Swimming for Sunlight

by Allie Larkin

  “I’m not upset!” The agitated whine in my voice reminded me of the sound Bark made when I closed a door between us.

  We were mostly quiet while we worked. I held strands of metal in place while Mo heated and bent them over and over, wrapping Morty’s skeleton. The immediacy of Mo’s torch flame and the work of my muscles slowed the frantic thoughts in my brain until I could poke at them one at a time, fighting to think the sensible truth instead. Althea wasn’t mad. Bark was home safe. Mo was just trying to help. No one was hurt.

  “I like you no matter what you do,” Mo said when we were almost done with the layer, her words muffled by her mask.

  “I like you sometimes,” I said, cracking a smile she couldn’t see under my mask.

  She laughed.

  “Morty looks good,” I told her.

  “Yeah,” Mo said. “He’s getting there.”

  My phone rang. I pulled a glove off with my armpit, flipped up my mask, and answered one-handed without looking at the screen. Nan was the only person who ever called me.

  I didn’t want to talk to Nan, but I didn’t want to make her worry about me either. “Hey, I’m still at Mo’s. We’re disgusting.”

  “Thanks for sharing,” a male voice said, amused.

  “I’m sorry. I thought you were my grandmother.”

  “No one’s ever said that to me before.”

  I recognized the gentle rhythm of his speech. “Oh my god! Luca?”

  Mo lifted her mask and made a kissy face. I stuck my tongue out at her.

  “Yeah,” Luca said. I could hear the smile in his voice. “I got your note. What are you photographing underwater? Wait. How are you? That’s the first question, right? How many years? Five?”

  “Almost six.” I tried balancing the phone with my shoulder so I could hold the next bit of metal in place, but the mask was not cooperating. Mo waved me away. “Hey, I loved your movie. I saw it in the theatre,” I said to Luca, eager to keep the conversation off of me.

  “Thank you! My mom, uh, Carla,” he said, like maybe I’d forgotten the difference between his mom and his mother, “called yesterday to tell me Marco got into Cornell’s agricultural engineering program!”

  “That’s amazing!” I said, taking my mask off all the way. I walked down the driveway, my feet slipping around in Pop’s boots as they clomped against the cement.

  In Luca’s film, Carla helps Marco plant a container garden. He measures the plants each morning. “They’re growing! They’re growing!” His eyes are full of wonder as he runs into the kitchen to tell Carla: “Four millimeters since yesterday.” The too-short hem of Marco’s pants shows how he’s also growing. Luca was subtle with it, but seeing Marco changing and thriving while his mother sits in a holding facility in Texas tugged heartstrings.

  “So, you’re with Mo?” Luca asked as I clomped back up the driveway.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m helping her weld stuff.”

  “Hi, Luca!” Mo yelled.

  “Mo says hi.”

  Luca laughed. “I heard! Visiting Nan?”

  “Um, kind of.”

  “It must be nice to get out of winter sometimes.”

  “Yeah.” And then, instead of letting the conversation drag out to the eventual result, I just said it: “Eric and I got divorced, so I’m staying with Nan until I figure things out.”

  “Oh, wow. I’m sorry, Kay. That’s got to be hard.” Luca’s voice was kind, sincere. I couldn’t read anything beyond that.

  “It was for the best.” I watched Mo inspect the work we’d done so far. “It’s good to be home.”

  “Well, I mean, who could resist Nan’s cookies?”

  “Oh, no, Luca,” I said, relieved for the shift in subject. “Things have changed.”

  Mo opened two beers and handed one over, giving me the thumbs-up to keep talking. She was a Luca fan. He always came home with me for spring break. The three of us spent late nights playing poker and getting into Nan’s schnapps. Mo took him to the beach when I would beg off with a made-up headache.

  I told Luca about Mo’s manatee, Nan’s health kick, the mermaids, and the calendar.

  “It’s probably crazy,” I said.

  “Crazy in the best way. Better than a bake sale, right?” The familiar music in his voice made my heart swell in a way that felt like relief.

  “Right,” I said. “It will keep us busy at least.”

