Swim Back to Me Read online

  One Friday night I stayed for dinner. It was a week before the end of the school year, June, an evening when the light hung on and on until at last there was nothing but a pale yellow-green rim of sky visible at the horizon. “Come wish on a star,” Joanie called into the house at around nine o’clock.

  She and Dan were on the patio, wrapped in blankets against the cool evening air. Sasha and I were at the dining room table playing Scrabble, and Peter lay on the floor reading comic books.

  “Go,” Sasha said to Peter.

  “You go,” he said without looking up.

  I could no longer see Dan and Joanie, though I could just make out their shapes.

  “Richard Appleby, are you still there?” Dan called.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t break my wife’s heart. Come wish on a star.”

  Sasha was rearranging the tiles in her tray, and she gave me a quick glance—shrugging, rolling her eyes—and looked down again. I had an “a,” an “e,” three “i”s, and a “q”—about the worst selection of letters imaginable. I got up and went to the door, sliding open the screen and then sliding it closed again behind me.

  “Is it getting cold in there?” Dan said. “Close the glass door, too, will you?”

  I had to reopen the screen door, reach for the handle on the glass door, and slide it closed. When I’d done this he gestured me close. “Have a seat, Richard,” he said in a low voice. I looked at Joanie, her entire body wrapped in the blanket so that all I could see was her hair and her high-cheekboned face.

  I sat on a bench.

  “Does Sasha seem different to you?” Dan said.

  Joanie made a little noise in her throat, a whimper. “Don’t.”

  He stood up and walked to the fence, jiggling the change in his pocket. He came back. “Richard, if there were anything going on, you’d tell us, wouldn’t you? Anything we should worry about, anything we should know.”

  I was speechless, couldn’t have gotten a word out if I’d had a script in front of me.

  “Richard?”

  I struggled to find words. “Yeah. I mean, I guess.”

  Dan stiffened. “There is something?”

  “He meant he’d tell us,” Joanie said. “Right? You’d tell us.”

  I looked into the bright house, saw pots and pans stacked by the kitchen sink, Sasha at the dining table with her chin in her hand, Peter on the floor with his knees bent.

  “No, I think there is something,” Dan said. “Richard. What is it?”

  Joanie was on a lounge chair, reclining, and now she sat up. “Dan, stop it.”

  He snorted and walked away again. He bent over and picked up some object I couldn’t quite make out—it was small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. He tossed it up and caught it.

  “Richard, it’s OK,” Joanie said. “I apologize.”

  “Christ!” Dan said, and he threw the thing at the fence, where it hit with a thud and fell to the ground and broke.

  In a moment Sasha was sliding the glass door open, asking what had happened, what was that noise, what was going on?

  “Nothing, nothing,” Joanie said. “Daddy tripped on something.”

  “A clay pot,” Dan said evenly. “What’s happening in there? Is Peter still reading comics?”

  “I don’t know.” Sasha stepped out and closed the door behind her. “It’s freezing out here.” She looked at her father and mother, and I had an idea she knew we’d been talking about her.

  “Come sit with me, love,” Joanie said, and Sasha went over and sat on the edge of the chair and let Joanie wrap her in the blanket. Inside the house, Peter had sat up and was sitting cross-legged, looking out at us—though of course he couldn’t see us, he could only see himself.

  “So what did you wish for?” Sasha asked me.

  “Nuh uh uh,” Dan said. “Richard Appleby gets to have some secrets, Sash, it’s only fair.”

  “I haven’t wished yet,” I told her. “I’m going to now.” And I looked up at the sky and held still for what seemed like the amount of time it would take to make a wish.

  …

  My father graded his last final exam on my last day of school, and that evening he announced that he’d booked a room at a lodge in the Trinity Alps: to celebrate the end of the year he was taking me on a surprise fishing trip. We’d never gone fishing before, and I was thrilled. When I was much younger I’d had a period of wanting to try fishing, based on a photograph I’d seen of a boy holding a fish the length of his torso. I’d pestered my parents for a while, but when the three of us went on trips it was always to cities with museums, or places where my father needed to do research.

  We left early Friday morning, a box of food Gladys had prepared sitting on the seat between us. We had a long drive ahead, and I tried to read for a while, but I was too excited thinking about the fish I was going to catch—big ones that would be so heavy I’d need help holding them up for the picture. Restless, I decided to find license plates from all fifty states, but after four I gave up and asked my father to play Twenty Questions with me. I got him up to twenty-nine questions with Mr. Murphy, my math teacher, then had him grumbling minutes later when I guessed Franklin Roosevelt’s wheelchair in seven.

  We ate ham sandwiches at ten o’clock and stopped at a Denny’s at noon. By three we were in the foothills, and I stared out the window, noticed how the trees changed as we climbed, pine and fir taking over, keeping the highway in shadow for long stretches.

  “I presume the house will be undisturbed,” my father said out of the blue.

  Sasha had used a key we kept hidden under a flowerpot just outside the kitchen door, and before leaving the house this morning I’d moved it inside, just to be safe. I looked over at him: my father with his gray hair and his short-sleeved plaid button-down shirt. He was getting soft at the middle: his stomach spilled over his belt like a baking cupcake bulging over the side of the tin.

