Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  I could point out that the closest Diana and I come to “going our own ways” is walking down different aisles in the grocery store, but she’d only say something like, Well, just for now, mija. Besides, she’s already off and running again, talking about work, about who heard what rumor from Mr. Binali on his stoop, or which pastor/priest/preacher will be hosting the tri-temple picnic/crafts fair/showing of Finding Nemo in his church’s basement.

  I pick at my food and try not to watch Dad stab inelegantly at his.

  After dinner, I take care of the dishes while Mom helps Dad wash up—he can get around, but needs help maneuvering into his shower chair so he won’t slip in the tub. Plus she likes to hover, even though we’ve installed this emergency pull cord by the toilet if he really needs us.

  They’ll be in there awhile, so I retreat to my room and pull my phone out to text Jake. It’s been days since I ditched him in the stockroom, and yet he’s still pissed. As if I owe him! But with no school, half shifts at Silvia’s, and a shortage of chores since Mom’s been home nearly full-time, I’m feeling particularly antsy. Thus, I’m preparing to suck it up and sweet-talk Jake Mosqueda, when I hear the water in the bathroom cut off, and a moment later, Mom raps on my door.

  I freeze. “Yeah?”

  She pokes her head into the room, phone in hand. “I just got off the phone with Xime. She can’t make it for your dad’s PT tomorrow, you know her mother’s got shingles, and I’ve got to open up the restaurant. Can you—”

  “Of course,” I say, relieved that’s all it is.

  “Gracias, mija,” Mom says, and sighs. “What would we do without you?”

  She slips back out, and I let go of the breath I didn’t know I was holding on to.

  There are several doctors on what Mom calls “our team.” There’s Dr. Dinapoli, Dad’s occupational therapist, who’s all about giving my father “the tools to go through his life as meaningfully as possible.” Dr. Dinapoli helps us make changes as his symptoms get worse and he moves out of the early stage of HD, like using little nonslip mats to carry plates and jars, and reorganizing drawers and cupboards so Dad can get to whatever he needs most as easily as possible. She gives us tips for when his memory and concentration slip, like making lists and calendars and keeping our questions short and to the point. And as his balance and spatial awareness get worse, she gives him strategies for things as simple as sitting down (touch the chair, then turn around, then sit). She looks like a tough little Italian grandmother, but smiles easily and often. We like Dr. Dinapoli.

  The doctor we see every Friday is his physical therapist, Dr. Petrovich, who works on his flexibility and mobility. He plans Dad’s exercise routines, like Pilates to keep up core strength. (I’m not saying it’s funny to watch my dad roll slowly around the living room on a big silver ball while on the TV, a high ponytail in a leotard reminds him to breathe . . . but since Mom got a matching ball, they stop regularly during their workouts to make fun of each other.) Dr. Petrovich also smells like hard-boiled eggs and has ice-cold hands even through his latex gloves, which Dad points out regularly in his own clipped way.

  We have mixed feelings about Dr. Petrovich.

  As Dad and I sit side by side in the waiting room of the Rehabilitation Services Department at University of New Mexico Hospital, waiting for Dr. Petrovich, his sneaker taps a nervous beat against my chair leg. It makes it hard to concentrate, but it’s not like I was enraptured by Golf magazine, so I set the issue down and turn in my seat. “Mom said Chris called from California last night?”

  Dad thinks, then bobs his head. “Made it into Monterey okay. He says thanks for checking on things.”

  Before he left, Chris gave us his spare key and asked if someone could pop over to the place from time to time in case any of the kids who sometimes hung around the arroyo made the quarter-mile trek across his property. The worst they’d do was leave red plastic cups in his scrabbly yard or smoke weed in the garage with the glass pane missing from the back door, but Mom promised one of us would drive over every few days, make sure nobody started a skunky-smelling fire in his trash can by accident.

  “Yeah, no problem. It’s been a while since I was out there,” I say lightly. “I don’t think since that barbecue? You made puerco pibil, sí?” Pork braised in spices, orange juice, grapefruit juice, and lime juice and cooked inside banana leaves. “That was his favorite.”

  “Eso que ni qué,” Dad confirms. “Since we were kids.”

