The Impossible Knife of Memory

  “Excuse me, sir?” I called. “I took a picture of their license plates. Would that help?”

  83

  In the end, they reviewed all the paperwork for Dad’s guns and, to my amazement, they were all legal. Dude even complimented him for securing them properly. In the end, they looked through all the photos on my phone and sent themselves the one with the motorcycle license plates. Brown Eyes put the plate numbers in his computer and found something that he talked to his partner about.

  In the end, they called an ambulance because Dad was so dehydrated. They put an IV in his arm, strapped him on a gurney, and loaded the gurney in the ambulance. Daddy asked Trish to follow the ambulance in her car. He made her promise not to bring me.

  In the end, I was alone in a house that had holes in the walls and bloodstained carpet. I choked on the words stacked up floor to ceiling, all of them charred black, held over the fire too long, so many words that I could barely breathe.

  I made a cup of tea, but when I poured the milk, it came out in sour clumps. We were out of bread and bananas. I ate a spoonful of peanut butter, then I mixed the rest of the jam into the peanut butter jar and ate it until my stomach hurt. I walked the house from one end to the other, back and forth, Spock following close behind me. It felt like the building grew smaller with every step, or maybe I was growing bigger, Hayley in Wonderland, maybe I’d shoot up twenty feet and my head would bust through the roof and my arms would stick out the windows.

  Spock got tired of following me and lay down on the carpet in the same spot where Dad collapsed the day he found out that Roy was dead. I stretched out next to Spock and let him lick my face before he fell asleep. The carpet was itchy so I crawled into bed but couldn’t get comfortable.

  He was alive. I’d been afraid of a day like this forever, but he was alive. At a hospital, getting help. This was a good thing, right? It was all that mattered.

  Except.

  What now?

  I closed my eyes, pretended I was twenty thousand feet in the air, high enough to be able to see where we came from and where we were headed. Borders didn’t come painted with lines, but it felt like we’d crossed one. This was a new place with no signs or landmarks. In a land with a million questions, I only had one answer.

  In the end, I stole Daddy’s pickup truck.

  84

  By the time I got to school, found the only set of doors that were still unlocked, and made it to the swimming pool, the boys’ practice was ending. The swimmers each put their hands on the deck at the edge of the pool and vaulted out of the water like seals. Finn was in a bathing suit, too, but he was dry, walking around the pool collecting kickboards as the team filed into the locker room teasing one another loudly, shoving until the coach blew a sharp note on his whistle.

  “Can I help you?” the coach asked me.

  “Um,” I started. “I’m waiting for him. The guard.”

  “Ramos!” shouted the coach, before he, too, went into the locker room.

  Finn lifted his head and finally saw me. I wanted to bolt for the door but was afraid I’d slip on the wet concrete and land on my face. He set the stack of kickboards by the door to the office, took off his glasses, put them on top of the stack, and walked over to me.

  “Do you always break the rules?” he asked, squinting a little.

  “What?”

  He pointed to the sign that read NO SHOES IN POOL AREA.

  “Oh, sorry.” I kicked off my left sneaker, peeled off my sock, and stuffed it in the toe. I stood on my left foot to take off my right sneaker, but slipped and would have crashed in an undignified heap if he hadn’t reached out and grabbed my arm.

  “Thanks.” I kept my gaze down as I finished removing the sneaker and sock.

  I’d driven to the school with the windows rolled down even though it had dipped below freezing outside. The cold wind numbed me from all the nightmares that popped up every time I replayed the image of Dad in the back of the ambulance. But here, instantly, I was sweating.

  I unzipped my jacket. “They always keep this place so hot?”

  “When the principal isn’t paying attention,” he replied.

  The team was still hooting and hollering in the locker room. Showers were running, too. The loudspeaker crackled with static as an announcement was made, but I could not understand what the voice said.

  “You need a ride or something?” Finn asked. “Wait, were you even in school today? I didn’t see you.”

  “I have Dad’s pickup.”

  “Hayley, you don’t have your license yet.”

  “Oops.”

  He looked ready to make a smart-ass comment, but instead he twisted sideways and dove into the water. He swam all the way to the far end, turned around—still underwater—and surfaced, his arms moving like paddle wheels as he swam butterfly back to me, creating a wave that sloshed over the pool’s edge and soaked the bottom of my jeans.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He bobbed under the water briefly, arching his head back so that when he came up, his hair was slicked back. “What are you doing?” he echoed.

  The speech I’d memorized in the pickup melted into the chlorine-scented fog. “Um, how’s it going?” I asked. “I mean, how’s your sister and mom? And everything.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he pointed out.

  “You noticed that, huh?”

  The voices in locker room faded. Metal lockers slammed.

  “Chelsea didn’t show up for Thanksgiving,” he said. “Mom cried all day. Dad went for a drive that lasted seven hours. How about you?”

  “We didn’t have Thanksgiving.” Could he hear my heart pounding?

