Surfacing

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  “My sister, Leah, died when I was five.”

  Nathan didn’t say what everyone always said, something like, “Geez, I’m so sorry.” Or: “Oh, my best friend’s cousin had a friend who died.” Or: “That almost happened to me once.” Which is why Maggie had long since decided it was easier to just omit that part of her history.

  So when her father finally pulled up to the side of the road and looked once at Nathan but said nothing more than hello, Maggie felt she had chosen wisely.

  No one came to a swim meet unless they had to. Swim meets were probably the most boring sporting events in all high-school history. There was a lot of waiting: so many heats in each race, so many swimmers in each heat. Meets were interminable, and even if you were rooting for someone, once the actual swimmers were in the water, they all looked the same. And swim meets were unrelentingly loud. Sounds echoed off the walls and thudded on the surface of the water. The constant splashing, whistle blowing, and cheering took on a kind of canned, unreal quality.

  Maggie hated the actual meets. She usually found herself hiding in the bathroom with cramps just before her race was announced, and because of this, Maggie had sussed out the least-used bathrooms in all the local schools and health clubs, even if it meant using an empty boys’ locker room after school hours.

  “Hey, you swim the fifteen hundred free, don’t you?”

  Maggie turned from the sink to the sound of a girl’s voice. It was a girl from the other team, Franklin High School. Maggie recognized her from last year and years before that. They swam a lot of the same events.

  “You must be as nervous as me.”

  “Probably more,” Maggie said. She cranked the handle on the dispenser to dry her hands, but the paper towels were stuck or missing.

  “We both better get out of the boys’ locker room. The wrestling team comes in for late practices Thursday afternoons.”

  “Thanks for telling me.” Maggie pulled open the heavy door, and both girls stepped out. The boys’ locker room was at the other end of the school from the pool, but the faraway sounds of the meet and the faint smell of chlorine were wafting down the hall.

  “I hate swim meets,” the girl said.

  “Me too. I’m Maggie.”

  “I know who you are. I’m Kiah.” She smiled. “I mean, you always win, so I know your name. That’s probably why you don’t know me.”

  Maggie wanted to say something nice to counter that, but it was true, and she couldn’t think of anything.

  “Don’t worry about it. I don’t care,” Kiah said after a long silence. “I just don’t want to go back in there yet. Do you?”

  “Not really.”

  The girls pressed their backs to the wall, bent their knees, and let their bottoms sink to the floor.

  “I should probably watch my best friend’s race, though. She always cheers me on.” Maggie meant Julie. Julie swam the early heats. She wasn’t expected to place, but you never knew.

  “You have a best friend?” Kiah began. “I have a best friend. Or at least I used to.”

  Sometimes Maggie had a warning, and sometimes she could even look back and see how she had affected the whole thing, maybe by asking leading questions or seeming overly interested, but sometimes these intimate confessions came out of nowhere, out of the blue. There was nothing Maggie could pinpoint as evoking such intimacy with an acquaintance, someone she knew vaguely or just met. It was almost as if the less connected she was, the closer she could become.

  “My best friend hates me,” Kiah went on. “We just had this huge fight. She says I talk about her behind her back.”

  Maggie didn’t ask for further clarification, but she nodded, and that was all Kiah seemed to need. “I don’t say anything I wouldn’t say right to her face, you know. Some people just can’t stand hearing the truth about themselves. Like, I told her she shouldn’t go out with that guy from West Hill — people will think she’s a slut. I didn’t say she was a slut.”

  Maggie stood up. “I better go. Good luck with your friend.”

  “Yeah, thanks. You too. Nice talking to you.”

  Just like that, people told her things, drank her in, a wellspring in the wilderness.

  Maggie hadn’t expected to see Nathan at the meet. She had no way of knowing how long he had been there.

  That was him, wasn’t it?

  It was. There he was, sitting at the very top, on the highest bench of the bleachers, his back leaning against one of the metal poles. Everyone was gathering their bags, their towels, slipping on pajama bottoms and sweatshirts. Parents milled around while coaches confirmed times and future competitions.

