Swimmers

by Amy Bright

  Lethbridge seemed like a foreign country now, compared to the top of the hill in Kelowna.

  "Come on," I said. "We still have some time. Let’s exercise our legs out."

  I readjusted Poppy’s backpack and we walked in a line again, this time without the hand-holding. But being all tied up with Lee and running for the hill was the first time I’d felt calm all day.

  It was a ten-minute walk before we hit the lake, the whole thing frozen over so hard that hockey nets had been set up at either end and it had skate marks running sideways. The ice wasn’t slippery in the way the packed snow on the hill was. It was outdoor ice without a Zamboni, hard and frosted. I ran across and tried to glide, but the thin blanket of snow on top made it difficult. I could feel Poppy’s backpack bobbing.

  Lee came out next, grabbing my hand with her gloved fingers, our palms pressed together.

  "Poppy? You coming?"

  "I’m okay," she said, her tiny voice coming from the side of the lake. She was sitting on top of a snow bank, holding her arms crossed against her chest.

  I ran fast across the ice, daring it to make my feet slide or crack underneath. The ice held tight.

  Lee ran with me, her feet more unsure. The rubber soles slid around, no grip under there. I kept checking back on Poppy, just sitting on the bank. She was too far away for me to tell what she was looking at.

  "Hey," Lee said. "Stop for a sec?"

  We were a hundred meters from the shore, a quick track-and-field race back. Lee caught her breath, this time sans inhaler.

  She put her chin on my shoulder and then her cheek. Our hips swung together. We kissed again. I wrecked it by sniffing, my nose all gross and runny from the cold. Lee put her finger under my nostrils, making a comical moustache and swooping my snot at the same time.

  "Nice look for you, Hunter."

  "I try," I said. I kissed her on the forehead.

  "We’re home in the morning," she said.

  Who knew what home was? Victoria, where my parents were, or back in Lethbridge, where I’d felt for a sec like I belonged.

  "Are you going to stay?" Lee asked.

  I hadn’t thought past seeing Niall. "I don’t know."

  If I wanted to stay in Victoria, would my parents let me? It had been their idea to send me to Lethbridge. I didn’t know if my exile was up for renegotiation. I didn’t know if I wanted it to be.

  "You like it there? In Lethbridge?"

  "It’s different," I told her.

  "Different how?"

  "It’s easier."

  There was a whole chunk of everything still in Victoria. My parents, how close I’d been with Bridget, Lee, Josh, and then there was even still some of the good stuff with Niall. Compare that to my Aunt Lynne, Poppy, and her mom, all of that new and temporary, and one of those seemed like a world that eclipses the other.

  "Where’s Poppy?" Lee asked, looking across the lake.

  "She’s over there," I said. But when I looked again, I’d lost the color of her small jacket. She had disappeared from the shore.

  My legs started to melt, going jelly from the running and the walking and the deep, deep snow. But more from the absence of Poppy, the twelve-year-old-size cutout missing from the other side of the lake.

  "She’s got to be on the bus," Lee said. Even though she was trying to be reassuring, there was no way to hide the panic in her voice. We ran across the ice and then dragged our feet through the thick, deep snow. My thighs were on fire.

  Poppy had no reason to go back to the bus. If she was running away, then she was running away from us. From me. I felt stupid for making out with Lee in the middle of the frozen lake. Poppy standing on the sidelines. She’d said she wanted to come with us, but she didn’t really know what that meant, how far it was, how long it would take, anything. But the real reason she was here was because I couldn’t leave her in Lethbridge. Poppy was a piece of the only place I’d felt close to normal since what happened to Niall. If I left her behind, I left that, too.

  Truth was, maybe I was closer to Poppy than I was to Lee. We’d spent a lot of time together when it counted.

  The bus was parked where we’d left it. A skinny line of passengers was waiting to get back on. If Poppy wasn’t there, I didn’t know what we were going to do.

  "You go," Lee said, using her puffer again and pushing me ahead. I butted in line, taking the steps in two leaps.

  Poppy wasn’t in our seats. She wasn’t anywhere on the bus. I made a beeline for the washroom at the back, but it was vacant and empty. I squeezed past the other passengers. That old lady gave me a look again. I gave her one right back.

