Maggie stood on the concrete deck now, taking a tiny step forward, another one back, her footprints drying in the heat almost as quickly she shifted from leg to leg. The last thing she remembers is the sun all of a sudden bursting out from behind the cloud where it had been hidden. She remembers thinking it was funny, as if someone had just flipped on a light switch.
But oh, no, they were outside. That’s funny.
The sunlight created a glare, a blinding reflection on the surface of the pool, so that everything became invisible, a white burst of blur. Maggie put her hand to her forehead to create a brim of shade, and when she was able to see again, she couldn’t see her sister anymore.
When a swimmer is right on your shoulder and you can hear her breathing, her strokes pulling and gliding, the splash of her hand slapping the water, her velocity and mass creating a momentum you cannot deny, it is all a blur. Everything you know about swimming flies away, and all you can do is hold your breath until your lungs are about to burst, until the pain is so great, and then push on past it.
You don’t see anything, not the line on the bottom of the pool, not your own hands diving through the surface and grabbing the water as if it were lead and forcing it behind you. You don’t see the marker, the end, the electronic timer pressed up against the side. You reach past it, beyond it. You swim as if you are going to crash right into the wall and never stop swimming.
Maggie hit the touch pad. Her head lifted into the air, and her lungs involuntarily filled with oxygen. A millisecond sooner and they would have taken in water, because that’s what lungs do. They breathe.
The LCD scoreboard lit up instantly with all the finishing times. All heads turned to look. Maggie’s lane recorded 4:12.41. In lane 5, right next to hers, the numbers read 4:12.02. Maggie had lost by less than four tenths of a second, an amount of time no human brain could comprehend. If she were swimming prior to 1912, the race would have been determined by a judge. He might have called a tie or made his decision based on bias. He might have blinked. He might have lied because he would have been human. Maggie didn’t think of any of these things. The team had lost their chance of going to Nationals.
The definition of time is, itself, circular. The very quantity needed to explain time is time itself. It relies on the acceptance that time is linear, made up of events in sequence, and time is the interval between them. Theoretically, in a dreamlike state, there is an infinite measure of the space from beginning to end. It never stops.
In three days, the high school would be on midwinter break, a quarter of the kids would get on a plane to some Caribbean island. In eleven hours and fourteen minutes, the sun would rise again and it would be tomorrow. In five days — in 120 hours, in 7,200 minutes — it would be the shortest day of the year, the winter solstice, and sometime after that, Matthew James would be returning home from college. Or so said his Facebook update, which Maggie hadn’t looked at in more than two weeks, or fifteen days, a perfectly reasonable amount of time.
“Dad? Mom?” she called out. “Dylan?” Maggie realized she sounded weak. It was hard for her to get enough force behind her voice. “Lucas?” she called out, louder, but no one responded. Mrs. Paris appeared instead, at the top of the stairs. She didn’t move to come down.
“Who dropped you off ?”
“Julie’s mom. Where were you guys? Where are Dylan and Lucas?”
“They’re at Grandma’s.”
“Again?” Maggie asked.
“Yes.”
“Where’s Dad?” Maggie asked, but she already knew. She knew now why he wasn’t at the meet. Why he wasn’t home.
The dress coat, the one he never wore, the one that hung year after year on the same hook in the hall, was no longer there. She looked down to the spot where his old sneakers were supposed to be sitting, side by side, worn only on weekends to jog. Without a word, Maggie ran upstairs, past her mother, and flung open the door to her father’s office. Mr. Paris didn’t often work at home, but he kept all his papers, his computer — her dad wouldn’t go anywhere without his computer — his books, letters he hadn’t opened, on a wooden table in an extra room on the second floor.
The table was gone. Papers, stacked or boxed, sat on the floor, pushed into one corner. No computer anywhere to be seen.
“You lied!” Maggie yelled. “You lied to me. He left. He said he’d stay, but he’s gone.”
