Phantom Limbs

by Paula Garner

  I followed her down the hallway toward the pool, gritting my teeth. Calling my poetry “froofy” was one of Dara’s cheap go-to’s for emasculating me. And I was in therapy before Meg even left.

  “Yes,” I said, catching up with her. “And it’s kind of a big deal. If you were my friend, you’d be happy for me.”

  She whirled around and faced me. “You know what? Fuck you. I’ve been here for you every fucking day since that girl left you in the dust. So don’t give me that if you were my friend shit — don’t talk to me about who your friends are. I’m your fucking friend. Which is more than you can say about her.”

  She started walking again. When she reached the locker room, she turned back to me. “God, Mueller.” She shook her head at me like I was pathetic, tragic. “She never even looked back.”

  IN THE POOL, WE WORKED ON SPRINTS. TO my eternal amazement, there were people who voluntarily showed up to practice before school in the off-season. Most of them did it because they wanted to stay in shape, but they had actual lives and couldn’t make the evening practice.

  There were six girls and eight other guys at the pool, despite the ridiculous hour, including — always — my medley relay team, because we were determined to set a school record, if a strong enough backstroker emerged to replace D’Amico, who was graduating. And of course there was Coach Brian, who oversaw the entire swim club, head-coached us senior swimmers, and who, I was pretty sure, never slept.

  If Dara hadn’t been there, I could have spent the whole time thinking about Meg as I put in my yards, lost in the blue blur and muffled echo of water. But even while she was swimming, Dara managed to keep an eye on me, occasionally even alerting me with her shrill two-finger whistle, which confused all the swimmers. That morning she paused on her way to the fountain to holler, “More rotation, Mueller! And quit breathing so much, you pussy! It’s a twenty-five, for Christ’s sake!” Everyone — including Coach — found this hysterically funny. I wasn’t laughing, though. I was wishing she’d go fuck herself.

  It’s not that I was ungrateful. Dara had transformed me, both physically and mentally — I knew that. When I met her, not long after Meg left, my daily calendar was divided into a triad of moping, writing depressing poems, and shoving my face full of the pies my mom kept making. If baking pies was my mom’s coping mechanism during those dark days, eating them was mine. If my therapist hadn’t pushed her to get me out of the house that summer, my mom, lost in a dark vortex of her own, probably never would have hauled me to the pool for some fresh air and exercise, and I probably never would have met Dara and ended up her unlikely protégé. She could spot a sucker a mile away, even as she swam laps with her sort of mesmerizing one-armed technique. I had walked to the end of the diving board in my billowy board shorts, held my nose, and jumped. When I surfaced, I flailed my way to the side — to call it “swimming” would have been generous. Enter Dara Svetcova, who flattered me with her attention. She was almost sixteen, which felt a lifetime older than my thirteen and a half years, and it didn’t take me long to realize she was the subject of the tragic news story I’d seen a couple of years earlier. Even with one arm, the girl was epic; I couldn’t imagine what she’d been like with two. She gave me some swimming tips and encouraged me, and the rest was history.

  Looking back, I could see that she was the human equivalent of a Venus flytrap. Hindsight is indeed twenty-twenty.

  I was approaching the wall for a turn when Coach stopped me with a kickboard. When I came up, he pointed toward the deck, his expression grim.

  Dara huddled near the pool, clutching her stump, rocking.

  Phantom limb pains. The sensation that the amputated limb is there, hurting, itching — sometimes even that it’s moving or picking things up. The drugs only helped so much. The most reliable relief came from her mirror box: a rectangular wooden crate divided by a mirror. When she put her right hand in, what she saw was a pair of hands, which somehow caused the phantom pains to subside. But if she wasn’t at home with her box, sometimes watching two hands rubbing together could help. And to see two hands, she needed someone. And in Dara’s world, “someone” was me.

  I climbed out of the pool and moved toward her, pulling off my goggles. Abby Stewart knelt beside Dara, rubbing her back, her forehead folding into lines of concern.

  Dara looked at me, grimacing. “I need the box.”