  When he thought he had caught her eye, Nathan waved. Maggie tried to remember if he had told her he had a sister on the team, or on the other team. Why else would he be here? He must have come to see her. Maggie lifted her hand and waved back, just enough to show interest but not enough to seem too interested. After all, this was her plan, and it needed to go accordingly.

  Maggie couldn’t swim, but Leah could, of course. Leah had passed the deep-water test at Camp Jekocee, though maybe that was because the camp lifeguard was flirting with the girls’ third-grade counselor when Leah had held on to the side of the pool on her way back.

  But the morning the two sisters sat in their bathing suits, green-and-yellow daisies and sun-bleached bunches of red berries, by the stairs at the shallow end of their condo pool and cooled their feet, no one was thinking about that.

  “So isn’t this good?” Maggie said. She splashed the water.

  “Yeah, this is good,” Leah agreed. She let her eyes wander to the front windows of condos A–C, the ones that looked out onto the pool, the one where Meghan lived. “We gotta go back soon, though.”

  “I’m gonna swim, then,” Maggie said. She stood up and took two steps into the water.

  “Oh, no, you’re not.” Leah turned back to look at her sister.

  Suddenly this little adventure struck Leah as very wrong. Leah was the responsible one. She was the older sister. She was supposed to be watching Maggie. All they had to do was stay in the house. Her mother would be mad, so mad. She would see the wet bathing suits. She would see footprints on their front step. Maybe she would come home early.

  No, Leah hadn’t thought this through at all. They needed to get back to the house before their mother did. Air-conditioning or not.

  “What?” Maggie twisted her hips around. The water was already up to her knees. Her feet looked funny, distorted, like they weren’t attached to her body, dissolving in the sunlight that reflected off the surface.

  “You can’t go in,” Leah said.

  Can’t? There were so many things Leah could do that Maggie wasn’t allowed to, so many more things Leah told her she couldn’t do. Leah got to stay up later. She got to say no when she didn’t want to eat something. Maggie always had to try it first. Leah got to sit in the front seat when there were only three of them. She got to order a whole meal in a restaurant, and half the time Leah didn’t finish hers, either.

  “You can’t swim,” Leah told her little sister. “You don’t know how.”

  “So?” Maggie shot back. “Neither do you.”

  It was a rare time when Dylan and Lucas weren’t together, but today Dylan was alone in Maggie’s room. Lucas had gone to the dentist to have a cavity filled, but only after being convinced that Dylan didn’t have one but that Lucas did. That’s why he had to go and his brother didn’t. They were still adjusting to not being in the same class for kindergarten. As Mrs. Paris predicted, it had made them cling more to each other, not less, as the school psychologist had insisted.

  Though now, without his slightly larger and three-second-older brother, Dylan was more talkative. He had already gone through everything in Maggie’s room, touching, looking, asking questions.

  “Can I have this, Mags?” Dylan was on Maggie’s bed, on his back, holding up a small pedometer. It had belonged to Leah.

  “Where did you get that?”


  “In that drawer, Maggie. Was it Leah’s?”

  Dylan and Lucas weren’t afraid to ask for anything they wanted or needed, nor were they afraid to talk about Leah. They had no memory of her, no guilt, no sadness. She was four letters, L-E-A-H, from the alphabet they copied into homework notebooks, and nothing more than that. Like a photograph of your great-uncle who was killed before you were born, in a war that you’ve only vaguely even heard of.

  “ ‘No’ and ‘Yes,’ Dylan. Sorry,” Maggie told him. She had her feet propped up on her desk, her laptop on her knees, but she leaned forward and snatched the pedometer out of his hands. Sometimes it felt like the twins were from a different set of parents, but of course they weren’t. They were just from a different marriage, a different life.

