Breath Like Water

by Anna Jarzab

  Her voice breaks, and my heart goes out to her. It can’t be easy to protect your kid at the same time you’re trying to let them grow up.

  Paula warns me that Harry’s mixed state is over, the euphoric high of hypomania gone. He’s suffering from a depression that will not abate.

  “His doctors are still adjusting his medication, trying to find something that works the way the old combination did,” she says. “He’s starting to feel better, but he’s still low energy, exhausted and deeply sad. I’m telling you all of this so you aren’t surprised when you see him. More than anything, the best thing we can do as the people who love him is show him support and understanding.”

  Regency has rules about who can visit someone who’s going through adolescent inpatient treatment—family only. But Harry’s been asking for me, and Paula requested that an exception be made given how well he’s progressing. She thinks it will be good for him to see me, and his doctor and social worker both agreed. I want to see him, but I’m worried that it will trigger upsetting memories of our fight. More than anything, I don’t want to cause him any more pain.

  “You won’t be left alone with him,” Paula assures me. “The hospital requires visitors under eighteen to be accompanied by a parent or guardian. They’ll be in the room with you the whole time, and the door will be propped. The meeting room is close to the nurses’ station and they’ll be keeping a close watch. If he’s not feeling up to it the day you visit, or his caretakers believe it would harm him to see you, they won’t let you in. But every time we see him, he asks about you, more than anyone else.”

  “Will you tell him I’m excited to see him?” I ask. Paula promises she will.

  * * *

  My visit is scheduled for Friday after practice, which I spend in a fog so dense I don’t even notice that Dave and Beth aren’t speaking until Jessa points it out.

  “They’re either secretly dating, or plotting each other’s murders,” she says under her breath during a break between sets.

  “Pretty sure it’s not the first one,” I mutter.

  Their dislike of each other has only escalated since the Battle of the Sexes meet. It’s putting us all on edge. I hope like hell they can keep it together until Trials.

  At least I have swimming to pour all my frustration and worry into. In the water there’s only one way forward. The simplicity of swimming has always been one of my favorite things about it.

  Mom agreed to come with me to Regency. As we drive to the hospital, I think about something Paula said to me last night on the phone.

  “Several factors contributed to this,” she told me in a calm, steady voice that must serve her well as a nurse. “Harry’s meds were off. He was upset. He started drinking. Depression tells you that you’re worthless, that people hate you, that you can’t do anything right. It convinces you that you deserve the pain you’re experiencing. Harry knows that you care for him, in spite of the argument you had, but his depression did everything it could to make him believe otherwise. I know you feel guilty—we all do. You did not do this to him, but it’s important to treat people with compassion, whether they have a mental illness or not. We can never truly know what someone else is going through.”

  I hate thinking about that night at the meet, the horrible words I flung at Harry—blaming him for things that weren’t his fault, lashing out at him because I was angry and afraid. I know better than to act that way toward someone I love, but I did it anyway, because I was overwhelmed by my own suffering.

  It wasn’t him I was mad at—it was me. When I decided to be with Harry, I thought I knew what it meant to let a new person in my life, someone with their own needs and wants and struggles. I believed I could handle it, because I believed I could handle anything life threw my way. Hadn’t the last few years been proof of that?

  The truth is, I was still the center of my own universe, locked in a prison of my own making. I couldn’t find a way to break free of it. Throwing myself against the bars of my cage won’t accomplish anything, and neither will pushing away everyone I love. There has to be a better path. I hope that I can find it, and that—if I do—I’ll have the courage to take it.

  But blaming myself won’t help Harry, or change what happened. I need to listen to him, and let him tell me what he needs. Maybe, through focusing on someone else for a change, I’ll figure out what I need, too.

  * * *

  I bring Red Vines to Regency. Food is allowed, but only if Harry consumes it during our visit. He’s not allowed to take it back to his room. I wish I could think of something to give him that he can keep, to remind him that I’m thinking about him, but between the regulations and the limits of my own imagination, I’m drawing a blank. If I could fill his entire hospital room with rubber ducks, I would.

  Once we’re checked in, Mom and I take a seat in the waiting area. There are signs posted that list the objects visitors cannot bring in to see a patient: weapons or sharp objects, drugs, alcohol, cigarettes or anything with strings. I’m wearing gym shoes, so I remove the laces and hand them to the nurse, who locks them away in a drawer.

  Harry is already with a visitor, so I have to wait for that person to leave before I can see him. Paula and Bruce were here earlier today, so it must be Tucker. He must’ve found out from Harry, or maybe Jessa, what happened at the Battle of the Sexes meet, and the few times I’ve seen him in the halls since then he’s pointedly ignored my attempts to talk to him. I’m nervous about running into him here.

  Mom goes to the bathroom. I try to read a book for school, but my mind keeps wandering. I stare at the pages until the words blur together in a series of gray lines.

  A tall white man enters the waiting area and speaks briefly with the nurse. He’s wearing black pants and a black long-sleeved button-down shirt, and he has a light jacket draped over his arm. His back is to me, but when he turns I notice he’s wearing a Roman collar. He thanks the nurse and starts toward the door, but stops when she calls my name and tells me Harry can see me now.

