Finally, during break, after Doug had already limped out of the room so it didn’t even matter, I got Brandon’s response:
Glad u remindded me. Ill ask Stepane.
For a ride, I finished for Brandon. Surely he only meant he’d ask her for a ride.
I PLUNGED OFF THE BLOCK INTO the water and glided until the precise moment when stroking would propel me faster. Then I broke the glide and kicked for all I was worth, with my anger at my mom and my dad and Brandon and Doug behind me.
I had fresh reason to be mad at Brandon. Stephanie Wetzel had brought him to the meet, all right. And she had visited him in the stands several times. Once I glanced up from the pool deck to wave at him and caught him sipping from her Coke, then passing it back to her.
Right then I vowed that I would win the 400 IM—which I had never done before. Usually I came in sixth or so. I would recapture Brandon’s attention. I would make him feel the pride I felt for him when I watched him score a touchdown. Actually I hadn’t seen it happen last Friday because Doug had distracted me, but I would be sure to see it this Friday.
And I had a fresh reason to be mad at Doug, like I didn’t have enough reasons already. After his show of caring about the team yesterday, he’d spent most of tonight’s meet texting on his phone. I wondered whether he was LOLing and ROFLing with another girl from Destin who didn’t know he’d been to juvie. He’d decided I wasn’t worth the wait.
That got me to the first turn in record time. Between strokes I couldn’t raise my head far enough to see the clock on the wall, but it felt like the cool water slipped past my skin faster than ever, and the chicks from Crestview and Niceville in the lanes on either side of me were nowhere in sight. Anger was a beautiful thing.
I pushed off the wall hard. Every time I took a breath, I heard Doug yelling my name. Amazing that I could pick out one voice from the hundred or so in the bleachers and around the deck, especially when my ears were full of water. If he thought hollering for me would refresh my anger and make me swim even harder, it was working. Then it occurred to me Brandon might not like Doug cheering himself hoarse for me. I decided Brandon was not as jealous as I’d thought. Brandon had shared a Coke with Stephanie Wetzel. Brandon did not in fact give a shit about me. My kick was powerful, my whole body in sync. Angrier and angrier, I would win this race. At the next turn I flipped toward the wall.
Something grabbed me like the cold tendrils of the undertow snagging me in the ocean. It grabbed me and wouldn’t let go. I screamed underwater, inhaled pool, and thrashed to get away until I didn’t know which direction was up. The thing dragged at me, pressing me against the side of the pool. But now I could tell from the warmth of the setting sun that my head was above water. Gulping air, I pushed up my goggles and came face-to-face with my mother.
11
“Zoey,” she gasped. She was lying on her stomach on the pool deck. With both arms around my back, she still pressed me toward her, into the hard cement of the pool. “Oh God, Zoey, are you okay?”
Other than the fact that she was lying down in a public place, she probably looked normal to the other people there. She looked like the other moms in their track suits, only with a better figure. But I knew the difference. Normally she would have done herself up gorgeously. No track suit, no way. Trendy jeans with an age-appropriate top. Her makeup would have been immaculate. She was wearing none. Her long blond hair was caught in a careless ponytail. Then I noticed something strange in her bangs, something I’d never seen before on her. Gray roots.
“Breathe,” she said. Her grip tightened around me. The sinews in her arms flexed. “Let me hear you breathe.”
“Mom, I’m fine.” Between gasps I said this quietly, like maybe if I kept it down, nobody would notice my insane mother lying on the pool deck and clinging to me. The girl from Crestview and the girl from Niceville each had an elbow up on the wall now, treading water and watching us. “Mom, let me get out.”
She released me around the back but kept one hand firmly around my wrist and pulled me. I crawled one-handed onto the pool deck and stood to exactly her height. Coach was right behind her, questioning me with his eyes. Behind him was a ref—he must have stopped the race, but I hadn’t heard the whistle. All the swimmers held on to the wall and looked up at us. All three swim teams huddled together in three bundles of bathing suits in three different colors, folding their arms against a sudden wind. All the people in the stands looked over at us. Brandon whispered to Stephanie. Doug was on the phone.