  Leah had begged for that pedometer. She made her case (as was Leah’s unrelenting style) that she would use it all the time, and how educational it was, and how she would take really good care of it. It wasn’t that expensive, she pointed out. Her mom thought it was a strange request for a nine-year-old, and her dad didn’t want to indulge Leah’s need to buy everything she saw on TV commercials. But in the end, she got it for her birthday. She used it twice and put it away in a drawer, and now it was Maggie’s.

  “C’mon, Magmag. It’s so cool, and you never use it.” Funny how he spoke perfectly well when he wanted something. “Why can’t I have it?”

  Maggie flung the pedometer onto the end of her bed and turned around in her chair again. She was about to answer, to tell her brother why he couldn’t have anything of Leah’s that belonged to her. The front door opened; their mom was home from the dentist, and it sounded like Mr. Paris had come home at the same time. They walked into the house shouting at each other, in that muffled, stilted way they somehow believed was quiet. Did they really think that no one could hear every word they were saying? Maggie tried to remember a time when their piercing, angry tone was rare, when it would have startled or surprised her, but she couldn’t. Was it before Leah? Or just after?

  When her mother first told her about the impending twins, Maggie clearly remembers wondering why her parents were having more children. Aren’t you supposed to love each other when you have babies?

  Her parents’ voices made their way up the stairs.

  What do you think? I’m home all day taking tennis lessons?

  Well, it would be nice if you picked up the laundry once in a while.

  This was unexpected. I needed to get Lucas to the dentist. The dry cleaner’s is on the other end of town.

  The door slammed.

  Maggie watched as Dylan’s entire face changed. His eyes dimmed; his mouth tightened. His whole presence looked smaller. She could see it in his eyes, and she could feel it in her own body. No matter how used to it she was, it made her sick.

  Lucas’s footsteps banged up the stairs. Dylan hopped off Maggie’s bed to meet him in the hall, and they disappeared into their room. When Maggie looked over at her bed for the pedometer, she saw that it was gone, too.

  “So who is this Nathan?” Julie asked. She took a bite of her sandwich and then set it down. “God, I hate peanut butter and honey.”

  “I thought you liked it,” Maggie said. “Banana?”

  “Don’t change the subject.”

  “I didn’t change it — you did.”

  There was a pause in the cafeteria noise. Maggie had once read that there is a natural lull in all conversations, every seven minutes. And then someone notices it, or everyone notices, feels really uncomfortable, and picks it up again. Silence is not well tolerated, like lying. As if on cue, the noise level rose again in a wave.

  “So who is he?” Julie asked again.

  Maggie lowered her voice. “He’s some boy. You know him. He’s a year ahead of us.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Maggie. I mean, who is he?”

  Instead of answering, Maggie looked around the room. Stacy Ketchum was, once again, throwing her uneaten lunch in the trash. Brendon Fox was flicking Poland Spring bottle tops across the room. Cari Stone was running lines from Twelve Angry Jurors with Zoe Lowenbein, who had recently taken Lowen as a stage name, on the advice of her New York City talent agent. Josh Jamner, Daniel Wu, and Cody Shea were in a heated discussion about last night’s play-off game. In the corner by the window, two boys Maggie didn’t know were playing chess, as they did every afternoon. Everything was just as it always was.

  “It’s a good thing I don’t have whatever it is you always say you have,” Julie said, not so quietly. She pushed the rest of her lunch across the table.

  “What?” Maggie tried to sound like she didn’t know what Julie meant.

  “You know, whatever it is you think you have that makes people tell you about themselves — well, it’s just very convenient that it doesn’t seem to work on you. Because then,” she went on, “you’d be telling me the truth, instead of this bullshit about some boy.”

  Maggie reached her hand out, palm up. A peace offering. “I am, Jules. I don’t know. Right now he’s just some boy that I kinda like.”

  Julie’s voice lowered. “OK, so say I believe you. What’s going on with him? You really like him, like him?”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Maggie said.

  “Well, anyone or anything that gets you to forget about that douche bag Matthew James is OK with me.”

  Maggie said quickly, “Nathan is going to drive me home from the PSATs tomorrow.”

