by Kobe Bryant
“And then what?”
“Then I’ll be out of your life again. Don’t worry, kid. I’m not here to fuck up your life. Or hers. Not any more than I already have.”
I feel sick. “How much did she give you?”
Darien shrugs. “Enough.”
“Enough that you’ll sign those papers? That you’ll let her have Winter?”
“Why do you care? You hate Mom. I know you do. You always have.”
“Well, I guess I hate you, too,” I say.
Her lips purse. “You know, you sound like Danny.”
“Danny’s dead.”
Darien falters, a flash of pain crossing her face, lowering her voice. “I know. Mom called me when it happened.”
My chest tightens. “You knew? Why didn’t you come? I needed you.”
“I couldn’t do it,” she says. Then: “I’m sorry, Gus. That was shitty. It was selfish.”
I don’t answer.
“You doing okay?” she asks.
My words are hard to get out. Like razor wire pulled across scarred skin. “I guess.”
“You’re the best of us, kid. You always have been. You have to know that.”
“That’s not saying a lot.”
Darien laughs and reaches to touch my hair, to tousle it like she used to, and I don’t really want her to but I let her do it because I guess I want someone to want to touch me, which is confusing, even to me. But as her fingers make contact, as they weave their way through my hair, I bend toward her, a bloom seeking light in the darkness.
“How’re things going with her?” Darien asks. “I know it can’t be easy. She’s all denial about Danny.”
“How so?”
“She keeps saying she doesn’t know why he did it. Why he would hurt her like that. But, like, even I could see it coming.”
“You did?”
“You didn’t?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I knew Danny very well. He mostly made me angry.”
“Pretty sure that’s how he made everyone feel.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just that it’s probably a shitty thing to go through life with everyone being mad at you all the time.”
“Yeah.” The sadness returns, fluttering down to darken my sky. “I guess I always thought he liked it. Like he thrived on people being mad at him. Hating him for what he could do.”
“Maybe. I always got the feeling Danny got angry at himself as much as he made other people feel that way. It was like he didn’t know any other way of being who he was.”
“So who was he?” I ask.
“Hell if I know.” Darien sits up, scratches her neck, then slides her phone out. She reads something off the screen. “I should get going.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll see you around. Okay, kid?”
“Sure.” I nod and smile, like that’s something I’d like.
My sister gathers her purse, kisses Winter on the forehead, and turns around. She walks quickly down the steps and heads for the gate, then the street, and then she’s gone and she doesn’t look back. Not at me. Or the house. Or her daughter.
107.
“Let’s go for a drive,” I tell my mom on the day that marks one year since Danny died. Sitting around the house and moping all day feels unfathomable and thinking about her doing the same is even worse.
“Sure,” she says. “But after the cemetery.”
“Whatever.” The cemetery isn’t a place I’d planned to visit. This is for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I don’t believe there’s any piece of my brother buried there. He’s gone. He’s only a memory now. But having a place to go clearly means something to my mother. So we do.
The cemetery’s tucked into a slice of Lafayette hillside, and it’s surrounded by trees and foliage. Hummingbirds abound, buzzing and diving, and from a watchful distance, I hold Winter in my arms while my mom arranges flowers by Danny’s headstone. When she reaches to touch the etched letters of his name, I turn away. I don’t want to see this. Her tenderness that’s always been reserved for him and only him.
I can’t.
Once we’re on the road again, I just want to keep going. We head south, navigating through winding mountains and towering redwoods before dipping down toward the ocean. Soon we reach Santa Cruz, a city disguised as a beach town or a beach town disguised as a city. We walk out on the pier and listen to the plaintive barks of the elephant seals before finding a restaurant that looks kid-friendly enough to handle Winter. She’s extra pleased about the choice when she’s handed a place mat decorated in sea animals, along with a box of crayons.
“I like it here,” my mom says once she’s settled in the booth. Once she can see the view. All those frothy ocean waves.
“Me too.”
Her fingers work to unknot her napkin. “I wish you’d helped me with the flowers today. Or any day.”
I look at her.
“Well, I do,” she says.
“I can’t,” I tell her. “Not yet.”
Her lips purse. “You’re still mad about—”
“A lot of things.”
My mother nods and looks out the window at the ocean. The waves are roiling, topped with white and crashing every which way. “You don’t want to talk about him, do you?”
“Not really.”
“Then tell me about something else.”
So I do. I tell her about my own swimming and not only what I hope to do in Omaha, but how it makes me feel to be in the water. How I feel closer to my father there, skimming above the lane lines with shadows spinning all around me, and how maybe the imagery is too womblike, but that I don’t care. It’s my truth and it means something to me. It means a lot, actually.
She smiles a little when I say this, her gaze growing distant at the mention of my father.
“You hate me, don’t you?” I blurt out. “For him dying the way he did. Because of me.”
My mother starts back to the present. “Oh, come on. You know I don’t hate you.”
