Swimmers

by Amy Bright

  "Who told you I was in here?" I asked him. He wheeled me outside, aiming for the opposite exit that my parents would be coming in. Bridget would be on the other side of the hospital, where the parking lot was. It was cool but the sun was out, warming us up from the outside in.

  "Someone saw the ambulance outside your sister’s place. You were strapped down to one of those boards. EMS workers giving you mouth-to-mouth." We stopped beside a low wall and Josh slid on top of it. I heard the click of his lighter. A couple of seconds and he passed the joint. I breathed in deeper than air and waited for lift-off.

  "You going to try to off yourself again?" Josh asked.

  "I don’t know," I said. "It gets to me all the time. That stuff with Niall."

  "Yeah, well. Me, too."

  He took back the joint and I didn’t see it again.

  We were the only two people at that end of the hospital. Most smokers hung out in the courtyard on the other side of the cafeteria windows. It made them look like animals at the zoo, contained behind glass.

  Turns out I lost eight hours in total. Passed out at Bridget’s, ambulanced over to the hospital, stomach pumped. I wished it was more. One of those stories about some kid sleeping for a hundred years and waking up to find everyone they knew dead and gone. I wanted something different than the same watery sun that was there the day before.

  "He’s still here," I said.

  Josh inhaled. "Niall?"

  "Yeah."

  "He’s a floor above you, man."

  Niall had been comatose since that day in the ocean. And me not even visiting him once.

  "He looks bad?"

  "Not pretty."

  Josh jumped off the wall. He rolled the metal stand with the IV bag close enough for me to hold it in my hand again. He started rolling me forward.

  "What are you doing?"

  "We’re going to see him."

  I panicked a little, back in my throat, trying to get my words out.

  "My parents are going to be here soon to get me."

  "Five minutes isn’t going to matter."

  "Josh."

  "He was my friend, too," Josh said.

  The wheels rolled smoothly over the linoleum in the atrium. Josh darted for the elevator and we went up to Niall’s floor. I felt some serious opposite forces. Elevator going up, body sinking down.

  Josh never asked what had happened to Niall. He read it in the newspaper or heard it at the assembly, or got the phone call from my parents. He never came to me and asked what really happened, as if my story and the official story would be different. They weren’t. But a lot of people didn’t think it was possible for someone just to jump off a boat and then be almost saved from drowning by some kid without a scratch on him. They figured that there had to be more to the story than that.

  Josh wheeled me to an open doorway. The blinds were pulled up and the sun was spread across the bed sheets. The machines. They sat around the bed in a circle, blinking and beeping.

  Niall had a private room. No skinny curtain divided the room in half, him on one side, another patient on the other. There were no obstacles or barriers to Josh and me walking right in and sitting down.

  But I couldn’t make myself go any further.

  Niall had shrunk so much. His face was pulled tight. His arms were toothpick thin, his knees unbelievably huge. One thick tube stuck out of his mouth, his lips cracked and damaged. The IV was in his arm. His feet were pointing in different directions.

  When you know someone so well that you’ve seen them every day, and you’ve hung out with them at their house or at your house, and you’ve passed them in the halls at school, it’s so much harder to look at them lying unconscious in a hospital bed.

  Josh jerked my wheelchair forward. I threw out my arm, stopping him from moving me.

  "No," I said. "This is good."

  "You should talk to him, man," Josh said. "You should say something."

  "No," I said.

  We stood at the door for a few minutes. It felt eternity-sized. Niall had been lying there for almost six months, Christmas to June. In all that time, he hadn’t made a single movement on his own.

  I said, "Let’s go back."

  Josh turned my wheelchair around and pushed me into the hallway and back into the elevator.

  "Is he doing any better?" I asked when we were back on my floor.

  "Did he look better?"

  "Six months is a long time to be hooked up like that."

  Josh shrugged and helped me into my bed.

  "See you when you’re back," he said, leaving.

  I sat stiff as a board until my parents came. Once you see someone you know like that, half-size, you can’t see them in their original packaging again. You take that step forward and lose the way back.

