“I hope the boat didn’t hurt the whale, Eema,” said Quinn. “I hope there was enough room for both of them in the water.”
“I hope so, too, sweetheart,” I said.
Then, as if on cue, we saw the spray. Quinn dropped her book and ran to the railing.
“There are two, Eema,” Quinn said. “Look!” The boat started to rock even more.
She was right. There was a second plume of water, a second dark back arcing up, slipping under. This one smaller than the other. Their tails perfect as drawings of whale tails, the edges lightly serrated as if they had been cut by those scissors people use to scallop the sides of invitations.
“It’s probably a mother and child,” I said.
“Like us,” said Quinn.
“Like us.” I wrapped my arm around her, and a pang went through my ribs as I thought of my own mother. She was never my partner the way Quinn was my partner, but that moment, I missed her terribly. I squeezed Quinn a bit tighter and brought myself back to the deck, to the whales. The water looked velvety as it cascaded over their backs, as it closed over them when they disappeared into its depths. I wondered how it felt, sheeting off their skin, surrounding them. It looked as if it would feel delicious, but if they were used to salt water, maybe the fresh water was unpleasant. Maybe it was harder to swim through it, no salt to buoy them up. I hoped they didn’t have to strain too hard. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how much a strained whale muscle would ache. It must feel like grief. It must feel as if the whole world is throbbing.
A SIMPLE FLU BUG,” HER DOCTOR SAID DURING A house call, “but they’re bad this year. Rest, water, you know the drill.”
“She has Sectionals coming up.” Deena paced around the room. “She doesn’t have time to rest.”
“If she doesn’t rest,” said the doctor, “she won’t be well enough to compete.”
Every fiber of Karen’s muscles ached and she threw up anything she tried to swallow, but it felt wonderful to lie down all day, to do nothing but let her body sink into the mattress.
Her mother tried to get her to do Pilates in bed.
“At least some core work, sweetie,” urged Deena. “You don’t want to lose your core strength.”
Karen closed her eyes and pretended to sleep. Maybe she would never get up. Maybe she would become an invalid. Knowing her mom, though, she’d find some way to turn that into a competition, too. She’d coach Karen to be the sickest girl ever. To have the worst blood tests on record, the most gruesome X-rays, the symptoms that only the most highly specialized doctor could diagnose. She was already a little famous for being sick—pictures of her throwing up, of Nathan holding her as they got their medals, had been picked up by different news sources, had rippled out into the national media. But Karen knew that wasn’t enough. If she was going to be bedridden, her mom, with the best of intentions, would want her to be like Lydwina, the patron saint of both skaters and the infirm. Lydwina was paralyzed in a skating accident at sixteen; she performed miracles from her bed until her death four decades later.
Karen knew she wasn’t capable of miracles. She was capable, at best, of hard work. She knew she’d get back on the ice much too soon, with a throbbing head and wobbly limbs. She knew she’d let her mom push her to exhaustion. But for now, she let herself close her eyes; she let herself drift into true sweet slumber.
DEENA RENTED MORE ice time after Karen’s fever broke.
It was 3 a.m. Karen still felt woozy, off balance as she took to the ice; she wanted to ease back into skating, but Deena was impatient. Nathan was, too. Karen told herself to skate well for him, but she couldn’t land her triple loop, missed his hand during a run of footwork. Then Nathan’s blade nicked the back of her neck during a flying camel. The shock of pain sent her crashing to the ice.
“You could have decapitated me,” she said, holding her hand to the cut.
“I didn’t,” he said.
She felt the blood seep against her palm.
“I could be dead right now,” she said.
“Don’t worry.” He did a backwards pivot next to her. “Your hair will cover the scar.”
———
DEENA DROVE HER to the emergency room, paper towels pressed to the gash. Karen needed five stitches, like a zipper across the back of her neck. She had to take yet another day off of training, a numbing bag of ice like a bolster beneath her. Her neck was tender, stiff, for days—she found herself holding her head up when she should give in to gravity, holding her breath when she should be filling her lungs. She found herself dizzy after every spin and jump.
