Like Water

by Rebecca Podos

  The Tub Aliens Have Landed. Bath Toys Spotted in Mexico, Washed Ashore at Last.

  TWENTY-TWO

  One thing you don’t think about when you sprint headlong into a big, change-your-world-overnight decision: how unbelievably goddamn long it can take for the world to catch up with you.

  I didn’t expect a big neon sign to descend from the heavens the second I made my choice, flashing POSITIVE! or NEGATIVE! But October’s halfway through by the time I sit down with Dr. Janowitz for our next-to-last appointment. Familiar by now, her office is white, lukewarm, and brightly lit. Having a pretty big sampling myself, it is almost what you’d call Generic Doctor’s Office™, except for this picture filmed over a single fluorescent light panel in the ceiling above her desk. A bright sky view with what look like those big saguaro cacti, their arms uplifted, flowers white and open, looking up out of the corners of the frame, as if you’re lying down in their shade. This being my third visit, I’ve had some time to study them. Which must be exactly the distraction Dr. Janowitz—the genetic counselor Dr. Michaels recommended to Mom and me—was hoping for when she stuck the picture up there.

  Not that I spent the first two visits staring at the ceiling. Since we got through my whole family history and retreaded the story of HD, Dr. Janowitz has been asking questions; questions are what the counseling’s all about. Do I believe I’ll be negative for the disease, or positive? Have I been obsessing over possible symptoms? Did I know that it’s incredibly common for potential HD carriers to symptom-hunt? Who have I told that I’m getting tested aside from Mom, who waited during the first appointment, and Diana, who sat through the second, and Leigh, who’s out in the waiting room now (still grounded, but given special permission for the occasion)? What have I done to prepare for the outcome? What are my immediate plans and my life plans, either way? Who am I planning to bring to my test results? How will I tell the people I love if I’m negative? If I’m positive? Here, I remembered that middle school summer when Diana and Marilee and I lay on the trampoline in our morbid little book club, plotting the melodramatic or cool or practical ways we’d tell our imaginary boyfriends about our imminent deaths. Diana: I am about to die, but don’t cry, my darling, because I had your love! Marilee: Since I’m dying, can we please go to second base after the dance tonight? Me: Hey baby, you know how the milk at the Trading Post is always, like, a day away from expiring?

  I don’t love answering all of these, but I know why Dr. Janowitz is asking. I know it’s important. It’s also kind of a relief. Nobody in this room is slapping on lipstick and pretending we’re fine, that life is the way it’s always been, that everybody’s okay and there’s nothing to be afraid of. If I’m scared, I tell the doctor I’m scared. Sometimes I tell Mom, too.

  When we’re not talking, we’ve been doing little tests, too. I’ve walked with one foot in front of the other across a hospital room, walked on my heels, held my arms out straight, pressed my head into the doctor’s hand from each side to make sure I’m not showing any signs of the disease yet. All scary, all pretty simple.

  Today’s the big one.

  On the other side of her desk, Dr. Janowitz follows my gaze up to the saguaro, glances back down at me, smiles. She has a Jake-like dimple in her plump left cheek, though none in the right. She’s also professionally kind and smells like yogurt. All of which could be much worse.

  “We were going over the repeats?” she reminds me.

  “Right.” In my chair across from her, I fiddle with the strings on Leigh’s yellow Bruins hoodie—the one I love—which she gave to me on the car ride over.

  “I know you’ve heard this before,” Dr. Janowitz says sympathetically, “but I don’t want you to have any questions going into the blood draw.”

  “I get it.”

  “You know we’ll be testing the gene that holds important information for the brain in its coding. Part of that code is repeated in the normal gene, but even more so in Huntington’s patients, where their mutated gene grows larger—we call that expansion, remember—causing brain cells to malfunction and die.”

  I nod, my right leg bouncing up and down against the lip of the desk. I spread my palms straight across my skinny jeans and press down to stop it, then reach into the pocket of the hoodie. Inside is the smooth, solid rectangle of Leigh’s folded-up note, which I don’t yet have permission to read, but take with me to every appointment. For luck, I guess, or something like it.

