Surfacing

  “What color are they?” the woman behind the counter asked.

  “Brown,” said Barbara, who was not yet Grandma Bobbie.

  “Black,” said her husband at the exact same time.

  “Brownish black,” Barbara said firmly, and the woman pulled out a pair and asked if these were the missing gloves.

  “Well, let’s see.” Barbara slipped them on and held them out in the light. “No, I don’t think these are them. Got anything else back there?”

  By this time in the story, tears of laughter were streaming down her cheeks, taking half of her thick foundation and leaving a trail of black mascara behind.

  This is what family is, Maggie knew, a collection of stories, half-truths, and raw honesty, a conglomeration of conflicting memories that somehow all add up. A place where no one is afraid to say what’s on their mind; no one is afraid to tell the truth. Or lie, for that matter, because it hardly made a difference. Love is love is truth is love.

  Maggie didn’t come to my funeral. They wouldn’t let her. They didn’t even tell her about it. She was too young, they felt. It will just confuse her. I heard them talking, but, of course, parents protect themselves and pretend they are protecting their children.

  Sometimes I wonder if Maggie even knew I had died, or if she sat waiting for me — if she’s sitting there still — downstairs in the den, where we kept all our toys, our books, all the little dolls we made out of paper and felt and colored with Magic Markers. That afternoon, Maggie sat for hours, not moving until our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Tate, went down there herself.

  “You can’t stay down here all afternoon,” Mrs. Tate told her. “You need to come upstairs and eat something.”

  “No,” Maggie said. She faced the wall of glass doors that led out to the backyard, where we used to sit cross-legged in the grass and play clapping games, like Miss Mary Mack and Itsy Meanie Teeny Eeny.

  “Now, Maggie,” Mrs. Tate said, “I insist. You’ve been waiting down here since everyone left for the —”

  “For where?” Maggie looked up. “Where did everyone go?”

  “Well, that’s for your mother to talk to you about.” And Mrs. Tate turned on her heels, back up the stairs. The swinging door into the kitchen banged shut.

  They were all at my funeral, dressed in dark colors, faces red and swollen, and Maggie was alone. She was alone in a way she had never been before. At the service nobody talked much, except for the reverend. He talked a lot and said nothing at all. The room was hot — too much air, too much carbon dioxide. The reverend went on and on. He read some poetry, the 23rd Psalm, and then he talked some more.

  “OK, Maggie. This is it.” Mrs. Tate had trouble with stairs, but she made her way down again. This time holding a plate of chocolate-chip cookies, warm from the oven. “With raisins,” she offered. “Your favorite.”

  Maggie got up from the floor.

  “Good girl,” Mrs. Tate said.

  She took a cookie. It melted in her mouth. “I’m not a good girl,” Maggie said. The cookie was sweet and delicious. I know it was, and it made her instantly thirsty, but she didn’t ask for a drink.

  “Oh, nonsense. Here, take another one.”

  Maggie stuffed another cookie into her mouth. It was hard to chew; her mouth was dry, her voice crumbly. “That’s why they don’t want me there.”

  “That’s not true at all, Maggie. Why do you make up stories like that?”

  I always thought that I was the bad one, the one who got in trouble, so I knew what Maggie was feeling, but there was nothing I could do about it now.

  When Maggie was at the height of making herself available to Matthew last year, most of her time was actually spent waiting.

  She waited for him to text her. Waited to bump into him at parties. Waited for his sister, Jennifer, to invite the girls over to work on another school project so Matthew could say “See ya” again, but it didn’t happen. She waited as if it were an art form, and this Thanksgiving break — other than swim practice, eating, and sleeping — Maggie perfected it. Over Thanksgiving break, Nathan texted dozens of times and even called her house phone, but with all the family obligations she claimed to have — of which there were none — Maggie managed to remain home doing nothing other than going to the pool and waiting.