  D E C E M B E R

  O n t h e B u s

  We got back on the bus. Lee went to sit beside Poppy, leaving me with two seats to myself. I stretched out my legs, putting them at a diagonal.

  Movies and TV shows always skipped past the on-the-road part of the story. No one cared about the guy sitting in the backseat of the car, twiddling his thumbs until he got to his destination. No one cared about the person on the bus, head against the window, trying to fall asleep without getting a cricked neck. It was all in-between time.

  I wanted to sleep until we got to Victoria. Lee was making me think too much about why she was here, and what changed and how it changed, and when. The graph of our relationship or friendship or knowing each other was this embarrassing wavy line that dipped too close to the X-axis more than once. But she took this bus all the way to find me, to tell me the thing that everybody else was keeping a secret. When I counted that, we were back to somewhere close again.

  Lee was digging around in her purse. Who knew what was in there? She used to always have her arm in there up to her elbow, moving things around until she found what she was looking for.

  "Hey, I thought you were going to read your new book," I joked.

  "I’m getting to it," she said.

  They were an odd pair, Poppy and Lee. Lee was taking these teeny, tiny glances at Poppy, her forehead creased in the space between her eyebrows.

  Poppy was totally getting in the way of me and Lee sharing some tender moments on the bus. Falling asleep on each other’s shoulders. Making out a bit at the back of the bus. It wasn’t going to happen.

  "You got that much stuff in your purse, Pops?" I asked her. "Lee’s is like the bottomless pit. Stick your hand in there and it won’t come out again."

  "Oh, ha ha," Lee deadpanned. With her hand in her purse, she made her entire arm shake, pretending it was being shredded.

  It was lame, but I still let out a horse-snort. Poppy rolled her eyes.

  "So let’s see yours, Poppy," Lee said.

  "My what?"

  "Your purse."

  "I don’t have one. I just throw my stuff in a backpack."

  "Oh," Lee said. Girly stuff was kind of her selling point. She used to get judgmental about shit like this, girls not being feminine enough. The fact that Poppy was younger made it hard for her to be too mean. Lee’s face was complicated. Somewhere in there, she was trying to make a decision. "Well," she decided, "want to go through mine? It’s kind of fun."

  We all took turns looking at Lee’s driver’s license. In school, everyone got a kick out of passing her license around. The BCAA got Lee on a bad day. The man who had taken her picture hadn’t liked her enough to let her do a redo. She looked high—her eyes sleepy, a dopey, open-mouthed grin on her face—but that wasn’t even the worst part. Her hair was sky high, static electricity giving it a lift to the roof. It was the There’s Something About Mary swoop, the gelled bangs like I used to wear in Grade 7 or something.

  "You look so bad," Poppy said.

  "Thanks," Lee said, snatching it back. It went back behind the plastic sheet in her wallet.

  The Tylenol in her purse rattled when she moved it. She changed necklaces, ditching the lock a
nd key for an owl that I recognized.

  "Here," she said, pulling out a long knitted scarf. "Do you like this?" she asked Poppy.

  "It’s fine."

  "Then it’s yours," she said. "Think of it as a welcome to Victoria gift. Your compensation for taking a daylong bus ride with this weirdo." She jerked her thumb in my direction.

  Poppy took it. Her fingers went through the knitted gaps, her hands playing a closed-circuit cat’s cradle.

  "Hang on," Lee said, taking it back. "It’ll look good with your outfit."

  She tied it around Poppy’s neck, wrapping it in a stylish way. I used to think scarves were just for keeping warm. Pull it up over your mouth and nose in the wind. Who knew they were an accessory?

  "What else do you have in there?" Poppy asked her. She put her hand to her neck. Feeling the weight of the scarf there. Something new.

  "I’m kind of using it as an overnight bag. Just enough to get me to Lethbridge to bring Hunter back."

  "Oh, yeah?" I asked, widening the opening. I found a few balled-up pairs of socks in there, the lacey edge of a pair of underwear, and a shirt rolled into a sausage. I only just stopped myself from taking out the underwear.

  "Bring him back for what?" Poppy asked.

  "What?" Lee asked, pretending she hadn’t heard.

  "You said, so you could bring Hunter back to Victoria. Bring him back for what?"