  “When we get your test results in the next few weeks,” Dr. Janowitz continues, “we’ll know the number of repeats in your gene. Again, fewer than thirty-five means you’re negative. There should be fewer than twenty-seven to show that your children would be at no risk, but the risk would still be very small. From thirty-six through thirty-nine repeats, we’re in more uncertain territory. This means you’re positive for the disease, but if symptoms do appear, it’ll happen much later in life. Perhaps in your sixties or seventies. More than forty repeats—”

  “I’m totally, completely, absolutely positive, right?”

  “It means symptoms will definitely appear in your lifetime.” Then she folds her hands atop her desk. “You know that you don’t have to get these results, Savannah. We don’t even need to draw blood today, or next week, or next year. And if we do, but in the time before the results are in you decide not to find out, then tell us so.”

  “I want to,” I say. “I know a lot of people don’t need to know, but it’s what I need.”

  “Okay then.” She smiles in her kind, professional, yogurty way.

  When I push through the frosted-glass door to the waiting room, Leigh glances up at me from her corner chair. “Hungry?” she says, without asking how my session went, without even pausing to level the hazel moons of her eyes at me in sympathy, and for this I love her a little bit more.

  “Starving,” I say.

  Leigh and I sit on barstools at the Mine Shaft Tavern, squeezed between big-shouldered bikers in leather and a pack of big-haired, frost-blond fiftysomethings in summer dresses. But just because we can sit at the long pine bar doesn’t mean they’ll serve us booze.

  “Do you really care how old we are?” Leigh hassles the tattooed bartender. “I mean, do you really?” The guy isn’t paying us much attention. He’s new, but he’s not dumb, and Leigh isn’t even trying all that hard. The second he strolls away, she turns cheerily back to me. “Figures we’d get the tough case. But you were right about this place. Check out the ambiance!” She sweeps her arm. A buffalo head hangs above the fireplace, and railroad spikes and pickaxes and coiled lassos decorate the wooden walls. Over the bar, framed paintings show the history of Madrid. Almost all of them are coal-related. In one, fat angels fly a banner over a huddle of tired-looking miners. Leigh, who tells me she’s taking Latin II this year, says the banner sort of translates as “It is better to drink than to work.”

  “Latin?” I screw my face up. “Where will you ever use that?”

  “Meh.” She ruffles one hand backward through her hair—chopped closer than I’ve seen it yet, so the back doesn’t nearly reach the collar of her gray jean jacket—and the strands stick up in little blondish hedgehog spikes. “Italian would’ve worked with my schedule too, but I already took Latin in Boston, and it’s not like I’m going to Italy.”

  “You think you’re more likely to time travel than travel?”

  “Yeah, good point. Maybe I’ll switch next semester.”

  Next semester might be the furthest into the future that we’ve spoken about. I get that, because we’re both still figuring things out, and waiting to hear what the other needs. But Leigh’s told me she’s been working on it, thinking more about pronouns—like how she wants to be called instead of “she,” which doesn’t feel right anymore, if it ever did. In the meantime, Leigh says she’s okay sticking with she/her. I’m definitely not pushing, but I’m ready the second Leigh decides.

  For now, I ask, “You’re sticking around, then, right? For the res
t of the school year?”

  “Yeah. I kind of promised Lucas when we moved him into the dorms.”

  I simply nod, when I want to say: Who cares about figuring our shit out, let’s just go into the bathroom and smoosh our utterly flawed bodies together until we forget all about it. But I don’t, because I can’t hide inside Leigh forever. And I can’t tread water forever while telling myself I’m swimming.

  “You?” she asks.

  “Me what?”

  Leigh leans forward over the bar top, looking intently into a bowl of peanuts. “Will you be around?”

  “Maybe,” I say without thinking.

  “What does ‘maybe’ mean?”

  “Where would I go?”

  “To college, if you wanted to start in the winter. A lot of places have rolling admissions.”

  “I know.”

  “You applied anywhere?”

  “Not yet. It’s not like I don’t want to, but if I got in anywhere, then everyone would expect me to go.”