  The locker room had grown so quiet that the only sounds were the buzzing of the overhead lights, and water lapping against the sides of the pool. Finn cupped a handful of water and splashed it over my toes.

  “It’s warm,” I said.

  “There’s a water aerobics class here in an hour; they get wicked upset if the water is below eighty. Ever had a bunch of scary old ladies wearing swimming caps with plastic flowers on them yell at you? Terrifying.” He splashed more water over my feet. “So. Why are you here, Miss Blue?”

  I took a deep breath. “Remember that day at the quarry? When you went to the edge? I never paid off that bet. And”—I pointed my toes and drew a circle in the puddle I was standing in—“I don’t know how much longer we’re going to stay here. Everything’s changing and, well, I thought I’d tell you that I always pay up when I lose. And your damn phone is turned off or you blocked me or something, and so I decided to come over and tell you in person.”

  “That you’re going to pay off the bet?” He seemed almost surprised.

  “Yeah.”

  The water lapped at the edge of the pool.

  “What’s your bra size?”

  “Excuse me?”

  He stared at my boobs. “Thirty-six B? Or maybe C. They don’t make a B-plus, do they? I wonder why.”

  Instead of waiting for an answer he pushed himself up and out of the pool (warm water running down his chest, his abs, dear God, those abs) and walked into the office. I reviewed the conversation, trying to figure out how it had gone off course so badly, but before I could, he emerged holding a girl’s bathing suit in each hand.

  “No time like the present,” he said.

  85

  I am so not a thirty-six C. Not a thirty-six B, either, but I decided it was better to have the suit too tight than to have it falling off me, so I put on the B, tugging at the bottom of it until my butt was more or less covered. As long as I didn’t stand up straight I’d be fine.

  Finn stood next to the ladder in the shallow end. “Looks good on you.”

  “Close your eyes,” I said.

  “So you can run away?”

  “Just close them.?
?? I stepped down the ladder quickly. The water wasn’t as warm as I thought it would be. I bounced, arms crossed over my chest. “Okay, I’m in. Can I get out now?”

  He chuckled. “No, you goof. You’re going to learn to swim. We’ll start with floating on your back.”

  “I don’t float. I sink.”

  “All right.” He moved behind me. “I’m going to put my hands on your shoulder blades. Lean into them. I promise I won’t drop you.”

  He put his hands on my back. I hesitated (What am I doing here?), then let my weight fall toward him. He took a step backward and pulled me along quickly, much faster than I was ready for. My feet flew up and it felt like my head was going under the water. I jackknifed, trying to stand up and get my feet under me again. I grabbed the edge of the pool and held on for dear life while coughing so hard, I expected both of my lungs to come flying out of my mouth.

  “Told you.” I coughed some more and adjusted the mother of all wedgies. “I’m hopeless.”

  “You’re scared, not hopeless. There’s a big difference. Don’t move.”

  He hopped out of the pool, took a kickboard off the pile by the office door, and turned on the radio. Soft saxophone music filled the air. He hit a couple of light switches and most of the lights went out. A piano played under the sax, with a gentle drum in the background, but as nice as it was, it didn’t change the fact that I was in a swimming pool and I did not like it.

  “Half an hour,” he said. “That’s all I need.”

  “You’ll get five minutes if you’re lucky,” I muttered.

  He dove in without a splash and popped up right in front of me. “I heard that.”

  * * *

  He maneuvered the kickboard under my back and, taking my shoulders, began to pull me across the water, slower this time.

  “How deep is the deep end?” I asked, trying desperately not to think about the fact that my feet touched nothing.

  “Three meters,” he said.

  “I don’t want to go there.”

  “Kick your feet a little,” he said. “Flutter them and they won’t drag you down.”

  He was right, though I didn’t admit it. Couldn’t because all my energy went into keeping my face above water and breathing. Finn babbled on and on and on, walking me back and forth, back and forth across the shallow end, my feet fluttering, until my arms softened and I let them float out a little from my body instead of holding them stiffly at my sides.

  Finn put his hand under the back of my head and gently lifted it a little so that I could hear him. “You’re doing great,” he said. “Now close your eyes.”

  “Why?” I asked, immediately suspicious.

  “Close them and picture something, maybe the stars we saw the night of the football game. Or the marching band. I don’t know, whatever makes you happy.”

  I closed my eyes and pictured him swimming right behind me. “The stars will work.”

  He kicked his legs and we were underway again. “You’re comfortable now, right?”

  “I’m less petrified of dying in the next minute, if that’s what you mean by ‘comfortable.’”

  “Who do you think trains the Navy SEALs how to get through the water? Me,” he said modestly. “I also spent a month teaching Antarctic penguins to swim.” He took another stroke and we flew across the water. “You’re doing great, but you’d be even better if you relaxed a little.”

  “I’m not screaming,” I said. “Give me some credit.”

  “You need a distraction.” Two powerful strokes. “Tell me why you haven’t been in school.”