  “Susannah?” he says, like he knows me. It takes me by surprise. My parents were raised Catholic but they’re not much for church. We don’t even belong to a parish. I don’t know any priests personally.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re here to see Harry Matthews.”

  I nod. Harry mentioned a priest to me once, his sobriety coach. This must be him.

  “Hi,” he says, extending a hand for me to shake. In the other hand, he’s holding a book, but I can’t see the cover. “I’m Bob.”

  “Father Bob?”

  He tilts his head and smiles warmly. “Sure. Or just Bob. Whichever you prefer.”

  “I don’t think I have a preference,” I tell him. His smile widens.

  “Let’s stick with Bob,” he says. “Unless you have something you’d like to confess.”

  I feel all the blood drain from my face. Does he know what happened with me and Harry?

  “I was only kidding,” he says. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “You didn’t,” I lie. “How is Harry?”

  “He’s been through a lot, so if you take that into consideration, he seems well,” Bob says. “They’re helping him here. He’s determined to recover, and I have no doubt he will in time.”

  There’s something about the way Bob says it that makes me believe it. Maybe it’s the confidence that comes with being a man of God, though I’m not sure I believe in God, or the wisdom of priests for that matter. The closest I’ve ever come to a religious experience is a really great race.

  Maybe that’s where my god lives: in the water, watching over me from inside the grates and gutters of an Olympic-size pool.

  I nod at the book in his hand. “Were you reading to him from the Bible?” I’ve never known Harry to be religious. I doubt he would enjoy being preached to, even by someone he likes.

  “Oh, no, th
is isn’t the Bible,” he says, turning the book so I can read the title. Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan. It’s got a big picture of the planet Jupiter on the cover.

  “This book made a big impression on me as a young man,” he explains. “I thought Harry might get something out of it.”

  “Did he read it?” It doesn’t look like the sort of thing Harry would pick up. He’s more of an airport-thriller sort of guy.

  Bob laughs. “No. Brilliant book, but dense. It’s not for everyone, I guess. We talked about it for a while today instead.”

  He turns to a page in the book and hands it to me. It’s a photograph taken—the caption tells me—by the Voyager 1 space probe from almost four billion miles away from Earth. The blackness of space is striped by streaks of colored light. In the middle of a brown band to the far right of the picture, there’s a tiny mark that looks white, not blue, to me. Apparently, that mark is Earth. Looking at it makes me feel incredibly small.

  “‘A point of pale light,’ that’s how Sagan described the way Earth looks in this picture,” Bob says. “I was trying to explain to Harry about perspective, but I don’t think he grasped my meaning.”

  I close the book and hand it back to him. “Perspective?”

  “There are two ways to look at that picture,” Bob says. “I think Harry chooses...not the wrong way, necessarily, but not the way I meant when I showed it to him.”

  “How so?”

  “He thought I was saying our lives are insignificant because they’re small and short. I confess that seeing a vast and varied world like Earth as a tiny speck of dust in the midst of such great darkness might lead you to that conclusion. But what I was trying to tell him is that the speck is important, precisely because it is there. That was what Sagan was saying, too.”

  “I’m not sure I understand,” I admit. These aren’t the sort of things I spend much time thinking about. To an athlete, the arena is the universe. Everything else often feels like a movie set.

  “Humans are alone in the universe, or if we’re not, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know otherwise. The pale blue dot is the only one of its kind, the only home we’ll ever have. Harry is the only one of his kind there has ever been, and that there will ever be. So are you. So am I.

  “No matter how deeply he might sometimes loathe or fear or doubt himself, I was trying to make him understand that he must love himself, too, be kind to himself and do right by himself as much as he possibly can. We’re all points of pale light swimming in our own seas of darkness, so it’s our responsibility to take care of ourselves, and each other. That’s what I wanted him to see, and I think someday he will.”

  I consider what he said, then tell him, “I like that.”

  “I’m glad you find it comforting.”

  “I don’t know if comforting is the right word.”

  Bob laughs. “You reminded me of someone just then. I met her when she was around your age.” He tucks the book under his arm. “What don’t you find comforting about the profound and heartfelt speech I just gave?”

  “It doesn’t change anything. People still get hurt. They lose things—and people—that mean everything to them. We don’t always take care of each other the way that we should.” I fight back against the tears that spring to my eyes. “So how is being a point of pale light floating in a sea of infinite blackness supposed to give us comfort?”

  “It’s not.”

  “Then why—”

  “If it did, I would of course be pleased—as a priest I’m nothing if not a peddler of hope, and like all good peddlers I feel proud when somebody buys what I’m selling. But, Susannah, it’s terrible, the things that people suffer. It takes more than cosmological philosophy to change that reality.”

  “What about God’s plan? Don’t you believe in that?”

  “The world isn’t governed by God’s plan,” Bob says. “That’s precisely what’s wrong with it. The downside to free human will is that people can and do make choices that hurt themselves and others.”

  It’s hard not to think of the hurtful choices I’ve made. He’s right about that part at least. But: “Harry’s illness isn’t a choice.”

