» Fiction

Swimmers

Alida Dean

HOOKY

The secretary called me to the front office on the intercom during Free Draw, told me to bring my things. Ms. Thomas said I could choose a friend to walk me there. I looked at Ben, who sat at a different table—our seats were assigned—but he was too absorbed to meet my gaze. He was at work on a portrait of a snake licking a mushroom with crosshatching in the shadows. Ben was by far the best artist in the fourth grade and perhaps the best in the whole elementary school. A few girls I didn’t feel either way about raised their hands. I ignored them and told Ms. Thomas, “No thanks.”

In the hallway, I got to thinking maybe Mom had died. Heart attack, or offed herself by swallowing pills and taping a plastic bag over her head. I was an orphan now, on my way to the orphanage, where the meals would be bland, but at least they’d be served on time—

But when I got to the office, there she stood waiting for me. She said I had a dentist appointment.

“Why do I need my backpack?” I asked. “Can’t I come back after?”

“They might need to pull that tooth,” she said. “You won’t feel so good.”

“What tooth?”

The secretary watched us.

“You know what tooth,” she said, but I didn’t.

It was late October. The trees were mostly bare. It should have been cold, but we were having a last-ditch heatwave. The blue sky was too bright to look at, so I closed my eyes, held her hand, and pretended I was blind as we walked to the truck.

“It’s such a perfect day,” she said. “Let’s go fishing.”

“After the dentist?”

She squeezed my fingers. “You don’t have to go to the dentist, Bug. I just couldn’t wait till three to see you.”

◊

SCUP

We stopped at Dick’s Tackle for bait. She got a quick lesson from Dick on how to tie the hook and sinker while I played ball with his oily border collie in the parking lot. When she understood the basics, we got back in the truck and drove past the hospital and along the causeway to Eastville, where we parked and walked to the end of the jetty that stretched into the harbor. We only had one rod, a kid’s rod I’d won in a school raffle, so we took turns casting and helping each other unhook the scup we reeled in. By the time school let out, we had four of them dead or faintly gasping in a drywall bucket, each the size of an adult’s foot. “That should be enough for dinner,” I said.

Mom peered into the bucket. “I hope I remember how to fillet,” she said. Though we lived on an island, we didn’t eat much seafood.

“It’ll come back to you,” I said. “It’s like riding a bike, I bet.”

We sat beside each other on the jetty with the bucket between us and shared a bag of sunflower seeds while the cold water lapped at the rocks. There was a doe in the beach grass on shore, twitching her ears in our direction. I’d never seen a deer at the beach before, but Mom said they liked to swim. They’d swum across the sound from off island once, she said. Three miles. I thought she was teasing. “How’d you think they got here?” she said. “On the ferry?”

I’d never thought about how anybody got to the island. It felt like everybody and everything that was here had always been here, though I knew that wasn’t right. Mom had escaped here from her foster home in Hartford, Connecticut the summer before she was supposed to begin her last year of high school. She’d camped in the state forest at first, she’d told me, subsisting on beach plums, huckleberries, and buckwheat gruel.

I believed that story, but deer swimming? Off island looked far away. And the doe looked so delicate, her long limbs tapering into her delicate black hooves. When I stood to get a better look at her, she bolted into the thicket of rose hips between the parking lot and the beach.

◊

RECESS

I was crouched behind a holly bush, pretending to be an orphan again, when Ms. Thomas sat on the bench and asked if everything was okay at home.

“I had to get three fillings yesterday,” I said.

“Poor you!” she said. “Is your mouth sore?”

Was it a trick question? I was a diligent brusher. I’d never had a cavity. I shook my head.

“Your mom works at the nursery, right?” she asked.

“Right.”

“I think she helped me with my window boxes last spring. And after school, before she gets off work, it’s just you at home?”

