Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  “It’s Saturday.” I shrug. “I close on Saturdays.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! I had you off the schedule weeks ago. Go enjoy yourself. Have some fun. And maybe you can stop at home and say hello to your father?” She pats her palm against my flushed cheek and smiles into my face. “We’re so proud of you. This is your big day.”

  “Not that big,” I say, discreetly brushing chalk off my face.

  Mom tilts her head. “It’s the start of the rest of your life, mija.”

  “What life?”

  It’s supposed to be a joke to slow the Vanni Pride Parade a little, but her forehead puckers, and I know right away I’ve stepped perilously close to the land mine always buried in the ground between us.

  I back away from it slowly, so as not to set it off. “Just, because I’m staying here. I’m happy I’m staying, but nothing’s really . . . changing.”

  Mom’s forehead smooths over; her smile returns. “Maybe not tomorrow. So? We’re glad to keep you for a little while longer. I took a couple of months after high school to figure things out too.”

  Look how that worked out, I would never, ever say to her.

  “Can I take your car?” I ask quickly. “To get to the party?”

  “Of course.” She fishes for the keys in her skirt pocket and drops them in my palm. “Jake will drive me home later, won’t you, cariño?”

  He dials the wattage on his smile up to Full Charm. “Happy to, Mrs. Espinoza!”

  “Thanks,” I say. And when Mom turns away, I lean across the podium boobs-first and murmur below the hum of the swamp cooler, “Hope you washed that hand, cariño.”

  He goes red to the tips of his ears, lets his blue-black hair flop across his forehead as he stoops to inspect a scratch on the podium. Jake talks big shit in stockrooms and hidden behind trees, but put him around my painfully cheerful, five-feet-nothing mother, and he’s a little boy. I laugh and head back into the killer heat, stopping on the way to the parking lot to bundle my graduation robe into the Dumpster.

  In the sunbaked front seat of my mom’s old Malibu, I weigh my options. I could go to the house, change, kiss my dad on the cheek, and then head to the arroyo. Party with all twenty-six kids in my class, most of whom I’ve said maybe a handful of words to since junior year. Wish a couple of them well on their way out of town and commiserate with the kids staying behind.

  I choose option two. Let it be known, I don’t enjoy lying to Mom. I always feel shitty about it, even when she does half the work for me by lying to herself.

  La Trampa sits just off the Turquoise Trail, a fifty-something-mile-long road that runs down from Santa Fe, through Los Cerrillos and Madrid and so on, south toward the Cibola National Forest. You can drive it all the way to Albuquerque. It isn’t as fast as the highway, but all the tourist brochures say it’s one of the most beautiful drives in the Southwest.

  I don’t care about that so much as that it takes me where I need to go. Half an hour later, I pull into the parking lot of the Bicentennial Pool, the nearest and only outdoor public pool in Santa Fe. It’s after five thirty, but jam-packed from the tot pond to the mushroom waterfalls to the big red slide, even when everyone should be toweling off their kids and taking them home for family dinner. Good thing they set up lanes for a lap swim at six. I take my time in the locker room showering off dust and sweat from my . . . extracurriculars with Jake. By the time I’m done, half the bright blue water is buoyed off, a few grown-ups in swim caps and goggles stroking back and forth. I slip into the cold pool with hardly a splash, maybe showing off a bit.

  And why not? I earned this. Dad’s parents insisted he learn how to swim, even though they’d come from the ocean to the desert, so Dad insisted I learn. And though Mom could barely frog-paddle, and probably wasn’t thrilled to spend a couple afternoons a week driving me all the way out to Bicentennial, there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for Dad. There never was.

  I freestyle to the deep end, fluttering my feet and reaching, reaching with long-but-not-too-long strokes, rolling my hips and shoulders at once, eyes on the bottom of the pool between breaths. I reach the far wall and flip-turn, swim lap after lap before I pause by the ladder in the deep end to catch my breath. Scrubbing my hair back, I blink up at the lifeguard chair a few feet from me, where a guard that Diana would’ve labeled an Unidentified Flying Hottie watches me.

  He tugs down his little white visor and keeps half his attention on the water, half on me. “Nice technique.”