  “No,” Bob agrees. “And it isn’t his fault. I can’t tell you why he has it. I can’t even say if there is a reason. But I do know that Harry fights against the pain and hardship it causes him, that he’s determined to live with it and makes choices that increase his happiness even as sorrow tugs at him. In the process, he makes others happy, too. If that’s not an act of being light, I don’t know what is.”

  “What’s a priest doing reading cosmology for fun?” I ask.

  “I used to be a physicist,” Bob tells me. “You’re aware of how Harry and I know each other?”

  I nod.

  “Scientific study is competitive,” Bob explains. “The pressure to produce brilliant, groundbreaking work is overwhelming. I wanted to be the best, and when I started to suspect I couldn’t be, I tried to drown those feelings, to blunt them with whatever I could find. But they never went away.

  “When I got sober, my sponsor told me something that changed my life. She said that failure is an intersection. You have the option to move forward, to try again, but you can also turn and follow a new path. Religion gave me solace during that hard time, so I became a priest. At least then, I figured, my life wouldn’t be—couldn’t be—all about me. What I could achieve became directly related to how many people I could help, not what I could do for myself. Maybe it was another way of distracting myself from failure. But it’s a lot better than what I was doing.”

  I feel light-headed all of a sudden, and like the ground has disappeared from under my feet.

  “Failure is an intersection,” I repeat softly. I’ve never thought of it like that. To me, failure has always been a wall I slam myself against over and over again, desperate to force myself through it. Changing course never felt like a real option. But if my single-minded focus has made me selfish, and turned me into a person I don’t want to be, what value will success even have?

  “Susannah?”

  Mom is back from the bathroom. She gives Father Bob a questioning look. I wonder how much she overheard. I realize that I’ve said more to Father Bob about what I’m feeling than I’ve shared with my own parents.

  “I’m going to see Harry now,” I tell Father Bob.

  He smiles at me and departs through the main doors without introducing himself to my mom or saying goodbye. It’s surprising how quickly he disappears, one minute there, the next gone. I wonder if, later, I’ll entertain the possibility I might’ve imagined him.

  * * *

  A nurse escorts us to the meeting room where Harry is waiting. It’s small, but there’s no one else in here right now, so we have some semblance of privacy, even with my mom hovering and the door open all the way. The room is mostly empty, just a table and a few chairs in one corner and two brown leather sofas in the other.

  Harry’s sitting at the table. He looks tired and pale, and his hair has grown out enough that a lock of it falls across his forehead.

  I can feel my heartbeat in my throat, and my hands are shaking so badly that the Red Vines package crinkles, but my stomach wheels like a flock of birds in the sky. It’s so good to see him.

  “Hi,” Harry says. I give him my warmest smile.

  “You can sit,” he says, nodding at the chair across the table. I take it, feeling shaky. When I get anxious before races, I bounce on my toes, swing my arms, adjust my cap and goggles a few times to release my nervous energy. I have no rituals to fall back on here.

  Mom settles at the far end of one of the couches. “Pretend I’m not here,” she says. “It’s wonderful to see you, Harry.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Ramos,” he says, ducking his head nervously.

  We sit for a few seconds in silence. Harry avoids my eyes as I continue to smile at him. I breathe slo
wly, carefully, desperate to calm the frantic pounding of blood through my veins. Now is not the time to give in to awkwardness or uncertainty or—worse—panic at feeling so helpless in the face of Harry’s pain. I have a plan. Focus on Harry. Let him tell me, with his body language and his words, what he needs. Do whatever I can to help.

  I always do better with a plan.

  “Tell me something, Susie,” he says.

  “What do you want to know?” I ask gently.

  “Anything. What’s going on out there?” he asks, glancing at the window that looks out over the park. “In the world.”

  A stream of bad news about wildfires in California and hurricanes in Florida and corrupt politicians getting away with their crimes shoves its way into my brain, but I stop it before it reaches my mouth. I don’t think that’s what he’s asking. He doesn’t want to know about the world. He wants to know about our world.

  “Amber quit swimming,” I tell him. He nods solemnly, but he doesn’t seem surprised. I wonder if I was the only one who couldn’t tell how miserable it made her. “She doesn’t seem to regret it at all.”

  Harry picks at a scratch on the surface of the table with his fingernails. “You must miss her.”

  Not as much as I miss you, I think. But I can’t dwell on that, not here. I’m with him now, and I have to focus on being in the moment. It’s never been an easy thing for me to do, but I’m trying.

  “Oh, and Amber was secretly dating my sister for, like, five months,” I tell him. “They’re public now, though. It’s excruciatingly sweet.”

  As she promised, Nina came out to my parents as pansexual, and told them about Amber. They’re open at school, too, holding hands as they walk down the hallways and kissing between classes. Amber and I haven’t been hanging out as much, not with Trials a month away, but every time I see her it’s like someone turned on a light bulb inside of her—she radiates joy.

  I’m glad for her, and for Nina, but seeing how content Amber is now that she’s done with the sport has been bringing up some complicated feelings. Sometimes I wonder whether, if I’d done the same thing, I’d be happier, too.