Surfacing

by Nora Raleigh Baskin

  “C’mon.” Julie took Maggie’s hand. Nathan followed in a chain. “Let’s go up front.”

  It was the last week before midwinter vacation, and there was already a buzz in the air. Not much work left to be done. No one wanted work over the break. There was a percentage of the student body that had already left, taking the extra two days, against school policy and despite repeated warnings that had come home in flyers and e-mails to parents.

  Nathan, Maggie, and Julie shifted in their seats, three rows from stage center, just as the principal, Mr. Walker, walked across and stood before the microphone. There was the usual tech malfunction before a loud screech and then Mr. Walker’s voice: “We’d like to welcome Hans Butcher to our school this morning.” He lifted his hand toward stage right.

  Mr. Walker was still talking, but the audience seemed to think they were being cued to clap.

  When it was quiet again, the principal continued. “Hans is engaging, entertaining, and affecting. He will challenge us all to take responsibility for ourselves and our actions.”

  Mr. Walker took a piece of folded paper from his pocket and finished up by reading. “As a youth, Hans struggled with both a learning disability and a complete lack of direction. After struggling to graduate from high school, Hans spent the next few years with no ambition. His life changed when he finally understood that it wasn’t his learning disabilities, or any other outside factor, holding him back in life. It was only his self-limiting beliefs and the labels he had placed on himself and allowed others to place on him.”

  The rest of the speech went on to describe Hans’s great achievements and how he would unlock the hidden potential within us all. Three kids were already fast asleep, but they woke up briefly when the clapping began again and Hans Butcher appeared on the stage and took the microphone.

  He was funny. He was loud and energetic. He moved back and forth, using the entire space. Hans told his life story and did magic tricks in between, while making rapid-fire jokes. Still, four kids near the back were now asleep.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” Hans announced, standing with his arms at his sides, palms out, as if in complete surrender, “comes the hypnotism portion of the show. I am going to prove that every one of you here, sitting in this audience, is a liar. And that only I can compel you to tell the truth.”

  Maggie felt her whole body tense, on alert. Her heart quickened, and when she looked over at Julie, she could see that her friend was having a similar reaction.

  “What does he mean?” Julie said, leaning over.

  Maggie whispered, “I don’t know.”

  “Do I have any volunteers?” Hans Butcher said.

  About two dozen hands went up, but Hans ignored them. “I am looking for someone specific,” he said, “someone with a secret.”

  Hands continued to wave around in the air, as well as jeers about particular football players, cheerleaders, and a few teachers. In the anonymity of the auditorium, all was fair.

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Pierson — we already know you’re gay.”

  “C’mon, Stewart, get up there and tell them about you and your mama.”

  “Don’t worry, Melissa — he’s not talking about last night.”

  Then, as if he were expecting things to get out of control exactly as they did, Hans Butcher calmed his audience by doing nothing more than speaking more softly and raising his hand as if he were about to pick someone. “The person I am looking for is mostly quiet and shy, a loner, in fact, although by choice. If provoked, this person will make things happen precisely as they need them to.”

  Nathan clucked his tongue. “He’s using contradictory descriptions that can fit everyone. He’s a con man.”

  But Maggie couldn’t take her eyes off the stage and the man who was parading around, calling out words, accusing and seducing. She felt cold, and her spine involuntarily compressed then released in a shudder.

  Hans said, “How about you, young man?”

  One of the jeering football players stood up. “Sure.”

  New hands shot up.

  “And how about you? And this pretty girl?” Hans proceeded to pick three more students and one teacher — a “good sport”— from their seats. Meanwhile, someone had walked onstage and set up five metal folding chairs. Without being told, the volunteers took their seats, facing forward, all in a row.

  Hans Butcher went through a series of relaxation exercises. He waved his hands a lot. He talked fast. He talked slowly, and sure enough, one by one, each of the five began to lower their eyelids and then nod their heads until they all appeared to be sleeping.