I told Coach, “I’ll take care of it.” I told the ref, “I forfeit, whatever, sorry.” Then I put my arm around my mom’s waist, wetting her but I doubt she noticed, and steered her out the gate to the front of the school. I’m sure we looked like an odd promenade because she still hadn’t let go of my wrist. Behind us the whispers of the crowd swelled. My eyes stung with tears.
The second the gate closed and the crowd couldn’t see us, I jerked my wrist out of her hand and whirled to face her. “What the fuck are you doing?”
She blinked and actually took a step back. “I had a dream you were drowning.”
I put my hands on my hips. “They let you out of a locked mental ward because you had a bad dream?”
She cleared her throat. “I guess I escaped.”
“You escaped from the mental hospital ?” My voice echoed across the high school parking lot, over the cars and a few buses gathered around the pool entrance.
She shrugged. “It wasn’t brain surgery.”
“It’s a forty-five-minute drive. How did you get over here from Fort fucking Walton?”
This time she didn’t even blink at the F-word, which was a bad sign. “I took a taxi.”
I ran my hands back through my hair, or meant to, and stopped when I felt nothing but rubber swim cap and goggles. “What am I going to do with you?” I asked, exactly what she’d asked me once in seventh grade when she caught me trying to run out the door to meet Keke and Lila at Beach Reads wearing argyle kneesocks with my gym shorts. What did I do now? I looked out over the parking lot and watched a police car cruise toward us.
Officer Fox to my rescue again.
He parked at the curb right next to us and got out. “Hey there, Counselor,” he called.
“Hi, Cody,” she said without smiling.
He strolled over and joined us like we were three old friends who’d run into each other at the homecoming parade. “I hear they’re worried about you at the hospital. I can drive you back, or”—he glanced over at me ever so briefly, then focused on my mom again—“Zoey can take you.”
My mom nodded. No argument. A bad, bad sign.
He jerked his thumb toward the pool. “Zoey, why don’t you go change into some dry clothes and meet us back here. Tell Doug what we’re doing.”
“Okay.” I let Officer Fox take charge, just as he had when I found my mother the first time.
Doug leaned on his crutches inside the pool gate. He’d called his brother to turn my mom in. That’s why he’d been on the phone during my heat. Or his brother had texted him first to tell him there was an alert out for my mom. I was the last to know.
Past Doug, in the pool, another heat had started. They must have repeated the one I’d ruined and begun a new one, because BENNETT was on the board. I wasn’t sure whether this was Keke or Lila. I couldn’t remember the order of the heats or who was swimming in what race. I was losing it.
The crowd didn’t mind. They cheered for the racers in the water. Only a few spectators nudged their friends and pointed at me. Brandon sat in the stands with Stephanie like nothing unusual had occurred. Maybe nothing had.
“What happened?” Doug asked, maneuvering in front of me like he thought I might escape too.
I waved vaguely toward the outside world. “She’s with your brother.”
“Is she okay?”
“If she’s not, maybe I can have her car,” I joked.
I’d walked five steps beyond him when the nausea hit me, and I can have h
er car throbbed in my throat. My mom would spend the rest of her life in an insane asylum, and I could have her car!
My clothes were in the women’s locker room, but I headed for the one-stall bathroom just off the pool for swim event spectators. If someone had been inside and I’d been locked out, I don’t know what I would have done. I could not vomit in front of a hundred and fifty people on top of everything else. Luckily the bathroom was open and empty and cool. I calmly closed the door behind me, turned the dead bolt, and dashed for the toilet.
Retched and retched and dry heaved, doubled over with the sharpest pain in my stomach and the unbearable nausea. Started sobbing to go with it, because dry heaving wasn’t horrible enough. Cried and retched with my face inches from a public toilet. At the same time, I saw myself. From across the room I watched a girl with family problems losing it in a public bathroom. That girl was not me.
A sound like machine-gun fire strafed the bathroom wall. Jerking my head up, I realized it was just someone knocking on the metal door. “I’m okay,” I called over the racket, standing up straight. I’d really hoped I could vomit so I’d feel better after, but I knew now that nothing would make me feel better, ever.