  Saturday morning, after an early practice, Maggie sat in front of the TV with her computer on her lap, the volume muted. She intermittently checked her Facebook and popped another Frosted Mini-Wheat into her mouth. The rest of her family was still sleeping, even the boys. The house was perfectly quiet but for the ticking of the kitchen clock, a square blue face painted with the White Rock girl gazing into the surface of a gentle pond.

  Maggie used to pretend — and sometimes still did — that she was the White Rock girl, with her little fairy wings that sprouted like tree branches. It would worry her, though, that those disproportionate tiny wings would be way too small and weak, and what good would it be to have wings so small and so useless? Maggie tried to concentrate on her TV show, a dog video on YouTube, and her reading homework for honors English. Then Matthew’s name popped up as a “friend online” in a short list at the right-hand bottom of her screen, and a few seconds later he sent her a message.

  Whassup?

  And just like that, her heart broke into loud thumps. Matthew was leaving that afternoon, later, he explained, but had a little time just before he headed back upstate. Did she want to meet him? Maggie immediately agreed, expecting somehow that wholeness could come by tearing herself apart.

  As a gift, when she finished her swim lessons — not only learned to swim but turned out to be exceptional — her father had planned a trip for the whole family to Club Med, where Maggie would get to swim with the dolphins. Her dad knew she had always loved dolphins. Didn’t she watch the Free Willy DVD over and over? Of course, Willy was a killer whale, but what’s the difference, and all girls love dolphins and horses, don’t they? He wanted to make her happy, and he wanted to heal his family.

  Lucas and Dylan were only two years old when they all boarded a plane for Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic.

  The twins had gotten past their infant stage, when they did nothing but cry and eat and poop, and were actually getting kind of cute. They were finally living up to their birthright, their birth burden, to overshadow the memory of Leah’s death. Besides, Mrs. Paris had worked hard on getting her figure back, which is why she agreed to this trip at all. Body Pump and Inner Strength classes had been her religion for the last four months. Vacations were good by definition, right?

  But by Wednesday, the day of the dolphin excursion, Mrs. Paris was sick with diarrhea. She put the twins in the full-day babysitting, and thirteen-year-old Maggie and her dad headed out on the open-air bus alone.

  “The guy at the desk said it’s a twenty-minute ride, didn’t he?” Mr. Paris leaned close to ask his daughter. It was hard to hear, between the wind and the sound of the bus motor. They had booked an excursion to Dolphin Island. The hotel arranged everything, including the bus ride.

  Maggie shouted back, “I think so, Dad, but he had a strong accent. I’m not sure.”

  “Hmm, French or Spanish?”

  “What? I can’t hear you, Dad.”

  He didn’t hear her either. He rubbed her back and asked, “So are you excited?”

  It was even louder now that they had hit the highway. She tried to yell out her answer, but she gave up. Yes, she was excited. After all, dolphins were kind of Maggie’s animal guide, weren’t they? Mammals that swam, breathed air but lived underwater, and what about all those TV specials where dolphins were reported to have rescued people or led boats to safety or fended off shark attacks?

  “In the wild,” the Dominican dolphin trainer explained, once everyone was standing in the murky, forty-by-twenty-five-foot floating enclosure, surrounded by slimy algae-caked fencing, “a dolphin might live thirty to thirty-five years. They have a lot of natural enemies out there, including humans.”

&n
bsp; Everyone else was smiling, Maggie noticed. The young girls and their mothers, especially, could hardly contain themselves as the dolphins swam back and forth, around the line of people in which Maggie and her dad stood shivering. As luck would have it, it was the one day, the one hour, in Punta Cana that the sun had not come out since they had arrived in the Dominican. When one of the two dolphins, apparently insane with repetitive stress behavior, swam close to the humans in its circle, everyone was supposed to put out their hands and let their fingers graze the top of the massive animal. A girl or two squealed each time.

  “But here, safe, at Dolphin Island,” the man went on. He stood atop the wooden platform that surrounded the tank, whistle poised in his mouth, and a bucket of dead fish beside him. He smiled, though no one seemed to be listening, and he tried to make eye contact with all the tourists. Then he looked right at Maggie. “Here, our dolphins live only half that life span on average.” She would remember that moment as solidifying the existence of her power. The moment she came to believe in the unpleasant and uncontrollable nature of truth telling.