  Abby stood, rising almost to my height. She had to be close to six feet tall. Her long hair, balled up under her cap, looked like a giant tumor on the back of her head. “Box?” Abby asked me.

  “I’ve got it,” I told her. “Thanks, though.” I couldn’t explain the box, especially not then. Abby was easily the most thoughtful, good-hearted person on the entire swim team, and I felt bad pushing her away, but even if anyone other than me could help Dara, they’d first have to penetrate her field of barbed wire.

  “You don’t need the box,” I told Dara, sitting down across from her. “I’m here.”

  “It was swimming,” she said into her knees. “It was stroking. I hate it when it does that. It fucks up my timing.” Her stump twitched and jerked. “Jumpy stump” she called this phenomenon, and there was no controlling it: it was a ghost limb seemingly controlled by a ghost brain. “God, make it stop!” she said through clenched teeth, trying to wrestle it down.

  “Come on.” I tapped her knee to get her to look up. “Watch.”

  She opened her eyes and I rubbed my hands together.

  “Good, just stay focused,” I said, hoping to distract her not just from the pain, but from the silence in the pool and the eyes, all the eyes. The last thing we needed was for her to be aware that everyone was staring. There was nothing she hated more.

  She focused on my hands, her stump occasionally jerking.

  I glanced around, and when I did, everyone quickly resumed swimming, pretended they weren’t watching. My eye caught Kiera Shayman’s, and she gave me kind of a sympathetic smile. I looked away, heat creeping to my face. Kiera was a total siren — an hourglass-shaped breaststroker (which led to the predictable locker-room remarks) who, according to Dara, was into me. And even though Dara was at least as clueless as me on these matters, I still blushed redder than a tomato any time Kiera so much as looked my way.

  I patted Dara’s shoulder. “Better?” Her stump seemed to be settling down.

  “What’s gonna happen when you’re not with me?” she asked in a small voice.

  Honestly, I worried about the same thing when she went off to college. Making friends didn’t exactly top her skill set. “You’ll be fine,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. I stood and pulled her up. “Now go swim.”

  She handed me her goggles. Dara manages pretty well on her own, but getting goggles on with one hand? Forget it. I helped her get them on, then put on my own. She stared at me for a minute, then flicked my goggles — a gesture I interpreted as some approximation of “thank you.”

  She turned and went back to swim. Swish-swish. Her suit crept slightly up her butt. I fought the odd urge to yank it out for her. I could never quite figure out if I needed to rescue Dara or be rescued from her.

  This conflicted feeling was nothing new. Last year at the winter sports awards banquet, Dara sat next to me, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her trying to cut into a chicken breast with the side of her fork. She pressed so hard, her hand shook with the effort, but the chicken just wouldn’t cut. Then she tried her knife, which didn’t do much better one-handed — it just slid the chicken back and forth on the plate. I didn’t know what to do. Dara would rather starve than ask for help eating, I’m pretty sure. But I was ravenous from practice, and I thought she must be, too. So I cut up my whole piece of chicken and, as smoothly and discreetly as I could, swapped plates with her. No words were exchanged, no eye contact made. I knew I might be in for it later. I could just hear her: Did I ask for help, asshole? Do I look helpless to you?

  But she never said a word about it. You just never knew with her. There
were parts of her that were a total mystery to me.

  I got back into the pool and finished my sets. Dara didn’t yell at me any more that morning. There was nothing like a phantom limb incident to turn her spunk dial down to zero.

  “Hey, Shakespeare, is Dara okay?” Shafer asked me in the locker room as he rubbed an Axe stick into his pits.

  Shakespeare. More than once I’d regretted letting some of my poems be published in the school literary magazine. Another page from the “hindsight” file.

  “Yup.” I hated talking about Dara. For one thing, she wasn’t very open with people, so I didn’t feel like I should be open on her behalf — especially with Shafer, the freestyler on my medley relay team, who was a part-time asshole and a full-time pervert. For another thing, people always had questions about our relationship, and I didn’t always have answers. No, we weren’t going out. No, I wasn’t paying her to be my coach. Were we best friends? Hell if I knew. We were together all the time, and we didn’t really have many other friends. So maybe we were best friends by default. It didn’t really jibe with my definition of best friends, which required one part me and one part Meg. I’d never really had a true best friend before or since.

