Geese Are Never Swans

by Kobe Bryant

  When I’m done, the silence overwhelms me. There’s only one answer, really, and its call grows greater the longer I stand in that kitchen. Or my resistance grows weaker. Either way, I end up outside, in the yard, by that sparkling pool, wearing nothing but my boxers. My feet sting, raw from the previous night’s punishment of diving off the blocks. Standing in the damp grass is salt-in-the-wound agony, but sacrifice is all I know.

  My intent is not training. I just want to wake up. I just want to find my way back to the life I knew.

  Unlike last night, I don’t dive. Instead I bend my aching muscles and bruised flesh to sit my ass on the pool deck. Then I dunk my sore feet below the surface and stare down my options. This body of water is neither deep nor wide.

  But it’s here. And it’ll do.

  I slip in.

  I slide under.

  88.

  Lainey wasn’t the breaking point between Danny and me. I can’t pretend this was the case any more than I can pretend Lainey wasn’t aware of the raging crush I had on her. But by that point I already loathed Danny, and I loathed myself more for not seeing through his dumb act earlier than I did. But it broke my heart when he broke hers, in part because she wouldn’t be coming around our house any longer. But hurting someone as kind and giving as Lainey was a dick move. So rather than sulk alone the way I always did, I went to Danny and told him what I thought of him. Right to his face.

  I’d never seen my brother so mad. His face clouded with fury. He leapt to his feet. Advanced toward me until I felt his breath on my cheek.

  “What did you say?” he snapped.

  I burned with fury. “I said you’re an asshole. You don’t deserve a girl like Lainey. You don’t deserve anything.”

  He shoved me and he kept shoving, driving me into the wall of his bedroom and using his arm to pin me back with such force I could scarcely breathe. “I don’t want to hear her goddamn name come of out of your fucking mouth ever again.”

  “Lainey,” I shot back. “And you’re the one who fucked her. Not me.”

  Danny laughed, releasing his hold. “So that’s what this is about? You’re jealous of me and you want to fuck my girl? Is that the reason you’re always sniffing after her when she’s over here? You just want to take everything I have, don’t you? Just like everybody else. You can’t do anything for yourself and now you want to rip me open and scavenge me for parts.”

  I snorted. “You wish.”

  “Shut up.”

  “You’re crazy,” I told him. “You’re fucking paranoid if you think I want to be anything like you.”

  Danny shoved me again. Harder this time, so that my head slammed the wall with a bang. I saw stars but shoved him back with a snarl. Then I did it. I put my shoulder down and charged, knocking Danny off-balance before I reared back and took a swing. My fist to his jaw.

  It landed.

  Danny fell back with a yelp, his fingers grasping for the spot on his chin where I’d struck him. I stood, tensed, ready for more, but he just stared at me with his mouth wide open, seemingly realizing for the first time how much I had grown. At fourteen, I wasn’t a child anymore. In fact, I was only a few inches shorter than Danny, and I’d be stronger than him someday. I was sure of it.

  “Stay the fuck away from me,” he growled.

  “Or what?”

  “You don’t want to find out.”

  Now it was my turn to laugh. His words were an empty threat and for once, we both knew it. I turned and walked from his room feeling better about myself than I had in years. This lasted roughly a week, when I found out he was back with Lainey again. But at least he made an effort to stay out of my way. That is, until one night, six months later, when I woke to find him in my room, hovering over my bed like a ghost.

  “What do you want?” I tried rolling away from him. The air in my room was hot and miserable.

  “I need to talk to you.” Danny shook my leg. “Wake the fuck up.”

  “Go away.”

  He shook harder. “Did you hear what I said?”

  “Fine.” I rolled over to look at him. The hall light backlit Danny’s shape and distorted his features so that he resembled an alien trying to make contact. I sat up and switched on my desk lamp, squinting to get a better look. My brother was seventeen, still two years away from death, but the expression on his face was an eerie omen of what was to come. Danny didn’t look like Danny. His eyes were bloodshot, puffy, his skin oily and pale.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Can you keep a secret?” He pushed his hair back, sat on the chair next to me, and swung his legs around. My nose wrinkled. Something about him reeked. Usually meticulous about his grooming and his looks, Danny smelled like he hadn’t showered in days.

  “Why me?” I squeaked.

  “Because I need your help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “I want you to keep these for me.” Danny shoved something into my hand. A plastic Ziploc bag filled with pill bottles. “Put them somewhere where I can’t find them.”

  “What’re they?” Thoughts of Darien flitted through my mind. I held the bottles under the incandescent bulb and strained to read the prescription labels. Relief rushed through me. They were Klonopin, Ambien, and Prozac, all pills he’d been prescribed for his anxiety and insomnia. The labels on the bottles had dire warnings about not mixing the medication with alcohol or anything else sedating.

  “Don’t they work?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Sure, they work, I guess.”

  “Does that mean you’re sleeping better?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Then why do you want me to have them?”

  “I don’t want them near me. They make me feel . . .” Danny twitched, shuddered. Clawed at his own throat.

  “They make you feel what?”

  “Scared,” he whispered.

