“They’re getting better,” he said.
I almost laughed. “Yeah, sure.”
I climbed the bleachers to sit next to my mother. “You’re so good with those kids,” she said, as usual. “I love watching you.”
“Thanks.”
I looked for Andy at the end of the pool and found him right away. Even though he was on a team with kids his age, he was a little shrimp and easy to pick out. He was jabbering to a couple of kids who were, most likely, tuning him out. Ben put his hand on Andy’s shoulder and steered him to the edge of the pool in front of lane five.
Andy’s burn was so much better. I looked at him lined up with the other high schoolers. I would have felt sorry for him if I didn’t know his skill. His tininess always faked out the other teams. He was ninety pounds of muscle. He had asthma, but as long as he used his inhaler before a meet, no one would ever guess. I watched him at the edge of the pool, coiled up as tight as a jack-in-the-box. Ben called him his team’s secret weapon. I smiled, watching him lean forward, waiting for the whistle. Next to me, my mother tensed. I thought we were both holding our breath.
A whistle lasts maybe a second and a half, but Andy always seemed to hear the very first nanosecond of the sound and he was off. This time was no different. He leaped through the air like he’d been shot from a gun. In the water, he worked his arms and legs like a machine. I used to think his hearing was more sensitive than the other kids’, that he could hear the sound of the whistle before they could. Then Mom told me about the startle reflex, how babies have it and outgrow it, but how kids with fetal alcohol syndrome sometimes keep it until their teens. Andy still had it. At home, if I walked around the corner from the living room to the kitchen and surprised him, he’d jump a foot in the air. But in the pool, his startle reflex was a good thing. Ben’s secret weapon.
Mom laughed as she watched the race, her hands in fists beneath her chin. I didn’t know how she could laugh at anything so soon after the fire. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to laugh again.
“Hey, Mags.” Uncle Marcus suddenly showed up on the bleachers. He squeezed onto the bench between me and the father of one of the kids on Ben’s team.
“Hey.” I moved closer to Mom to give him room. “I didn’t know you were here.”
“Just got here,” he said. “Sorry I missed your team. How’d they do?”
“The usual,” I said.
“Looks like Andy’s doing the usual, too.” Uncle Marcus looked toward the water, where my brother was a couple of lengths ahead of everyone else. “Hey, Laurel.” He leaned past me to look at my mother.
“Hi, Marcus,” Mom said, not taking her eyes off Andy, which could just be a mother-not-wanting-to-look-away-from-her-son kind of thing, but I knew it was more than that. My mother was always weird about Uncle Marcus. Cold. Always giving him short answers, the way you’d act with someone you were tired of talking to, hoping they’d get the hint. I asked her about it once and she said it was my imagination, that she didn’t treat him differently than anyone else, but that was a total crock. I thought it had to do with the fact that Uncle Marcus survived the whale while Daddy didn’t.
Uncle Marcus was always nice to her, pretending he didn’t notice how bitchy she acted. A few years ago, I started thinking of how cool it would be if Mom and Uncle Marcus got together, but Mom didn’t seem interested in dating anyone, much less her brother-in-law. Sometimes she and Sara went to a movie or to dinner, but that was it for my mother’s social life. I thought her memory of my father was so perfect she couldn’t picture being with another man.
The older I got, the more I thought she should have something more in her life than her part-time school nurse job, her every single day jogs, and her full-time job—Andy. I said that to her once and she turned the tables on me. “You’re a fine one to talk,” she said. “Why don’t you date?” I told her I wanted to focus on studying and coaching, that I had plenty of time to date in college. I shut up then. Less said on that topic, the better. If Mom knew how my grades had tanked this year, she’d realize I wasn’t studying at all. That was the good thing about having a mother who only paid attention to one of her kids.
The race was down to the last lap and I stood up along with everyone else on the bleachers. I spotted Dawn Reynolds in the first row near the end of the pool. She had no kids on the swim team; she was there to watch Ben. I followed her gaze to him. Ben had on his yellow jams with the orange palm tree print. His chest was bare, with some dark hair across it. He was tall and a little overweight, but you could see muscles moving beneath the tanned skin of his arms and legs.