  “No one really tells the truth. Not to themselves in particular,” Hans Butcher said, his subjects all resting comfortably, or as comfortably as one could be sitting up onstage in a metal folding chair. “On any given day, the average person tells seven to ten minor lies.” He paused dramatically. “And one to two major ones.”

  The audience had gotten very quiet. It seemed to Maggie the lights had been lowered.

  “Now, when I snap my fingers, any one of you”— he addressed the five —“who is holding a minor secret, something benign, something you wouldn’t be afraid to tell two hundred of your closest friends”— the audience laughed nervously —“please feel free to tell us now.”

  One girl, center stage, number three in the middle seat, stood up immediately. Lots of heads swiveled around, then turned back to the stage. The girl was a senior. Her name, when Hans prompted her to speak, was Louisa.

  “Louisa,” Hans began, “I don’t want you to tell us anything you will regret later on. Are you sure you want to tell us?”

  Louisa nodded in a kind of drunken stupor.

  Louisa began to speak, her eyes still half closed. “I was at a party last night —”

  Hans interrupted her again. “Please do not name any other names, understood?”

  Onstage, Louisa nodded again. “Everyone was drinking.”

  “Wow, some secret that is,” a male voice shouted from the darkened house seats, but Hans paid no attention and no one else on the stage even seemed to hear.

  “No parents were home.” The audience groaned. “So no one was really paying attention to the house — just to each other. The boys all wanted to find someone to have sex with, and the girls pretended not to care if no one wanted to have sex with them.”

  “This is a setup,” Nathan whispered. There were other uncomfortable comments floating around the audience.

  “And this house was really rich. I mean, the people who live there are really rich. Like rock-star rich. I started to hate them.” Louisa still spoke in a monotone, seeming not to know where she was or to whom she was talking.

  “And why did you hate these people? They weren’t even home, am I correct?” Hans prompted her.

  Louisa nodded. “I didn’t hate them. I hated that they had what I didn’t have.”

  “Which was what?”

  “Nice things,” Louisa said, her voice more animated now. “Stuff. So I wanted to take something. Something no one would miss.”

  Hans suddenly snapped his fingers, and Louisa’s eyes flew open. She seemed to have no idea what had just transpired. She looked to the other four subjects and then out to the audience with a bewildered expression on her face.

  “There is the voice we all have in our heads,” Hans went on, “the voice that perpetuates the narrative of our lives. It talks and talks, noticing the world, deciding what we will do or won’t do. Expressing our anger and our sadness and our frustrations. Noticing that pretty girl. That hot guy. It knows the answers to the test. Or not.”

  More laughter.

  “But there is another voice we don’t often listen to. It’s quieter,” Hans said. “You can’t hear it while the other voice is talking.”

  Hans went on to do the same hypnotic act with the remaining volunteers, stopping each before he or she had gone too far. Each time, Hans used the confession as an opportunity to talk about taking responsibility. Being a be
tter person. Tolerance. He was earning his PTO check at his subjects’ expense.

  “He stole your mojo,” Julie said as they filed out with the crowd toward the rows of double doors.

  The light in the lobby was stark. It felt like hours had gone by.

  “Well, at least I know where it went,” Maggie said. She forced a laugh.

  Nathan reached back and held out his hand, but Maggie pulled away, subtly enough that it seemed accidental. A motion so deft that even Maggie would look back and wonder if it had happened or not. She would wonder if everything that happened before and everything that happened after had ever been in her control at all.

  Sometimes when I’m sleeping, Maggie comes over to my bed and watches me. I know she does this, even though I keep my eyes shut tight, and I am very good at not moving. I don’t move an inch. If I am perfectly still, I think she will go away, go back to her own bed. Sometimes Maggie can’t sleep at night and wants to come into bed with me.

  She knows as much as I do that she could just go into Mom and Dad’s room. They would grunt sleepily and shift over and let her right under their covers, but she wants me. She wants to see if I’m awake, too, because she doesn’t want me to be mad at her for bothering me. “Don’t bother me. You always bother me,” I’d say. And I know that hurts her feelings, and I also know she doesn’t care. She knows she isn’t really bothering me. I mean, she is, but I’m used to it.

