by Anne Leigh
“Dad you have to stop calling John,” I stated, a touch irritated. “I’m not the only athlete he’s taking care of. I’m fine. You want to ask about me? Ask me. Don’t call him.”
He replied, dismissively, “I know you’re not the only athlete under his belt. But you’re my son. And I wanted to catch up with him.”
Mom touched my dad’s shoulder lightly. “Steve, let them do their job.”
Before my dad could answer, I saw my brothers Zach and Matthieu, since I was facing the door of the restaurant, walking towards our table. They didn’t say they were coming. I didn’t know they were even in town. Who told them?
My gaze flitted to my mom’s and she smiled. “They both wanted to see your girl. Jonas wanted to come too, but he’s busy cramming for the bar.” Jonas, the only one who followed our dad’s footsteps, recently graduated from law school and was in New York for the bar exam.
Brynn’s hand reached for mine, which was sitting on top of the table. My mom saw the movement and with her mouth quirked slightly and her gaze knowing, she said, “My sons are nice Brynn. They might not be as well-behaved as I want them to be, but they behave when it counts.”
That must have relieved the added pressure that Brynn felt because she laughed.
As soon as my brothers reached our table, Brynn stood up since she was at the farthest edge, probably wanting to make room so my brothers could join us. Next thing I saw, she was being hugged like a bear by Zach, who let go after a quick squeeze, only to be mauled into another one by Matthieu. She looked like she was suffocating because her face had lost some color.
“Matthieu, let go of her, you moron.” I stood up and shoulder punched my brother, calling him by his full name, which he hated so much. His friends called him Matt, but I preferred Matthieu so he could just deal with it.
Brynn let out a huge exhale of breath and then she started laughing. “Whoa, so that’s how a football player hugs. I could only imagine how they tackle.” She winced slightly.
I pulled her into my arms, pushing my brothers to the side, and asked, “You okay honey?”
She nodded and grinned, her dimple visible. Gorgeous. That’s what she was. I lightly caressed her hair, and for a moment, it felt like it was just the two of us.
Forced, pretend coughs invaded our single moment of privacy, and when Brynn and I sat back, making room for my brothers, my mom and dad’s eyes honed in on us, almost in shock. The first time I brought a girl to meet my parents, now my family, and I was showing how protective I was of her. I didn’t think my parents expected that of me, I was not one to show my emotions or any type of affection well. Sports magazines usually described me as closed off, and they were right. I was closed off to the world but to Brynn, I found myself opening up. I couldn’t help it. Mom was the first one to speak. “Okay, I think we can order now.”
The conversation at our table flowed from sports to trivial stuff. When Zach asked what Brynn’s profession was and she informed him, “I’m an ER nurse,” my mom lifted her glass and gave her a toast.
“ER’s one of the most difficult places to work. It’s fast paced; you never know what kind of patients you’re gonna get, and every person needs to be on top of their game. When I was in med school, I liked the ER, but I was also downright scared of it.” My mom confessed, her eyes gleaming and her voice reminiscent of the medical career that she gave up for us. I’ve asked my mom if she felt that she had sacrificed for us; she always gave me that dismissive answer, “I love being a mother to all of you. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Dad remarked, his eyes flashing in admiration and maybe a bit of reverence, “I’d be scared shitless to be in the ER or just be in the medical field. Just the thought of poking and prodding someone gives me jitters.” We all laughed at that. It was somewhat difficult to imagine my dad being ‘scared shitless’ about something because I have always seen him as the cocky, overbearing, lawyer that he was.
Mom talked about some of her past ER experiences and Brynn shared some of her crazy stories.
My brothers delighted Brynn with embarrassing stories of my childhood. What did you expect? Crazy, annoying, and unrelentingly vulgar; the epitome of who those two are together. My mom gave up trying to clean their mouths up when Zach turned twelve. Before that, she had a swear jar for all of us but my brothers stole the money and ‘returned’ it back there when they swore. One day, she just gave up and handed me all the money in the jar because she said I was the one with the cleanest vocabulary. I was $672 dollars richer that day. Well, only for a few hours because Jonas found my hiding place and decided that he was entitled to half of it.