“Go, Pirates!” Dawn yelled, her hands a megaphone around her mouth, but she wasn’t even looking at the swimmers. She was so obvious that I felt embarrassed watching her. It was like watching someone do something very personal, like inserting a tampon. I imagined climbing down the bleachers when the race was over to sit next to her. I could ask her how the fund was doing. I could ask if there was a way I could help. I wanted to in the worst way. I knew Mom put in three thousand, and I gave five hundred from the money I was saving for extra college expenses, although I told Mom I only gave a hundred. Andy gave thirty from his bank account. Money was not enough. I needed to do more. I watched Dawn cheer on Ben’s team, imagining the conversation I’d never have with her.
The race was almost over. Andy was in the lead. Surprise, surprise. “Come on, Andy!” I yelled. Mom raised her fists in the air, waiting for the moment of victory, and Uncle Marcus let out one of his ear-piercing whistles.
Andy slapped the end of the pool, and the applause exploded for him, like it had two days before in the Assembly Building, but he just turned and kept swimming at the same insane pace. Mom laughed and I groaned. He’d never understood about ending a race. At the end of Andy’s next lap, Ben leaned over, grabbed him by his arms and lifted him out of the pool. I saw him mouth the words You won! to Andy, and something else that looked like You can stop swimming now.
We all sat down again. Andy looked at us, grinning and waving as he walked to the bench.
Uncle Marcus leaned forward again. “I’ve got something for you, Laurel,” he said.
My mother had to break down and look at him then. “What?”
Uncle Marcus pulled a small folded newspaper article from his shirt pocket and reached across me to hand it to her.
“One of the guys was up in Maryland and saw this in the Washington Post.”
I looked over my mother’s shoulder to read the headline: Disabled N.C. Boy Saves Friends.
Mom shook her head with a laugh. “Don’t they have enough of their own news up there?” She looked at Uncle Marcus. “I can keep this?”
“It’s yours.”
“Thanks.”
Uncle Marcus took in a long breath, stretching his arms above his head as he let it out. Then he sniffed my shoulder. “You wear chlorine the way other women wear perfume, Mags,” he teased.
He was not the first guy to tell me that. I liked that he said “women” and not “girls.”
The pool had been my home away from home since it was built when I was eleven. Before that, I could only swim during the summer in the sound or the ocean.
Daddy taught Andy and me how to swim. “Kids who live on the water better be good swimmers,” he’d said. He taught me first of course, before Andy even lived with us. One of my earliest memories was of a calm day in the ocean. It was nothing major. Nothing special. We just paddled around. He held me on his knees, tossed me in the air, swung me around until I practically choked on my laughter. Total bliss.
When I was a little older, Andy joined us in the water and he took to it the same as I did. Daddy’d told me that Andy probably wouldn’t be able to swim as well as I could, but Andy surprised him.
I couldn’t remember ever playing in the water with my mother. In my early memories, Mom was like a shadow. When I pictured anything from when I was a little girl, she was on the edge of the memory, so wispy I couldn’t be sure s
he was there or not. I didn’t think she ever held me. It was always Daddy’s arms around me that I remembered.
“How’s Ben’s head?” Uncle Marcus asked.
“Better,” I said, “though he’s still taking pain meds.”
“You know who he reminds me of?”
“Who?”
“Your father.” He said this quietly, like he didn’t want Mom to hear.
“Really?” I tried to picture Ben and Daddy standing next to each other.
“Not sure why, exactly.” Uncle Marcus put his elbows on his knees as he stared at Ben. “His build. His size, maybe. Jamie was about the same height. Brown eyes. Same dark, wavy hair. Face is different, of course. But it’s that…brawniness or something. All Ben needs is an empathy tattoo on his arm and…” He shrugged.
I liked when he talked about my father. I liked when anyone, except Reverend Bill, talked about Daddy.