I picked my lip. The boys were playing two-hand touch in the dirt field where, try as he might, Gary the hippie groundskeeper couldn’t keep the grass alive, even if he reseeded over summer break. Ben threw the ball with a high arc and a perfect spiral to Ryan, who should have caught it, but the ball slipped through his hands. “Butterfingers!” Ben yelled. Ryan flipped him off, and Ms. Thomas pretended not to see.

“Hey, I’m talking to you,” she said.

“About what exactly?”

She smiled. “There’s nothing wrong with being home alone at your age,” she said. “But if you ever want to stay after with me, you’d be welcome. It could be fun. Maybe you could help me with Mr. Rogers. You’re so good with him. I could show you how I change his shavings.”

Mr. Rogers was a ball python, our only class pet. The other girls were afraid of him, but not me. I looked forward to feeding him a squirming mouse, dropping it into his terrarium by the tail, watching his jaw unhinge wide, wider, to swallow the vermin whole. I was an animal lover but only some species. Extra time with the snake was tempting, sure, but why would I stay after with Ms. Thomas when I could do whatever I wanted at my house? I could make a butter and jelly sandwich, climb a tree and spy on the neighbors. I could dress the cat up in Mom’s best underwear and force-feed him mayonnaise, or ride my Schwinn up and down Norris Ave, past Ben’s house. I’d made my lip bleed. Ms. Thomas touched my wrist so I’d leave it alone.

“You’re so quiet,” she said, “but I can’t tell if you’re lonely.”

◊

PARTY

Friday night there was a full moon and an impromptu drumming circle on the north shore because the weather was still so warm. Before we left, I made Mom promise we’d come back that night. Parties often turned into sleepovers for us, when she drank too much to drive. This was fine when we were at someone’s house—it usually meant watching cable before bed and somebody cooking us eggs in the morning—but I didn’t want to sleep at the beach. “Home by ten,” she said, “I promise.” Then she packed the wool blankets in the back of the truck.

It was dusk when we arrived. The usual spread: fire, chanting, hot dogs, marijuana smell. Ben’s dad, Richard Herman, shucked oysters at a folding table with Duke, all wet, at his feet. Little kids danced with other little kids. Mom danced with everybody. I spotted Ben on the other side of the fire, digging a giant hole with a boy I didn’t recognize. I sat by myself near Richard’s table and buried my shins in the sand.

Ben kept whipping his head around to get his shaggy hair out of his face as he dug, and one time he made eye contact with me through the smoke and sparks. When I waved, he made a face. His cheeks and mouth went slack, and he sort of slow-rolled his eyes up into his head. I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of me or trying to tell me something important, like maybe he wished the two of us could go somewhere else together.

I rubbed sand into my legs until it burned, jumped up, ate a hot dog, and took a sip of beer from a can I found balanced on a rock. Nobody’d thought to bring soda for the kids. I was afraid to dance, so when Mom beckoned with her arms outstretched, I turned and made my way to Richard. He’d finished shucking, but there were still a few oysters fanned on the table. “Hungry?” he asked.

I didn’t like oysters, but I nodded. He squeezed lemon on one and handed it to me. I tried to swallow it whole like you’re supposed to, but it felt like an enormous glob of snot in my mouth. My throat closed up. I spat everything out in the sand. “I like them better in the oven,” I said. “With cheese and breadcrumbs.” I’d had this dish at last year’s holiday party for nursery staff and their plus-ones.

Richard tried not to laugh. “I like them better that way myself,” he said. His words came out slowly, as if he had to clear a space around each of them. I thought maybe he’d been drinking, but he didn’t seem very animated.

“And you don’t like dancing, do you?” I said.

“Not really.”

“How come?”

He shrugged. He didn’t seem to like talking very much either. Richard was challenging to talk to in a way that made me curious. Like how Ms. Thomas felt about me, I guess.

“I’m in Ben’s class at school,” I said, “but we don’t sit at the same table.”