  "She’s not on there?" Lee said.

  "No. There’s some stores down the street. She might be there. I’m going to go look. I’ll be right back. "

  "Hunter," Lee said. "Go fast. I’ll stay here in case she comes back."

  I took a jog in the opposite direction of the hill. That had been the worst idea. We should’ve all stayed on the bus and left Poppy sleeping and me and Lee being okay.

  "Poppy!"

  My teeth were back to freezing again. The cold sucked all the moisture out of my lips.

  I spotted her jacket. "Hey!" The back of her hood. "Poppy!"

  I ran to where she was standing at a street corner. Her hair stuck to her forehead. Her scarf had come undone from where Lee had tied it earlier. She looked younger than ever. What had I done, bringing her here with us?

  "Where did you go?"

  Poppy shrugged her shoulders.

  "Heads up," she said and tossed me my phone. It made a basketball arch in the air and I palmed it.

  "Did you call your mom?" Panic.

  "We should get going," she said. "The bus is leaving."

  "Did you?"

  She shook her head. "No. I decided not to."

  When we got back on the bus, everyone was eyeballing the hell out of me. Poppy settled back in her seat. I stayed, standing awkwardly in the middle of the aisle, looking down at her.

  Lee put her hand on my shoulder, urging me to sit down. I had to shake myself out of it. I gave my head an actual shake.

  I slid into the seat next to Poppy. "Want to watch a movie? Lee brought her laptop."

  "Sure," Poppy said.

  Lee retrieved her bag from under the seat and passed it over. I set up the headphones and the sound, and was just about to press Play when Poppy asked the question.

  "Are you going to stay in Victoria when we get there?"

  "I haven’t thought about it yet," I said, hedging badly. "We still have a while before we make it."

  It wasn’t an answer, not even half of one. Poppy plugged in an ear bud and stared at the screen, waiting for me to start the movie.

  Halfway to Merritt, I realized I still had Poppy’s pink backpack slung over my shoulders, the almost weightless bag stuffed against the back of the seat. She’d fallen asleep by the time I undid it and was looking for a sweater to put on her legs, because her jeans were still wet with snow. Instead, my hand closed around a book at the bottom of her bag. She must have thrown it in to have something to do on the bus. A picture poked out of the top, a hard crease through the corner. Keeping an eye on Poppy, hoping she wouldn’t wake up, I pulled gently on the corner.

  I recognized Poppy and her mom, but not the face of her dad sitting beside them. He looked different from how he’d looked in the newspaper. Less grainy. Younger. The only thing I could think was that he looked like a good guy. All of the lines on his face were the ones you get from smiling and laughing all the time.

  I put the picture all the way back in the book, hoping the weight of the two covers would erase the crease. I found a sweater and draped it over Poppy’s legs, and finished the movie without her.

  While the closing credits rolled, I took out my phone. I hadn’t even noticed her take it from me. Pickpocketing me sometime when we were stopped in Kelowna. I pressed redial.

  It was a Lethbridge phone number on the screen and it wasn’t Poppy’
s. When I knew it wasn’t going to her mom, I let it keep ringing.

  When it went to voicemail, I listened close.

  "You have reached J.R. Duncan Financial Firm. Please leave your message."

  I ended the call before the machine could record my breathing.

  Poppy’s eyes were shut tight. They weren’t even fluttering. She wasn’t just pretending.

  I tried to jigsaw it together, but it made a weird kind of sense. Poppy’s dad had been at a financial firm. What did Poppy want to call that number for? The company probably hadn’t had her dad’s name in the message for months.

  Maybe she had been looking for his voice. But it had been erased.

  We passed through Merritt. Hope. Chilliwack. I didn’t know why BC had such good names but it did. I bet every single person who drove through wondered what it would be like to live in Hope. Hope, hope, hope.

  Across the aisle, Lee was sleeping. She had her legs tucked underneath her, a dinosaur curled inside an egg. Her head against the window.

  I reached into Poppy’s backpack where there was a package of Mentos that I’d bought her at the gas station in Banff. I popped one out of the top. I made it last from Abbotsford to Langley, and then it melted me to sleep.