  “It will,” I said.

  I asked about the fishing lodge, and we talked about the kinds of fish we might find and whether there’d be some way to eat our catch; and then we drove for several minutes without speaking. There was a California state map in the door pocket, and I opened it and ran my finger along the route he’d shown me at the Denny’s. We were getting closer.

  “So,” he said. “I guess things are a little iffy with the Horowitzes.”

  I looked over at him. “What do you mean?”

  “About whether or not Dan will stay at the University next year.”

  “He is staying.”

  With his right hand my father felt for the box of food and without looking found the plastic bag of gingersnaps Gladys had tucked between the sandwiches and the apples. He pulled a couple of cookies out, put one in his mouth whole, and held the other between his thumb and forefinger as he put his hand back on the wheel. He chewed and swallowed the cookie in his mouth before he spoke.

  “My understanding,” he said, “is that there have been several conversations, and there’s a chance … by mutual agreement …”

  “They’re renting a house in College Terrace,” I said. “Sasha told me.”

  “Hmm,” my father said, and I turned away from him and stared out the window. In the next lane there was a station wagon with its backseat full of kids, and I could tell from a glance that they were having a lot more fun than I was. If I were on this trip with the Horowitzes, it would be me and Sasha and Peter in that backseat, passing around MAD magazine and arguing about who was going to get the windows after the next gas station stop. From the front, Joanie would hand us slices of apple, and Dan would make up silly rhymes based on the road signs we passed.

  Instead, I was alone with my father. “They are,” I said, but I was still facing the window, and he might not have heard me.

  It was sundown when we reached the lodge, a redwood structure about a mile from the highway, its “No Vacancy” sign blinking in the dusk. My father went to the desk and got our key, and I followed him up a nar
row flight of stairs to the second floor. “Here we go,” he said. “We made it.”

  A strong flowery smell assaulted me as he opened the door, and I covered my mouth and nose. “Let’s let in some air,” he said, and he crossed the room and pushed open the single window.

  The light switch was just inside the door, and I stepped in and flipped it. The beds were covered by flowered bedspreads in shades of pink, red, and purple. The pillows were draped with giant squares of lace. There were pitchers of dried flowers on every surface, sitting on top of lace hankies. A line of china sheep paraded across the dresser, followed by a single china shepherdess. And, maybe worst of all, there was a row of pink hearts above each bed.

  “I thought this was supposed to be a fishing lodge,” I cried.

  “It’s not so bad,” my father said.

  “It’s terrible.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said with a sigh.

  “Everyone’s sorry,” I shouted, and I hurried back down to the lobby, went outside, and started walking. There was enough light for me to follow a path around the side of the building, and I moved quickly, crossed a clearing with picnic tables, climbed over a low fence, and headed into the trees. It was cold and smelled of pine, and of damp earth and something a little rotten that I couldn’t identify. An animal skittered away, and I froze, imagining a skunk but then figuring if it were a skunk it would’ve sprayed already. I thought there might be deer nearby, maybe antelope. What were antelope, anyway, a kind of deer? I knew nothing. The idea that my father and I could just drive into the mountains and catch fish revealed itself in all its absurdity. The whole thing was doomed, pathetic. I imagined Cal laughing at us. The inn building was close, lights from the guest rooms shining down from the second story. I pictured my father in our frilly room, wondering whether or not to come after me. Let him wait, I thought, let him wonder. How could he have brought me to such a ridiculous place?

  But now that I was thinking about him, I began to feel bad. It wasn’t fair to leave him there, when the whole reason we were here was me. I made my way toward the building, crossing the fence at a different point, outside some kind of office, a room with a desk and several fish mounted on the wall. I moved closer and identified a rainbow trout, a brown trout, and a salmon. There was a door to the outside, and I tried it: unlocked. I stepped in and made for a door just opposite, which let onto a hallway that smelled of cigarettes. I got my bearings and found the lobby, and I moved through it as fast as I could, breaking into a run when I reached the stairs. I opened our door, and my father was stretched out on one of the beds reading, looking as relaxed as he might have at home.

  “There you are,” he said. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  In the morning the proprietor fixed us up with equipment and a guide, a slow-talking man of about thirty-five who drove us in a pickup truck to a wide, rushing river, where he kept a boat tied to an old wooden pier. It would be nice to say that the day was a great success, that I was an angler from that weekend on, someone whose spirit came alive when he held a rod in his hand, someone whose every encounter with a fish told him who he was. It would even, in a different way, be satisfying to say it was a disaster, one mishap following another, not a fish caught after eight hours on the water, and that my father and I drove back to the Bay Area united by failure, laughing together or entirely silent.

  In fact, I learned to thread a worm onto a hook, to hold a fishing rod in the correct way; I discovered that catching a fish was hard work, and that the satisfaction—because I did catch a couple—was fleeting and tinged with dismay. My father and I both got sunburned; for dinner Saturday the innkeeper served us the tiny trout I’d caught that afternoon; Sunday morning we went back out ready to repeat the entire thing; and by one or two that afternoon we were both finished.

