laughing over his shoulder as he glided through the deepest end of the pool then hoisted himself out of the water and scurried across the pool deck and out of sight, daring her to follow.
“I’ll get you later, Billy,” she yelled then muttered under her breath “Boys” as she turned to Leah.
Except Leah wasn’t there. The raft was there, with Momma’s straw hat floating in the water alongside. But Leah was gone.
Brooke would have many shocks in the years to follow. Sometimes she thought her life a lightning rod to the world’s surprises (generally choosing to ignore her role in inviting such lightning bolts, always reaching to the sky). But no subsequent shock would rival that instant and the paralytic fear it produced. For some length of time, everything froze—her usually limber body first and foremost.
Then it unfroze. She dove beneath the water. Most times she kept her eyes closed in the pool because the chlorine irritated them. But now her eyes were not only open but wide with fear and desperation. She spotted a dark shape at the bottom, where she’d been just seconds before (had that been what she’d felt?). She swam to the shape with a speed she didn’t know she possessed. And suddenly Leah’s face was inches away through the pale blue medium. Her sister’s eyes were also open, and not frightened at all, just staring to Brooke, to where she knew her help would descend. Leah’s blond hair billowed out behind, framing that trusting gaze.
But when Leah saw Brooke’s terrified expression that calm faltered. Leah’s eyes closed and her mouth released a huge bubble of air, her cheeks that had been puffed out suddenly deflating. Brooke pulled her sister tight against her body with both arms and braced her feet against the pool bottom. But before pushing off, she instinctively put her mouth over Leah’s, to keep it sealed or give her sister air, whichever was needed. Then she pushed off.
They surfaced directly under the raft which bobbed off to one side. Brooke unsealed her lips from Leah’s, which had never parted, and leaned her head back a few inches. Leah’s eyes opened and showed the briefest moment of surprise before settling again into the trust that seemed their natural state when pointed toward her sister. Leah drew a long draft of air. She hooked her legs around Brooke’s waist, her arms over her shoulders.
Brooke laughed. “What you do with Momma’s hat?”
Leah looked around and pointed to where the hat was floating beside the raft toward the deep end.
Brooke turned and saw the soaked hat. Beyond that, she saw the lifeguard, a hunky senior, making moon eyes at Jackie Stevens, a svelte cheerleader in a very skimpy bikini, from his seat in the lifeguard’s chair. Then she took in the whole pool perimeter, looking over Leah’s shoulder as they made a slow twirl. Children were playing, in the water and out, parents were reading newspapers or dozing or chatting away. No one was looking at them. No one had seen what had just occurred.
Brooke again looked at Leah, whose eyes had never left her face. “I broke my promise,” Brooke said.
Leah tilted her head in question.
“You got wet!” Brooke shrieked.
They both laughed. Leah hadn’t even noticed. Then Brooke used one arm to stroke their way toward the shallow end of the pool, holding Leah, who was still wrapped tight around her, with her other arm, nudging the raft and the hat ahead of them with their conjoined bodies.
That night Momma gave them permission to lie out on the deck for a few minutes before bed. In their pajamas and bare feet they spread the beach towels from this morning and lay on their backs looking up at the sky. The sun’s heat still clung to the moist air that draped itself over them like the world’s biggest and best blanket. But the sky was clear, and the stars sparkled above in their infinite multitude. They stared off into that infinity, each lost in her own thoughts.
Brooke was already hatching a plan to get even with Billy Alexander. It had to be good and it had to be secret. He couldn’t know who’d done it, just as he didn’t know how nearly his show-off stunt had come to tragedy. She considered lots of options before settling on biting red ants. Matt, in a rare confidence, had shown her the hill of a large colony of such ants on the vacant lot next door, warning her to steer clear or suffer the penalty of many painful bites. She could lure some ants into a jar with a cloth soaked in sugar syrup, then drop that cloth into Billy’s gym bag tucked under the seat while they rode on the bus. That plan would have to wait till September and the resumption of school, but no matter—it would work and it would be good.