  I’ve been told so. Casually, I paddle to the ledge in front of him. “You’re new here, right?”

  He nods. “Lucas.”

  “Savannah.”

  “That’s pretty.”

  I like the way his voice rumbles. Even from below, I can tell he’s not tall, but solid, with excellently proportioned biceps. Sandy-brown tufts of hair splay out above his visor; below, his eyes are green, surprisingly dark lashed. My own hair is a bedraggled mass of seaweed dripping down my back, I’m wearing my frumpiest two-piece—navy blue and high-cut—and though most of my makeup washed off in the shower, I suspect my resilient Colossal Chaotic mascara has smudged below my lids, like a football player’s eye black.

  But fresh blood only comes around so often. I can try to work under these conditions.

  “I’m here a lot. You’ll be around?” I flutter and twist one soggy curl around my finger.

  He smiles, scanning the pool. “Just three days a week. They were only hiring part-time. Other days I’m at the Lost Lagoon. I lifeguard there, too.”

  “That water park?” I heard one was opening in the desert just north of Albuquerque. There are a few small places in the city, like Cliff’s Water Mania, but the big park my parents sometimes took me to called the Beach closed when I was ten. I guess they shit the bucket (maybe literally) on a health inspection. Some other town in New Mexico bought the slides but never put them up, so now they sit in piles off the highway, all cracked plastic and bent ladders and tumbleweeds. “Is that place any good?”

  Lucas looks down at me again, eyeing what might be my necklace, a tiny low-hanging pearl Mom let me borrow for the ceremony, but might be something else my mother gave me. “It’s pretty decent. You should check it out, you know?”

  “I guess I should.”

  In the parking lot a car honks once, twice, lingers on the third blast.

  “My little sister.” He sighs. “My shift was up at six, but the cavalry’s late. . . .” Then he looks past me and waves, and I turn to see a blond lifeguard in her own fire-engine-red suit padding around the pool’s edge. “There she is. See you around, Savannah . . . ?”

  “Espinoza.”

  “Clemente.” Lucas pats his chest. Then he rises out of the chair and points a finger at me, like a promise, before striding to the locker room. He’s shorter than Jake after all, and slightly bowlegged.

  It works for him.

  I watch a few minutes later as he pops up beyond the pool gate, wearing a loose black-and-white baseball tee and carrying his duffel bag to an ugly green minivan parked right by the entrance. In the driver’s seat, his sister’s face is half shadowed by the sun visor, the other half streaked with light through the windshield, so all I can really see is her silhouette. Lucas slips into the passenger seat, and together, they crawl forward through the shrieking crowd.

  I sink until my nose is submerged, eyes above the surface like a crocodile for as long as possible. Once I run out of breath, I kick off from the ledge and float backward, even though I’m in a lap lane. I’m weightless. I let my arms go, hands curling gently as they drift away from me.

  My right thumb twitches.

  I drop my legs so quickly I nearly sink, then paddle to the rough-bottomed shallows. Once I’m home free, I slog toward the stairs and out onto the hot concrete and then I plant my legs, flexing every muscle in them, and stand dripping and sizzling under the sun, simply because I can.

  THREE

  When I park
in our driveway on Jemez Road, I wedge the Malibu in beside a boxy blue Dodge Ram whose paint chips and fender dings I know by heart, smiling despite myself. I let myself into the house and call out, “Chris?” kicking my heels off beside our old Navajo print sofa.

  Chris Zepeda slowly shuffles in from the kitchen; he toppled a dirt bike and shattered the bones in his left leg when he and Dad were my age, and he’s favored it ever since. Squinting small brown eyes bracketed by crow’s-feet as splintered as a dried streambed, he holds out his arm. “Vanni, ¿qué onda?”

  “Fine. Good,” I say, and duck into the hug. “Mom’s still at the restaurant?”

  “Till closing.”

  “I didn’t know you were staying. You could’ve called me to come home.”

  He smiles widely through a black briar patch of a beard. “Happy to stay, cariño.”

