The Opposite of Drowning

by Erin McRae

  Some were from the group at large, but most were in a backchannel thread limited to himself, Meryl, and Dennis. That Dennis was involved was unusual; he was generally too busy hosting his extra-late-night network TV talk show to bother replying to anything. Harry wondered what on earth Steven, who was usually the calmest, sweetest, and least drama-prone member of the group, had done to set off the firestorm.

  And then he saw the original email, sent by Steven to the entire list. Harry opened it with trepidation.

  Hello all,

  I won’t be coming to Christmas this year. Things seem to have progressed unfavorably, and the docs don’t want me travelling. Sorry to miss it and hope to see you all next time around.

  - S

  Harry blew out a long, slow breath. Steven had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer over a year ago. His prognosis had never been particularly favorable, but he’d stayed outwardly optimistic and Harry had stayed more or less in denial. Steven never talked about the future with anything but certainty that he’d be present for it. A message like this wasn’t just a planning email for the sake of making everyone’s holiday logistics easier. This was him, in his characteristically understated way, telling them things were very much worse.

  The rest of the emails were, of course, all about Steven and his announcement and what the group could do for him and Mallory, his wife. They may have been a bunch of degenerates, but they took care of their own.

  Harry opened an email window to send a reply just to Steven, and then stared at it for a long time. What could he say that wasn’t trite, obvious, or blithe? How was anyone supposed to respond to a friend’s email admission that he was dying? Especially with the history that lurked between them?

  He considered, briefly, calling Meryl. It was late in Frankfurt but barely dinnertime in Florida. Whether she was dining or sleeping, Harry knew she would always pick up his calls. That was one of the rules of their friendship – sometimes intimate, always loyal, and never romantic. But Harry knew how to have a conversation about this even less than he knew how to write an email about it. Besides, he was sure there would be many nights in the coming months where he would call her at some terrible hour and need her to answer the phone far more than he did now. He didn’t want to use up all her goodwill this early in the grim process ahead.

  Harry pounded out an email, just to Steven, all in a rush, lest he overthink each word and phrase. Whatever was going to happen in the course of his friend’s illness, it wasn’t going to happen right now, and that included Harry’s sentiments about it. He sent his regards from Frankfurt and then made what was likely an obviously reluctant offer to visit Steven in the wilds of Connecticut. Harry hated Connecticut and often went to pains to avoid his home state, as Steven well knew.

  He stared at the shadows of the furniture in the dark room as he hit send. Harry wasn’t a young man, and none of his friends were young either. But they had, until Steven’s diagnosis, all been more or less healthy. They had even gotten used to Meryl’s MS as simply a thing that was what it was. Now death was coming for one of them, and Harry felt so very, very old.

  He felt, too, a fool for his peculiar fascination with Elizabeth, and shame threatened to drive him to bed without further communication. But the Miscreants deserved to hear from him as well; if he didn’t whine about Frankfurt, people would note his silence and Steven would holler at all of them about going on with their lives as usual. So he opened a new email to the group at large and typed.

  This is your annual “Does anyone want anything from Frankfurt, although God knows why you would” email. Also someone hired a twenty-something genius and she is perfect. Is this what a midlife crisis feels like? You’ve all been instructed to save me from myself.

  He hit send with an inappropriate amount of gusto. The sheer absurdity of his confession would provoke the lot of them into being clever and give them all something other than Steven’s situation to discuss publicly.

  Too bad there was no more useful sacrifice, no bargain with the universe, he could make.

  Chapter 2

  An Odd Man on a Long Flight

  Eliza

  AFTER DOING BUSINESS in three languages, enduring two fourteen-hour days at the book fair, and dealing with one completely ridiculous new colleague, Eliza finally, finally had a moment to herself. She was determined to take advantage of it by putting as much distance between herself and the hotel as possible with the intent to do some sightseeing. Everyone at her new gig swore that Frankfurt was boring, but Eliza relished finding small, private gems in unloved places. She also didn’t trust the judgement of her new colleagues at all.

  She was outside the Römer trying to appreciate German architecture and thinking that she should head back to her room to get some decent sleep when her phone rang. It was Cody, her fiancé.

  “Hello,” he said fondly when she answered. “Is this a good time?”

  “Well, I’m wandering around Frankfurt trying to take in the sights. So it depends on what you want to talk about,” she said and winced at herself. But Cody’s calls lately had either been about his House of Representatives special election campaign or their wedding. And both of those topics were not only boring, they required her to take notes.

  “Frankfurt has sights?” Cody asked.

  “Yes, it does. Why does everyone hate Frankfurt? It seems perfectly nice!”

  “I wouldn’t know; I’ve only been to the airport,” Cody said unhelpfully.

  Still, Eliza was glad to hear his voice. She hadn’t seen him in nearly five weeks, and she missed him. Curling up in her hotel room bed and chatting about little meaningless things seemed perfect, although she suspected this was not that sort of call. “What’s going on?”

  “I know this is the last thing you want to deal with this week,” Cody said. “But my parents have started planning the engagement party, and I’m supposed to check in with you. If you’re available.”