  “So you’re going to shoot underwater?”

  “Nan and Bitsie want to.” I picked at a rough spot at the edge of my thumbnail with the nail of my index finger. “But I’m starting to rethink. I mean, shooting on dry land would be easier, right?”

  I’d promised Nan I could handle it, but I was still hoping for a Hail Mary; for someone to say it was impossible, or champion a vision for mermaids on deck chairs that the ladies wouldn’t be able to resist. Even if I got someone else to take the pictures, I’d need to be there to style the mermaids, and the idea of watching them in the water made my stomach twist.

  “Oh, no,” Luca said. “It’s totally doable.” He rattled off the kind of camera he would use, lenses, and lighting options. I tried to scribble it all down on a scrap of cardboard with one of Mo’s grease pencils.

  “Is this stuff I can rent?” I asked, wondering how much it would cost. Maybe that would be the obstacle I needed.

  “I have a friend in Orlando who would probably loan you that stuff if I ask nicely.”

  “Really?” I paced, swinging one foot in front of the other. Heel hitting toe, other heel to toe, repeat.

  “It’s for a good cause,” Luca said.

  We chatted a little longer and then, with every ounce of restraint I had, I said, “Hey, I think Mo’s ready for next steps on this project, so I should go.” I could have stayed on the phone listening to him breathe. I was usually bad at being the person to hang up. I’d let conversations grow strange and laborious when maybe the other person was trying to say goodbye. I wanted to do everything right with Luca. Every little thing.

  “I’ll talk to my friend,” Luca said. “Call you tomorrow?”

  “Good,” I said, trying to push down the welling excitement. “Thank you.” We would talk again tomorrow. We were back in touch, and it didn’t carry the awkwardness I’d feared.

  “Good,” he said. “I missed you.”

  “Me too.” I could almost feel his arms around me, his breath warm on my ear. I wondered if he was thinking of that perfect little world we used to exist in together.

  “Alright,” he said. “Bye for now.”

  “Bye.”

  “I ordered Da Vinci’s,” Mo said when I walked back into the garage.

  “Mushroom and anchovy?” I asked, amused to be eating pizza two nights in a row. Nan would be horrified.

  “What’s the point of anything else?”

  * * *

  We were on our third beers, but because we’d been working and busy and eating pizza, I didn’t feel totaled.

  “He’s the one I wanted,” I said, as if we were already in the middle of a conversation about Luca.

  “Did you two ever?” Mo made a circle with her thumb and index finger, pointing at it with her other index finger.

  I laughed, spitting beer. “Once.”

  “That’s it? Was it bad?”

  “I liked him too much,” I said, finally admitting something to myself I’d never quite let through. “The stakes were too high. I made a mess of it.” I peeled the label off my beer bottle and stuck it to Mo’s arm. “I’m pretty fucked up.”

  “Oh, come on,” Mo said. “We didn’t drink that much!”

  “No, I mean, in general. He’s a good guy and I’m not—I don’t think I’m the best person.”

  Mo put her arm around me. Her armpits were ripe. “Don’t put yourself down. And don’t put everyone else on such a high pedestal.”

  “You don’t know him like I do,” I said. “He’s incredible. And then, deep down . . . he’s even more incredible.”

&n
bsp; She pulled the damp beer label off her arm and stuck it to my cheek. “I think you make the world out to be extra scary in the name of keeping yourself safe.” Mo took a swig of her beer and burped loud.

  “You get annoyingly philosophical when you’re drunk now,” I said, wiping the label from my face. “You used to tell fart jokes.”

  “I’m coming to terms with my brilliance.” She gulped air. “A-B-C-D-E-F-G,” she burped, making it all the way through to Z in two gulps’ worth of belches.

  “No burp talking!” I yelled, calling out the old rules of our friendship. I was not allowed to sing show tunes in her presence and she wasn’t allowed to burp talk in mine.

  “Come on! Try it. Try. It.” Mo tipped my beer bottle toward my mouth and spilled it down my shirt.

  “Jerk,” I said, like it even mattered. I was covered in rust and black oily gunk and metal shavings.