Mrs. Paris had come, almost, into the room by now. She stood leaning on the door frame, her arms crossed over her chest.
“What are you talking about? Nobody lied. We both told you. We sat down together and talked to you about this.” Her voice was shaking. “Why are you crying, Maggie? You knew about this.”
“I’m not crying,” Maggie said, because she wasn’t and wouldn’t.
“You disappoint me. How are Lucas and Dylan going to be able to handle this if you can’t?”
There was a familiar voice in Maggie’s head, talking to her. And now it was angry. It repeated Mrs. Paris’s words, each one, just to make sure Maggie understood, and then filed them away for future use. In an instant, the voice tried out a shocking response and gave its approval.
“I disappoint you,” Maggie shouted back. “Are you fucking serious?”
She had never cursed at her mother before, but if any occasion seemed to call for it — and seemed likely to go unpunished — this was it.
Mrs. Paris took a deep breath. Her chest heaved up and down, taking her arms with it. Finally she spoke again. “We didn’t lie to you. Your father moved out this morning. He — we thought it would be easier if you kids didn’t have to watch.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Believe it or not, we were thinking of what would be best for you and the boys.”
Did her mother truly believe that her life, the way she behaved, the choices she made, had ever been for anyone other than herself?
“Like the way you left me and Leah alone?”
Maggie could see her mother’s body start to tremble. She watched as her mother’s face melted into another form, older, more tired. It was still her mother, but it wasn’t.
“I left to buy food. I left you safe inside the house. I told you to stay inside.” Mrs. Paris’s voice was unnaturally pitched, and with each word, it got higher, louder, and less familiar. “And why don’t you ask where your father was that day? It was Saturday, wasn’t it? Where was your father? Why don’t you ever ask that?”
Too late, Mrs. Paris’s hand flew up to her mouth and locked, a riveted metal clamp.
Maggie figured that her sister had gotten out of the water.
Boy, she is fast.
Maggie kept her hand like a hat over her eyes and scanned the concrete that surrounded the pool. There would be footprints, wouldn’t there? Little wet Leah footprints. She wouldn’t just leave me like this, would she?
The sun was so hot, but water couldn’t dry that fast. It had been a second, less than a second, since she had turned to look for Meghan. And Maggie was pretty sure there were no footprints. Leah shot up out of the water, just her face, her eyes wider than Maggie had ever seen them. No voice came out of her mouth, just a fierce popping sound.
Maggie would never, as long as she lived, forget that sound. It was not the sound of human gasping, not a feral, wordless cry for help, but the actual rush of air forcing its way into Leah’s lungs. Pop.
Maggie could finally breath again. Mrs. Paris was completely defeated, but Maggie took in huge gulps of air and felt energized, alive. Mrs. Paris’s whole person fell slack, as if she had no control over her own body. Her arms fell to her sides. Her entire weight was slumped against the door frame. If you took away the house, she would fall over completely. She was ugly, old and ugly. Maggie didn’t want to look at her anymore. Ever again.
Anger was joy and freedom. Maggie raced to her room and slammed the door behind her, the echo unnaturally loud. There were no locks — the house was old and the doors were fitted with wrought-iron bars and latches — bu
t long ago Maggie had learned that shoving a hair barrette into the space just above the bar would prevent the latch from being lifted and, in effect, lock her bedroom door.
Maggie stood on her side of the door and waited for her mother’s footsteps. She listened to hear her mother stomp up the stairs, stop in front of her door, maybe jiggle at the handle, but there were no such sounds. The house was quiet. All Maggie could hear was her own heart pumping with oxygen. Adrenaline whooshed through her arms and legs, every vein and muscle. It was deafening.
Maggie flipped on her CD player. She didn’t recognize the music, but that didn’t matter. It filled the space. She twisted the dial loud enough to obliterate everything else. She stood in the center of her room, which had once been a play stage for singing, for make-believe and pretending, a place of dreams, which now seemed broken. The wholeness of it all, the math. Two becomes four becomes three becomes five becomes four again. Why was this happening to her? She had lost her race and let down the team. Her sister was gone, her dad. It was all her fault.