Zach was now talking about the day I asked mom if it was okay to pee in the pool. Man, he needed to stop or I would stuff his mouth with the bread platter that was in the middle of the table. I reached around Brynn’s shoulders and gave him a forceful shove. Brynn tilted her head towards me and her unique vanilla goodness filled my nostrils.
“Zach you better stop now or I will make you lose your dinner,” I warned. He had been a soccer player in college, and was now a CPA for a highly respected firm in Los Angeles, but judging from his fit form, he maintained regular physical activity that might be unheard of in an accountant who wore suits every day. So, of course he could care less about my threats, and told Brynn the whole story. She ended up laughing so hard that I thought I saw tears forming around the corners of her eyes.
In between fits of laughter, she asked, “So basically Kieran couldn’t hold it, and since he didn’t want to contaminate the pool that he loved so much, he got out of the pool and peed on the concrete?”
Zach nodded, obviously rejoicing at my embarrassment. “Yeah, that about sums it up.”
I was going to send male strippers to his work. That would teach him a lesson.
Laughter and jokes were abound at our table during the whole dinner. Drinks were overflowing, food was great, the ambiance was excellent, and the company was fantastic - minus my brothers, of course. For the most part, I liked my brothers, but sometimes, they were totally clueless about swimming.
When Matthieu asked, “How’s your training going big Bro?”
I shrugged and replied, “Good. We’re at peak now so I’m doing about 50 a week, about five to six hours a day.”
“Fifty laps? Fuck, that’s a lot of swimming.”
I was just about to correct him when Zach tapped Matthieu’s head with a fork. There was an audible clang when it hit his skull. “You’re an idiot, Matt. Kieran’s swimming 50 miles a week now. Not 50 laps. If he was only swimming 50 laps, he’d still be in the junior leagues right now.”
Matthieu scratched the top of his head where Zach’s fork might have caused a brain injury. “Fifty miles? Damn, that’s how many football fields? I can’t think mom … I think Zach damaged my ability to convert miles to yards.”
My mom, probably ruing the day she gave birth to my brothers, wisely quipped, “Matthieu, you don’t even know the difference between a hundred dollars and a thousand dollars on your credit card statements, how can you possibly calculate a complex math equation such as miles to yards?”
Zach and I high-fived while Matthieu just sniggered. “Whatever.”
Everything was going smoothly, Brynn and my family were getting along. My mom seemed to have really have taken a liking to Brynn because she was already asking Brynn to visit her if she was ever in Los Angeles. I told them that I had already brought Brynn to our place, and my brothers were about to make some snide, raunchy comments, but I kicked their legs under the table to shut them up. My kicks were powerful. I performed a lot of vertical and underwater kicks on a regular basis. They were part of my drills.
We were enjoying our food, me having Brynn try out the shrimp primavera that I had ordered and her feeding me a bite of the lobster ravioli, when my dad asked, “Your last name’s Tanner, right? You know there’s a swimmer, Milo? He’s a Tanner. Are you related to him?” My dad was quite perceptive. He must have seen some simil
arity between Milo and Brynn, or it could have been just out of curiosity that he asked.
Brynn turned her head towards me, the light in her blue eyes fading. She explained to my dad, “He’s my brother.”
Matthieu bumped his right fist on the table. “No fucking way! Milo friggin’ Tanner is your brother? I love that dude. He’s the badass of swimming. He cusses at officials and he knows how to throw it down.” He continued while my mom disapprovingly shook her head, “He says all sorts of shit, and man, that dude could be a football player. Remember Kieran when he said he could beat you at the 200 free and he did, by what was it? Ten seconds?”
Matthieu really was a bastard. “Yes, I remember it.” Like it was yesterday. “He beat me by two seconds, not ten.” That was one of my major events. How could I forget? It burned a hole into my gut all the way to my suit, every time I thought of it.