  “Thanks for the help tonight,” she said, clinking her bottle to mine.

  “It’s really good,” I said, surveying what we’d done. Morty had a full layer of metal rope wrapped like skin over his skeleton. “And thanks for coming to get me.”

  “Anytime,” she said.

  I started singing the “Thank You Very Much” song from Scrooge: The Musical in my worst cockney accent.

  “That doesn’t even sound like a real song,” Mo said. “You made that up.”

  I shook my head, and sang louder, hitting the trite rhymes with extra enthusiasm.

  Mo shoved my shoulder, hard enough to knock me off balance.

  * * *

  “I talked to Althea,” Nan said as soon as I walked in the door like she’d been waiting to pounce.

  Bark rushed over too. I bent down to kiss his head. He licked my face.

  “You could have told me,” I said, hauling myself up on my sore knees.

  “Well, I never know what you’re going to be alright with,” Nan said, a snip in her voice.

  “You can ask me.”

  “Althea is happy to walk Bark!” Nan said. “It’s good for him.”

  “I’m not even objecting to that. I’m objecting to—It scared the shit out of me, Nan!”

  Nan clucked. “So tightly wound,” she said. “Maybe you should come to my meditation class at the senior—”

  “You know what? Do what you want.” My voice was too sharp, but I was tired of being told what would fix me. “You’re going to anyway, right? Do whatever you want. Just—If Althea takes him, leave a note or something, okay?” I went to my room to avoid saying anything worse.

  * * *

  Before bed, I checked Luca’s Facebook page. He’d posted a picture of himself with his arm around Marco, captioned: This guy got into Cornell! I hit like, and put my phone down before I could get stuck in a web of Nikki photos again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  I knew Luca for months before he ever mentioned his foster mom.

  Over dinner once, telling a story about carving pumpkins for Halloween, he said, “My mom—foster mom—one year she got a pumpkin so big she couldn’t lift it herself, so we were trying to carry it together, but she tripped and we dropped it off the back porch. Splat!” He laughed hard, not self-conscious of the fact that it wasn’t as funny to someone who hadn’t been there.

  I liked seeing him lost in a good memory. I was curious, but he didn’t explain further and I wasn’t sure if it was more polite to ask or take it in stride. I’d never met someone in foster care before. At least not that I knew of.

  Months later, in bed—we’d had beers—he snuggled into me and shared the story of how his mother came across the border to give birth so he could be American. He didn’t call her his birth mother. She was still his mother. His foster mom was mom. “My mother, my mother, she came here to have me. Left her whole family for me, and she worked so hard. She scrubbed floors in office buildings at night while all the workers were home, and cleaned houses during the day while all the people were at work. She slept twice a day. Two short naps, and she made sure we always ate dinner together.” I could hear his heartbeat. Too loud. Too fast.

  “When my mother worked,” he said, “I stayed with a lady in our building who took care of a couple of kids like me. We called her Titi, but she wasn’t really my aunt. She was okay. She wasn’t nice. She wasn’t mean. And then my mother would rush in with a flood of kisses and all her perfume and I’d feel so much better, you know? So much better.” He threaded his fingers between mine and pulled my arm across his body. “My mother had a broken taillight. She got stopped by a cop on her way home from cleaning offices.”

  He told me like he was repeating a well-worn story, the same way I could calmly report the details of my father’s death if I had to. I squeezed his hand, desperately hoping something had saved her, even though I knew if it had, Luca wouldn’t have a foster mom.

  “Her license was Mexican,” Luca said. “Expired. She was too scared to cross the border to renew it, worried she wouldn’t get us back here.” He took a deep breath, ragged. “She spent a month in a detention center. Titi said she couldn’t keep me, so a social worker picked me up at school and took me to my foster mom’s house. Carla had other kids like me. American kids who didn’t have American parents. She spent days on the phone trying to find my mother. They don’t tell you things. You have to fight for answers. I was eleven. I didn’t know how to fight.” His tears soaked through my sweater, pooling at my collarbone.

  “Have you—Is your mother okay?” I asked, wrapping my arm around him tighter.