  But tonight I will roll over and I will make room for Maggie to climb into bed right next to me. She needs me now.

  There would be an easy practice tomorrow, right before the finals, but today would be brutal. No letting up on anyone.

  “Do people really say you don’t sweat in the water?” Maggie said. She held on to the side of the pool and tried to calm her chest heaving.

  Julie held on beside her. “Is my face as red as it feels?”

  “Redder. You look like a cherry. You match your cap.”

  Coach Mac was standing on the bulkhead, leaning in, gesturing in all sorts of wild ways. The 200-meter relay needed to work on their turning technique. Any second the assistant coach was going to stroll over and give the girls their next set of drills.

  “I’m not feeling so good, Jules,” Maggie said. “Can you cover for me?”

  “Cover for you? How?”

  “Jules, I can’t breathe. I can’t catch my breath.”

  The assistant coach was still filling in papers on a clipboard while Coach Mac was repeating his flip-turn pantomime, over and over.

  “OK, just go,” Julie said.

  Maggie put her hands on the deck and hoisted her body out of the water. It never stopped amazing her how light her body felt in the water. If she could be that weightless on dry land, she would fly.

  She wanted to fly.

  Maggie sat down on a bench in the locker room. She put her hand to her heart to calm its beating and relieve the tightness constricting the flow of air. She counted to ten, then fifteen, and slowly the burning lessened, and then slowly it stopped altogether. Back on the pool deck, she moved along the wall, trying to blend in with the grayness and slip back into the water.

  “I told the coach you had to go to the bathroom,” Julie said to her when Coach Mac gave the girls a short break. “You OK now?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” Maggie said, “but everyone knows we all pee in the pool.”

  Julie smiled. “Don’t get me started.”

  The whistle blew; their break was over.

  Maggie didn’t think that what her sister was doing was swimming — not real swimming anyway, even if it had gotten her a deep-water pass at camp last summer. It looked to Maggie like the doggie paddle as Leah headed right out to the middle of the pool.

  She could have shouted out, reminded Leah about how soon Mommy was coming home. Made fun of her stroke. Stopped her. Called her back. Told her she wasn’t going to be able to hide her wet hair.

  Stopped her. She could have stopped her.

  Leah didn’t say anything while she made her way toward the slide and the ladder on the other side. Her head was barely above the water. Maggie remembers her sister’s head looking like a funny insect skimming the surface, bobbing up and down, like those water bugs you see on ponds and streams. When she got to the other side, Leah held on and waved back at Maggie.

  “Hey there, Sis,” she called out.

  Leah never called her that. It was all for Meghan’s benefit, to sound cool. To look like a big shot.

  Maggie looked over to see if Meghan was outside, still acting as if she didn’t notice anyone in the blue, blue pool — to see if Meghan was still standing on her green, green lawn — but she had gone.

  Things at home were so strangely the same that Maggie was able to ignore the surreal conversation she had had with her parents about divorce. The tension was still there, in the short responses and averted eyes, but if anything, her parents were fighting a little less. It was easy to pretend it hadn’t happened and that it wouldn’t happen, like a bad dream you can’t quite remember.

  The morning of the state finals, Maggie woke up before her alarm went off, before any of the three fail-safe clocks — her cell phone, desk clock, and computer — chimed. The blackness always confused her. Was it morning? Was it midnight? Was it only a few minutes after she had fallen asleep or hours later? Finally she just got out of bed and flipped on the light in the bathroom. Only then did she remember her dreams. It was sometimes hard to distinguish a memory from a dream. Had that really happened, or had she dreamed it?

  The house was silent. It was four thirty, December dark. Too late to go back to sleep. She had to get up in twenty minutes anyway.