I was probably five or six when I asked Daddy what the word “empathy” meant. We were sitting on the deck of The Sea Tender, our legs dangling over the edge, looking for dolphins. I ran my fingers over the letters in the tattoo.
“It means feeling what other people are feeling,” he said. “You know how you kissed the boo-boo on my finger yesterday when I hit it with a hammer?”
“Uh-huh.” He’d been repairing the stairs down to the beach and said, “Goddamn it!” I’d never heard him say that before.
“You felt sad for me that I hurt my finger, right?”
I nodded.
“That’s empathy. And I had it tattooed on my arm to remind me to think about other people’s feelings.” He looked at the ocean for a long minute or two and I figured that was the end of the conversation. But then he added, “If you’re a person with a lot of empathy, it can hurt more to watch a person you care about suffer than to suffer yourself.”
Even at five or six, I knew what he meant. That was how I felt when something happened to Andy. When he fell because his little legs weren’t steady enough yet, or the time he pinched his fingers in the screen door. I cried so hard that Mom couldn’t figure out which of us was hurt at first.
When I heard that Andy might be trapped by the fire—that any of those children might be trapped—the panic I felt might as well have been theirs.
“I was worried about him,” Uncle Marcus said.
I dragged my foggy brain back to our conversation. “About who?” I asked. “Daddy or Ben?”
“Ben,” Uncle Marcus said. “He had some problems in the department at first and I didn’t think he’d last. Claustrophobia. Big guy like that, you wouldn’t think he’d be afraid of anything. But after the fire at Drury—” he shook his head “—I realized I’d been wrong about him. He really proved himself. All he needed was the fire.”
And right then I knew it wasn’t fog messing up my brain. It was smoke.
Chapter Nine
Marcus
EXCELLENT DAY FOR THE WATER, AND the boaters knew it. From the front steps of Laurel’s house, I stopped to look at Stump Sound. Sailboats, kayaks, pontoon boats. I was jealous. I had a kayak and a small motorboat. I used the kayak for exercise and fished from the runabout. Or on those rare occasions I had a date, I’d take the boat for a sunset spin on the Intracoastal. I had this fantasy of taking Andy out with me someday. Never happen, I told myself. Give it up.
I rang Laurel’s doorbell.
Nearly every Sunday that I wasn’t scheduled to work, I did something with Andy. Ball game. Skating rink. Fishing from the pier. Maggie used to come, too, but by the time she reached Andy’s age, she had better things to do. I got it. I was fifteen once myself. I liked the time alone with Andy, anyway. He needed a man in his life. Father figure.
My beautiful niece opened the door and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I’d dated a woman a while back who turned out to be too artsy-fartsy for my taste, but I did learn a few things from her. We were standing in the National Gallery in Washington one time, in a room full of paintings of women. Most of the women had thick wavy hair and big, heavy-lidded eyes. They looked like they were made of air. You could lift any one of them up with a finger.
“These paintings remind me of my niece,” I told my date.
“Really?” she asked. “She has a Pre-Raphaelite look to her?”
Whatever, I thought.
“I’d like to meet her,” my date said.
We broke up before she could meet Maggie, but since then, whenever I saw my niece, the term Pre-Raphaelite popped into my mind even though I didn’t know what it meant. I would have given my right arm—both my arms—for Jamie to have the chance to see the long-haired, heavy-lidded beauty his daughter had become.
“What are you up to today, Mags?” I asked.
“Studying at Amber’s,” she said. “I have some exams this week.”
I sat down on the stairs that led to the second story. “You can see that ol’ light at the end of the tunnel now, huh?”
She nodded. “You better have my graduation on your calendar.”
“Can’t imagine you gone next year,” I said.
“I’ll only be in Wilmington.”
“It’s more than geography, kiddo,” I said.
She looked up the stairs, then lowered her voice. “How’s Mom gonna manage Andy without me?” she asked.
“Hey,” I said, “I’m not going anywhere. All your mom has to do is say the word and I’m here.”