“No, I don’t know that. How could I? You’ve always loved Danny more. You said I couldn’t need you, because he needed you more.”
“I never said that.”
“You did!”
She shakes her head. “Well, I don’t remember that. But Danny had a lot of problems when he was young. He did need me.”
“You know what I think?” I tell her. “I think you’re the one who needed him. And he knew that. When he was sick and upset as a kid—he used that to keep you close to him. He manipulated you.”
Her eyes flash. “He was a child.”
“Well, that’s what it seemed like to me. And I was a child, too. But you and him had some sort of bond that I wasn’t allowed to be a part of. Ever. And I don’t even blame him for wanting to keep you close, but it sucked for me.”
“So you’re blaming me? For what? Your lack of happiness? Or his?”
“I’m not blaming anyone. I’m telling you how I feel.”
My mother falls back against the booth seat and throws her hands up. “What do you want me to say? After your father died, yes, I needed Danny. I needed someone. I hated my life and a lot of times I hated the person that I was.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Do you know how hard it was to be on my own with three kids? Do you know how hard it still is?”
I line Winter’s crayons up in front of her, tuck a curl behind her ear. “No.”
“But . . .” My mother softens. “I don’t hate you, Gus. I promise. And I don’t blame you for what happened to your father. Not at all. Why would you think that?”
“It’s what Darien told me.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Really. Danny, too. He was there when she said it.”
She rolls
her eyes. Dips a french fry in ketchup before placing it in her mouth. “God, they were both such assholes, sometimes.”
“Yeah.”
“I guess I just hate that he died at all,” she says with a sigh.
I lower my head in response, focus on my food. I mean, I’m not sure who the he is in this statement. My father? Danny? But I don’t bother asking or pushing for more. Another time, maybe.
For now, it’s enough.
* * *
Later we walk down the boardwalk, stepping into the sand. Winter’s wild in the presence of so much stimulation. The rides. The lights. The food. My mother runs ahead with her, offering promises of a carousel ride or the Ferris wheel, if only she’ll slow down.
For my part, I’m a mess—jumpy, irritable, and torn between my usual urges of throwing myself into the waves or needing godlike power in order to control the tides and everything else in my universe. But it’s okay to feel this way. That’s what I decide. My brother’s been dead for a year, my father far longer, and I remain endlessly angry and bitter about both these truths. But maybe this is just what grief is.
Maybe this is what my mother was trying to tell me.
108.
I should probably ask Coach Marks before I do what I’m about to do. But then I probably wouldn’t do it in the first place. Besides, I’m impulsive. So what I do is this: I rummage around in my room until I find Renee Matheson’s business card. She’s the reporter from Swimming World who I met with in San Diego last September.
With what I hope are only good intentions, I call her. I end up leaving a message, but she calls back the next day and we talk for a long time. About everything that matters to me.
Danny.
Depression.
Suicide.
Survivorship.
Anger.
Trauma.
Guilt.
Grief.
Self-harm.
Self-loathing.
All of it.
I also tell her about black swan theory and how trying to understand the past is just a way of trying to understand yourself so that you can figure out a way to move forward in an uncertain world. That within all of us lies the ability to grow and learn and adapt and get better at what it is we want to achieve. We just have to be here in order to do that.
Danny didn’t get that chance, I tell her. He’s not here, and for all our conflict and toxic sibling resentment, I wish like hell he were. It took me a while to realize this. For so long, I was the floundering goose to his swanlike glory that it was difficult for me to accept his pain as anything other than a tool meant to punish me. Plus, my mind was working so hard to define his death as something inevitable, I almost didn’t see my own coming. But then I got lucky. I had people around me who cared enough to make sure I got help when I needed it.
Who couldn’t bear another fallen bird in their midst.
I tell her everything. About hurting myself and the people around me. About therapy and meds and how they’ve helped and yet I’m still me—endlessly flawed and lit by fire. Sometimes this fire is the same one that fuels me in the pool, in practice, but it can’t be the whole of my being. Not without burning me alive. And I also tell her how I really don’t have any answers. I’m still unsure about so much. But the one thing I know is that sometimes you need other people and that there’s no weakness in that. None.
“So are you doing this for him?” Renee Matheson asks, because this is what everyone always asks of me. “The Trials, I mean.”
“Yes,” I say. “I’m doing this for him. I just wish I didn’t have to.”
109.
There’s no send-off party for me before the Trials. No fanfare or fuss. Coach M and I fly out to Omaha on Thursday morning—my mother will come tomorrow—and while I’m on the flight, I tell myself the lack of attention is a blessing. It’s all on account of my weak qualifying performance. I’m not expected to do anything—I’m just supposed to feel lucky for the opportunity. But that’s a game I already know can be won.
I’ve seen it happen, after all.