“You need to pull yourself together, sweetheart,” her mother said when she did a double toe instead of a triple. “Sectionals are a week away.”
“Don’t be a baby,” chided Nathan when she begged off on the death spiral, but later he examined her stitches with such tenderness, and looked at her with such concern, it was almost worth the pain.
WHALES ARE BIG,” SAID QUINN IN BED THAT NIGHT.
“This is a fact,” I said.
“Much bigger than us,” she said.
“So true.” I loved the smell of her at night, her just-brushed teeth, her earthy warmth.
“But when I start to worry about how big they are, I just remember that story about Hymir and Thor.”
“The one where they go fishing?” I asked.
“Yeah, and Hymir catches two whales and he’s all excited, but then Thor catches the serpent whose tail can go around the whole world, and it makes the whales seem dinky.”
“Small potatoes,” I said.
“Hymir’s embarrassed,” she said, her eyes closed, her voice starting to drift. “All he could catch is two whales.”
I hoped we’d have a chance to get back to the library soon. Maybe we could have them special order a book about whales. Maybe they’d even let us get a library card—some libraries allowed that for seasonal farmworkers and their families. I was eager to learn more about our new humpback friends.
Quinn breathed steadily next to me now. I gazed out into the dark water, unable to sleep. The surface barely stirred, but I could feel the whales out there, moving low and large and slow, like dreams simmering in the subconscious, waiting to breach up into the brain.
The large one, the mother, raised her head, just a few inches above the surface, a dark curve barely discernible in the darkness; I hadn’t realized how many layers of darkness existed—the darkness of the night, of the river, of her body, all different shades, like the blue of the sky, the sea, blending but distinct. Like the old blank polar-bear-in-a-snowstorm page, but inverse. I knew the bottoms of her fins and tail were white, but they were hidden underwater.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
An eye, dark in dark in dark, looked toward me, full and indifferent. I wanted her to look at me with hope, with confusion; I wanted her to say “Help me” or “Follow me” or “I’ll help you” with that one sloe liquid eye, but she didn’t. Her spray briefly caught the moonlight before misting back down.
THE EASTERN SECTIONALS WERE BEING HELD IN Oldsmar, Florida. Deena, in a fit of indulgence, bought all three of them first-class plane tickets.
“I don’t think of Florida as eastern.” Nathan downed his complimentary glass of champagne—only one, Deena had cautioned him. She herself was on her third flute.
“What do you think of it as, then?” Karen took a sip of her ginger ale. The bubbles snapped against her nose. Her seat was next to her mother’s and directly across the aisle from Nathan’s. If she wanted to, she could reach out and touch his arm. Or his knee, which rose so invitingly inside his jeans.
“Tropical,” he said. “Geriatric.”
“So you’re moving there in a couple of years?” Karen asked her mother with a laugh. She felt giddy, even bold, up in the air, lifting her gold-rimmed glass.
Deena said, “Ha ha,” but then fixed her with a glare so potent, Karen barely spoke the rest of the flight.
———
EVEN IN NOVEMBER, the air in Florida was dense with humidity, like the inside of someone’s mouth. Karen’s eyelids felt heavy; she wanted to lie down on the tarmac and let the thick air blanket itself over her, but the palm trees that stood sentry outside the Tampa airport warned her to stay upright.
After the first-class plane ride, Karen was expecting an equally swanky hotel, but Deena pulled the rental car into the driveway of a two-story pink stucco building on a street full of furniture stores and cheap souvenir shops. Deena had reserved adjoining rooms; Karen daydreamed about opening the inner door to Nathan’s room in the middle of the night, knocking so he’d open his own. If her mother had enough of the little bottles from the minibar, she’d sleep right through anything.
“Get your suits on,” Deena said as they lugged their bags up the concrete and wrought-iron stairway. “We can do some water training.”