  I said nothing. I didn’t understand what Danny had to be scared of. He had everything—the girl, the coach, the future of unlimited potential. He had everything I wanted, but in a sick way I admired his refusal to take pills for something that to me seemed like a matter of mental toughness. That meant he was strong and capable, not weak like Darien, who took any shortcut to numb her pain. Danny might be an asshole, but at least he had conviction.

  So I accepted the pills, waved him off, and kept them buried somewhere in my room. Danny never mentioned that night again, and I didn’t either because with whatever crisis he was facing averted, he went right back to swimming. Right back to winning. Right back to treating me like the whipping boy he saw me as. In fact, he grew more insufferable than he’d been before the fight we’d had over Lainey. I didn’t understand it. I’d done him a favor and now it was like he was going out of his way to make me miserable. No, I couldn’t practice driving in his car. No, I couldn’t get a ride to my meet. Yes, I could sit and talk with his girlfriend while he made her wait downstairs, but later he’d tell her about the time I shit my pants after getting food poisoning from a breakfast burrito at Jack in the Box.

  But now, as I glide through the water of his coach’s pool, I can’t help but wonder why he gave those pills to me and what he thought I might do with them. In hindsight, it’s not hard to imagine what his fears were. It’s not hard to understand who he was afraid of and why he felt so unsafe. But maybe he thought I’d tell someone about the pills. Or that he could provoke me into telling. Maybe he trusted that I would do something and I didn’t, and that’s why he did what he did in the way that he did it.

  Or maybe . . . he didn’t think about me at all.

  89.

  I leave a note before I go.

  It’s not one I’ve personally written; no, it’s Danny’s envelope for Coach Marks that I should have given up long ago and that I find crumpled in my jacket pocket from last night. Keeping it all this time was a shitty thing t
o do. I know that now and I know I’ve never been the one that matters. All this chasing after my brother’s legacy has only proved what my mother was trying to tell me in the first place: I don’t know how to create one of my own.

  Who in their right mind envies the dead?

  90.

  My hair wet, my body shivering from the cold, I walk away from Coach M’s house. It takes a lot to push aside my guilt for abandoning Winter, but she’ll be loved here. Cared for. Far better than what I could give her, so I hit the road—on foot; I don’t have a car out here—in the grainy haze of predawn darkness and make my way toward the highway that will lead me to my mother, which is where I need to go. I failed Danny, and my father, and I failed her, too. The least I can do is apologize.

  The least I can do is be better than who I am.

  The walk’s endless. A winding maze of empty streets, expensive cars, sleeping strip malls lined with day spas and restaurants adorned with uninspired names like Gentle Greens or Vitality Bowls, which make it sound like the most important thing about their food is that it’ll pass successfully through your digestive tract.

  I reach the highway, at last. Five lanes of tractor exhaust and roadkill turn my stomach, but I take the shoulder heading north. I stick my thumb out a couple times but it’s wasted effort. There’s not enough daylight and not enough traffic. Black Friday’s sleeping late or moved online or who the fuck knows. What I do know is that my mom’s at John Muir Hospital, which is up in Walnut Creek, a good eight miles away. It’s also where I was born and where my mom was when she got the news my father had died. Right on this very road. I don’t know the exact spot where he lost his life, but it can’t be far.

  My clothes are dark; I hang close to the guardrail, my shoes stumbling over gravel and broken glass. Trucks and cars blow past me, their wheels throwing up chunks of dust, dirt, and fumes. I cough, choke. My eyes sting. A couple of the trucks honk and shout, but no one stops. My head hurts, my feet ache. I keep going.

  I pass housing developments, fast-food restaurants, then a long stretch of ranch land. Horses linger in dewy grass, heads lowered, tails flicking flies, and the sun is beginning to peek over the mountain—bright bursts of golden rays like the hand of God itself is reaching down to touch the animals. I stop to watch. To breathe in the scent of wet grass and truck exhaust. It’s strange, the way nature’s cordoned off by man-made choices. But boundaries exist for a reason, and this is when I see it. On the hillside, maybe a hundred yards away, beneath the widespread branches of a giant oak tree, a mare and her foal struggle desperately, trapped by something that’s hidden in shadows.

  Clambering up the roadway, I find the fence lined with razor wire but climb it anyway. My arms are scratched, bleeding, my clothes torn, but I make it to the other side. I slip running up the hill, sliding on dew and long grass, but I get up, over and over, until I reach the oak tree where I can see that the foal’s hindquarters are pinned beneath a fallen branch. The injuries are bad from what I can tell, and the mare is frantic. I tug at the branch but can’t lift it on my own, so I turn and run farther up the hill toward the darkened ranch house. A yellow dog barks as I draw closer but I spot people in the barn, four men in jeans, flannel, throwing flakes of hay onto the bed of a truck and I shout to them and wave my arms, calling out that there’s an animal hurt, a baby that needs help.

  The men stop to look at me but don’t make a move to follow me at all, to go where I’m pointing.

  “I need your help!” I cry.

  They still don’t move.

  “An animal’s hurt! One of the babies.”