  “So?”

  “So, I’m scared I’ll back out if I’m positive,” I admit, because even if Leigh’s not my girlfriend or my boyfriend (not anymore, or maybe not quite yet), she’s still my person.

  She shakes her head firmly. “I don’t think you will.”

  “You know for a fact?”

  “I just know you.”

  Then our plates come, and when I take a bite of my Shroom Burger, I’m pleasantly surprised. I haven’t eaten here since I last came with Mom, and I forgot how good the food tastes. Even when we’re done and stuffed, we still order dessert, and then another one, because we want to make the most of Leigh’s day pass. It’s like Mom said—one of the worst things about HD is the time being carved out of Dad’s life, bit by bit at first as his symptoms get worse, and then years from now (but who knows how many) all at once.

  Fuck that. This is today, and this time is ours.

  The same can’t be said of the weeks between the blood test and the results. They slip by slowly, slowly. And let’s just be honest, they suck maximally. It’s not hard to keep busy at the restaurant, at the car wash, at home, with Diana, at Leigh’s. But constantly moving doesn’t distract me like it used to, and I think about the results all the time, and feel every passing minute until my cell phone rings in the last days of October, flashing Dr. Janowitz’s office number.

  Mom and Dad come with me to this last appointment. We sit in the waiting room together—Mom on one side, Dad fidgeting on the other, and Leigh texting me stupid selfies every time she escapes to her locker—until the doctor pokes her head out and calls my name. We move achingly slowly toward the room so Dad can keep pace. I perch on the end of the padded table, and Dr. Janowitz asks me one final time if I’m ready to hear the outcome of the blood test.

  I nod.

  And then, I know.

  After Leigh meets me in her driveway that night, and asks me how I’m doing, and I still don’t quite know.

  After we walk as far as we’re allowed to, down Berry Creek, all the way to the end.

  After I tell her the test results, and she cries and smiles at the same time, so when we kiss once, for the first time in months, her lips taste like salt and cinnamon.

  After we say good-bye, I drive home alone but smelling of Leigh Clemente. The road is without streetlights, and I can’t see very far along it but everything I can see is familiar and new at once, and with the bugs catching my headlights like low little stars, everything seems to be moving, flickering, alive.

  TWENTY-THREE

  My nose stays glued to the cold cube of the window as we rise, the roads below us like gray rivers fringed with trees, then ribbons, then higher still, a delicate web. When we break through the choppy mist of the clouds, rough air lifts us and dips us, leaving my stomach in twists, and I still can’t stop staring. It turns out Mom hates planes, was scared of me tumbling out of the sky, but honestly.

  What’s up here to be afraid of?

  The seat belt sign dings off as we level out, but even as people unclick themselves to meander toward the bathroom or drag their laptop bags out of storage, it’s a good hour before I can tear myself away from the view. When the sun flares over the wing and the suited businessman in 32B cringes dramatically, I lower the shade. It’s cool. Over an hour to go until Denver. Then another hustle through an airport packed with travelers returning home after Christmas and New Year’s, a two-and-a-half-hour connecting flight to L.A., and an hour-plus plane ride to Monterey; the sky will still be there.

  In the meantime I dig for my backpack beneath the seat and haul it into my lap, trying not to elbow the businessman, but not trying that hard. I take out my phone, now in airplane mode, and scrolling for the millionth time through the saved email from Chris, I go over the Plan. When I touch down in the Monterey Regional Airport at 6:43 p.m. this evening, I’m supposed to call Mom and Dad immediately, to prove my continued existence. Chris’s sister, Sophia, and her husband, Mark, will be waiting to pick me up in baggage claim.

  It is ridiculously, unreasonably cool of them; Sophia says she’s happy to help a friend of the family and a fellow La Trampan (meanwhile, I’m super curious to meet the original occupant of the hideous room and find out who she became). I’ll stay with them for the night, and then Sophia will drive me an hour up the coast to help me move into the dorms at Hillview U, home of Division II women’s swim team the Sea Snakes. I certainly haven’t had Sea Snakes posters tacked to my bedroom wall since I was a kid, but Hillview had scholarships for low-income students and a bilingual scholarship. And it’s not so far from the beach, either. Walkable, if you have the time.