Brynn sensed my discomfort. She squeezed my hand and gave my brother a quick smile.
Holding a hand up in the air, mid-chew, Matthieu voiced his sudden realization. “Hey, if Milo’s your bro and he’s like Kieran’s biggest rival... Oh man, does he know that you guys are dating?”
Everyone knew that Milo and I didn’t sit around sharing sob stories and singing Kumbaya with each other. The media hype about our rivalry leading to the upcoming Worlds was at an all-time high. My brothers knew about my dislike for Milo. They never asked why, but they knew because I made no comments about him, and the one time they asked me, I replied, “He’s an asshole.”
My mom must have realized that Milo was not aware that Brynn and I were dating. It was obvious from Brynn’s avoidance in answering Matthieu’s question, and the unusual silence that came over her when just a few minutes before she had been trading barbs with my brothers. My mom directed the next question at Matthieu. “How’s football going?”
I glanced at my mom, sending her a flicker of gratitude for the reprieve. My dad also encouraged the change in subject. He talked about his current clients and my brothers all but groaned.
At the end of the night, I acknowledged my brothers’ efforts for coming out to meet with Brynn and me by kicking them in their shins. My parents reminded me that they would be attending the World Championships, but they would only be there on the last few days because of my dad’s schedule. My brothers were also coming to Shanghai, but they still had not figured out when exactly they would be arriving. I just told them that it was in a few weeks and they better be prepared to pay through the roof because it was such a short timeframe for buying international plane tickets. They just replied with ‘whatever’ and said that Jonas would pay for their tickets since he probably could not attend. He had to take the bar. They were a bunch of moochers. I kicked both of them in their shins again. Matthieu let out an exaggerated ‘ouch’ hoping to garner attention from Mom, which she thankfully didn’t give him. We were brothers. We didn’t hug. We inflicted uncalled for and small amounts of pain onto each other. That was how we showed affection. We all stood in front of the restaurant as the valet fetched our cars. While waiting, Matthieu was eager to give Brynn another hug, which I intercepted with my arm and shooed him. Brynn laughed at that. As my mom hugged me, she whispered, “She’s a good one son.” I hugged her back and replied, “I know.”
Brynn was a good girl and an even better person. She kept me on my toes, feet, gills, or however you wanted to term it. I didn’t have any dull moments with her. Whether we were just hanging out having coffee, window-shopping at the mall, eating dinner, or playing in bed, she made me feel relaxed. I found myself always looking forward to spending more time with her. With her, I was myself. Not Kieran, the athlete. Not Kieran, the swimmer. Not even, Kieran the son of so-and-so. I was just Kieran. A guy, who for once in his life was taking a chance with a girl, who was taking all of her chances with me.
“I want to learn Italian.”
~X.P., age 14, von Hippel-Lindau syndrome
“Brynn, you know what your name means in Welsh?” He asked, eyes probing mine, and his fingers threaded lightly in my hair as we laid on his king-sized bed. Kieran liked to touch my hair all the time. Sometimes when I woke up, I would find him tracing my face and holding strands of my hair in his fingers.
“How would you know how to speak Welsh?”
His twin dimples appeared, his eyes not quite meeting mine. “I, ah, was with a girl once who spoke Welsh.”
“Uh-huh, I bet you didn’t do any talking with her,” I teased. Kieran was honest about the girls he slept with before me. He didn’t give me a number but he said that he had it regularly, to which my eyebrows lifted, wondering what his definition of ‘regularly’ was.
He was a guy so it really didn’t bother me. He did say that he’s never had a girlfriend. I asked him why not, and he answered, “I don’t know. I guess I was just focused on swimming and school, and I just didn’t feel like having a girlfriend.” I could totally see that type of reasoning go through Kieran’s head. He was pretty laidback and straightforward, which was why it made it harder every single time he has asked me to tell Milo, or for us talk to Milo about ‘us’.
“So you want to know what your name means in Welsh?” he prodded again.