  By the time we arrived in Vancouver, we didn’t have any energy to even think about leaving the Greyhound Station, but we had to get off our bus and transfer to a new one. Lee thought we should go get breakfast, eat a little something before we got to the ferry terminal, but Poppy was sitting like a dead weight, and I was chilled in my still-damp pants and jacket from when we got off the bus in Kelowna. It was so early that the sun wasn’t even up yet, keeping winter hours at five-thirty this morning.

  We found a row of chairs in the station. Poppy fell asleep instantly. Lee stayed to watch her while I used my phone. It was finally time to let my parents know I was coming.

  The phone rang twice before Dad picked up groggily, just a brief note of panic cutting through his voice and reminding me that I was making an early morning phone call.

  "Hey, Dad."

  "Hunter?"

  I left a little silence, picking over the words that I could choose from.

  "Hey, Dad. I’m, um, almost home."

  He left a neat package of quiet.

  "Where are you?"

  "I’m in Vancouver. Lee is here. And …" I took Poppy out of it, just for a second. "I’m going to see Niall."

  Dad didn’t answer for a bit. Eventually he asked, "Are you coming to the house?"

  "After."

  "And then what?"

  "I don’t know."

  Dad sighed. I heard him shift the phone from one ear to the other.

  "We’ll see you when you get here."

  We had to get off the bus for the hour-and-a-half ferry ride. I went out to the deck, telling Lee and Poppy that I wanted to look for whales. It was bullshit. I’d taken the ferry dozens of times between Vancouver and Victoria and I’d never seen a single one. I let the icy wind blow me around out there. It was this close to being Lethbridge wind, the kind that gave you whiplash. Hurricane wind. It whipped around a couple of seagulls, giving them the eggbeater. They hung motionless in the air, even with their wings beating frantically.

  We went back to the bus before the ferry docked and got ready for the final drive into the city. I took a window seat, leaving a pair of seats for Lee and Poppy to share. I recognized the terminal and the highway down to Victoria. The sun was out, rippling across the sky in a welcome home. It should be raining. It shouldn’t be a sun-shiny day. It should be gray and pouring.

  "Hey," Poppy said, leaning across the aisle. She pinched my arm. "This is where you’re from?"

  "Yeah," I said. "I lived right here on the side of the highway."

  She rolled her eyes. "You know what I mean."

  "Yeah," I said. "This is where I’m from."

  "If I lived somewhere like this, I would never leave," Poppy said. "So why did you?"

  D E C E M B E R

  O f f t h e B u s

  Lee had arranged for her dad to meet us at the Greyhound Station downtown. He hadn’t changed. He was in his uniform of suit jacket with jeans. His hands were lazily holding on to his pockets, this close to hooking them with his thumbs. Dude looked pleased as punch to see me. By which I mean, you could tell him and Lee had a little argument about whether or not she should go all the way to Alberta to get me.

  I stayed back with Poppy while Lee did a jogging walk to her Dad. He hugged her. I had a phantom feeling in response, an arm around my shoulder. It took me a sec to realize it was Poppy’s, and that she was standing on her tiptoes to reach me.

  "Come on," I said. "We should go say hi."

  "Hunter." Mr. McKenzie took my hand to shake it. My hand did not make the effort. "And this is Poppy?" Lee had prepared him. He took Poppy’s hand and shook it firmly. Her grip was a lot stronger than my wet noodle in his hand. "I’m Lee’s dad," he said. "Bruce McKenzie."

  "Hey," Poppy said, taking her hand back. I accidentally beamed out a smile at her.

  Mr. McKenzie took us to his car, small and white and expensive. I sat in the backseat with Poppy. I was more out of place and uncomfortable than she was. I’d been away so long but nothing had changed. Not Victoria, not Lee, not her family.

  Had I?

  "I can drop you off at your house. Your parents should know you’re here."

  "They know," I said. "We can just go to the hospital."

  He turned on his right signal light and turned at the next stop sign. He put on a talk-radio channel and it was the only talking going on in the car.