  Not like a part of me isn’t hurting. When my parents said good-bye at the airport—Dad folding an arm around me and accidentally shouldering me in the chin, Mom pressing a lipsticked-kiss onto my forehead and whimpering, “Te extrañaré. Estoy orgullosa. Te adoro, mija”—it was everything I could do not to duck out of the security line, sprint to the short-term parking garage and hide in the trunk until we pulled back into La Trampa, where everything and everybody waited.

  There’s so much I haven’t figured out. Most of the time I think I’ve got absolutely nothing figured out. But I’ve figured out how to move forward anyway, and that’s not nothing.

  The suited businessman starts to snore, head tipping forward into his chest. I slide my window shade back up to see, slide it down when he jerks awake and fiddles with the TV on the seat in front of him. The screen plays that sitcom Dad and I sometimes watch; an old episode where the best-looking boy agrees to babysit the third-best-looking-but-still-gorgeous girl’s baby nephew, then accidentally leaves him in a grocery store, having mistaken him for a sizable butternut squash.

  I fish out the sweatshirt folded at the bottom—Leigh’s Bruins sweatshirt, specifically. The thick fabric smells like Leigh, that clean Irish Spring scent that nobody’s going to bottle and sell at Sephora for fifty bucks an ounce, but I don’t think I’ll ever get enough of it. I smash my nose into it, then pull it over my head despite the too-warm, canned air of the cabin. I tried to give it back this morning, when Leigh met me in the driveway to say an unfairly brief good-bye, but she wouldn’t take it.

  Which reminds me . . .

  I stuff my hands into the pockets, and when paper crinkles, I pull out the folded-up notebook page. As she helped shove my suitcase into the trunk of the Malibu, she gave me permission to read it, but only once I was in the sky.

  Flattening it in my lap to see familiar handwriting scratched across it, I feel the ghost of her pen tip against my palm as I read:

  “Little Cosmic Dust Poem” by John Haines

  (I know, I know, but don’t stop reading. I dare you.)

  Out of the debris of dying stars,

  this rain of particles

  that waters the waste with brightness . . .

  The sea-wave of atoms hurrying home,

  collapse of the giant,

  unsta
ble guest who cannot stay . . .

  The sun’s heart reddens and expands,

  his mighty aspiration is lasting,

  as the shell of his substanace

  one day will be white with frost.

  In the radiant field of Orion

  great hordes of stars are forming,

  just as we see every night,

  fiery and faithful to the end.

  Out of the cold and fleeing dust

  that is never and always,

  the silence and waste to come . . .

  This arm, this hand,

  my voice, your face, this love.

  Okay? So now you’ve read, and now we know what the end of the world will be like (it’ll be sappy as a motherfucker). So we don’t have to be scared anymore.

  All my love,

  Leigh

  Part of me wishes I’d cheated and read this when Leigh and I were separated by four miles of dust and three traffic lights . . . but part of me is so glad I waited. Glad that Leigh knew just what I needed. And we’ll see each other soon-ish, when I come home for summer. That’s the next Plan.

  What will it be like when we’re together again? Who will we be by then? Where will we go from there? I have so many questions, and no answers on the near horizon.

  But I can live with that.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to Lana Popovic, my agent and queen, for answering every insecure text and email and for making each book better.

  Thanks to Jordan Brown, my genius editor at Balzer + Bray, for believing in me and in Vanni and in millennial anxiety.

  Thanks to the team at HarperCollins and Balzer + Bray, including Alessandra Balzer and Donna Bray, Kate Jackson, Viana Siniscalchi, Alison Donalty, Stephanie Hoover, Bess Braswell and Tyler Breitfeller, Bethany Reis, Caitlin Garing, and Oriana Siska—you guys make everything possible.

  Thanks to Xaviera López for her gorgeous cover illustration, and to Sarah Kaufman, who designed the cover. You both captured the heart of the book, and every time I look at it I fall in love.