  Hosting the state finals was big business for West Hill. The athletic director, Mr. Eli, who had never come to a meet before, was wandering around checking on the ticket booth, the raffle booth, the two separate concessions. Six schools were all converging for a ten-hour event. Hundreds of spectators, competitors, and coaches. There were even rumors of scouts from Florida State, Penn State, and the University of Maryland being there.

  “I didn’t think I’d find you here,” Nathan said. “I looked everywhere.”

  Maggie was crouched by the entrance to the old boys’ locker room. It wasn’t used much, and the whole wing was slated to be torn down, renovated for a new ceramics and woodworking shop, but the water was still turned on. The sinks ran, the toilets flushed.

  “Are you nervous?”

  Maggie nodded. She was wearing her flannel pajama pants, a sweatshirt, and her pool sandals. Her goggles bulged from the side of her suit where they were stuffed into the leg opening. Her cap was bunched up in her fist.

  “Are my parents here?” Maggie asked. “I haven’t seen my dad yet. Is my dad here?” She had scanned the bleachers when she came in but hadn’t seen her father.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see him, but it’s mobbed out there. I could tell you it’s just a swim meet, right?” Nathan tried.

  She nodded again.

  “But that would be stupid, right?”

  Nathan sat down beside Maggie. “Or that it’s supposed to be fun?” he tried.

  “It’s not,” Maggie said. “Listen, I’ve been thinking about something. I wanna make a date.”

  “A date?”

  “For ten years from now,” Maggie went on.

  “What?”

  “I don’t mean a date date, like a going out on a date. But a real number, a calendar date. For us to meet in the future, in our futures.”

  Nathan shifted back. “Huh?”

  Maggie pulled at Nathan’s arm. “Just wait. Just do this for me. Ten years from now, we meet at the Dutch Reformed church on Old Main Street. OK? Say, like, twelve noon. So wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, in ten years we each make it there at the exact same time, OK? No matter what?”

  “And what if we’re still together? Did you even consider that?”

  “Yeah, I did. If we’re still together, then we just have an anniversary. We go ou
t to dinner or something. We mark ten years from when we first . . . you know.”

  “You know the date?”

  “You don’t know that date?”

  “Yeah, I know it.”

  “OK, so ten years from that exact day. You can’t forget. I’ll write it down for us both, and you have to put it in a safe place. No matter what happens, we have to be there.”

  Nathan stood up. “You must be really nervous, Maggie. It’s just a swim meet. If you guys lose, at least you can sleep in the rest of the semester. We can actually go to the movies.”

  Maggie got to her feet beside him. “No, promise, Nathan. Promise me you’ll be there.”

  “And eat pizza in public.”

  “I’m serious. Will you be there? No matter what?”

  “OK. OK,” Nathan said. “I promise.”

  Her knees were shaking so much, it would have been audible in a silent room, the knocking together of her bones. Maggie knew that real athletes lived for these moments, for the moments when the difference between winning and losing hung in the balance, in determination, in flesh and muscles. And this moment was far from silent. There was cheering and yelling from the stands and the deck, and the echo of stomping on the metal risers was deafening. Then, just before the referee lifted the whistle to his mouth, the sounds lowered to an unnatural stillness. Maggie’s body seemed to know what to do, even if she didn’t. Her grip, the arch of her back, the readiness of her shoulders.

  “Swimmers on your marks. Get set. Go.”

  So many times Maggie had wondered about all the tiny things that might have been different. One shift in the lineal sequence of events, in somebody’s decision, one choice, no matter how irrelevant, and the story changes completely. Maggie was the only one who saw Leah’s considerable feat of both courage and skill. Maybe if she had looked impressed, if she had clapped.

  Maybe if Meghan had come back out or stayed to see it the first time.

  Instead, Maggie watched her sister head out again, across the pool, across the deep water. By this time, Maggie was getting anxious. She kept turning her gaze from the water to the road, where she thought she might see her mother’s car returning. But there were so many silver cars. Which one was her mom’s? She didn’t know, but at some point, her fear of being caught outside the apartment had changed to the hope that her mother would get back and find them, even if it meant getting in big trouble.