Swimming for Sunlight

by Allie Larkin

  “Sam had anxiety?”

  “When Sam was just out of the academy, new on the job, he and his partner were breaking up a fight and a stray bullet hit him in the leg.”

  I thought about standing on Sam’s shoes, dancing around Nan’s living room to Astrud Gilberto. He felt so safe and calm. His smile made me feel better. “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, it wasn’t something he talked about. There’s this idea that if you picked the job, you’re supposed to be able to handle that stress, but no one is prepared to get shot. And working on the force can leave a person with a whole chain of things they can’t shake. Sometimes that stuff would flash back on him. He said it was like a lens he had to look through to see everything else. It was so much work to pretend to be normal. And when he couldn’t actually get to normal, he felt like he was letting us all down. That’s how you feel, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Sam got a lot better. He went to therapy, we started yoga, he got really good at paying attention to himself. It can be better than it is now, Kay. I promise. It’s not your spine. It’s not all of you.”

  * * *

  After Althea left, I checked the guest room, my room, the living room, hoping Luca had left something behind. A note. A t-shirt. A sign of some sort. There was nothing.

  Everywhere I checked, Bark followed, bright-eyed and interested. When we were done with our search, I filled his Kong with treats to keep him busy. I found Nan’s eyeglass screwdriver from the junk drawer and sat at the kitchen table to take my father’s watch apart.

  I’d managed to get the back panel off, and was using a cotton swab to soak up moisture on the gears, when Mo came in without knocking, carrying an armload of Chinese food.

  “Peace offering.” She lined up the paper containers on the counter. “I can fix that watch,” she said with absolute certainty, like sheer will would make the difference.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t actually know what I’m doing.”

  “Do you hate me?” There was a bend in her voice I’d never heard before. She was actually afraid I did.

  Bark pushed his head under her hand. She scratched his ears absentmindedly.

  “No,” I said. “I know you didn’t mean to—It’s not your job to hold my fear at the front of your mind.”

  “But I want to,” Mo said. “I don’t want to hurt you.” She opened the containers and put the one with dumplings on the kitchen table next to me. “You’re my favorite person.”

  My eyes stung.

  “Aw! Don’t cry on me!” she said, hugging me to her chest way too hard. “I swear to god, Kay. The only thing in the world I’m not tear-proof against is you crying.”

  “I’m not crying,” I said, trying hard to stop the flow. “You have onions in your armpits.”

  “Weirdo.”

  I pulled away and wiped my cheeks. “Someday, I’m not going to cry eight times a day.”

  “Maybe four?” Mo said, grinning.

  “Shut up.”

  She put me in a headlock and rubbed her fist into my skull. I fake-elbowed her in the gut. She pretended to go in for a body slam, lowering me gently to the floor. Bark jumped in, yelping, stepping on my leg.

  “We’re just playing!” I shouted.

  Bark knocked Mo over and licked her face.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Two weeks later, when I finally replaced my phone, I had three voicemail messages from Luca.

  The first one was right after I left the mermaid show: “Are you alright?” he said. “Come back, okay?”

  The second: “Hey, Katie. You didn’t come home and I—I want to make sure you’re okay. I’m here for you.”

  The third was only hours old: “Hey, Katie. Thinking about you.” And that was it.

  I sat in my car in the parking lot of the phone store and tried to think of what I would say if I called back. I didn’t know how to trust myself. I wondered if there’d ever be a point where I knew for sure I could be someone who would make Luca happy. If I could be someone who was happy.

  I remembered when Eric slunk into the basement after our first miscarriage, saying the furnace smelled funny and he had to change the filter. I heard his sobs through the floorboards. I wished he would come up and comfort me, but I should have tried to be his comfort too. He was a man who’d lost his child, crying in the cold, damp basement alone. Somehow I expected him to be my hero when I couldn’t be his. We didn’t show up for each other. We’d thrown too much blame when I couldn’t get pregnant, and we never took the time to fix it. By our second miscarriage, we were barely speaking. Not angry, but quiet. He’d come home late. I’d go to bed early. Or I’d offer to do all the costume repairs after a performance, to have an excuse to stay at work. When I found him asleep on the couch, I convinced myself that pulling a blanket over him counted as care. I didn’t want to wake him up. I didn’t want to see his sadness when I was still stuck in mine. I left our marriage before he did, or at least at the same time. He wasn’t the only one who failed us.