  Maybe it’s because they grew up two streets apart, or maybe it’s through long exposure, but in his more emotional moments, Chris speaks a little like my dad. It’s their clipped sentences, the way the words at the beginning and the end slide away like loose rocks crumbling from a cliff face. They’re best friends, so it’s not surprising. I can’t remember a time I didn’t know Chris Zepeda, who I danced with at my quinceañera, who showed me how to drive the ATVs in his shed when I was thirteen and taught me card tricks I’ve long since forgotten.

  “Is Dad in bed?” I ask.

  “Resting. But it was a good day. Probably still up, you want to poke your head in.”

  “Okay.” I drop Mom’s car keys in a heart-shaped basket on our scuffed coffee table. “Thanks for hanging out with him today.”

  Usually that would fall to Dad’s part-time home aide, Ximena, a tiny little woman with surprising biceps beneath her button-down shirts. Since Dad stopped driving last year, we used Xime whenever I was in school and Mom needed to be at Silvia’s, and Dad had to get to PT, or OT, or to the once-a-month psychiatrist who specializes in HD (what a fun alphabet soup life has become). We haven’t needed Xime as much since Mom rolled back the restaurant hours—we only serve lunch and dinner Monday through Friday, a full day Saturday, and closed on Sunday—because Mom wants to be there for Dad whenever he needs her.

  Anyway, the four locals who made up our a.m. crowd weren’t exactly paying the staff’s salary with their pancakes and horchatas.

  Chris lifts his Windbreaker off the coatrack. “It was great to see you on that stage today, graduating and everything. Only sorry I gotta get back and get packing. I got that flight tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, how’s Sophia?”

  “Tired,” he laughs. One of the rarest La Trampans, Chris’s sister, Sophia Zepeda, split for California after high school, got married, and stayed gone. She’s just had her fourth kid, and is apparently adrift in a sleepless haze of formula and diapers and the senseless wailing of their new bundle of joy. Chris is closing up his auto-repair business for the whole summer to sleep on their couch in Monterey and help his sister out.

  “Enjoy that.” I smile sweetly.

  Chris gives me a quick kiss on the cheek. “Left a little something for you in the fridge. Felicidades, Vanni! See you in September, hey?”

  As soon as he’s gone, I pop my head into the fridge and find a foil-wrapped plate of chocolate-banana empanadas on the top rack. They must’ve come from the bakery in town, because Chris, who lives the stereotypical bachelor’s life out of meals in boxes, definitely didn’t bake them. He used to have dinner with us a couple times a month, but now that Dad doesn’t really cook, they spend most of their time together slowly sipping beer in the backyard, neither of them speaking. They’ve never really needed words anyway.

  I think it’s helped just having Chis around while Dad readjusts to a world that’s growing harder and shrinking smaller. We’ll all miss him this summer, for sure.

  Shoveling four empanadas onto a plate, I carry my sugary riches down the cramped hall, pausing outside Mom and Dad’s room. No light seeps out below the door. I ease it open with my free hand and whisper, “Daddy?” into the dark. Squinting toward the bed, I can just make out the shape of him, flat and still. No answer. I know the medication he takes knocks him out, sometimes even in the middle of the day.

  We can talk tomorrow.

  “Vanni?” a gruff voice calls just as I’m closing the door.

  Frozen for a moment in the slice of hallway light, I tell myself to set the plate on the floor and go perch on the very edge of the mattress. “How was physical therapy?”

  It usually takes a few extra seconds for him to grasp questions—the medicine that helps with other symptoms actually makes this worse—but he answers eventually. While I wait, I watch him. Though curled in on himself a little, Dad looks mostly the way he did when he was healthy. His wiry hair is still full and dark, he’s got the same proud brown wedge of a nose, his knuckles are still strong. Though even before the first signs and symptoms, he wasn’t truly healthy. This rotten, implosive combination of genes was always inside of him, invisible and waiting.

  For Dad, Huntington’s started with trembling fingers. A dropped pitcher of water, a fumbled knife while chopping carrots, a dangerous twitch when he went to pull a pan out of the oven at Silvia’s. Hand cramps, he claimed. Nothing to worry about, and no need to see a doctor (even before the bills and the shortened restaurant hours and occasional help from Xime, we were never rolling in it).