  “Then you don’t need a ride from me. Okeydokey.” She smiled at her friend. “Sounds like you have a plan.” Julie winked.

  The plan:

  Maggie had dug out her eighth-grade health notebook, flipping through the pages until she found the section “Sex Education,” which at the time she had paid no attention to, just diligently copied the SMART Board notes into her notebook. The instructor was Mr. Cilberto, shy and quiet, and the assistant wrestling coach, by coincidence. He didn’t talk much about the list of birth control methods as he wrote in tiny letters on the board. It all seemed to embarrass him terribly, but he put ABSTINENCE on the top in big letters, followed by the others.

  The rhythm method was number three.

  The timing was just right, seven days from the end of her last menstrual cycle. Safe for intercourse and prevention of pregnancy. It wasn’t advisable necessarily, but it was a viable plan and one Maggie planned on using.

  The girls were dressing for practice, yanking on their suits, or two, one over the other for extra resistance, tying up their hair, stepping into flip-flops. That afternoon, there was to be a mandatory film on water safety before practice. No one was excused, not even seniors, who had heard the Red Cross spiel three times before. Though somehow Maggie had managed to be absent last year.

  “No one can skip this,” Coach Mac told them.

  The whole team squeezed into the coach’s office, sitting mostly cross-legged on the floor, a couple on top of the desk and the filing cabinet. These girls were used to being close together, breathing to the sound of one another’s breath. Often they swam with only a foot or two between bodies, in full stride. A touch of someone’s toes during a flip turn to signal the need to cut ahead, all in a smooth rhythm, like a machine, and now they sat, bored and restless, packed tightly, fish out of water.

  “Lights out,” Coach Mac called. The girl nearest the wall switch stood up; everything went dark, and a low whispering began immediately. The video suffused the room in a hazy light.

  “Quiet down, everyone.”

  A white-sand beach. The peaceful dark-blue ocean. Jump-cut to an aqua-blue pool, the painted black line wavering under the water. All stillness, all calm. A family on a boat. A couple picnicking by a lake. There were comments here and there from the girls, giggles and jokes. Maggie sat leaning her back against the doorjamb, Julie next to her.

  A child wanders off. The young woman in the couple decides to swim by herself. The family in the boat encounters some bad weather. And in each case someone nearly drowns.

  Water is wet. The s
un hot. The concrete burning. The sirens loud. The voices frantic. The water is covering her head. There are no words, no directions.

  No sound at all. One man is waving his arms like a lunatic, grabbing the head of the person trying to save him, dragging them both under.

  There is an image. A narrative. Actors. Water.

  People on the shore making a chain with their hands, a woman in a boat throwing out a rope, a life preserver, a plastic blow-up chair. A lifeguard in red runs across the beach.

  Reach. Throw. Go. The words flash across the screen.

  On the grass, in the boat, on the beach, the people so brave and so determined. The body is not moving; the arms are limp. Tipping back the head, checking the mouth. Then pressing and blowing and working so hard for someone they don’t even know.

  “I knew this was a bad idea.” Julie reached over and touched Maggie’s shoulder. “Are you OK?”

  “Yeah,” Maggie answered.

  “No, you’re not. C’mon, let’s get outta here.”

  When Mr. and Mrs. Paris moved out of the condo, they hoped that only good memories would come with them, and that’s how Mrs. Paris bundled and labeled their belongings, throwing out everything she possibly could.

  Before her mother had taped up the last of the boxes, Maggie grabbed as many things as she could from Leah’s room: books, the smallest of gadgets (Leah loved her gadgets), a Barbie puzzle, even a pair of sneakers — she hid them at the very bottom of the box. She still hadn’t opened it when Julie came over for their first “playdate.”

  “What’s in there?” Julie asked.

  They had already explored the house, had a snack in the kitchen, fed Maggie’s betta fish, and gone through pretty much everything in Maggie’s room. Perhaps Mrs. Paris had been too thorough in her purging, because none of those activities had taken very long.