  When I got home, I went to Nikki’s Facebook page. I stared at the picture of Eric holding the ultrasound photo, feeling joy for him and sadness for me, and realized those things could exist in the same place. I didn’t want him to be unhappy. I didn’t want Nan and Bitsie to cut his balls off. I wanted to move on and heal, and it was okay for him to do that too. I took one last look at his red-rimmed eyes and the way his smile stretched across his whole face. I saw the wrinkles and the touches of gray in his two-day beard. We’d come a long way together. Or at least we’d tried. I touched the screen, tapping his chin with my thumb, right on his dimple, the way I used to back when we were crazy college kids who thought we knew what we were doing. Then I blocked Nikki, and went to Eric’s profile and blocked him too. Not out of anger, but so I couldn’t see their lives anymore. So I could move on.

  Bark followed me to the kitchen. I gave him a dental bone and made myself a cup of tea. He followed me into the living room, bone gripped in his teeth. I took one of Nan’s blank note cards from her desk, sat on the floor in front of the coffee table, and wrote. Bark leaned against me as he chewed.

  Dear Eric,

  I heard the news, and while I hold my own sadness, I am also grateful for your joy. I’m sorry about the way we ended. I’m sorry for how things fell apart. I wish you happiness. Thank you for the time we spent growing up together.

  With love,

  Katie

  I addressed it and stamped it, and stuck it in the mailbox. And then I took Bark for a walk, clearing other thoughts from my head like wind pushing clouds away until all that was left was this: I don’t know what will happen in the future, but right now, we get to walk together. And we did it well, keeping time with each other. I breathed in the scent of gardenias and fresh-cut grass as we walked up one street and down the next, trying to make the good moment last.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  I rented Althea’s friend’s house for the summer. Cheap, because Althea’s friend wanted a caretaker more than she needed the money. I had to tend the yard and three tanks of tropical fish, but it allowed me to live well beyond my means. It was a cute cottage with exposed beams in the living room, ceiling fans with paddles shaped like palm fronds, a white picket fence, and a kidney-shaped pool.

  I suspected Nan and Isaac’s future included marriage, or at least cohabitation, and I wanted to give them space to decide without feeling like I needed to be figured into the arrangement. Plus, I wanted my own space. I hadn’t lived alone as an adult. It was time to try.

  Nan swiped boxes from the liquor store so I could pack. I didn’t have much more than I’d brought home, but I’d made enough clothes for myself that I felt okay getting rid of all the theatre t-shirts. I dumped them in the rag bin in the laundry room.

  Elvis was playing on the stereo. Nan was in the living room shaking her hips to “Hound Dog” as Bark pranced around her. I joined them, jumping in the air.

  We switched albums every few songs. Bark eve
ntually gave up and crashed on the couch with Murray. Our dancing got slower and lazy, until we were sitting on the floor looking at records. I loved the sharp scent of the stained pine record cabinet, the snap of the magnet on the door, the rustle of cellophane still covering some of the cardboard sleeves.

  Nan started making a pile of records. “Do you have an extra box?” she asked. “You should take these with you.”

  They were the albums Nan bought for me at rummage sales. Outdated for my timeline, the way yard sale records would be, but they were strange choices for Nan too: Kate Bush, Cyndi Lauper, Pat Benatar, Blondie, Joan Jett, Patti Smith, Heart.

  “Why did you buy me these?” I asked, flipping to my favorite Blondie album.

  “They were so different from the music I grew up hearing, like ‘Chantilly Lace,’ and all those songs about being someone’s girl or wanting to be someone’s girl. These ladies were changing what being a woman meant.” She reached over to touch Cyndi Lauper’s face on the cover of She’s So Unusual. “I remember the first time I saw her on television, with that crazy hair, singing about upsetting her parents. I wish it was the version of girlhood I’d heard. I wanted you to have that.”

