street, at a little white cottage set back in a weedy yard.

  “You can’t just go up to someone’s house.”

  She set off, and I followed, across the street and up the steps to a small porch. A tall, skinny guy answered her knock; he had light brown hair and weirdly pale blue eyes. He looked about the same age as my father’s graduate students, maybe late twenties.

  “Excuse me,” Sasha said. “We’re doing the Walk for Mankind, and I have a blister I need to pop. Do you have a needle and a pack of matches?”

  The guy frowned. “A what?”

  “A needle and a pack of matches. I have to sterilize the needle or I might get an infection.”

  He had a long neck—very long, and thin. Also long arms, long legs—he looked like what a stick figure would look like if a stick figure were an actual person, except his face was long, not round.

  “I’ve got matches,” he said. “I guess I can look for a needle.” He stood there for another moment and then headed inside, leaving the door open and heading down a hallway. I saw a dark living room with a sagging couch, a fireplace containing a single charred log.

  “Come on,” Sasha said, stepping up into the house.

  “What are you doing? Stop.”

  She kept going, crossing the room and looking at something on the mantel before moving to the TV and lifting a framed picture from its surface.

  I stepped over the threshold. In addition to the couch there were two huge, disheveled armchairs and several small tables, all piled high with books. I wondered if he might be a graduate student—or an assistant professor, for that matter. My father had chaired the History Department hiring committee the previous year, and he said the candidates were getting so young the University was going to have to start requiring the daily wearing of academic regalia, just so everyone would know who was who.

  The guy came back in, the top of his head just missing the doorframe. He saw me first. “Whoa. Did I say to come in?”

  I looked at Sasha, and his eyes followed mine, in time to see her put the picture back on the TV.

  “Whoa,” he said again. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

  “Sorry,” she said, smiling a big, bright smile like the one she’d given the guys at SCRA. “You seemed cool—I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  He half laughed, half snorted. “Cool? How old are you two, anyway?”

  “Fourteen,” she said. “Well, I am. His birthday’s not till July.”

  “Man,” the guy said—but he went into the kitchen and began rummaging in a drawer, and after a moment we followed, Sasha going in after him while I stopped in the doorway.

  He found matches and gave them to her, then rummaged some more and found a needle. She held them both in one hand while with the other she reached down to pull off her shoe and sock.

  “You can sit down,” he said.

  She sat at his table. I thought of going to help her—offering to hold the needle while she lit the match or something—but I just stood there. When it came time for her to pierce the blister I looked away. There was a red Stanford banner hanging on one wall, and I wondered if he’d done his undergraduate work at Stanford, too.

  Sasha stood. She unpinned her hair and then redid it, catching the damp strands that had come loose and working to jam the mangled pencil back through the holes in the leather thing.

  “OK?” the guy said.

  “Um,” she said, smiling brightly again. “Could I use your phone?”

  He smiled, too, but not in a friendly way. “You want to use the phone,” he said, making it a statement rather than a question.

  “My parents said I had to call in the middle. They’re really overprotective—they almost didn’t let me do this. Their parents were overprotective. I’ll probably grow up to be overprotective myself.”

  “Or you could break the mold and surprise everyone.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, and then he swept his arm to the side, indicating a wall-mounted telephone.

  “Richard,” she said, barely glancing in my direction, “you might as well wait outside.”

  I turned and left, walking through the dark living room and out the door. She was in a weird mood, and I almost wished we were walking with some other kids. It was strange Dan and Joanie had told her to call, but so what if they had? That didn’t make them overprotective. I thought of how she’d complained about Dan’s waving us off at the starting point. She had no idea how lucky she was.

  The tall guy came out of the house and stood near me, his arms dangling by his sides. I had my gorp open, and I offered him the bag. To my surprise, he reached in and scooped up a handful.

  “Thanks, I like the raisins.”

  “So does Sasha,” I said. “My friend. Whenever we stop she just picks out the raisins.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’ll bet she does.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing. So how long is this thing, anyway?”

  “Twenty miles,” I said. “We’re halfway done.”

  He looked across the street. A woman with big sunglasses seemed to be arguing with the volunteer at the check-in station. He said, “If I was going to walk twenty miles it sure wouldn’t be around Palo Alto.”

  “But it’s in Palo Alto.”

  “I mean I’d want to get something for my efforts. Some payoff.”

  “We are. A thousand dollars.”

  “You aren’t,” he said, and then he really looked at me and smiled. “Unless you two are out to defraud some folks. Are you out to defraud people?”

  I shook my head.

  “You’re sure?” he said. “May I see some ID, please?”

  I giggled, then coughed to cover the girlish sound. “It was Sasha’s idea,” I said. “I just came along for the ride. I’m not much of a do-gooder.”

  “Do-gooders do good for themselves,” he said, “not for the people they’re helping. Did you know that?”

  “How cynical.”

  He grinned, revealing big, square teeth. “How about a couple more raisins?”

  I handed him the bag and he dumped some more gorp into his palm. He said, “It’s none of my business, but do you always do what Sasha wants?”

  This annoyed me, and I was about to tell him how wrong he was when the door swung open and she appeared.

  “OK,” she said as she came down the steps, “let’s get going.”

  The guy put his hands on his hips and stared at her. “You get both birds?”

  She looked up at him. “What?”

  “With one stone. Wasn’t that the whole idea of this stop? Kill two birds with one stone?”

  She stood still, on the verge of saying something. I was sure it would be something sarcastic or rude, and I felt nervous. Then whatever it was disappeared and she looked at me. “Ready?”

  I nodded.

  She adjusted her backpack, then looked up at the guy one last time. “Thanks again, by the way.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said evenly. “By the way.”

  The last two miles were death. We’d thrown away our water bottles—too heavy—and we were hot and thirsty and incredibly tired
, each step a trudge, each curb a mountain to descend with another opposite to scale. My whole body was made of sand, a vast desert that could be moved only by time. Sasha’s face was the color of a faded bloodstain, her hair almost black with sweat.

  “A thousand dollars,” she said when we’d entered the last mile, and the two of us began chanting it, “A thousand dollars, a thousand dollars,” over and over again. I tried to think of something I’d buy if I were getting the money, but all I could come up with was grass, I wanted to buy a field of grass to lie on.

  The last check-in station was on campus, in front of the Hoover Tower. There were banners congratulating us, tables with free food and drinks, a group of elementary school kids with a row of basins that people were lining up to bathe their feet in. We surrendered our sheets to be stamped one last time, and then we lay down under the closest tree and didn’t speak for at least ten minutes.

  “I can’t believe we said we’d walk home,” I said at last, and she laughed.

  “Yeah, that was brilliant.”

  It was almost six, and I pictured my father in the kitchen, starting work on one of the rudimentary weekend dinners he served. I imagined him casting glances at the box of See’s Candies, looking forward to the moment after we’d eaten when we’d break the seal on the box and each choose a chocolate.

  “Maybe I’ll come over,” I said.

  Sasha looked at me. “What for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She’d been lying there with her eyes closed, but now she got onto her knees and began scanning the area.

  “Who are you looking for?” I had an idea she thought Dan might’ve driven over to ferry us home.

  “I’m meeting someone. I don’t know when I’ll be ready, so maybe you should just go ahead without me.”

  “Who?” I said, but my voice cracked, and I sounded squeaky and pathetic.

  “Just someone.”

  My stinking shoes lay a few feet away, and I sat up and reached for them. “It’s not like I care.”