  There’s this picture hanging in our hallway with the family photos, of the two of them as ten-year-old boys. Barefoot and bare-chested beside a pool, they’re small and brown, with biceps the size of acorns. I’ve heard countless stories about these kids around the chiminea in Chris’s backyard. How Chris would regularly follow Dad home for dinner, and every time, my abuela would shake her head and say, “No te preocupes, le echamos más agua a los frijoles.” How they’d wrestle in Dad’s backyard until the day Dad slipped and cut the skin below his eyebrow on the old splintery fence that used to border the property, blood pouring down the side of his face, and Chris was so sure he’d gouged out his best friend’s eye, he passed out in the weeds on his way to the house for help. And the way they used to climb the gutter to sit out on the roof of Mr. Zepeda’s garage and smoke . . . cigarettes . . . while the sun went down, summer through winter and back again.

  I look at Dad in his slouchy old T-shirt and sweatpants, folded into his waiting room chair, and try to imagine him and Chris with young bodies that could take them anywhere they wanted to go, that were never full and rarely tired. Bodies that chased down ice cream trucks for mango con chile paletas, and leapt into pools, and climbed tough, dusty hills out in the desert. Bodies so perfect they were beneath their notice; like the ticking of a clock you never pay attention to until the day it stops, and then it’s not the sound you hear, but the silence.

  Dad blinks at his watch and rocks his knuckles against his jawline, shaved with Mom’s help this morning.

  “I might go out with Marilee tonight,” I blurt. I don’t know why, except that it’s an easy enough lie to back out of, and it always makes my dad happy.

  “Muy bueno. Your mother’s right. It’s important . . . to have people like that.”

  I lean over and quickly kiss him on the cheek. “You’re my people.”

  Dad pats my knee with a mostly steady hand and scrapes his throat clear. He turns to the window, watching a small brown bird flit around a hanging feeder.

  I pick up the magazine and pretend to care about the politics of sand traps until Dr. Petrovich comes out to claim Dad. Then I head to the cafeteria to grab a wilted spinach salad or a dewy ham sandwich. The whole way, I have to stop myself from sprinting down the hospital halls, as if I were ten years old again.

  EIGHT

  That evening, I’m drying the dinner dishes while Mom helps Dad in the bathroom, when an email chimes across my phone. I grab it off the counter to read:

  Hi, Savannah,

  After rigorous auditions and careful consideration, I’m pleased to offer you a spot as one of the Lost Lagoon mermaids! Please let me know if you’re still available for the position, which will consist of three eight-hour shifts per week, exact schedule to be determined. A full day’s work on the Fourth of July is required—this is our debut show. As announced at auditions, training begins tomorrow, Saturday, June 24 at 9:00 a.m.

  Sincerely,

  Eric Barber

  Director of Performing Park Personnel

  The Lost Lagoon

  I reread, then start to text Jake the good news (well, the okay news), pausing halfway through to delete it all. Instead, I abandon my station at the drying rack and slip down the hall into my room, scrolling through my contacts. Shutting the door behind me, I flop back on my bed and tuck the phone between my shoulder and my ear as it rings.

  “Hello?”

  “So I’m a mermaid,” I announce. “This is Vanni, by the way.”

&nbs
p; “Yeah, I figured that out,” Leigh laughs. “Congratulations, I think.”

  “It’s okay. I mean, it’s mostly a good thing. Exciting with a little dash of depressing. Feel like celebrating?”

  “I wish. Lucas is dragging me to the movies with him and Scoop Girl.”

  Without noticing, I’ve been tracing my fingers over the palm where Leigh’s number used to be. I clench my fist and snatch up the phone in my other hand. “Too bad.”

  “You can come to the movies, if you want.”

  “No, that’s—”

  “Seriously. It’s this double feature all the way out in Las Vegas.” She means Las Vegas, New Mexico, and not Sin City, I presume. “Lucas wants us to have quality sibling time before school starts, but I don’t see what’s quality about sitting in the backseat, trying to see the screen through their interlocking tongues. It’ll be better if you’re there.”

  “You want me to come?”

  “Yes, my god, I want it, I need it.”

  I bite back a smile.