Maggie looked in the mirror that hung over her bureau. Bad is ugly.
Maggie wasn’t speaking, but the lips of the girl in the mirror were moving. The angry voice was talking, but Maggie didn’t understand the language. She leaned closer to listen.
What are you saying?
It was a face she knew better than her own, the eyes and mouth and chin, the pores of skin, the follicles of hair, and the dark hair. A young face. A face to kiss, and pinch, and get angry at, with a mouth that eats ice cream and Easter candy, and the unwanted vegetables from Maggie’s plate when no one is watching. She hated that face; she loved that face.
Listen.
What is she saying?
And then her cell phone chimed, a text: Yo baby. I’m home early from SUNY. Wanna hang?
Matthew suggested she meet him just down the block and around the corner from her house, where apparently he was texting her from. Maggie invented a story as she cut across her neighbor’s lawn: Matthew had a fight with his girlfriend; she drove away crying. Matthew was upset at having hurt her but was now free. His first thoughts were of Maggie.
Her toes were frozen, but sweat dripped down her back. Maggie imagined her face was blotchy and red from the wind and the walk. She hadn’t seen her mother on the way out, but she had left the music blasting in her room, set to repeat.
“Hey there,” Matthew said. He rolled down the window of his car. “C’mon. It’s cold out there.”
Maggie walked around, opened the passenger side, and dropped into the front seat. Inside, heat poured from the vents, and the radio was broadcasting the end of a college basketball game.
“Damn.” Matthew slammed his fist on the dashboard. “Oh, well. They suck.”
Matthew turned to Maggie and said nothing. Instead, he grasped the back of her head and forced his tongue deep inside her mouth. He tasted forceful and unapologetic. Maggie could feel herself leaving her body. Being there but not being there.
“I don’t have much time,” Matthew told her, and Maggie wondered what he did with his time. She knew nothing about him, which meant she had no reason to feel bad that he knew nothing about her. Matthew pushed his hand inside Maggie’s coat, squeezed her left breast, and groaned. “Let’s go somewhere more private.”
Matthew shifted into drive.
Somewhere more private — though Maggie had never actually agreed — turned out to be the back of the Fairway shopping center. Most of the stores, other than Friendly’s, were closed. The old video store had been empty for five years. The dry cleaner’s had locked up and left for the day. No one went to the Variety Newsstand and Convenience Store anyway. Its shelves were always empty. Mr. Paris used to joke that it was probably a front for some terrorist organization, which no one else thought was particularly funny. But in any case, the back lot had only three scattered parked cars. Matthew took the farthest spot, near the woods and the chain-link fencing. He left the car running.
Why talk? Maggie didn’t have anything to say — but she knew she could provide what Matthew had been wanting. She was an expert now. A real woman in control of herself — her present and her future, if not the past. She held the greatest power, which, at that moment, meant having no power at all.
When he entered her, Maggie closed her eyes as her body blew into a million pieces and dispersed, like feathers in the wind, oil into water, light into darkness.
Maggie opened her eyes again, straining to see Leah’s face as it seemed to float just above the surface of the water.
“Leah?” Maggie tried to read the look on her sister’s face. “Are you OK?”
There was nothing in her mind that could speak to what was happening. If Leah was hurt or needed her, she would call out, as she had when she fell off her bike last week, when blood had formed at the surface of Leah’s knee and on the palms of her hands.
“Get help, you dummy! Go get Mommy!” Leah had yelled that day.
But then again, there was the time Leah had tripped holding a glass bottle filled with flowers while she ran across the backyard. The bottle shattered and cut right through Leah’s thin T-shirt, but Maggie was ordered not to say anything.
“Don’t you dare tell Mommy. You hear me? Don’t ever tell her.”