  Lee made eye contact with me over Poppy’s head. My lips tightened. My head shook just the tiniest amount. A silent, Please don’t tell her.

  Lee looked down at her purse again. Her hand went down to her chest, to the owl necklace hanging there.

  "Hunter gave this to me for my birthday once," she said.

  I remembered. I bought it for her from a jewelry store in the mall, borrowed fifty bucks from my dad. She didn’t wear it often. Maybe a couple of times a year. When she’d show up at school with it sitting at the center of her sweater, I knew it was going to be a good day. Nothing could go wrong with a sign like that.

  "How old were you?" Poppy asked, suddenly curious.

  "Grade 10, maybe," she said. "When we’d just started dating." She held it between her hands, the beginning of another cat’s cradle. "There was this owl that used to hang around my house. In the backyard. It came out at night, about the same time as my curfew. Hunter’s cue to go home, hey? Hunter was always going, ‘Man, that owl must hate me. He’s kicking me out.’"

  My eyes crinkled. I hated that owl. It would let out that eerie hoot right in the middle of a good make-out session and, two seconds later, Lee’s dad would call out the window and tell Lee to come inside.

  "So he bought you an owl necklace?" Poppy was underwhelmed.

  "It was like our little joke," Lee said. She unclasped the necklace and put her hands out to Poppy. Poppy pulled away, just a little, but she didn’t stop Lee from putting the necklace around her neck. Clasping it at the back.

  Lee’s voice got quiet. "Ask Hunter why we’re going," she said. "It’s his reason for going back. Not mine."

  Poppy examined the necklace. I looked out the window. Avoiding eye contact, avoiding the subject, avoiding everything. I leaned my head against the window and watched the blur of the outside flying past me.

  J U L Y – A U G U S T

  The day I was released from hospital, Dad drove me home, patted me on the shoulder, and went back to ignoring things. Mom sat me down at the table and we talked about what was going to keep me a busy little bee for my week of recovery, before the last three weeks of school. All of summer stretching empty out in front of me.

  Bridget gave us something to focus on for the next few weeks. She got a phone call from a friend at the beginning of July and decided to go to Vancouver to temp for a month, before the two of them flew to Australia. It felt permanent. Like a real decision. Over dinner, we were all plastic smiles and shoveling our food away, and making conversation about Byron Bay and the Gold Coast and Ayers Rock.

  "Do you think I’ll find a job there?" Bridget asked, half-and-half pizza open on the table.

  "I don’t know, hon," Mom said.

  "You got a work visa, Bridge. You better be able to find a job."

  She rolled her eyes and kicked me under the table.

  "I’m sure you’ll find something," Mom said.

  Dad watched us like a tennis match, moving his eyes back and forth, back and forth. Poor Bridge was going to get to Australia and wonder what the hell Dad was on during her last week home. He didn’t know how to talk to me. He wasn’t even trying.

  "You’ll waitress the hell out of Australia," I told her, "at the very least."

  "Hunter," Mom said.

  By August, Bridget was busy packing and saying goodbye to friends, and making last-minute runs to the store with Mom to pick up toothpaste and flip-flops. Mom and Dad took turns screening my calls—the ones from Josh—and kept the portables downstairs. No visitors until they figured I’d got myself sorted out. Mom sat in my room in the afternoons, waiting patiently for me to talk about what led to my decision to take a whole handful of pills at Bridget’s empty apartment. I stayed zipped-up about seeing Niall in that hospital room. One word about it and I knew I’d come undone.

  Bridget and me had a heart-to-heart on the last night she was in town. She sat up with me on the couch with the TV on, the neon light on our faces and hands. Her luggage was lined up in the hallway, two giant red suitcases that were heavy even before she packed them full of clothing. The TV screen was making the Northern Lights against the wall behind them, dancing all over the place.

  "You doing okay?" she asked me.

  "I’m doing fine."

  "What do you want to happen next?" she asked me.

  "I have no idea."

  I stopped on CNN. There was too much on the screen. The scrolling banner at the bottom running through the most recent news, the two people video-conferencing in the middle, a graph on the side. Bounced my eyes around.