  The streets were winding and lined with trees. It was weird to miss the prairies. I got a few glimpses of the ocean, sitting over on the right. There was nothing stopping it from going on forever.

  Mr. McKenzie dropped me and Poppy off at the hospital. It was the first time I wondered what I was going to do with her. I hadn’t thought this far ahead, to what would happen to her when I had to go in.

  Lee stayed in the car, lifting her hand in a goodbye. She rolled down her window.

  "Call me after," she said. "Don’t you dare forget to call me, Hunter Ryan."

  I leaned in through the open window, wanting to give her a kiss.

  "Don’t even think about it," Mr. McKenzie said.

  I squeezed Lee’s hand and said, "Come on, Pops. Let’s go."

  Last time I had been to this hospital, there was a chance I wouldn’t make it out. We went past the wall me and Josh had sat on, him with his joint, me with my ass sticking out through the back of my hospital gown. The cafeteria on the main floor. I went straight to the elevators, jabbing at a button with my index finger.

  "Hey," Poppy said, "are you going to throw up or something?"

  "No," I said. I was white-knuckling the metal bar that skirted around the inside of the elevator. Poppy was fishing. Why were we here? I gave her a weak smile. "Before I moved to Lethbridge, I was in here," I told her.

  "What for? Did you break a leg or something?"

  "Nah," I said, shaking out my legs to show her it was nothing like that. "It was a little more serious." Inside my chest, my lungs were getting all tight. "I took some pills. Overdosed. Ended up in here."

  "On purpose?"

  Penner had asked me the same thing. Mom, Dad, and Bridge. Maybe I hadn’t been sure before, or maybe I just liked giving them a half-answer. Poppy didn’t deserve a half-answer.

  "Yeah," I said.

  "So what are you doing here now?"

  Poppy was looking right at me. Her eyebrows were close together. That little frown line in the middle.

  "Happened to my friend," I said. "Similar kind of thing. Only . . . he’s still in here."

  The elevator doors opened. I walked stiff-legged down the hall.

  Poppy caught up to me. I felt her hand on mine. Her backpack was bouncing, the straps loose on her shoulders. Maybe I had loosened them with mine. We stopped outside Niall’s room.

  "Can you
wait out here?" I asked her. "Just for a minute."

  Poppy reached around me. Her ear pressed into my shoulder. We stayed like that for a long time. I didn’t want to let her go. She was the most familiar thing about all of this: the bus ride, the hospital, the city. I took a deep breath and stepped away.

  I shoved my hands into my pockets, but then I remembered I needed one of them to knock on the doorframe. I forgot to turn around to give Poppy one more smile.

  Niall was lying on the hospital bed. He was a skinny body covered by a white sheet. Small machines were blinking and buzzing around him. A tube ran into his mouth. Other things in his arms and nose. He did not look like a real person. He sure didn’t look like himself.

  We studied Ancient Egypt in Social Studies when I was in elementary school. Me and Lee built a pyramid out of sugar cubes after we watched a couple of characters do it on an after-school special. I remember a video about these mummies being brought out of the pyramids, all skinny and shriveled. That was the first thing I thought of when I saw Niall, the almost-anniversary of his one year in the hospital and his body getting smaller.

  Niall’s parents were already looking at me, dressed cool and together. More together about this than I was. Niall’s dad was by the window, adjusting the blinds. Like Niall could tell whether he was getting slanted light or full-on sun. They knew who I was. Niall’s friend, the person who had pulled him out of the ocean to this place.

  "How is he?" I asked, my voice a croak.

  Niall’s dad pulled on the blinds, his knuckles white from clasping the string.

  "He’s coming off of life support," he said.

  Niall’s mom looked at the floor. Her face crumpled like a paper ball. A dozen tiny wrinkles spider-webbing across her face.

  "When?"

  "Tomorrow."

  My chest pulled tight, collapsing with the realization that this would be the last time I’d see him. For the first time, I didn’t know what I’d do when this was over. I didn’t know where I’d go when he was gone.

  I stayed in his room, his parents flanking me beside his bed like a couple of bodyguards, for fifteen minutes. Niall was like the live wire I didn’t want to touch. But there was nothing live about him. Nothing close to the Niall I knew.