  “They sent her to Mexico eventually. But we didn’t know if she was okay for months. I was so scared. At least when she got to Mexico, we could talk again. She sent phone cards in the mail. She’d sing me songs and tell stories and make me promise that I wouldn’t forget how to speak Spanish so I would always be able to call her on Sundays. I still call. Every week. But she can’t visit me. And she won’t let me go to Durango. She says if it was safe, we would have stayed there.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”

  “I’m not like the other kids here,” he said. “It’s all so heavy in my heart.”

  I hugged him hard. I felt like we belonged together.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The next day when I got home from work, Bark wasn’t there. Nan left a sticky note on the table by the front door where his leash had been: He’s with me.

  I knew she was at Althea’s for Taco Night, and I knew I was invited, but I couldn’t make myself go. I needed to apologize to Althea, and I didn’t want to do it with everyone there. I made myself a bowl of oatmeal and went to my room to eat it. It was too quiet without Bark. The air felt too still. I turned on the TV and flipped channels until I saw black and white. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. I’d seen it so many times that it felt like an old friend chatting in the background.

  I dug a tape measure from my desk drawer and took measurements of myself. I was bigger than Nan and Bitsie, but I only needed rough numbers to order supplies for a prototype tail. I sketched and calculated.

  I wanted to go for time-period authentic, but Bitsie told me the stiff lamé of their original tails left welts on their legs at the flex points. She said it like a point of pride—how tough they were—but I wanted them to have full range of motion. Spandex would look flimsy, but other fabrics wouldn’t flex, or they’d hold water and sag. Latex was too expensive, silicone too. Even though neoprene has been around since the thirties, it didn’t scream sixties to me, but performance-wise it made the most sense. I was only planning to order enough to make one tail as a sample, but I found a closeout deal on thirty yards of mustard yellow neoprene that was cheaper than buying four yards of a normal color. It was hideous, but a decent base to paint over.

  Bitsie told me the mermaids in the show used two fins bound by the tail, but the way they had to position their feet made her hips ache as a twenty-year-old. I ordered a monofin from a scuba shop. It had a funny rounded edge. I’d have to make an extra inser
t to shape it correctly, but it was a good place to start.

  I started a Pinterest board of kitschy inspiration: mermaid wall hangings, matchbooks, ashtrays, soap dishes, Valentine cards. I used the pictures for inspiration and sketched for hours, fine-tuning my ideas. I didn’t even notice that The Ghost and Mrs. Muir turned into Key Largo, until I looked up and saw Humphrey Bogart where I’d been expecting Rex Harrison.

  I fell asleep, pencil in hand, and woke to Bark pouncing on me. I knew it was Bark almost instantly, but there was a time delay between instinct and reason. I screamed.

  Bark jumped off the bed, howling. Eyes narrowed, ego wounded.

  “It’s us, Katie,” Nan said, running down the hall to my room.

  “I know,” I said.

  Nan sighed. I used to scream the same way when she woke me up for school in the morning. Bark wasn’t used to it because we always fell asleep together. If he woke me, it was small movements, a gentle easing from sleep to wake as I left my nightmares behind.

  “I’m sorry, Bark,” I said, reaching my hand out to scratch his ear. He grumbled and kept his distance. I didn’t even ask how he did at Althea’s house. I wanted him to be okay, but the fact that he seemed better without me hurt.

  “Wow,” Nan said, pulling a Bark-crumpled sketch from the bed. “You’ve been busy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Here.” I rifled through the sketches, trying to move my hands quickly enough so she wouldn’t notice they were still shaking. “This is what I’m thinking for you.”

  “Kay,” Nan said, and her face softened to joy. “It’s perfect!”

  “I’m sorry. About last night.”

  I thought maybe she’d apologize for sending Bark with Althea without telling me, but she said, “I know, dear,” and kissed me on the forehead.

  After I took Bark to pee and fed him dinner, he forgave me for screaming. We cuddled up to watch TV, but the movie was over, replaced by an infomercial for a contraption that made perfect eggs in the microwave. I hadn’t realized it was so late. Taco Night was usually over by nine.