  But soon, he would stagger on flat ground. Smack his hip on a restaurant table a time too often. Just after that New Year’s Day in 2014, he missed a step coming off our front stoop and scraped his knee raw. Every now and then, he’d slur his words as if he wasn’t a two-beers-maybe-on-a-Friday-night guy. And then there were the quick-bright flares of temper, so unlike Dad, who’d always been about as excitable as sand.

  Finally, Mom made him an appointment with his doctor, who sent him on for tests and . . . well, here we are.

  His answer comes a moment later. “PT was hard.” He grimaces. “Did a lot of stretching.”

  “That’s good though, Daddy.”

  Propped up against two pillows, he shrugs. Or I think he does; sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s on purpose and what’s not. Dad pats my hand above the sheet, then after a pause, “You like your graduation, mi corazón?”

  Let’s see; it was hot. Dusty. Endless. Pointless. “It was great.”

  Another long pause. “You see us on the bleachers?”

  “Of course I saw you, Daddy.” More silence, so I keep going. “Sorry I couldn’t stick around. I went to this senior party after the ceremony. It was so much fun.”

  “All your friends there?”

  “Yeah, Daddy. Everybody went. It was great.”

  We trade white lies and wavering pauses for a few minutes, and then I kiss the hard, tan apple of his cheek and tell him I’m off to bed.

  “Proud of you, Vanni.”

  I wince, glad he can’t see me clearly in the dim bedroom. Everybody’s just so, so proud of me today.

  When I’m safe in my bedroom, I flop onto the sheets with my empanadas and stare up at the ceiling, where Dad stood on his own mattress when he was a teenager and reached way up to scratch GABRIEL ESPINOZA WAS HERE into the plaster with a pocketknife. This was Dad’s childhood home. I sleep in the bed he slept in. He combed his hair, deep chocolaty brown like mine, in the speckled mirror above the desk. He spread his books out on the same worn red rug and did his homework left-handed, like me.

  I swim like my dad. I look like my dad. I write like my dad. I might not walk like him, but I run and laugh just like he used to. There are plenty of differences—for one, it turns out a lack of talent can be passed down through blood just as easily as talent, as I’ve inherited my mom’s unfortunate gift for runny eggs, burnt Campbell’s soup, and still-chewy noodles—but the similarities do add up.

  Feeling way too tight in my skin, I scoop my phone, silenced for the past few hours, out of my purse. There’s one new email (a Nigeri
an prince needs my help and will share his fortune with me in exchange for a small one-time loan) and a text.

  Jake: Not cool, crazy girl! Not in front of the boss!

  Me: Like you don’t love it

  A moment later he answers.

  Jake: Pick you up tomorrow?

  I drop my phone on my stomach. Tomorrow: the first day of the rest of my life, post–high school. I’m already bored.

  To make things worse, for the first summer in three years I won’t be working full days at Silvia’s. Some days I won’t work at all, because even though I’m cheap-to-free labor and despite the cost of keeping on our regular waitstaff, my parents couldn’t bring themselves to fire Jake and Estrella and the rest. Instead, they scaled back our hours. Now Jake works a second job at the Trading Post, where you can get a package of T-shirts, juice, and a baby doll in a mariachi costume all within one aisle. You know, the essentials.

  When I’m not working, I’ll help out at home, of course. I’ll do chores and help Mom cobble together breakfast and wash the dishes, drive Dad to his appointments, run errands at the grocery store or the pharmacy. Then before noon a few days a week, I’ll head to the restaurant. Except for a new sign outside the Shrine of Our Lady Parish, the route will look just like it always has.

  Generally: it’s brown.

  Specifically: it’s old, tiny, dusty, and brown. Grown-ups always complain about how things changed in the cities—how Santa Fe is all white tourists on bicycles and fancy restaurants downtown and B and Bs where families use to live for generations—but it’s not like that here. Mr. Binali has always smoked two packs a day on the porch outside his one-room real estate agency. Mrs. Reyes has always handed out Turn to Jesus pamphlets by the bronze statue of a coonskin-capped, musket-toting fur trapper in the miniature town square on her lunch hour. Kids have always gathered in the arroyo off Silver Avenue if they’re cool, and around the picnic table outside Burrito Bandito if they’re not.