  Shafer sat in front of me on the bench. “What’re you two gonna do without each other when she graduates? You’re, like, fused at the hip.”

  “I’m sure we’ll manage,” I mumbled, pulling my T-shirt over my head.

  I wasn’t actually so sure. As much as I was looking forward to my freedom, life without Dara was pretty hard to imagine. But I supposed I’d manage. It wouldn’t be the first time a girl had left me behind.

  After school I headed upstairs to my room, but I stopped in my tracks in the hallway. Where Mason’s racing car bed had stood this morning, there was now a desk. My mom knelt, wiping the baseboards, her back to me.

  After all this time, she was finally de-shrining the room? She’d talked about it for years — turning the room into a craft-slash-gift-wrapping area or an office-slash–guest room — but she had never acted on it. I guess I never thought she would.

  And then it hit me: she must have found out the Brandts were coming back. She couldn’t leave Mason’s room the way it was when they left. Couldn’t let them know just how miserably we’d failed to move on.

  The room looked so different; the canary-yellow walls seemed to jump out at me with the bed gone. A white scrape arched across the paint where the “spoiler” used to hit the wall — probably the result of Mason’s love of jumping on the bed.

  “Where is it?”

  Mom startled and turned around. She had on Dad’s Wildcats sweatpants, and her dark hair was in a ponytail. She was in “project” mode.

  “Hey, Otie.” She came over and gave me a hug that smelled like lemon Pledge and cinnamon gum. “How was your day?”

  “Where is it?” I repeated.

  The smile fell off her face, and that’s when I noticed her eyes were red and puffy. “I donated it to charity.”

  I knew I should have cheered her on for this step forward, but what came out was: “Why didn’t you tell me first?”

  “We still have the crib, Otis. I kept that.”

  When Mason got his big boy bed, Dad moved his crib into the damp storage room in the basement. At some point someone had covered it in a light blue sheet so that no one would have to actually look at it when we went in search of extra dining-room chairs or winter coats.

  Her eyes pleaded with me. “Do you know how happy that bed is going to make some kid? Better to do something good with it, don’t you think?”

  I averted my eyes, as unable as ever to meet head-on the intersection of her pain and mine.

  “Hey, there’s something I need to tell you.” She hesitated. “It’s about Meg and her dad.”

  “I already know. She emailed me.” I slipped my backpack off my perpetually sore shoulders and turned to go, but then I turned back. “Wait, what? Meg and her dad? Her mom’s not coming?”

  She glanced away. “They’re separated.”

  “Separated? Like, divorcing?”

  “I don’t know. I just know Jay is transferring back to Chicago and Meg is staying with him for a few weeks.”

  Transferring back. “Wait. He’s moving back? Alone?”

  “I really don’t know, Otis.” She took some pens from a box on the desk and put them in one of the drawers. “I haven’t talked to them in . . .”

  I stepped closer, leaning a hand on the desk. “How did you even find out —”

  “Apparently your father is Facebook friends with Jay.” She shoved the drawer closed, making the boxes on top of the desk jump. “You should probably also know . . . I guess Meg has a boyfriend, Otis.”

  “I know.”

  She glanced up. “You knew?”

  “Saw their pictures on Facebook,” I mumbled. I thought about explaining that Meg and I weren’t actually friends on Facebook, but then I’d be admitting I basically stalked Meg, which probably wouldn’t put Mom’s mind at ease.

  Her forehead creased with sympathy. I looked away, hating how pathetic I must look in her eyes. My gaze landed on a framed photo on the wall, glinting in the afternoon sun. It was one of Mason and me, sitting in the rocking chair on the night of his first birthday. I was reading him Goodnight Moon — my birthday gift to him, purchased with my own money, which felt like a big deal to nine-year-old me. He sat in my lap in his green-and-blue zip-up pajamas, sucking his pacifier, leaning sideways to look up at me, wide-eyed.