  “For the party or for a discussion about it right now?”

  “Well, both. But for the moment, planning.”

  Eliza sighed. “Would your parents be very offended if I wasn’t available to talk logistics?”

  “Nah, I told them you’re probably too busy. And the more details my mother gets to decide on her own the happier she is. As long as you’re okay with that?”

  Eliza was torn. While she couldn’t have cared less about the details of her engagement party – or about having one at all – she knew it was an occasion that could not be avoided. There were things to be done, and because of who she and Cody were, they had to be done in a certain way. She could either grumble and take charge or let her future mother-in-law do so and just add the date to her calendar.

  “I’m okay with that,” she finally said. “Although, please, warn me if anything is going to be shocking about it.”

  She braced herself as Cody took a deep breath in response, but he remained silent.

  “What?” she prodded.

  “We’re probably going to need to have press there.”

  Eliza felt herself physically recoil. “Ugh. Why?”

  “I’m running for a congressional seat? I know, the whole thing will be weird. But all you have to do is smile and adore me, and you already do that anyway.”

  Cody wasn’t wrong. And he was, at least, joking. But the only thing that worried Eliza more than being a society wife was being a political one. Conversations and considerations like this were very much why. She knew it wasn’t kind of her, but she hoped he would lose.

  THAT NIGHT ELIZA SLEPT poorly and had dream after dream that she was running late. Late for flights, late for meetings, late even to her own wedding. She was relieved to wake up and realize it was five in the morning in Frankfurt and hours before she had to be anywhere. She had no planes to catch, her wedding was still more than a year away, and she had plenty of time to address anything needed before the work day began.

  A quick glance at her inbox showed only a handful of emails, none of which wer
e urgent. Going back to sleep would have been ideal, but Eliza was too keyed up from the nightmares. And the hotel had a pool.

  She would never admit to anyone that, for as long as she could remember, she had always believed that the water called to her. Her affinity for it was not defined by skill or hobby so much as a need to be submerged in it that was as fundamental as her body’s need for food. She’d realized young it was too peculiar to explain and had learned to swim laps to have the excuse.

  She dug through her suitcase until she found her swimsuit. It took a little while; her clothes were tangled together messily. Not a useful state for them to be in, given how most of them needed to be perfectly neat and pressed. But if her clothes would need to be ironed anyway, she saw no reason not to let them get wrinkled in transit.

  The pool, when she located it, was a dreary basement affair, long and narrow and split down the middle with a single rope marking it off into two lanes. It was, however, mercifully empty, and she shed the hotel bathrobe she’d used as a coverup and slid in. The water was too cold, so she did the only thing she could: dove under and began. Soon the world fell away – her bad dreams, her new job, the specter of her engagement party. There was only the strange muffled peace of the water around her ears, here under the earth. She counted as she swam, neither laps nor strokes, but a steady beat as if to music she could not quite remember.

  Eventually, out of breath, Eliza stopped. She spread her toes against the tiled bottom of the pool and hauled herself up to sit on its side. Across from her, in the other lane, another swimmer – a man – slowed, then stopped as well. She’d been alone when she had arrived and hadn’t heard or felt anyone enter the water. She wondered now if there was any way to grab her robe and flee to her room without looking like she was in a hurried panic to avoid human contact.

  But when the man hauled himself out of the water, it was Harry. She felt all the more impulse to flee. They hadn’t even been colleagues for a day and now here they were in their swimsuits! Eliza took a deep breath. She’d been born a WASP for something, and if it wasn’t to suppress all her emotions in this incredibly awkward moment, it wasn’t for anything at all.

  “Oh,” he said, startled, when he finally looked up and saw her.

  “Oh,” she echoed. It only seemed natural. Their body postures mirrored each other across the water; why not their repressed horror too?

  “Of course it’s you.” His voice wasn’t mocking; he sounded and looked as dismayed as she was.

  “Yes.”

  They sat in silence for a few moments, probably because standing up and revealing more of their bodies to each other would make the whole thing worse. Each of them absently kicked at the water which rippled between them, sending darts and flashes of light onto the ceiling.

  “Good morning,” she tried awkwardly.

  “You’re up early,” Harry replied with only somewhat more aplomb.

  To Eliza’s surprise he kept his eyes on her face. Not once did his gaze drop to her body, clad only in her blue swimsuit. With any other man she would have dived back into the water to cover herself with it; men could be so awful about their gaze. But now that they were here, she could feel no threat emanating from him. Only a resigned weariness.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she confessed. She tried to match Harry’s courtesy and not look anywhere but his eyes, but she found it difficult. Not because of desire, although he was fit and handsome, all long limbs and strongly built. But because he was an infuriating and curious creature. She wanted to know things about him, even if the stories of men were often less written on their flesh than the stories of women.

  “Neither could I,” he admitted.

  The conversation, stilted as it was, felt strangely intimate, even though they weren’t really saying anything, just sharing space while they swirled their legs in the water and caught their breath from swimming. After their near-combativeness yesterday, Eliza didn’t know what to make of it.