Leah thought of the silence inside the silence of the blue world she’d descended through this morning. Until that moment she’d always perceived the world as a hum of motion—inside her eyes, her bones, her head, even in the quiet moments before sleep, even in her sleep: always that hum, that sense of motion all about her, whether seen or not, touched or not. But in falling through the water, everything else had stopped. It was only her moving then, nothing else—a new stillness, inside the silence. Then suddenly Brooke had joined her in that new place, that total silence, mashed her body, her lips against hers, made them a single entity in this just discovered realm where nothing else moved, nothing else existed. From that point forward Leah never wondered what it was like to be someone else, like the others. It was enough just to be herself, be that person inside that stillness within the silence, and Brooke there too. That would be a place she could always go.
Above them a meteor flashed its brief trail across the sky. They both saw it. To Brooke it was a prod toward the future and the life that future held, no place else to go. To Leah it was the heavens’ seal on her silence, a flash without sound or hum but bearing promise. That these different perceptions found their way to a common sharing and purpose seems in retrospect incredible, but to those two sisters lying on that deck it was already taken for granted in that part of themselves beyond reason and sensing.
Smoking
Brooke slammed the phone down and glared at Leah. “Why are you always listening in?” she screamed. She jumped off the bed and pushed Leah toward the door. “Get out of my room.”
Leah didn’t fight but didn’t run either. She’d stumble sideways a couple steps at each push then catch her balance and wait till Brooke pushed again. In this stumble and stop sequence the two made their way across the room toward the door.
“Get out!” Brooke shouted as she pushed Leah into the hall. “Leave me alone!” She slammed her door.
Leah stood outside the door. She hadn’t been listening in. She’d been doing her homework in Brooke’s chair while her sister was lying on the bed talking on the phone. She wasn’t even looking at Brooke, so how could she be listening in? But sometime in the midst of her multiplication tables she felt a tension enter the room. As with most of these instinctive perceptions, she could not have described the feeling or how she’d become aware of it; but something made her look up. Roscoe felt it too, as the Boston terrier quietly rose from his pillow at the foot of Brooke’s bed and made a discreet exit out the door. Maybe that’s what she’d felt—Roscoe’s unease.
She looked to her sister. Brooke was lying on her stomach on the bed, her feet in sneakers nearest Leah and her head and face not visible from where she sat. But even with this limited view, Leah could tell Brooke was upset. Her legs were extended out straight, her feet pointed like arrow tips wanting to stab something, anything. And Brooke’s shoulders were square and tight, not their normal relaxed swagger. Leah knew from the start of the phone call, when she’d entered Brooke’s room with her math book and her sister had smiled and nodded toward the chair as she dialed the phone, that the call was to Billy—yes, the same Billy that had nearly drowned her at the pool five years ago—because Brooke’s face exhibited that recent giddiness that maybe charmed Billy and other boys but seemed fake and forced to Leah. But then Brooke didn’t ask her permission or her opinion.
Nor did she ask her advice once whatever was said on the other end of the line had sent her into this fit of emotion. She’d just slammed the door. Leah stood outside the door for a few more seconds, wait
ing for it to open, willing it to open. But it didn’t open. So she walked the few steps down the hall and into her room.
Her math book was still in Brooke’s room—she’d left it on the chair. But she didn’t feel much like multiplication tables right now anyway. They made her head hurt even under the best of conditions and usually required Brooke’s help on the most difficult parts. She had her well-thumbed Laura Wilder Little House books and a copy of The Secret Garden Momma had given her for Christmas, along with some Welty stories and a Cather novel that Brooke had checked out from the junior high library (at Leah’s specific request—Brooke wouldn’t read a book for pleasure if her life depended on it). But those options of escape into imagined worlds, soothing and captivating in almost all circumstances, offered little consolation at the moment. She flopped down on her bed and stared at the ceiling. Roscoe, who’d been hiding under the bed, suddenly appeared and jumped up beside her. He gave her face a quick lick with his dry and raspy tongue, then settled into the notch along her side. She let her arm gently wrap itself around his chubby body, making an impromptu cradle for the dog—security for him, comfort for her.
Leah couldn’t
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