A small kidney-shaped pool sat within a chain-link fence in the center of the parking lot. A couple of kids paddled around the greenish water inside inflated plastic rings. When her mother had told her to pack a swimsuit, Karen had imagined a beach from a postcard, or at least a fancy pool, one with cabanas and plush lounge chairs, waiters carrying fruity drinks.
“Why’d you choose this place?” she asked. Her mother opened the door to their room; it was dark and smelled of mildew.
“It’s off the beaten track,” said her mother. “No one will know we’re here.”
KAREN FELT SHY when they emerged from their rooms at the same time, her with a scratchy white hotel towel wrapped around her navy one-piece, Nathan in Hawaiian print trunks that rode low on his hips. He was shoeless, even though the concrete was hot, even though he should be protecting his feet. His chest was smooth, but a wispy path of hair traveled down his belly into his waistband. Karen followed him to the stairway and watched the muscles of his back slide beneath his skin as he sprinted down the steps.
As soon as they went through the gate to the pool, Nathan ran and dove into the water, despite all the signs that warned against it. “What do you want us to do?” he asked Deena when he emerged, water dripping down his face. He shook his head like a wet dog. A couple of drops splashed onto Karen’s leg. Water beaded on his eyelashes, darkening them, making the blue of his eyes even more intense.
The kids were still churning around in their plastic tubes, their mother reading a gossip magazine in the area’s one patch of shade.
“Try some lifts,” Deena said from a rubber-strapped chaise. She looked like a movie star in her gold-toned bathing suit with a filmy leopard print cover-up, gold sandals with a little heel. Big sunglasses, big floppy hat that would make Karen look like a farmer but made her mother somehow even more glamorous.
“You’ll have to get in first,” Nathan told Karen, who stood on the top step in the shallow end, letting her ankles get used to the surprisingly cold water.
Karen tentatively stepped down to the next concrete landing. Her calves adjusted to the temperature, but the line where her skin transitioned from water to air was freezing. She knew the line from hips to belly would be especially hard to cross. The line from ribs to breasts would be even worse. She took a deep breath and stepped down to mid-thigh.
“Aw, come on,” Nathan taunted. “You can do better than that.” He dove underwater like a dolphin and swam under the kicking legs of the kids; his head emerged in front of the steps, gleaming, as he crouched in the shallow end.
“I like to take my time,” said Karen.
“So do I.” Nathan winked, and even though Karen wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, she had to hold on to the metal rail to catch her bearings.
“Sometimes, though,” he said, “you need to just dive in and get it over with.”
He splashed Karen’s belly. She bent over at the shock of cold. He splashed some more, big handfuls that drenched her shoulders, her hair.
“Stop it,” she said.
He stood up, water sheeting down his chest, and wrapped his arms around her—his cold wet body a bracing thrill—then threw himself backwards, carrying her underwater with him.
NATHAN HAD TOUCHED her skin before, but never so much of it. Her legs were always encased in tights, her back covered with mesh. Now their limbs slid against each other underwater, briefly entwining, slick as kelp. Nathan put his hands on her belly and lifted her above the water, the warm air blowing goosebumps across her skin, then tipped backwards and let her tumble on top of him, both of them going under again. They stared at each other for a moment through the greenish water; Nathan smiled and blew bubbles through his nose before they surfaced, their bodies separate now, Karen’s nipples embarrassingly hard.
“Quit fooling around,” called Deena. “You have training to do.”
LIFTS FELT DIFFERENT in the water, harder and easier all at once—an alternation between buoyancy and slog. They tried a few throws, too, the water grabbing onto her legs, dragging her down with its resistance.
“I wish the ice was this easy to fall on,” Karen said after Nathan dropped her during a hand-to-hip lift and she had twisted the fall into a dive.
“Ice turns to water when you skate on it.” Nathan lifted her again, this time lowering her slowly so her front brushed against his. “Maybe if I skated fast enough, I could turn the rink to water before you land.”