Lorna, Ben’s mom, was dancing with a toddler with a skeptical look on his face. Richard wouldn’t look at his wife. He massaged the ruff of Duke’s neck with his boot, and the dog’s otter-like tail thumped the sand. I bent and stroked Duke’s side. His thick fur was damp, and he smelled like low tide, but his body was warm and consoling.

“Ben says you two are the best at drawing,” Richard said.

Ben talked about me at home? “He’s way better than I am,” I said. “It’s just, most people don’t even try. Or they just do the same thing over and over.”

Richard spread his fingers on the table. “Ben’s talented,” he said. “Light hands. Not like these fuckers. Sorry.”

It wasn’t the word that scared me. It was the hands. Not the black crescents beneath the nails or the scabs on the thick knuckles, but the way they seemed separate from the rest of him, like two wild animals, tensed and ready to spring. It was the hands and the intensity with which he stared at them. I couldn’t help but stare at them too until I noticed Mom moving toward us, weaving her way through the crowd. “Dance with me, Bug!” she screamed.

I thanked Richard for the oyster and ran to the water, where I rinsed the fur off my fingers and got busy writing names in the sand with a piece of driftwood. Ben. Richard. Lorna. Duke. My own name and my mother’s. “Fuckers,” I whispered, over and over again.

Ben found me down there a while later, when the moon was up and the tide had risen to erase what I’d written. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Hiding?”

“Skipping rocks.”

“Lemme see.”

A loon swam past. I threw a rock at it, and the bird dove under. Ben threw one too. “I think I got him,” he said.

I took a step closer and considered touching his hand, but he said, “Your mom’s pretty hammered. She bit my dad’s ear when he wouldn’t dance with her, made him bleed.”

“She’s just playing around.”

“Maybe. He’s not mad, and my mom thought it was funny, but he wants to go home now, and he told me to ask if you want to come. He said you can stay with us tonight if you behave yourself.”

Behave myself how?

The drumming was over, and most people had left. Mom was dancing on a rock with Lorna now. Richard waved to me and Ben. He said something, but the wind carried his voice in the wrong direction. Lorna’s silhouette and Mom’s were slender, but Mom was the inspired dancer. Lorna put her hands on Mom’s hips and swished her long hair from side to side. Mom arched her spine, dropped her head back, and reached her fingers toward the sky. Duke was on his hind legs, pawing at them. They were bothering him. These crazy women. These fuckers. He wanted to bark at them, wanted to tell them to knock it off, to sober up, but he was too polite.

Of course I wanted to go with Ben, but the thought of it—Richard’s hands squeezing the steering wheel, Ben and me sleeping or not sleeping under the same roof—also terrified me. If I wasn’t safer in Mom’s care, I at least knew what was coming. Or I never knew what was coming, but nothing she did surprised me. My lip was bleeding again. The blood tasted like the ocean. “I’ll stay here,” I said.

Ben watched our moms. “Are you sure?”

“I’m having fun.”

“No,” he said, “they’re having fun.”

◊

SWIMMERS

We made a bed in the dunes. One blanket underneath, two on top. Mom’s breath was unpleasant, but her body next to mine calmed me. She fell asleep quickly, though she shivered for a long time. I pressed myself to her. I felt jittery, wide awake.

Across the sound, I saw the shape of the mainland, black against the sky. The port cities glowed orange—New Bedford, Fall River, Providence. I didn’t know which was which. Raccoons crept down the path in a line and nosed through the remains of the party. The moon was so powerful I could make out the gray and black rings on their bushy tails. I watched a particularly fat one sit on its hind legs to nibble a hot dog bun.

Did it count as sleeping at the beach if you never fell asleep?

As the horizon faded from gray to pink, two deer tiptoed past us to the water’s edge, touched their muzzles to the sea, and studied each other before wading in. I shook Mom awake and pointed, and we watched them swim toward the sandbar, side by side, their white tails bobbing behind them. She pulled me tight against her and whispered, “I told you, Bug.”