  My eyes teared. “Thank you.”

  “It’s just a silly little thing,” Nan said, messing up my hair.

  “It’s so kind,” I said. “How much you thought about me.”

  “Well, of course I was going to think about you! You’re my granddaughter!”

  “You had to take on a lot more than a normal grandmother,” I said, flipping back through the pile of records so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact with Nan. “I know I cramped your style.”

  “You weren’t dumped on my doorstep. It was my choice to spend my life with you,” Nan said, tears in her eyes. “I lost my husband. I lost my son. But I got you. We kept waking up every morning. And look at all we have now.”

  She wasn’t offering a platitude. She meant it. She’d said similar things a million times before, but finally I had room in my brain to believe her.

  Nan reached up to grab a photo album from the shelf next to the record player, opening it on the floor in front of her. “Look at these nice times we’ve had!” she said, flipping the page.

  I scooted closer. She’d already printed out the picture of me and Mo posing like the Hulk and Wonder Woman before we went out prowling. It was toward the back of the album, but we had many pages left to fill.

  Nan flipped to the front and pointed to a picture of me and Mo playing Wiffle ball in the yard, my eyes closed, swinging the bat. The ball was already well past me.

  I laughed. “It drove Mo nuts that I was so bad!”

  We spent the next hour thumbing through all the old photos. Cocktail parties and canasta games, twenty-pound turkeys at Thanksgiving. Nan and Bitsie blowing paper horns on New Year’s Eve. Nan holding my newborn father in her arms outside the hospital, ready to take him home. In another picture my father is asleep on Bitsie’s shoulder, her ponytail draped across his bald baby head like hair. Nan and Bitsie were younger than me when my father was born, and it was strange to know that I had two years on the women in those photographs.

  There were pictures of my father in a cowboy hat and diaper, playing on the front lawn. In another, he’s grinning to show the camera his first missing tooth.

  A few pages later, there was a picture of Bitsie with short hair like Twiggy, wearing a National Organization for Women t-shirt, painting a placard on someone’s kitchen floor.

  “It made me so nervous when Bitsie went off marching,” Nan said. “I brought her casseroles so her husband wouldn’t go without dinner and get angry. As if chicken surprise could save a marriage.” She turned the page and pointed to a picture of Bitsie holding the sign. It read: I AM A HUMAN BEING. ERA NOW! “I think I was most worried because my life felt set in stone after I had your father, and if Bitsie’s changed too much, maybe she’d outgrow me.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “No,” Nan said. “She didn’t. We had times when we felt a little further apart. She had school and then work and I had your dad and Gramps, but eventually . . . Oh, when she and Bunny bought their house here, I was so happy.” She grinned. “I may have pushed them into it a little.”

  “You,” I said in fake disbelief. “No!”

  Nan laughed.

  On the next page there was a picture of my dad, at about seven or eight, pushing an old canister vacuum cleaner.

  “I got in so much trouble for that!” Nan said, flipping the page. “And this.” She pointed to a picture of my dad standing on a step stool washing dishes at the sink.

  “For what?” I asked, sure I was missing something.

  “For making him clean the house,” Nan said. “Ruth told me I would turn him into a sissy. Her boys”—she mimicked Ruth’s accent—“didn’t lift a fing-ah in her house.” Nan’s face flushed, she clenched her hand into a fist. “Oh, I got so mad! I remember I yelled, ‘Better a sissy than a jerk!’ We didn’t talk for months.”

  I’d never heard about more than light bickering between Nan and her friends. We’d never had discussions like this. It felt like our world was starting to tip a bit sideways, but I was happy for it. Nan had been a young woman once, and it wasn’t a storybook tale. Her young womanhood had all the complexity mine did.

