Geese Are Never Swans

by Kobe Bryant

  But Lynette starts crying again, so while I’m shit for gratitude, I do my best and rack my brain for memories of these people I hope to never see again. Some of the moments I come up with are funny—like the time Marco asked Anya the Air Show Girl if not having nightmares anymore about the accident would be like experiencing the loss all over again, and she replied, “Who the hell cares? I just want my beauty sleep.” But before we can read the messages written to us, Marco plucks the papers off our backs and stuffs them into individual envelopes while promising to hand them out as we’re leaving.

  “Can’t we just read them now?” someone calls out. “I want to know what you assholes said about me.”

  “Patience,” Marco insists. “Doing it this way allows you to leave the group with something tangible. A transitional object, if you will.”

  “Like a teddy bear?” I add wryly.

  He sighs, exasperated. “I mean, if that’s what you want it to be.”

  32.

  Later, I stand in my bedroom with the A/C blaring and pull the sealed envelope Marco handed to me out of my backpack. My fingers run along the sharp edges as my mind swims with memories of a different unopened message—one I came across back in May while rummaging in the Mink’s glove compartment the week after the transport service returned her to us.

  For reasons that will never be made clear, Danny abandoned his car and his college and flew home to die on a plane ticket he bought with our mother’s credit card. Maybe it was meant to be the ultimate fuck-you. Sticking her with the bill for his final travel expenses. Although if that’s the case, I don’t know what he had to be so mad about. She would have willingly paid for the damn thing if he’d just asked. Probably would’ve tied the rope for him, too.

  That’s how much she loved him.

  The envelope I found in the glove compartment wasn’t like the one I’m holding now, which is just a cheap Staples knockoff, already creased and worn with minimal handling. The one in Danny’s car was larger, thicker, and made of creamy card stock. Its heft gave it importance, and an address I didn’t recognize was written on the front. No name, though, but the handwriting was definitely Danny’s. I could tell right away. But seeing as the message inside wasn’t meant for me, I didn’t think to open it. I just shoved the damn thing back where I found it, and as far I know, it’s still there.

  Well, the message I’m holding now is meant for me. It’s got my name on it, and I can still feel the fading sensation of other people’s hands scrawling their memories of me onto my back. But I don’t bother opening this envelope, either. I force it into an overcrowded desk drawer, alongside a bunch of other letters and junk and trash I don’t have the energy to deal with.

  Then I shut the drawer. Tight. I guess you could say I have a thing for delayed gratification and that this is the reason I’m not interested in reading what the group wrote about me or what memories they chose to share. It would be an accurate account of who I am and what I’m like.

  But more accurate would be to say I simply don’t care.

  33.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” Coach Marks tells me a few weeks later at the end of evening practice. Reluctant to leave the pool, I’ve stayed to get a few more laps in while he watches. Now sitting on the tiled edge by the steps with my feet still submerged, I lean my head against the railing and watch as he uses the skimmer to pull dead leaves out of the pool. A few drowning spiders.

  “Aren’t I quiet every night?” I ask, although I know this isn’t true. I run my mouth all the time, but it’s not like he ever listens. It’s not like anyone does.

  “Hey, how was school today?” he calls from where he’s standing and shaking the wet leaves onto the grass. “You’ve been back for a week now, right?”

  “Next question,” I call back.

  “I’m serious.”

  “I didn’t go today.”

  Coach Marks frowns and sets the skimmer down. After brushing his palms off, he comes back over and settles beside me on the pool’s edge. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  I close my eyes. The urge is there to say something about wanting to do online learning like Danny did when he was on the traveling circuit. But it wouldn’t come out honest. It would sound like I want something from him. Which I do. I want him to put me on the roster, to let me race. Only I can’t ask for this directly, because I’m supposed to prove I trust him.

  Which I don’t.

  “That bad, huh?” he asks.

  “I guess.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Will I see you this Friday night?”

  I open my eyes. “What’s happening on Friday?”

  Coach Marks offers me a rare smile, the one that says I’m not fooling anyone—least of all him. “It’s the dedication ceremony for the scholarship that the Brownings are starting in Danny’s name. I know you know this.”

  “Whatever.” My feet turn circles in the water.

  “It’d be nice if you came,” he says.

  “Would it?”

  “It would mean a lot to your mother.”

  My feet turn faster. “How would you know?”

  “She told me.”

  I jolt, quickly pulling my feet from the water and bringing my knees to my chest. The image of Coach Marks talking with my mother about me, about anything, isn’t something I can deal with.

  “You’re upset,” he says.

  “I don’t like people talking about me behind my back.”

  “She’s your mother.”

  “Maybe you should remind her of that.”

  Coach Marks sighs. “I know this can’t be easy, but I really think it would be good for you to come on Friday. There’s so much more to this sport than what you do in the water, and it wouldn’t hurt to let people get to know you a little. To let some of us in and help you get through this.”

  My eyes widen and I stare at him with the sudden understanding that he really and truly believes my reluctance to go to the dedication ceremony is because it might be too painful for me. That I’m still in the throes of grieving my brother’s death and that the only issue is that I’m too repressed to say this.