God, they would not stop pounding on the door. “I’m okay,” I said again. Something hard and cold moved against my cheek. I was on the floor. I must have fainted. I lay on the public bathroom floor in my wet bathing suit. Glorious.
Slowly I sat up. I braced myself with my hands on the floor—nasty—but better my hands than my face. I took two deep breaths before scooting my back against the wall and easing my way up, standing again, eyes on the door. Something told me the persistent knocker would come through the door soon whether I liked it or not, and I needed to be standing up when that happened.
Sure enough, the dead bolt turned by itself as I watched. And I probably had floor cheese on my cheek. I ran for the sink and splashed cold water on my face, bracing myself against the wall with the other hand so I didn’t fall down.
The door popped open a crack. The school’s elderly janitor lady peeked in. “Zoey?”
“Hey, Ms. Roberts,” I sang, reaching for a paper towel to blot my face. “Thanks for checking on me.”
Her face disappeared from the crack. Doug burst in, shouldering the door aside. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Looking for privacy!” I screamed hard enough that I felt dizzy again. “Can’t I have a little fucking privacy?”
“No,” he shouted back, “you can’t disappear and lock the door, not when your mom—”
I squeezed the paper towel into a tight ball and hurled it at him. It bounced off his chest. We watched it roll across the floor. I knew I was not crazy, I was completely normal, because I suppressed an overwhelming urge to pick up the ball and put it in the trash can. I did not litter.
“You passed out, didn’t you?” he said.
“No.”
“Come here,” he said, switching both crutches to one arm and holding out the other arm for a hug.
“No,” I barked. “Don’t touch me. Get out of my way.”
He was surprised enough that he scooted aside. I walked out the door.
And faced almost the entire swim team, everyone who wasn’t in the pool, shivering in an arc around me.
Without meeting their eyes I edged past them against the wall of the building and headed for the locker room.
“Go with her,” Doug said quietly.
I didn’t turn around to see who he was talking to. It didn’t matter anyway. Inside the locker room, I wound my combination lock with fingers shaking from sudden cold. When I turned with my clothes, Lila was standing there with a towel tight around her and her arms folded to keep it in place, scowling at me, staring me down without a word. Lila or Keke or Stephanie, it was all the same. Everyone knew about my mother now.
We both jerked our heads at what we couldn’t see: Doug shouting somewhere in the hall between the women’s and men’s locker rooms. “Brandon, get the fuck over yourself.” And then, “Great timing, motherfucker.”
Doctors could keep brain-dead patients alive on heart-lung machines. If they could also get those brain-dead folks up walking, talking, and driving to the produce stand for a pineapple smoothie, that would be me. I was aware of what was going on around me, but my brain had shut down, and zombie Zoey did not have any reaction to Doug Fox calling her alleged boyfriend a motherfucker. I pulled off my goggles and swim cap and hung them from the top hooks in my locker. Quickly combed out my damp, tangled hair. Dressed and walked past Lila still glowering at me, out to the pool.
This time Brandon met me at the door. Really, I didn’t want a hug from him either, but he took up the whole doorway, and pushing past him might cause a fuss. I walked right into the front of him. He folded me in his huge arms.
Over his shoulder, Doug leaned on his crutches, watching me. Or watching Brandon, making sure he didn’t get away from me. I’d hugged Brandon and helped him through countless affairs all summer. I’d always listened, never complained. Once he woke me up in the middle of the night, calling me to whine about woman trouble, drunk. I’d spoken soothingly to him, not because I had a crush on him then—I didn’t—but because I’d cared about him.
And now I suspected Doug had to yell at Brandon to get him to hug me.
This was how it would be with people from now on, now that they knew about my mother.
I counted to ten because that seemed like a long enough hug, then pulled back and smiled up at Brandon. “Thanks so much for coming. Maybe I’ll see you later.”
He put one big hand back through his golden hair. “Call me anytime,” he told me. As if this were not an automatic privilege of being his girlfriend. As if he were doing me a favor.