  “I guess we probably won’t do that again,” I said at some point during the long drive home, while we were on a particularly dreary stretch of Interstate 5.

  “We could,” my father said.

  “No, we don’t need to.”

  We didn’t say anything more for a few minutes, and then he cleared his throat and announced that there was something he needed to tell me.

  I looked at him, thought about how skinny his shoulders were, about how our fishing guide had such big shoulders that the sleeves of his T-shirt barely reached the tops of his arms.

  “What?” I said.

  “It’s about your mother.”

  She was sick. I thought of Joanie telling me she was sorry to hear my mother was ill, and I had an idea that she knew, that Sasha knew—that the lie Sasha had told had been not for her benefit but for mine, to hide my mother’s illness from me. My mother’s thin face: she’d been sick for a long time.

  “We’ll be divorcing,” my father said, and for an instant I was disappointed: she wasn’t dying.

  “I’d hoped we could avoid it,” he went on. “When she left I thought she’d realize she’d made a mistake.”

  She’d been gone over a year now; I couldn’t believe he’d been thinking that this whole time.

  “She’d like more time with you,” he added. “Every other weekend.”

  “No.”

  “It’s a new idea. Things like this take some getting used to.”

  “I won’t.”

  We entered a terrible smell, cow manure or cow carcasses or something, and I held my hand over my mouth and nose, breathing in the scent of worms and the river.

  After a while the smell faded. We approached a cluster of gas stations, the arches of a McDonald’s springing up among them.

  “Would you like to stop for a milkshake?” my father asked.

  “No, keep going,” I said, and for a long time after that neither of us spoke.

  The house was untouched. It was long after dark when we arrived, but I left my father poking around the kitchen and went to ring the Horowitzes’ doorbell.

  A full minute or two passed, and then Joanie answered. “Richard!” She was wrapped in a bathrobe, but I could see the outlines of her nipples through the thin material. Bare feet, her yellowish toenails longer than they should have been, which made me feel weird. “Sasha’s not here,” she said. “They’re both—”

  “Who is it?” Dan called from their bedroom.

  “Richard,” she called back.

  He came up the hallway, naked except for a towel he pinched closed at the waist. The hair on his chest was sparse, ginger going white.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought—”

  “We farmed the kids out tonight, Richard Appleby,” he said. “Married couples need time alone.”

  “Dan, for God’s sake.” Joanie tucked her hair behind her ear, then untucked it and spiraled a lock around her finger. “Sorry, Richard. How was the fishing trip? Did you catch a lot of fish?”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Dan said. “This was the great fishing weekend. Don’t you have a speckled trout for us or something?”

  I wanted to ask him about what my father had said. And “by mutual agreement”—did that mean he and Joanie both thought he should leave? Or he and the University? That would be embarrassing, the University wanting him to leave. Though Yale had.

  He was holding the towel between his thumb and forefinger, and now he pinched it tighter, gathering the material into his fist. “No speckled trout, then,” he said. “Too bad.”

  “I’ll bet you had a nice time, though,” Joanie said. “You and your dad.”

  I looked past them, saw empty wineglasses on the coffee table, discarded clothing on the couch. “Where is Sasha?”

  “They’re both with the Wilsons,” Joanie said. “They’ll be home tomorrow morning.”

  Sasha hated the Wilson kids, fifteen-year-old twin girls who attended a private school and played field hockey.

  “Come back tomorrow,” Dan said. “We like having you around—you know that, don’t you?”

  I mumbled something and got out of there, running down their driveway and out into the street,
and then running all the way to my house for no good reason.

  I took the Band-Aid box over to Sasha’s the next day, and I had my first taste of marijuana in a tiny park near our houses, the two of us sitting on adjacent swings that creaked every time we moved. I coughed, of course, and didn’t feel a thing, but, unlike fishing, smoking pot turned out to be something I was very good at, and each encounter with a joint told me exactly who I was, a guy who preferred the dazed-out float of a good high over everything else.

  “Now do you get it?” Sasha said one hot afternoon when we’d gotten stoned and were on our bikes in search of food. “It took you long enough.”

  “Give me a break,” I said. “You loved being the only one. Well, no more, sister.”

  She laughed at this and then couldn’t stop laughing and had to get off her bike. We were headed for JJ&F, a little grocery store on the far edge of College Terrace, but she was laughing so hard I got off my bike, too.

  “Well, no more, sister,” she sang, and now we both cracked up, laying our bikes on the sidewalk and crouching next to them, laughing the ocean-wave laughter of the stoned, up and down and down and up, and it was incredibly intense and at the same time locked away from the real world, safe behind a wall of glass.

  At last we got back on our bikes and continued. In the store we walked back and forth between the ice cream display and the shelves of chips, finally settling on an enormous bag of Cheetos. Once we’d paid, we walked our bikes down College Avenue, taking turns holding the bag open so the other person could scoop out a giant handful.

  “Beware the orange fingers,” she said at one point, waving her stained fingers in my face, and we cracked up again, Sasha laughing so hard this time that she had to cross one leg in front of the other.