  “You can’t keep hiding forever,” he adds.

  “I’m not hiding! You’re the one who won’t let me—” I snap my jaw shut before I can say more.

  “You’re not exactly social.”

  “I didn’t know that was a prerequisite for swimming.”

  “It’s not, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “It’d be nice to have you there.”

  “No.” I grip my knees tighter. “It wouldn’t.”

  Coach Marks is quiet for a moment. “Maybe you could help me understand what’s going on with you. Because I really feel like I’m missing something, Gus.”

  “You shouldn’t be,” I mutter. “It’s not like I didn’t tell you on the first day I came here or anything.”

  “What did you tell me?”

  “That I’m not sad about what happened to Danny! That the only thing that matters to me is being better than him. That I want to make his name, his legacy, everything about him, disappear!”

  “You said that?”

  “I said I wanted him compared to me.”

  Coach Marks nods and takes a deep breath. “Okay. Yeah, you did. I guess I thought that was your competitive nature speaking.”

  “No.”

  “So I take it you didn’t like him very much.”

  “For good reason.”

  He doesn’t answer. I’m pretty sure he has no idea what to say. Coach Marks isn’t just going to the dedication ceremony, he’s giving the main speech at it, and I’m guessing the bottom line is that we don’t have a whole lot in common on this topic.r />
  “Did you like him?” I ask, because I have to know. “Danny?”

  “Yes,” he says, after a moment. “I did. I still do. I liked him a lot, and I wish . . . I wish we’d had more time together. I wish I could’ve been there for him.”

  My shoulders droop, but what did I expect? None of this is a surprise. Still, it’s the wistfulness in his voice that gets me. I hate hearing it, and even the word itself sounds like remorse. Wistful. A wish long gone and never granted.

  “Does that make you uncomfortable?” he asks. “Knowing how I really feel?”

  “Not at all,” I say tersely.

  “Then what is it? What’s wrong?”

  I roll my head back. “It makes me think less of you.”

  34.

  A funny truth: Danny’s the one who taught me to swim in the first place.

  It happened during the summer after Darien ran away from home that first time. Danny and I spent eight weeks at a city-run day camp while our mother worked. We needed full-time care and even Danny’s elite athlete status couldn’t get him out of going. He wanted to go, though, which surprised me and also contradicted my own emotions. I didn’t want to be outside all day with strangers. But Danny, filled as he was with his newfound confidence, said it would be a chance for us to make friends and to have a little freedom in our lives for once.

  The camp met at the local reservoir. There were fields and trails and a rocky shoreline with a designated swimming area marked by ropes. Not knowing how to swim, I rarely ventured into the water, occasionally daring to wade in the marshy spot lined with reeds where the youngest children chased tadpoles and dragonflies in water no deeper than their knees. I wore my shorts and sandals when I did this rather than incur my mother’s anger by asking for swim trunks.

  Danny was the one who forced the issue. He gave me a pair of his old trunks and told me he’d teach me to swim.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Everyone needs to know how to swim,” he said. “It’s a matter of survival.”

  “Mom said I couldn’t. She was really mad.”

  “Forget about that. She doesn’t care if you swim.”

  “How do you know?”

  “She’s just mad you asked about it. It’s not the same thing.”

  “Fine,” I said, because if Danny was an expert on anything outside of swimming, it was definitely our mother. She doted on him in ways that didn’t make sense. Like when he was really young and had screaming tantrums and refused to go to school, she’d say he had separation anxiety, meaning separation from her.

  Her cure back then was to baby the hell out of him. I remember standing in the kitchen, watching her warm milk for hot chocolate and make brown sugar toast, while she cooed to Danny what a brave boy he was. I’d never heard of Pavlov’s dogs at that point in time, but even my childish brain could understand that Danny was being rewarded for his fears. But I didn’t dare challenge her methods. Danny was fearful, I’d been told, because his father had died when he was little, and that was a terrible, tragic thing.

  Well, my father had died, too, but I wasn’t fearful. I was something else. So when we got to the day camp, I put my suit on and let Danny lead me into the reservoir’s chilly depths. Here, he taught me to float and kick and blow bubbles. I took to it as quickly as he promised and by the end of the summer, I was swimming to the raft and back. Danny even had me racing against the other eight-year-olds and I beat them every time. I’d haul ass out and back, returning to the shore with my chest heaving, only to clamber to my feet and sprint up the rocky beach so that I could see my brother’s grinning face.

  “You’re awesome, Gus!” he’d say, before high-fiving me, and I loved it. His praise. His approval. His friends would cheer, too, which only pushed me to swim faster, and when summer was over, Danny worked some sort of different magic and convinced our mother to let me join his swim team in Orinda. She resisted at first, but he reminded her that we’d be there together. It wasn’t like it would make extra work for her. Just the opposite; she wouldn’t have to find childcare for me now that Darien was out of the house and who knew where.

  That year was a whirlwind time. If not rags to riches, it was like moving from the cargo hold up to first class. My mother remained chilly toward me—she always was—but I thrived on the swim team, and for the first time, I was eager to be a part of something. I was good, too, but more than anything I was proud to be Danny Bennett’s little brother. Everyone knew who he was and what he would someday do.