  “No baby,” one of the men says.

  “What?”

  “I said there are no babies in the field.”

  “But I saw it!”

  He shakes his head and I reach for his arm, to bring him with me, but he steps back, holds me off. I lunge again and he shoves me. Furious, I swing back. The other guys are on me in an instant, shouting at me to calm down, pulling me back. I’m thrown to the ground. My head hits dirt, ringing my ears and blurring my vision.

  Fuck this. Fuck everyone. I stagger to my feet and flip them off before turning to head back toward the horses. I’ll figure something out if they won’t, although my head is in agony and even though the sun’s starting to rise, it’s growing harder for me to see. I stumble through the grass, following my footsteps, but I can’t find the oak tree and the stuck foal. I keep looking but my legs burn from the running and the falling and the torment I put them through the previous night. A thundering of hooves and a fresh swell of dust freeze me in place as the horses stampede up the hill, heading for the silhouetted flatbed truck rumbling along the ridgeline while the men throw hay into the grass.

  I’m better off leaving. The pinned foal must be fine and if it’s not, it’ll suffer and die because everything suffers and dies, and I can’t remember why I cared about the animal to start with. I crawl back over razor wire to the highway shoulder and my stomach’s bleeding, which means I’ll probably need a tetanus shot to avoid lockjaw, but I’m on my original path again. I’m walking toward where my father was killed and where my own life ended in any practical sense of the word, since I was the one who sent my mother to the hospital in the first place and this is why she’ll never love me.

  My ankle buckles. A bright shot of pain. I limp forward as the sun grows brighter, but it’s hard to know if I’m here or if I’m there, on that shining spring day when my brother died and left me alone to find him on my own. I came home from school that afternoon and pounded up the stairs. I didn’t know he was coming home, but Danny had put music on and he knew my schedule and that I’d be the one to get there first.

  He knew what I would see.

  Finding my brother felt like Danny’s punishment for me. I was alone, all alone, and I had to cut him down and call for help and try to breathe life back into his cold, vomit-specked lips. He’d made pasta in the kitchen before hanging himself and I could taste the sauce with each desperate rescue breath the 911 operator told me to force into his lungs. My nostrils were filled with the stench of tomatoes and bile and worse. And all of it, everything about that day, felt like vengeance. Or retribution. That even in death Danny would ensure my misery.

  It made sense. I’d taken his father and so Danny took everything he could from me. I guess I hate him for that—I hate him for a lot of things—but the truth is that I’ll always hate myself more. If our father meant that much to Danny and my mother, he must’ve been someone special. He must’ve been worth grieving—he must have been a better person than I am.

  Unloosed, unmoored, the rest of my memories of the day Danny died fly free, buzzing from my head in a vicious swarm. Like raptors after prey, they claw at my consciousness and threaten to swallow me whole. I’m consumed by an assault on my senses—a wicked cacophony of flashing lights and blaring sirens. Penance, I think. This is penance for my sins. I killed my father, which killed Danny, and I almost killed my mother, too. Even Winter hasn’t escaped my grip unscathed.

  I grab my head with both hands, but the pain’s unbearable. Everything hurts, only I can’t pinpoint where it’s coming from. The noise swells louder and I look over my shoulder, and that’s when I actually see the noise. It’s floating behind me and coming closer, muddled in the spinning blue and red lights of a cop car. An ambulance, too. But I’m not in our house or Danny’s room on the second floor, so I sit down hard on the highway shoulder and lift my arms and wave for them to come to me because at this point, even if I haven’t technically given up, my life is over.

  91.

  You know, there’s not much to say about being picked up by the cops on the side of the road and getting hauled off to juvie for trespassing and attempted assault. But it really sucks. I can tell you that much.

  92.

  The next few days are a blur. I’m transferred out of Alameda County, back to Contra Costa, where I’m held in a ju
venile facility until Monday. This is when I’m released into my mother’s care, although it’s not clear to me whether that’s because of the holiday weekend or the fact that she’s been in the hospital. Either way, she shows up right on time and I wrap my arms around her before I have a chance to think better of it. I don’t really know what else to do.

  “I was so scared,” I tell her.

  “Shh,” she says.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “I am, too.” She sighs heavily and presses her chin to my chest.

  A surge of panic hits me. “Where’s Winter?”

  “At home. Cleo’s watching her. She’s excited to see you.”

  We meet with my caseworker, who says she won’t recommend filing charges against me, seeing as I was the only one who was hurt and that I’ve never been in trouble before and anyway, the men at the horse farm just wanted to make sure I was okay. This is a relief, obviously, but then she has to tell my mother that they came this close to putting me on a psych hold because of my erratic actions and inability to care for myself. It’s beyond embarrassing, hearing this, but I get stupid about it and start crying, which really only proves her point. My mother pats my shoulder and thanks the woman for her concern because what else can she do?

  After that, I’m set free.

  We head for home.

  93.

  “I think I do need help,” I tell my mom in the car on the ride home. My teeth chatter and my hands are shaking. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m losing my fucking mind.”

  “It’s okay, Gus,” she says. “We’ll figure it out.”