  “Anything wrong? Other than jetlag?” she asked, mocking his remark to her at dinner in an attempt to get back on that footing.

  Harry gave a surprisingly weary shrug. “One of my best friends is dying of cancer,” he said. “Which was also true yesterday, but now he’s doing it faster. And we’re talking about it.”

  Eliza’s training for any and all social eventualities continued to fail her. She did not immediately know how to respond. When she said nothing, Harry frowned – at her or at himself for being so honest, she didn’t know – and began to hoist himself up from his seat at the edge of the pool.

  “Well, fuck,” she said, in lieu of anything else. She didn’t want him to leave because of her silence.

  He stopped and looked down at her. “That was rather my reaction, yes.”

  She hurried to scramble to her feet. Even on opposite sides of the pool she couldn’t stand the idea of him towering over her any more than she could stand the idea of leaving him alone to his circumstances.

  “I suppose the suggestion of bier und brotzeit would be inadequate?”

  Curiosity sparked behind the sadness in Harry’s eyes, and Eliza tried not to wince at herself. She’d effectively invited Harry out for a booze breakfast.

  TO ELIZA’S UTTER SURPRISE, Harry accepted. And so, an hour later, she found herself sitting across from him in an excessively cheery bar decorated with beer steins a few blocks over from their hotel.

  Having since, like herself, showered and changed, Harry was dressed for another day of meetings in a grey checked suit that had a flair to it that made Eliza think more of the flashy stock brokers of London’s City than the dreary New York editor’s life Harry presumably led. But even though he was starched and ironed to perfection, there was something about him that seemed rumpled, almost weary, nonetheless.

  The news about his friend, perhaps. Or the exhaustion brought on by a demanding schedule. Or maybe it was that once she’d seen him undressed, dripping, and defenseless on the side of a hotel pool, the sharp lines of his clothes couldn’t disguise his weaknesses so well anymore.

  Eliza looked away from Harry and focused on the menu. He did the same.

  “Do you need me to translate for you, Harold?” she asked as she stared down at the laminated paper. Better to tease than to dwell on thoughts of...whatever sort of thoughts she’d been dwelling on. Harry was a colleague, and Eliza had no business trying to figure out how he could look so put together and so at loose ends at the same time.

  Harry gave her a sharp sideways look. “Please never call me that.”

  “I was testing it out.”

  “Well, don’t. And no, thank you for the kind offer, but I am perfectly capable of understanding a menu.”

  “Not a fan of your name, then.” She didn’t mean to needle him like this, not really, but she didn’t know how to do anything else.

  “Harry is fine. Harold makes me sound....”

  “Old?”

  “Yes, something like that.” He frowned and looked up from his menu at her. “What about yours?”

  “What about mine?”

  “Elizabeth Ann Abgral,” Harry said slowly, rolling the sounds off his tongue. “That’s a lot to contend with.”

  “I never met anyone who was so hell-bent on using all of it every time they address me.” She wasn’t sure what Harry was driving at.

  “It’s a New England patrician pain-in-the-ass of a name, and good luck trying to pass yourself off as anything but what your family has ever been.”

  Eliza was torn between offense and amusement. “You really did grow up with girls like me.”

  “Indeed.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my family,” She said. He had, somehow, turned the tables on her, and Eliza felt defensive. There was, in truth, a lot wrong with her family.

  “I didn’t say there was. But New England names – and family legacies – are terrible. Rich and snotty and exploitative of someone. Did you have a governess as a child? Or just a live-in housekeeper?”

&n
bsp; “My grandmother, actually,” she said, although it absolved her of nothing. “And Abgral is Breton, technically.”

  Harry blinked twice. Hard. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s a Breton name. From Brittany? In France? It’s not from New England.”

  He continued to gape at her in terrible, fish-like silence.

  “Is something wrong?” She did not understand what was happening in this conversation.

  “Are you sure we haven’t met before?” Harry asked, with a frown of what might have been desperation.

  This again. “If we have, I don’t remember. Why do you keep asking that?”

  “It’s just...you seem so very familiar,” he said.

  “We’re at an international book fair in Frankfurt,” Elizabeth reminded him. “Everyone looks like someone you know from somewhere else.”

  Harry shook his head and tapped his fingers against the table. Eliza looked down at his hands, strong, elegant, and with a soft sheen to his blunt nails. A manicure.

  “No. I can always place someone,” he said.

  “But not me?”

  “No. I mean....” He deflated. “You’re right. You must remind me of someone.” Harry said, though he sounded less than convinced. “Where in Brittany? I mean, where in Brittany is your family from?”

  “I don’t know. My family’s been in Boston since the Revolutionary War at least. I’m sure someone somewhere keeps track, but I try to ignore it. It’s like having a pedigree. Like a dog. Or a horse.” Eliza shrugged. “People get odd about it. As you probably know.”

  “Being Breton?”

  Eliza squinted at him. Harry was peculiar and never seemed to say anything that made complete sense. “No. Being a Daughter of the American Revolution. Why are you so terrible? I grew up with a girl who was a Daughter of the Mayflower. She was also terrible and held that over me for years.”