  “Can we hold on to their fins?” a boy asked, even though the introductory video had already explained that hanging on the dolphins was not allowed.

  He fiddled with the large plastic skull charm he had hanging around his neck from a leather cord. He clearly hadn’t taken off any and all jewelry. Maggie’s hair whipped around her face due to the lack of even a ponytail clip. This boy was annoying her.

  “You know”— the trainer kept his eyes on Maggie; he looked sad, despite his overly cheerful voice —“no matter how many times we tell everyone not to hang on the animals, someone always does.” His English was perfect, and his Spanish accent made it sound like music, so it took the boy a while to realize that he was being reprimanded.

  The trainer let the whistle fall from his mouth. He stopped reaching into his bucket of fish. “Day after day, four times in the morning and three times in the afternoon, these two dolphins perform for rich tourists like you. They will jump up into the air and balance on their tails so they can have one tiny dead fish dropped in their mouths.”

  The crowd shifted uncomfortably. Maggie was certain he was looking right at her again.

  “In the ocean, these animals would normally swim hundreds”— he paused and repeated —“hundreds of miles a day, hunt for their own food, and find their own companions. They are extremely smart animals. Here, they swim in circles, over and over and over, so that I can take home a paycheck and feed my family for a month with what you will go home and pay for a new video game.”

  “All right, all right,” the boy responded. It was hard to tell exactly what he was paying attention to, but video game seemed to register with him.

  “I think, ladies and gentlemen, that if I were a dolphin, I would prefer not to live than to live like this, and yet, here I am, holding the bucket and blowing this whistle.”

  “I think we should go now,” Mr. Paris said, but nobody moved.

  Another trainer hurried out onto the deck. With a big smile, he took the whistle and the bucket and gleefully took over the rest of the show. Maggie hoped the first man wouldn’t lose his job. She worried about his family, but when it was her turn, Maggie took her place on the partially submerged metal platform. Then, on command, one of the dolphins rose out of the water, paused for a moment, leaning his massive body against hers, and pressed his bottlenose against her cheek in what was to simulate affection, while someone on the deck snapped the photograph and then tried to sell it to Maggie and her father as they were leaving.

  “But don’t you want to buy a photograph of your daughter getting kissed by a dolphin?” a very pretty girl in a bikini asked in perfect English.

  “No, gracias,” Maggie answered before her dad could say anything.

  But then Matthew wasn’t there, where he’d said he’d meet her, by the front of the school, near the track. Matthew James was a no-show. A few minutes later, a text buzzed into her pocket telling her he couldn’t make it. He had to get on the road back up to Albany. His ride was leaving early. Sorry, Abbe. She figured he’d meant to spell Babe but hadn’t bothered to even look at the screen while he was typing.

  He was such a jerk, just like Julie had said.

  What did she call Matthew? A shit-for-brains? Shithead? A douche bag? The familiar comfortable feeling of discomfort rose up from Maggie’s feet, settled in her belly, and then flew around in her brain. It didn’t feel good, but on the other hand, it felt just right.

  “You so waited all week for him, didn’t you?” Julie asked. She had just finished her race, coming in third in her heat, breaststroke, and breaking her personal best. She was feeling pretty good. Together, Julie and Maggie sat on the metal bleachers in their pajama bottoms and Uggs, their hair wet, their eye sockets ringed by goggle suction.

  “No, not all week. Wednesday I went to the mall with my mom, remember?”

  “Nice,” Julie said. “Good job.”

  “Did you just roll your eyes? You know I hate it when you roll your eyes.” Maggie’s race was being announced. “I gotta go.”

  “No, not at all. I never roll my eyes,” Julie said. “Good luck. You don’t need it, but good luck.”

  When Maggie turned back around, Julie had pulled her knees up to her chest and had wrapped her arms around her legs. When she caught Maggie’s gaze, Julie rolled her eyes as dramatically as she could.