  “It seems so insignificant now,” Nan said, “but at the time, sneaking Bitsie casseroles and making your father dust the bookshelves felt like my own little revolution. I was proud of Bits for marching, for naming the wrongs we faced, and I was determined to make your father an equal partner when he got older. I already had to defend it to your grandfather. Like hell I was going to hear it from Ruth too!”

  “My dad always did the dishes,” I said, remembering him scraping our plates into the compost bin after dinner. He always said that the cook shouldn’t have to clean.

  “I wish it had mattered more.” Nan flipped pages without looking at them. “What does it even matter in a world that didn’t value your mother’s work enough?” She pressed her hand to her cheek. “He would have loved being home with you instead. And I know it broke your mother’s heart to give up on her career.”

  “It did?”

  Nan never talked about my mother. As a rule. So I’d always felt like I shouldn’t ask questions. I knew my mother had been “in school” when I was a toddler, but I didn’t know any of the details.

  “She was All But Dissertation on her PhD, you know. She put her work aside to support your father while he finished his PhD. Someone had to.” Nan shook her head. “He couldn’t do it alone. They had you, and quite frankly, he was going to make more as a professor than she would.”

  “And then he died and she didn’t have a PhD or a husband,” I said, understanding something I hadn’t before.

  Nan nodded.

  “I don’t even know what she studied.”

  “Art history, like your dad. Do you remember that book he wrote on Kandinsky?”

  I nodded.

  “That was going to be your mother’s dissertation.”

  “He plagiarized her work?”

  “She’s the one who gave him the idea,” Nan said. “It’s not like he stole it from her. She felt like she’d never get taken seriously without the PhD, so the research she’d done would better serve your family if she gave it to him.”

  My version of my mother had been someone who bitched about things. She never had fun with us. She kept order. She had a hard line where her smile could have been. And then, when she left me, she was all light and wide grins, perfume that made my throat itch, gauzy white cotton shirts. She talked about auras and the universe’s path for her. It made more sense now. She’d given up everything for the betterment of a family that no longer existed. Maybe she needed to believe it had all been for a reason. It would have hurt too much otherwise.

  “I wish your mother could have handled her pain in a way that didn’t hurt you,” Nan said, hugging me with her strong arms, “but I’m h
appy we got to have all this time together. Don’t you ever think for a second that you cramped my style, okay?” She pointed to her purple hair. I’d helped her re-dye it the day before. “We’ve got style for miles, kiddo.”

  * * *

  Of course, the whole neighborhood came to help me move. And, of course, there was a party.

  “It’s not really my house,” I said when Nan wheeled her drink cart three blocks over. “And it’s only temporary.”

  “Oh, like we need a bigger excuse for a party,” she said, kissing my cheek. She also brought grilled vegetable canapés topped with herbed cashew cream, and carob macadamia nut cookies.

  Isaac brought me a bottle of good scotch.

  Ruth brought me a huge bouquet of roses from her garden. Marta gave me a stack of homemade dinners. “Who wants to cook, right?” she said, sticking them in the freezer.

  Bitsie gave me Bunny’s sewing machine.

  “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t—”

  “You are always welcome at my house,” Bitsie said. “But someone with talent like yours should be able to sew whenever she wants. Just . . . bring it back to visit, okay? I like it when you’re in Bunny’s room.”

  “That I can do,” I said, hugging her. Isaac set the sewing machine up on a desk in the guest room for me.

  Althea brought Bark a calming pheromone collar in case he got new home jitters. She gave me a smooth gray stone with the word Breathe carved in the surface. She’d helped me find a therapist who was teaching me to use deep breathing to calm my frantic thoughts. “Sometimes, it helps to have a touchstone,” she said. “Literally.”

  I slipped the stone in my pocket and rubbed my fingers over the letters. “I have something for you.” I ran to my bedroom to get the tail I’d made for Althea, wrapped in kraft paper. “Open it,” I said, handing it to her.

  Althea ripped the paper open. “Oh, Kay,” she said, holding it up to show everyone. I’d covered the tail in a rainbow of sequins that flowed from bright to pastel in an ombré pattern. “It’s beautiful!”