  After we hang up, I quickly get ready in my bedroom, in the little mirror above Dad’s old desk. I slick on lip gloss and pile my hair into a topknot to get it off my neck. Outside it’s holding steady in the high eighties, though the temperature will sink with the sun, thank god. I change into a loose-fitting pink-and-white-striped halter top and denim short-shorts. Leigh might accuse me of wearing them to spite Scoop Girl, but I just can’t bring myself to be jealous of Lucas’s girlfriend, when Leigh described her to me on Monday as having all the depth of a coaster.

  I poke my head into my parents’ room, where Mom’s rushing to put laundry away while Dad showers, so she can help him after. She’s still in her restaurant clothes; she got home just before dinner and didn’t take the time to change.

  “Guess what? I got that job.”

  “At the water park? ¡Qué bueno, mija! And good for your résumé!” But she looks worried. “It won’t be too much for you, will it?”

  “It’s only part-time, and just for the summer. No te preocupes.”

  “I don’t want you to be overwhelmed.”

  “It won’t mess up my shifts at Silvia’s.”

  “We can adjust that if we need to. We’ll have to sooner or later, anyway.” Mom wipes a sweaty strand of hair off her face with the knob of her wrist. “You’ll still have time to help keep an eye on Chris’s place?”

  “No problem. And it’ll be great. I’m really excited I got the job,” I lie.

  Then Lucas is honking in the driveway, and I grab my old backpack with a sweater stuffed inside. I’ve got my hand on the doorknob when, feeling guilty, I circle back to the kitchen to dry the last plates and shove them into the cabinet. Then I dash out into the heat.

  The Fort Union Drive-in is over an hour away in San Miguel County. Their ugly minivan squeals and rattles eastward, Lucas driving with Scoop Girl up front (“Bethany, but call me Beth,” she says, and smiles) and me and Leigh in the back. Scoop Girl is, it turns out, a lot like I’d pictured her from Leigh’s description. Blond and bubbly, with sizable scoops beneath her tiny maroon UNM T-shirt. A funnel of hot wind whips through the car, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for small talk, but from what I can hear of the conversation, Scoop Girl is . . . sweet. Maybe not the sharpest cactus in the desert. She has a habit of chopping the ends off words, in that weird yet efficient language I didn’t know girls still used. “This movie will probs be awesome. Gerard Butler is the hottest thing alive. I totes love romantic comedies.”

  “Oh, totes!” Leigh yells back, then leans in close and whispers, “Please beat me in the face with your backpack until my hearing goes.”

  If Leigh’s aiming for nice, she sometimes misses the mark. But so what? When we were in school, everyone was always going on about how Nicole Mendez is nice, and Kim Brentwood is a bitch, so isn’t she the absolute worst? But there have to be more important things for a girl to be than nice. I was considered a nice girl until spring semester of junior year, when I fooled around with Nicole Mendez’s very freshly ex-boyfriend under the bleachers, and then according to the third stall in the girls’ room at El Trampero High, I was nice no longer.

  Well, who needs nice?

  Leigh might be a bitch, but she’s funny, and she’s sharp, and she rocks her gym-class style. And she’s strong. When we park at the drive-in, she spreads one of the trunk blankets across the hot car roof, vaults onto it and hauls me up one-handed, the muscles in her thin arm hard and round like fruit. We lie on our stomachs while Lucas and Scoop Girl take the front seat, turning the radio up all the way so we can hear the movie through the open windows. As the air finally cools and the sun sets behind the big white screen, she rocks me with her elbow. “You’re crowding the popcorn.”

  “You’re crowding the Coke.” We only bought one between us—she doesn’t have a job, and those sweet, sweet mermaid dollars aren’t rolling in yet.

  Leigh holds the huge sweating cup so I can fit my lips around the straw, and then I hold out a fistful of popcorn for her to pluck from while we lie there waiting, arms crowded together and back legs lightly touching. I feel good. Like even while I’m on top of the car, looking out on the roofs of the dusty El Caminos and pickups, I’m really up above my body, high in the air and looking down and watching. That’s probably why my heart’s beating hard by the time the movie starts. Or maybe it’s just that Gerard Butler is totes the hottest thing alive.