  "You’ll call me in Vancouver? If you need to talk?"

  "Yeah," I said. "I’ll do that."

  Bridget fell asleep on the couch. It was funny, but I hadn’t thought even a little bit about the fact that she was going to be on the other side of the world pretty soon. She had been spending the last couple of weeks at home, her apartment downtown empty and ready to be rented to someone else. I didn’t think I’d believe in it until she was actually gone. It was her last night home, so I pulled out the pillow from the couch and fell asleep there, too, the light from the TV aurora-borealising around the room.

  In the morning, Bridget went to the airport. I went to my room. The phone rang downstairs and no one picked it up.

  At the end of August, when I told Mom and Dad that I wasn’t going back to school, Dad decided I was going to live with his sister, my Aunt Lynne, in Alberta. A province away. I didn’t even complain. I just let Mom do my packing for me. I let Dad drive me through the mountains. I let Aunt Lynne set up everything for me in that new place. I let everything happen.

  Why would I want to stay in Victoria, where the ocean that had swallowed Niall waved at me from every direction?

  S E P T E M B E R

  The drive with Dad from Victoria to Lethbridge blurred by. I was zoned-out all the way through the mountains. Alberta was flat and dry. My skin felt tight over my face. It said a lot that I didn’t care where I was, because anywhere was better than home.

  After Dad left, Aunt Lynne gave me a tour of her single-woman-living house. Couch angled to the TV, remote control on the coffee table. In the fridge was a pathetic tub of margarine, half a block of cheese, and a Styrofoam take-out container. I wondered how long it would take her to send me back to Victoria.

  "Help yourself to anything," she said, doing her impression of put-together person.

  I left my face in a mask.

  "Sure. Thanks."

  She ended the tour by showing me the stairs to the basement, wood with carpet slapped on.

  "I thought you’d like to be dow
nstairs," she said. "That way, you can have more privacy."

  If Dad knew she was giving me a floor to myself, he’d lose his shit. I figured he wanted me living with Aunt Lynne because she worked at home half the time and could keep an eye on me. Make sure I didn’t off myself on her watch. Instead, she was giving me privacy. She didn’t seem to know that my privacy privileges had been revoked.

  "There’s a bathroom down the hall," Aunt Lynne said, switching on lights as we walked through the basement. "Your bedroom is in here." She went upstairs to order a pizza and give me time to unpack my fat duffel.

  The room wasn’t bad. The half-sized basement windows were depressing and covered with slotted blinds, and a double bed was pushed against the wall. The duvet was forest green and brand new. It had that plastic smell, bought and unwrapped and unused.

  I unzipped my bag. I dug around for a clean shirt and put it on. A trio of white envelopes perched on top of all my clothes, my name written in Mom’s, Dad’s, and Bridget’s writing. I didn’t feel like reading their optimistic bullshit. Keep your head up. Make the most out of this opportunity. This will be good for you. I put them in the top drawer, flaps sealed, and kicked my bag behind the door.

  I’d unpack the rest when I knew how long I was staying for.

  I sunk into the bed and dropped my head on the pillow. The ceiling was good. It had a curlicue pattern—stucco and paint—that would work for staring practice. My ceiling at home was flat and white. This was a regular Rorschach test. Whatever Mom and Dad had worked out with Aunt Lynne had been kept confidential. Top secret. Maybe all I’d be doing in Alberta was taking in the ceiling.

  "Hunter, are you finished down there?" Aunt Lynne called down the stairs.

  Or maybe not.

  I went back up.

  "Can you set the table?" she said, gesturing at the cupboards. It was a question that didn’t sound like a question.

  "I thought you were ordering in."

  "I am," she said. "But we can still sit down together."

  Aunt Lynne wasn’t the way I remembered her. The last time we got together was a couple of Christmases ago when she flew out to Victoria and stayed at a hotel downtown. Since then, she’d joined the twenty-first century. She’d stopped wearing old-lady clothes, knits and felted sweaters, subbing out Sears for J. Crew, Banana Republic. She was standing in the kitchen in a purple skirt and black sweater. She’d left her boots on, brown leather up her shins.