  Maggie stood on the starting block, looking out onto the water. The lane markers rocked slightly on the surface, from the race before, but other than that, the water was silent, coaxing. She looked once toward the bleachers. Her dad was there. Her teammates. Julie gave her the thumbs-up. But no Nathan.

  Maggie crouched, her hands gripping the base of the block. She heard the commands and then nothing else. She jerked her body forward into the air. Her fingertips touched the surface first, piercing it and sliding inside. She would win the race and the one after that. Her team would take second in the relay, which would give them enough points to win the meet and get one step closer to the state semifinals. Everyone would be celebrating, except the other team, of course, and though not many students would be listening, the principal would report the good news on the morning announcements. Maggie wanted to believe that even though he had stopped calling and texting, Nathan would be sitting somewhere in class and hear of her achievements through the loudspeaker.

  Maggie prayed that Meghan Liggett would just go back into her dumb-old house already. She had a bad feeling about this as she sat on the pool stairs, as Leah had directed her to do.

  People always claim to have known something bad was going to happen before it happened. They talk about premonitions and foreboding, but if they really knew, why did they let it happen? And why would they then admit something like that? If you could have known beforehand, you would have stopped it. And if you didn’t, you would have to live a lifetime with that knowledge. Why would anyone ever want to admit that?

  But there Meghan was, just puttering around on her green, green lawn in her purple Gap shorts and matching T-shirt. And even though Maggie herself had invoked Meghan to entice Leah outside the apartment, Maggie also understood this to be big trouble.

  Before Leah stepped into the pool, Maggie remembered thinking — realizing for the first time — how wrong it was to want someone you didn’t like, someone who didn’t like you. Maggie realized this was her first real grown-up thought, and it had come too late to do anything about it.

  And just as Maggie was processing the newness of a thought that was so profound and complex, Leah went into the water. She didn’t step in or slowly submerge one body inch at a time, as they sometimes did together.

  Toes, ankles, shins.

  Shins, knees.

  Shins, knees, thighs.

  Shins, knees, thighs, tushy.

  No, Leah dove in off the first step, and when she poked her head back out, her hair was slicked back and long down her back. Water trickled down her nose, and the
sun reflected off her wet cheeks, and Maggie remembers thinking her sister was the prettiest, most special big sister in the whole world.

  If Meghan Liggett wasn’t jealous by now, she should be.

  “I’m not stupid, Maggie,” Nathan said. At Maggie’s request, they walked around the track, close but not touching.

  Yes, he wanted to see Maggie again, but he was hurt. She had avoided him all Thanksgiving break. He didn’t know what he had done to deserve that. When she saw him in the cafeteria Monday morning, Nathan reluctantly agreed to talk.

  “My dad has this saying,” Nathan started. He was prepared.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, well, my dad has a lot of sayings, and he’s always saying them and some of them make a lot of sense.”

  “Well, tell me one that doesn’t make sense first, then,” Maggie said softly, as softly as she could.

  By this point they were on the far side of the football field, the school, the tennis courts, and far from anybody who happened to be out at this time. Without saying so, they both slowed their pace, nearly to a stop.

  “OK,” Nathan said. “It is what it is.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s the saying. He says it a lot. He says, ‘It is what it is.’ And I tell him that doesn’t make any sense. It’s redundant and meaningless.”

  Maggie laughed. “It’s just like saying, ‘Get over it.’ Deal with it. It’s not going to change. It is what it is.”

  “Like ‘Fuck it,’ ” Nathan added.

  “Yeah, ‘Fuck it.’ ”

  Nathan stopped. “But you don’t strike me as a ‘Fuck it’ kind of girl. So why did you stop talking to me? What happened?”

  She wouldn’t tell him, not the whole of it. There are certain ways to lie without lying at all, though it wasn’t telling the truth either. Lies by omission. Telling a version of the story that sticks to the facts, like syrup running back down the inside of the jar.