I smiled offering a light smirk. “Tell me what your ‘bed buddy’ told you about my name.”
His chest vibrated with laughter. “One time bed buddy.”
“Uh-huh.” I didn’t get jealous of his past sexual exploits. He was a healthy guy who had a healthy sexual appetite, and he had practiced safe sex. They were in the past. Why waste time thinking about the women before me? He was here, with me, now. Kieran started referring to me as his girlfriend when he was on the phone with his friends. He didn’t ask me to be his girlfriend, though; it just seemed like the natural evolution of our relationship.
“No, seriously honey. She just got me curious about the Celtic language so I looked up some names. I happened to look up Brynn, and I didn’t even know a Brynn at that time. An example is Aderyn—it means ‘bird’.”
Wow. He was serious about this. He really knew the meaning of my name, in Welsh? I doubt my mom had even thought of that when she picked out my name. A sense of longing filled my heart at the thought of her picking out my name. My dad bowed to my mom’s wishes, so I was pretty sure she had picked mine, and Milo’s name.
My throat tightened. “Okay what does my name mean?”
His face softened, “It means ‘a hill’.”
“Oh cool. I’m a hill.” I laughed. “I thought it was something extraordinary like a rainbow, or something mythical like a fairy.”
He began quietly, his gaze searing:
“In Italy, where this sort of thing can occur,
I had a vision once—though you understand
It was nothing at all like Dante’s, or the visions of saints,
And perhaps not a vision at all. I was with some friends,
Picking my way through a warm sunlit piazza
In the early morning. A clear fretwork of shadows
From huge umbrellas littered the pavement and made
A sort of lucent shallows in which was moored
A small navy of carts. Books, coins, old maps,
Cheap landscapes and ugly religious prints
Were all on sale. The colors and noise
Like the flying hands were gestures of exultation,
So that even the bargaining
Rose to the ear like a voluble godliness.
And then, where it happened, the noises suddenly stopped,
And it got darker; pushcarts and people dissolved
And even the great Farnese Palace itself
Was gone, for all its marble; in its place
Was a hill, mole-colored and bare. It was very cold,
Close to freezing, with a promise of snow.”
He paused his recitation of words that I had never heard of before. Words that flowed from his mouth as if they were as normal as breathing. I knew he read classic literature. I have seen him with a big b
ook or two when we were just lounging around, me baking, him reading.
He continued again, his voice deeper, steady. The warmth of his eyes directed at me the whole time. I focused on his eyes, the litany of words merging in my head with the emotions he was trying to convey. This was important to him.
“The trees were like old ironwork gathered for scrap
Outside a factory wall. There was no wind,
And the only sound for a while was the little click
Of ice as it broke in the mud under my feet.
I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,
But no other sign of life. And then I heard
What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed;
At least I was not alone. But just after that
Came the soft and papery crash
Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.
And that was all, except for the cold and silence
That promised to last forever, like the hill.
Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored
To the sunlight and my friends. But for more than a week
I was scared by the plain bitterness of what I had seen.
All this happened about ten years ago,
And it hasn’t troubled me since, but at last, today,
I remembered that hill; it lies just to the left
Of the road north of Poughkeepsie; and as a boy
I stood before it for hours in wintertime.
His last words came out subtler, a touch softer than when he began, and his face held an inscrutable expression. “One of my favorite poems by the late Anthony Evan Hecht. In the midst of all the sadness and war around him, there was one thing constant—the hill. Your name, honey … it’s not just a hill. You’ve been through so much in your life, yet you remain constant, like the hill. Optimistic. Happy. Some would have broken apart a long time ago, but you … you’re still you. The clouds? They come and go. Sometimes they’re bright and airy. Sometimes they’re dark and heavy with rain. But the hill stands. Rooted to the ground.” His hand lifted my chin, now streaked with fat, wet tears, and he whispered, “With all the challenges you’ve faced, you’re still you, Brynn. I think your name is beautiful. As beautiful as you.”