We land and sit on the tarmac. I turn my phone on while we wait for a gate and when I do, there’re tons of messages. It’s more than a little baffling, since it’s not like I have a ton of friends. But the first is from Lynette:
Good luck, Gus! she writes. We’re so proud of you.
I smile. It turns out there’s one from Caleb, too.
Good luck, man. You got this.
Then I see ones from Vince and Raheem and the rest of the team. I keep scrolling because even my cold cynical heart is warmed by their well-wishes. Fitz’s makes me smile:
On the day we met I told you how much I admired your brother. Now I can add you to the list of assholes I look up to.
I read Lainey’s last.
I’ll be watching, she tells me. Remember that it’s okay to feel scared! Or not! However you feel is just right.
110.
We tour the aquatic facility Friday night before the Trials. It’s an indoor pool and Coach Marks walks me through my race, the schedule, all the quirks of the event. I won’t actually be in the water until Sunday, and it’s eerie how quiet the space is. We sit for a moment in the upper deck and I breathe it in. This moment.
This possibility.
“Nervous?” he asks.
“Definitely. What about you?”
“Closer to terrified.”
“Sounds about right,” I say, and I wait a beat before asking my next question. It’s one I’ve been thinking about a lot. “Why do you think he did it?”
Coach M turns to me. “Danny?”
“Yeah.”
He shakes his head. “God, I don’t know.”
“You spent so much time with him.”
“I did. But I don’t have any answers. I’ve second-guessed myself a lot about the way I trained him, the way I treated him. But I had no idea. Not until . . . closer to the end. By the time I realized he was sick, I did what I could to get him help, but it didn’t make him very happy with me.”
I sit up. “What did you do?”
“I told his coach at UCLA about his history with anxiety and insomnia. Said that he needed to stay in treatment and stay on his meds while he was competing.”
“Did he?”
“I don’t know. He was an adult, by then. No one could make him do anything. But Lyle asked me for my honest assessment of what would make Danny successful, and Danny took it as a betrayal. Wouldn’t talk to me after that. I never heard from him again.”
I’m stunned. “That’s really shitty. I didn’t know that.”
“Yeah.”
“Wait, did you get the letter he wrote you? I left it in your house. On Thanksgiving.” My cheeks warm at the mention of that ill-fated holiday. “It was for you, right? It was your address. I found it in his car.”
“It was for me. And I did get it. Thank you.”
“Did he forgive you?”
The smile Coach Marks offers me is a sad one. “He was pretty unwell when he wrote it. Still angry. I think he was mostly saying good-bye.”
“Fuck,” I say.
He dips his head. “Did you know that Renee sent me a copy of your interview?”
My pulse quickens. “She did?”
“It’s going to run tomorrow, just in time for the Trials.”
“Win or lose,” I say. “I guess it’ll all be out there.”
Coach M lifts an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you thought about losing.”
“I mean, I kind of have to, don’t I? I’ve figured that much out by now. With your help. And my therapist’s. So yeah, I have a plan for dealing with whatever the hell happens on Sunday. Win or lose, I’ll be okay.”
“Glad to hear it.”
I smile. “I’m still going to win, though.”
“I kn
ow you will.” He claps my back. “And by the way, that interview, I really enjoyed it.”
“You did?”
“That took a lot of courage. More than I have, that’s for sure. It’s going to do a lot of good for a lot of people, okay? People who need to hear what you have to say.”
I bite my lip. Every part of me wants to thank him or tell him he’s the reason I have any courage at all, but it’s hard right now and I can’t and that’s stupid. But he knows, I think. He wraps his arms around me and holds me to him.
“Oh, Gus,” he says. “This is going to hurt for a long time. Forever, maybe. It’s damn sad what happened. There’s no way around that. But I’m glad you’re here. And I’m glad I’ve gotten to know you.”
111.
On Sunday morning, I walk onto the pool deck with a myriad of emotions, thoughts, swirling through my veins. It’s my first heat of the day and the crowd is huge—nearly ten thousand people, every one of them waving tiny red, white, and blue flags—and the sheer mass of their presence is enough to generate its own force. Its own energy.
My insignificance feels staggering. I do what I can to hold my own in the presence of so many legends, so much history, and I know I’m not here by myself. Somewhere in that vibrant, raucous crowd, my mother is watching me, along with Winter. Coach M is out there, too, of course. Plus there’s Vince and Fitz and everyone back home. Even Lainey, I remind myself, who I have to hope knows how much I care for her and how much I appreciate the kindness she showed me at a time when I didn’t understand that kindness was even something to be valued.
Danny and my father aren’t far from my thoughts, either. They never are, and there’s nothing comfortable that comes from thinking about them. But what I’ve learned over this past year is that every life contains tragedy. Every story is born from loss. And no, I don’t know how to reconcile the different parts of me and my story—the anger and resentment, the guilt and the shame—but I know I’ll always be connected to my family in ways both good and bad. In ways I have yet to figure out.