  That picture never got easier to look at. Mason adored me. No one would ever feel exactly that way about me again. I used to have a brother, and now I did not. People who knew me now thought I was an only child. But I was not an only child. My brother was always there. In a fleeting shadow, a muffled giggle, the smell of toast and jam . . . In dreams that seemed so real, for a cruel moment. In the permanent sadness in my mother’s eyes. In my father’s rare brooding silences. In the gnawing hole in me that couldn’t be filled. He was right there.

  I escaped to my room, where I sat at my desk and logged on to Facebook. Meg was so late arriving to the Facebook scene, I’d had paranoid thoughts that it was part of a strategy to keep me away from her. I’d signed up for Facebook as soon as she left, hoping it would keep us connected. But no. She didn’t appear until last fall, not long after my sixteenth birthday (which I admit I’d held out hope of her acknowledging), and then she was posting pictures of herself with that macho asshole.

  He was so good-looking, it was only reasonable to despise him on sight. Plus, he was obviously a land animal, which I am not. I was the kid who always struck out. The kid who ducked. The kid who, ironically, didn’t like getting splashed in the pool. I guess “sissy” is a fair description. Once in sixth-grade PE I got nailed in the side of the head with a football, and Meg saw it happen. She watched as I stumbled off the field to the nurse’s office, clutching my throbbing ear as I attempted — unsuccessfully — not to cry. She held her hand over her mouth, looking like she might cry, too, and somehow that made the whole thing about a hundred times worse.

  Later I’d tried to make a joke about my lack of athletic ability. But she shrugged and said, “Who cares about sports?” Which filled me with happiness and hope.

  Of course, the punch line was that she ended up with a football player.

  Here it was, the picture that stopped me cold: He was in his football uniform, all pads and grass stains and ego, his arm draped so carelessly around Meg that the proprietary sentiment was unmistakable. And there was Meg, honey-colored hair coming loose from a ponytail, bright turquoise eyes turned upward at him. She’d posted other pictures of him over the last year, other pictures of them. But somehow, until I saw that picture — saw that heartbreakingly familiar look on Meg’s face — it hadn’t fully occurred to me that she might ever feel that way about anyone else.

  When I first found her online, I wanted so badly to connect with her, to talk with her, but where to even start? What the hell hap
pened to you? was probably not the smoothest strategy. The last thing I wanted to do was scare her off before we’d even reconnected. I couldn’t tell her I had never really stopped loving her. And I didn’t want to be in competition with her boyfriend. To me, that seemed ridiculous — offensive, even. He wasn’t there when her dog got hit by a car; I was. He didn’t hold her hair back when she threw up at the Wisconsin State Fair after three cream puffs and a Tilt-A-Whirl; I did. He hadn’t been her best friend, her first kiss, her first love; I had.

  But he was something to her; the picture made that pretty damn clear. Whatever it was, though, it couldn’t erase everything that had been between us.

  Could it?

  I logged out of Facebook and opened my email. I ignored the spam and clicked on Meg’s message. It was kind of crazy how a few little sentences had turned my whole world upside down:

  Hi, Otis. It’s been a long time, I know, but I wanted to tell you that I’m coming back to Willow Grove next month. It’ll be a short trip — just three weeks. But I thought you should know.

  Hope you’re well!

  Meg

  Despite obsessing over her message all day, I still had no idea how to respond. Why was she coming? Did she want to see me? She wouldn’t have made a point of telling me she was coming if she didn’t want to see me, right? Unless she was trying to avert an awkward situation if we accidentally ran into each other? Should I ask her if I could see her? What was I supposed to say?

  Over an hour ticked by. I’d have to eat soon, before Dara picked me up for evening practice. And I didn’t want to wait any longer to respond; it already felt weird to have waited most of a day. Should I ask her how she’d been? Should I ask about her parents? I didn’t fucking know her well enough now to ask personal questions.

  It didn’t leave much.

  After half a dozen failed attempts, I messaged:

  Wow, okay — that is news! Yes, it has been a long time. Let me know if you need someone to show you around town.