  While the hot dogs dance onscreen in the intermission before the ten o’clock movie, Lucas and Scoop Girl unfold from the minivan. “We’re going to get soft pretzels,” Lucas says. “Bring you back a few?” Unlike his sister, he’s been extra sweet this trip. Must be thrilled that Operation Make Leigh a Friend has borne fruit.

  “Sure,” we say, and Lucas and Scoop Girl stroll away, leaning into each other like they’d fall down without the other. Leigh sits up on the car roof, twisting her back until it cracks, and sighs. “What’s next?”

  “I think it’s the one with the boy and girl who would be perfect together if they’d just get out of their own heads, and then they get out of their own heads.”

  “Another romantic comedy?”

  “Obvs.” I shiver in the desert air and pull the picnic blanket up around my right side, while my left is still crushed against Leigh.

  “This is dumb,” she says, noticing. “Let’s just take their seats. They’re not coming back any time soon.”

  “They just—”

  “Wandered off in the opposite direction of the concession stand? Unless Scoop Girl keeps soft pretzels down her pants, we’re going hungry.”

  We hop down off the roof and slide into the front seat of the minivan, where the temperature is warmer, but with the cup holders and the stick shift between us, the body heat is lacking.

  The second movie opens on the lead actress falling asleep in her luxurious bed, bought on her TV producer salary, surrounded by ice cream cartons, cheese singles wrappers, wine bottles, and the remote (on a Friday night, the sad old crone!). Leigh turns the key in the ignition. “Fuck this. Let’s go to Boston.”

  I check the gas gauge. “We have a quarter of a tank.”

  “Well, let’s go someplace.”

  “We can’t ditch your brother.”

  “Sure we can. For a little while.”

  “And skip quality sibling time?”

  She inspects my face, scrunching her tanned nose I know to be lightly freckled in the daylight. “Okay. If in the next scene, Channing Tatum’s out in the club being the Man, and he takes home a hottie to have meaningless sex with in his perfect apartment, where he lives a superficially happy but meaningless existence, and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him even though he’s happy having meaningless sex with hotties in his perfect apartment, we go. Okay?” She holds out a hand to shake, and, scanning her face to see if she’s serious, I take it.

  Technically, Channing Tatum meets the hot blonde at a pool party for grown-u
ps, but the judge (Leigh) rules that it qualifies.

  “What if your brother comes back?” I ask as we jerk forward from our spot.

  Leaving the car running, Leigh hops out and spreads the picnic blanket in the empty patch of dust we’ve left behind. She’s thoughtful that way.

  I figure Leigh’s plan is to drive as far as we can in one direction before time, a dwindling gas reserve, or a flurry of outraged texts from Lucas force us back. The minivan bucks down the backstreets of Las Vegas, and to keep my queasiness at bay, I focus on the darkened shapes of the mesquite-spotted hills in front of us. I’m so busy staring ahead, I don’t even recognize the scenery around us until we squeal onto Route 1, and then pull off into a familiar parking lot.

  “Lucas told me this was here,” Leigh explains. “Have you been?”

  “Yeah,” I say, and nod. I haven’t seen the old sand-colored visitors’ center of the Las Vegas National Wildlife Refuge for a long time, but I remember it. My parents and I came here once or twice, and then sometimes I came just with Dad, which I always liked.

  Not that I don’t like spending time with Mom, and I spent plenty of it growing up. She was always the one to help me with math and science homework. She took me clothes shopping, made all of our hair appointments together, brought me to Blues Fests at the Mine Shaft and the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque and the Indian Market in Santa Fe, and chattered straight through all of it. The perfect foil to Dad, she was excitable when he was calm and outgoing when he was quiet. I love my mother, so I say this with a double-size-serving of guilt: because her words came so easily and cost her nothing, they were never quite as precious as Dad’s.

  Through the unlocked gate, we start down the auto loop, a paved horseshoe around the refuge. With the windows down, we cruise slowly past ponds, marshes, and cottonwood stands just visible in the moonlight. Behind it all the mountains rear up to the west, ink-black shadows against the starlit sky. When we roll up and park at the overlook at Crane Lake, I see this vivid flash of my dad. Having packed us a picnic lunch and hiked out with it, he’s peeling the lid off a recycled Country Crock tub stuffed with his beef empanadas (I liked them even better cold) and uncapping a lemon soda for me as he tells me the story of meeting my mother.