I walked past him to march between the pool and the bleachers, running this gauntlet one last time. Keke’s heat was over, and now she stood shivering with the rest of the team. She and Lila might not be identical twins, but their outraged glower was amazingly similar. I kept my eyes on the gate ahead of me.
Outside the gate, I saw for the first time that the sun had set. My mom and Officer Fox sat on a low wall around a palm tree in front of the school, illuminated by the parking lot floodlights. I couldn’t hear what they said at this distance, but they seemed to be chatting casually. Officer Fox’s feet were far apart on the ground, his hands on his knees. Just as I would expect Officer Fox to sit on a planter. My mom should have crossed her legs elegantly in front of her, or even refused to sit on a cement wall. But her knees were tucked to her chest with her arms around them, in the fetal position. If she started rocking back and forth before I reached her, I was headed right back to the bathroom to throw up.
The gate clanged behind me like the bars of a jail sliding shut. “Zoey,” Doug called.
I stopped and turned to face him.
“You ride in the police car with your mom,” he said. “My brother will bring you home.”
I shook my head. “That’s not the plan. I’m driving her. Your brother said I could drive her.”
“You are not driving to Fort Walton when you just passed out in the bathroom,” Doug informed me.
“I wouldn’t drive if I wasn’t okay to drive. What do you think I am, crazy?” I walked to the planter, watching my mom carefully for rocking. “Let’s go.”
I didn’t look back to see whether she followed me. Officer Fox was there to Taser her if she resisted. But I heard her footfalls crunching the sand that covered everything here, even the concrete parking lot. Her footfalls stopped at the back of the Benz. “Where’s your car?” she asked.
“I totaled it.”
No reaction. None. Next she asked in a monotone, “Where’s your father?” Of course she wouldn’t remember that he was in Hawaii, marrying his pregnant mistress. My mother was crazy.
“Away on business.” I hit the button to unlock the doors of the Benz, and we slipped inside. As I pulled from the parking lot onto the road, I glanced in the rearview mirror and s
aw Officer Fox’s patrol car with Doug in the passenger seat, following me closely.
I headed north and took the highway that hugged the bay, the fastest way to Fort Walton from here. There was absolutely nothing to see—just the patch of highway visible under the headlights, fading into an impenetrable tangle of plants with sharp tips and briars on either side of the road. If I’d turned the wrong way, east toward Panama City, I wouldn’t have been able to tell. It all looked the same.
“You realize what you are?” I burst.
No reaction. She sat as she had the whole drive, staring out the window into the scrubby wilderness, hands rubbing her thighs slowly like her palms were sweating and she needed to dry them before shaking another lawyer’s hand in court.
“You’re an escapee from the loony bin,” I said. “You’re the butt of every joke ever told. You might as well be the chicken that crossed the road.”
“It’s a chemical imbalance,” she whispered to the window.
“Right. And you poured your chemical imbalance into an Erlenmeyer flask, shook it up”—I bobbed my hand violently to show her—“and spewed it all over my school!” My arms circled as wide as the explosion. One part of me felt so, so guilty for saying this to her. I couldn’t stop myself. Anger was a million times better than panic.
She didn’t move. She didn’t speak. But when I glanced over at her again, the tracks of tears down her cheeks glimmered in the glow from the dashboard of the Benz.
I HALF EXPECTED MY MOM TO bolt toward the forest surrounding the low mental hospital building and disappear into the palmettos. Officer Fox would dash after her. My mom would prove surprisingly elusive and they would pick her up a few days later walking along the highway, legs torn to shreds by the unforgiving Florida woods, arms thrust through holes she’d poked in a garbage bag like it was the latest fashion in outerwear, eyes vacant. This time there would be a photo in the newspaper.
But she walked quietly into the hospital with me, without once pulling a razor blade out of her shoe or collapsing into a seizure. When I told the receptionist who we were, four security guards descended on us and swept my mom away down the hall, all business and alacrity to prove they had their shit together even if a brilliant loony did slip through their grasp every now and again.