  It tumbled out before I could stop myself, everything that had happened from my mall meltdown to Roy’s death to the sight of the ambulance leaving. Talking made being dragged around the pool slightly less terrifying. I even told him about the holes in the living room wall, and combing the glass out of the carpet. He listened without saying a word.

  We paused once so Finn could move the kickboard up, away from my butt. After that, I had to kick my legs harder and push up my hips to stay on the surface. I wasn’t going to tell him but he was right, keeping my eyes closed made it easier to focus on the feeling of floating instead of the feeling of drowning.

  He stopped again. “I’m taking the kickboard away now, but I’ll keep holding up your head.” The board started slipping away. “Move your arms.”

  “How?”

  “Pretend you’re a bird. Flap your wings.”

  I smacked the water with my arms, making massive waves.

  “Argh!” He pushed me so I stood up, and wiped water off his face.

  “Wrong kind of flapping?” I asked innocently.

  “Brilliant deduction. Ready to try again?”

  I was, to my surprise. I kicked my legs and flapped my arms under the water and I kept my own head above the surface.

  He put his lips close to my ears. “Close your eyes again.”

  I did and we moved across the pool like I was a sailboat and he was the wind. “Trust the water,” he said. “It will hold you up as long as you try. Can I take my hand away?”

  I bit my lip and nodded.

  “Kick and flap, kick and flap,” he said. “Eyes closed, kick and flap.”

  Without his support, my head dropped a little, enough so that his words melted back into the sound of the water, and the saxophone sounded like a faraway whale. I could hear my heartbeat and maybe his, too. I relaxed and found the balanced place between the water holding me up and me staying on top of it. Finn took the fingers of my left hand and pulled just a little until they touched the side of the pool.

  “Open your eyes.”

  I held on to the edge and stopped kicking so that my feet could drift to the bottom of the pool. Only there was no bottom. My eyes snapped open and I looked down. “You brought me to the deep end!”

  “You brought yourself,” he said, swimming closer. “You did great.”

  “I did great?”

  He grinned and nodded, his head bouncing up and down like a bobblehead doll on a dashboard.

  “What?”

  He gritted his teeth and drew in a sharp breath. “I really want to kiss you. But you broke up with me.”

  “Maybe we were just a little broken up,” I said.

  “A little broken is still broken,” he said.

  “But fixable,” I said. “Right?”

  He smoothed the hair off my forehead. “How do we fix it?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Will that help?”

  He nodded. “I’m sorry, too.”

  “We’re not going to be drama junkies like Gracie and Topher, right? I can’t do that.”

  “Me neither.” His toes touched mine under the water. “If I promise to always answer my phone, will you promise to call me?”

  “Yes.” I let myself sink a little in the water, then kicked hard. “If I promise to listen, will you promise to tell me when things are bad, without joking around or clamming up?”

  “No joking?”

  “Okay, just a little joking.”

  “Deal.”

  “I don’t want to shake on it,” I said.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, three old ladies in rubber bathing caps decorated with plastic flowers shuffled out of the locker room and were scandalized by the sight of us fixing what was a little broken with an epic kiss in the deep, warm water.

  I’d like to think that my grandmother would have understood.

  86

  Trish brought Dad home around eleven that night. He went straight to bed without a word. She asked if she could come in for a while, long enough for a cup of tea. I made two cups and sat with her at the table. (I had no choice. It was the only way to find out what happened.)

  The ambulance had taken him to the VA hospital in Albany. It took two units of saline solutio
n to fix his dehydration. His blood work showed high cholesterol, sucky liver enzymes, and a lot of white blood cells, which meant he had an infection somewhere, plus his blood pressure was through the roof.

  Trish filled out forms for him and waited and filled out more forms and waited longer until finally the nurse came with signed release papers and a note that he had an appointment in three months to see a doctor. The nurse was excited because the hospital had cut its backlog in half. Now it only took three months instead of six. But, she explained, “If you have a crisis, call your doctor’s office immediately and they’ll find a way to squeeze you in.”

  “But he doesn’t have a doctor,” Trish said. “He doesn’t have anyone to call in an emergency. That’s why we’re here.”

  The nurse repeated her line about the three-month wait. Trish told me that she’d pulled the nurse to a quiet corner for a conversation that no one else could hear, and after that, the nurse found a spot for Dad on some kind of priority list. His appointment was the second Monday in January.

  “Andy wants me to move in,” Trish told me. “I told him no. A girl from work is letting me rent her spare bedroom. This way I’ll be around, but not close enough to irritate him. I think that would be better, don’t you?”

  I cupped my hands over the steam rising from my mug. “I guess.”

  “Are you mad that he wanted you to stay at home? Should I have taken you with me?”

  “No. It was probably better for him having you help with doctors and stuff.” I blew on my tea, sending ripples across the surface. “Anyway, I didn’t stay here.”

  I explained the bet with Finn, reminded her about my near-drowning, and gave a few boring details about my first swimming lesson. I’d expected a lecture about taking the pickup without permission or a license, but she surprised me.