Now Leah was silent. Her eyes were like an owl’s, perfectly round, pleading, maybe, but Maggie didn’t know what they were saying. And then Leah went under the water again, so Maggie stepped closer to the edge of the pool. She walked around the perimeter, toward the deep end, where Leah had just disappeared.
“Leah?” Maggie called out again. “Are you OK?”
Matthew dropped Maggie off at her house. When she opened the door, she noticed that the music had stopped and her dad’s running shoes were still missing.
“Mom?” she called out. “Mom?”
“Maggie?” It was her father.
“Dad.”
Mr. Paris was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee cupped in his hands, as if he had never left.
“You don’t look so good, sweetie. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. What are you doing here? I thought you moved out.” Maggie said it as if maybe it weren’t true. “You left. You don’t belong here anymore.” Like a little kid, stomping her foot, throwing a tantrum, and hoping someone will stop her and make all the bad feelings go away, because she can’t. She doesn’t know how.
“I know,” Mr. Paris said. Guilt sure does weaken a person. He would never have tolerated her talking to him this way before. “Your mother called me and said you were very upset, and then she said you ran away.”
“I didn’t run away.” The memory of what had just happened burned between her thighs, and shame burned her face.
“Well, she thought you did. Are you OK?”
Long ago — long, long ago — Maggie would fall asleep on pretty much any car ride her family took, whether an hour and a half or ten minutes. It was kind of a joke in their family that Maggie would be asleep before their dad shifted the car into drive. And if it was late at night when they pulled up to the house, Maggie would try to remain as still as she could so that her dad would have to lift her little body out of the car and carry her into the house.
As she stood there now, Maggie remembered the amazing feeling of being in her dad’s strong arms. She thought about how the world sounded, passing around her — the voice of her sister complaining that she could walk perfectly well on her own, her mother’s high heels clicking on the kitchen floor, the lights being flipped on — and all the while she rode high above it, as if she were flying.
And she started to cry.
“Maggie, talk to me,” Mr. Paris said. “Your mother told me what she said. She didn’t mean that. Nobody blames you for what happened. You weren’t even there. We know that.”
Where were you, Dad? It was a Saturday. Where were you?
Leah’s head came up to the surface one more time, but only for a moment. She no longer looked panicked. She looke
d calm. She looked peaceful.
When Leah slipped underwater again, a single ripple appeared on the surface of the water. Maggie watched as the tiny wave spread wider and wider, until it reached the edge of the pool. Everything’s going to be OK now. No need to bother the strangers sitting around the pool, Maggie thought, and then she ran home.
She ran back to the apartment, but not before she took one look toward Meghan’s front yard, and she thought she saw the front door closing. She should run there. It was closer. Ask Meghan for help. Maybe Meghan’s mother was home, inside, cooking or cleaning, like mommies do. And weren’t there other people around the pool? There was a couple of old grandparents, playing cards. They looked annoyed. They hadn’t looked up once. The boy and the girl, kissing on the grass. Maybe they could help. But when Maggie turned to where she had seen them, they were no longer there.
Nothing was OK. Nothing was ever going to be OK again, and somehow Maggie knew it.
She just didn’t know what to do.
Daddy. I need to get Daddy. Daddy will know what to do.
They had left the house unlocked, so Maggie was able to squeeze the handle, push open the door, and slip inside. It was hot, still so hot without the air-conditioning. She took in as much as she could, widening her eyelids and actually sucking in the light. Were there groceries on the counter? Were Daddy’s keys hanging by the front door? Was the TV on in the kitchen? Because Mommy liked to watch her talk shows while she was putting the food away.
It would be best to approach this problem carefully. She didn’t want to get her sister in trouble. Leah hated that. Leah hated it when Maggie told on her.
“Never tattle,” Leah had told her. “No one likes a tattletale.”
Maggie looked up at the blue clock hanging above the sink. It had a picture of a fairy sitting on a rock, leaning forward and gazing into the water. The tiniest hand of the clock ticked with every second in a single jerking motion.
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