  For a while there, Danny was my champion and the feeling was almost mutual. That was the best part, and it was as if Danny suddenly saw me as an extension of him. A winner by proxy. Not only did my success up his stock, but he liked the attention he got for caring about his kid brother. To a point. I made it through one full season on the Orinda team and by the end I was winning everything in my age-group. I even broke a couple of Danny’s U-10 records. My downfall, of course, was being dumb enough to boast about this and the fact that my coach had dubbed me “the future of the league.”

  That was that. The season ended and by that I mean Danny abruptly stopped speaking to me or acknowledging my existence. A few weeks later, my mother sidled up while I was watching television. She plopped down on the couch beside me and with the smuggest look I’d ever seen announced that our family wouldn’t be returning to the Orinda club the following year.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Danny’s been accepted to the Lafayette Country Club. He’ll be training under Colin Marks from now on.”

  “Who’s that?”

  She laughed. “Only the best coach in the country. Or one of them.”

  “He’s going to coach Danny?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh,” I said, but my mom lingered. She didn’t get up and leave or say she was sorry. Instead she stayed right where she was, her fingers tapping away on the sofa’s armrest. She stayed there and she kept smiling and staring and waiting for me to ask what was going to happen to me and if I could swim at the country club with my brother and the very best coach in the country. But I didn’t. I refused to give her that satisfaction.

  Besides, I already knew.

  35.

  Friday night rolls up and the closest I get to the dedication ceremony is watching my mom get ready for it. It feels a little masochistic, but there’s also an air of absurdity to the whole thing. Not only is my mother getting all dressed up, but she’s even having her hair and makeup professionally done. Like it’s the Oscars.

  A few of her friends drop by for drinks before heading over, and I know they mean well. Plus it’s good for her to have a social life and people who care about her. She shouldn’t be moping around all the time like she usually does. But it seems morbid to turn the occasion into a party. Maybe that’s just me, though, because I hate that any of this is happening at all.

  In need of distraction, I focus my efforts on helping Winter, who’s also going. We’re standing in the downstairs bathroom together, and she’s wearing a sparkling green dress that has her resembling a bright-eyed leprechaun. It’s cute, I guess. Green was Danny’s favorite color so it’s a good tribute, but I happen to know that Winter’s favorite dress is one with sunflowers printed all over it.

  “You sure you want to wear this one?” I ask.

  “Uh-huh,” she says.

  “Let me do your hair,” I say.

  Winter knows the drill. She sits on the stool in front of me while I work on detangling her curls in the mirror. I don’t know how to do much more than that, but I’m careful not to pull and her dark hair ends up soft and bouncy.

  “What do you think?” I ask.

  She slides off the stool, then turns to grab my leg. Staring up at me with eager eyes, she beckons me closer.

  I squat to Winter’s height. “What is it?”

  Smiling, she takes
the brush from my hand and begins to groom my own head. The bristles are sharp and she’s not at all gentle, but reciprocity is a rare occurrence in my life. I can’t help but milk the moment for all it’s worth and stay still until my hair is styled into a shape that leaves me looking like a long-lost Kennedy cousin.

  “Thank you,” I tell her. “You want something to eat?”

  Winter nods and I lead her into the kitchen, where we’re both subjected to the boozy attention of my mother’s two best friends, Marla and Cleo. She’s known them since they were all in high school together, and while they’re not the worst people in the world, they’re too nosy for my taste.

  “We hear you’re not coming,” Marla says to me in a singsong voice.

  “Where’s my mom?” I ask.

  “Upstairs. She’ll be down soon. She’s getting her eyelashes glued on.”

  “He’s not going?” Cleo echoes. “Why not?”

  Marla waves a hand. “Oh, you know how Gus is. Angry and antisocial.”

  “That’s me,” I say. “Angry and antisocial.”

  She grins. “Just like your dad.”

  “You think?”

  “I do.” Marla sets her glass down to pull Winter into her arms. “But don’t let it rub off on this one. She’s too sweet for bad boys. Isn’t that right, Winnie?”

  36.

  Just like your dad.

  Ten minutes later they leave and I’m alone and I don’t feel good about it. Not that I wanted to go but maybe I should’ve. Or maybe I should’ve wanted to.

  Still standing in the kitchen, I grab for a glass, fill it with tap water, and gulp it down. Then I pour another. But something feels wrong. Really wrong. It’s selfish and stupid and self-absorbed, but I don’t think I can stay in this house right now. I don’t think I can handle the fact that almost everyone I know is spending the night thinking about Danny.

  The hardest part is knowing Lainey will be there. It’s pathetic, but I still stalk her social media when I’m in one of my more self-pitying moods. Her post this afternoon was of an old photo of her and my brother, where Danny has his arms wrapped around her perfect waist, looking happier than I ever remember seeing him. For her part, Lainey’s as perfect as she always is, brown eyes radiating warmth. The photo’s caption was just a link to the club’s dedication ceremony announcement, and I almost sent her a message when I saw it, but nothing I could think to say sounded right or said what I wanted her to know.