“That’s the sweetest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” said Karen, her chest against his ribs. She could feel a hardness in his trunks press against her stomach. It scared her a little, but also made her feel proud, as if she had accomplished something important, something adult. She wished the little boys weren’t still in the pool, watching from their plastic rings, their mother’s face now poking above her magazine.
“It’s true.” Nathan laughed, leaning into her. “The blades melt the ice.”
She wanted to tell him that she was telling the truth, too.
“You haven’t done the lasso axel yet,” her mother called from her chaise. Karen couldn’t see her expression beneath her large sunglasses, but she could tell Deena was irked. She grabbed onto Nathan’s hands underwater and he hoisted her away from him, toward the sun.
IN MY DREAM, I TOOK A PEAR AND CLEAVED IT IN TWO with my hands—it came apart easily, cleanly, no rough edges or spilled juice. The center was filled with dark round seeds, like a papaya, not like the typical two or four inside a pear; the scent of pear wafted out clear as day. I handed half to Quinn. She plucked a seed out with her thumb and forefinger, the way she used to lift Cheerios from high-chair trays in diners across the country, and put the dark pearl in her mouth.
“It’s sour,” she said, and I felt a jolt of fear. Apple seeds are full of arsenic; apples and pears are cousins, if not sisters. Pear seeds are probably packed with poison, too.
“Spit it out,” I barked, but it was too late; she had already swallowed it whole.
I WOKE WITH a start, and watched Quinn breathe—the sweetest sight in the world—until the dream lost its hold. I microwaved a cup of Earl Grey and brought it onto the deck to try to enjoy the sunrise. I loved how the water lapped against the boat in the morning, a gentle easing into the day. Birdsong rippled through the air. A light breeze played upon my skin, made me feel a bit more awake, a bit less freaked out. No sign of the whales, but it made me glad to know they were out there, somewhere, big and silent and peaceful. Next time they came back, we would really connect. Next time, they’d be able to tell me something I needed to know.
I set my mug down on the life preserver box, stood and stretched my arms over my head, darts of tightness shooting down my back. I found myself slipping into an old warm-up routine to loosen my muscles, starting with isolations in my neck, shoulders, rib cage, hips, moving into a simple rolling up and down of the spine, side stretches, lunges. It had been years, but my body remembered the whole sequence as if it had been only days. I put my foot up on the railing and bent sideways over my leg, one arm in the air, stretching out my poor neglected hamstrings.
Quinn wander
ed onto the deck, her hair pillow-frizzed. “I didn’t know you could bend like that,” she said.
“This is nothing,” I told her, so happy to see her alive and whole, unpoisoned. “I used to be a pretzel.”
“I used to be a cupcake.” Her smile was soft with sleep.
I didn’t often let myself think of what I used to be able to do; I felt a sudden wave of loss for my old flexibility, for how easily I could lift my leg over my head or drop down into a split. I took my leg down, put my other foot onto the railing, told myself I could get at least some of it back.
Quinn propped her leg on the life preserver box and bent over it like me. We stretched together for a while, which quickly slipped into dancing together across the deck, copying each other’s arm swoops and spins and waltzes. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see our reflections glimmering in the water, moving in tandem across the slough like the mother and baby whale.
———
THE STRETCHING HELPED. I felt faster, stronger than I had before when I practiced picking over my lunch break. My body felt more integrated—foot and thigh, belly, shoulder and hand, all working together. It wouldn’t be long, I hoped, before I could join the rest of the team. Show them how fast a woman could pick.
I thought I had been so stealthy in my practice, but Jorge walked toward us as if he had known where we were all along, carrying the largest pear I had ever seen. He held it out to me on both hands, like some sort of offering.
“I don’t need it.” I shook my head. My pear bag was almost full.
He nodded and pushed it closer to me. I took a step back. I could smell several days of sweat on his clothes.
“For the contest, Eema,” Quinn said excitedly. “The Pear Fair.”
He gestured to ask if he could give Quinn the pear. I shrugged, and he set it in her waiting hands. It was larger than her head when she was born.
Delta Girls Page 9