“I know.”
“You decide on a major yet?”
She shook her head. “Still between psych and business.”
I couldn’t see a Pre-Raphaelite woman in one of those stiff, pin-striped business suits. Her choice, though. I’d keep my trap shut.
“You’ve got plenty of time to decide,” I said.
Maggie swung her backpack over her shoulder. “Do they know what caused the fire yet?” she asked.
I shrugged. “We’re still waiting on results from the lab.”
“You’re in charge, aren’t you?” she asked.
“On the local side, yeah. But once there are fatals…” I shook my head. “The State Bureau of Investigation and ATF are involved now.”
“Oh, right. That guy who talked to Andy at the hospital.”
“Right.” I got to my feet. “Your brother upstairs?”
“Yeah.” She smiled. “Wait till you see his room. It looks like a Hallmark store. Oh, and Mom said don’t mention anything about him writing a book. She hopes he’ll forget about it.”
“He’s still talking about that?”
“Every once in a while.” She clipped her iPod to her low-rise jeans.
“Your mom home?”
“Went for a run.” She popped in the earbuds. “Later,” she said, pulling open the door.
Maggie wasn’t kidding about the Hallmark store, I thought as I walked into Andy’s room. Greeting cards were propped up on his desk and dresser and the windowsills. Tacked to the cork wall he used as his bulletin board, clustered around the charts Laurel had made to keep him organized. What I Do Before Going to Bed on a School Night: 1. Brush teeth 2. Wash face 3. Put completed homework in backpack. 4. Pick out clothes to wear to school.
And on and on and on. Laurel was a very patient woman.
Andy was at his computer and he swiveled his chair around to face me.
“What’s with the cards?” I asked.
“They’re thank-yous.” He stood up and handed me one. The front was a picture of an artificially elongated dachshund. Inside it read, I want to extend my thanks. Then a handwritten note: Andy, you don’t know me, but I live in Rocky Mount and heard about what you did at the fire and just want you to know I’d want you around any time I needed help!
He handed me a few others.
“Some are from people I know,” he said as I glanced through them. “And some are from people I don’t know. And some girls sent me their pictures.” He grinned, handing me a photograph he had propped up next to his computer. “Look at this one.”
I did. Yow
ks. She had to be at least twenty. Long blond hair and wispy bangs that hung to her eyelashes. She wore a sultry look and little else. Well, all right, she had on some kind of skimpy top, but it didn’t cover much. I looked up at Andy and caught the gleam in his eye. He scared me these days. He used to see girls as friends, like his little skew-eyed pal, Emily. Now, he was getting into fights over girls. When did that happen? His voice was starting to change, too, jarring me every once in a while with a sudden drop in pitch. Sometimes standing next to him, I smelled the faint aroma of a man. I bought him a stick of deodorant, but he told me Laurel’d already gotten him one. That was part of the problem. If Laurel would just talk to me about Andy, we wouldn’t be buying him two sticks of deodorant. It had to scare her, too, the changes in him. The temptations he could fall victim to because he wanted to be one of the guys. By the time I was Andy’s age, I’d been having sex for two years and drank booze nearly every day. I didn’t have a disability and I still managed to screw myself up. What chance did Andy have of surviving his teens?
“How about we fly your kite on the beach today?” I suggested.
“Cool!” Andy never turned me down.
Laurel suddenly appeared in the doorway. She had on her running shorts and a Save the Loggerheads T-shirt. Her cheeks were a bright pink. She leaned against the jamb, arms folded, a white sheet of paper dangling from her hand. “What are y’all going to do today?” she asked.
“We’re going to fly my kite,” Andy said.
“That’ll be fun,” she said. “Why don’t you go get it? It’s in the garage on the workbench.”
“I can get it when we leave,” Andy said.
“Get it now, sweetie,” Laurel said. “We should check it and make sure it’s all in one piece. It’s been a while since you flew it.”
“Okay.” Andy walked past her and down the stairs.