We learn that the fins are supposed to fit snugly but without smashing our toes. Everyone puts them on and sits at the side of the pool to get the feel of them in the water. The instructor tells us we’ll have fifteen minutes of laps and then a water polo game to increase our agility. It sounds like fun, and it should be fun, but I look at my feet waving in the water and wonder if I’m going to brick. It’s one of the main reasons I didn’t want to take the class, the possibility of me freaking out and Sage having to take me home while everyone else learns deep dives and repressurization. Sage probably expects me to freak out too. I watch him moving his feet back and forth in the water with great concentration. Just to spite him I decide I will not brick. Cognitive therapy, like what my mother had me do to get comfortable in the bath again: I will not drown here with all these people watching, and me a good swimmer, and with fins on my feet. At least today there will be no tank for Sage to fuck with underwater. The girl in the red suit grins at me as we splash our feet in the pool. If I brick, I tell myself, this nice Romanian kid will think I’m an idiot.
We all line up to swim laps, starting at the deep end of the pool. Why we have to start at the deep end is quickly explained: We’re practicing our roll entry, where we have to crouch down with our backs facing the water, the way you go backward off the boat with all your gear on. If the water were too shallow, people might clonk their heads. Once you fall in you’re supposed to orient yourself and swim down to the shallow end of the pool, kicking in the fast smooth way you do when you’re wearing fins, and then get out and wait by the starting blocks.
This would be a good time to have a brother who cared if you were feeling shitty about getting into the water, but Sage is not that kind of brother. He won’t stand anywhere near me. I go to the back of my group, hoping to have more time to get calm, and I think about my sea anemones because they are the calmest of the fish, though technically they are not fish at all but flowerlike polyps of the order Actiniaria. My two anemones, a purple and a pink Pachycerianthus mana, are similar in size but have different personalities. The pink is shy and smart and retracts its tentacles fast when something brushes by, but the purple is slower and perhaps less smart, though when it waves its arms it looks more graceful. Thinking of them makes me forget that I am about to fall backward into a pool, gallons and gallons of water, with at least thirty people watching, including my brother and the girl in the red suit, who has already done her roll entry and is now whip-kicking toward the lighter blue of the shallow end. Sage shoots me a look that says You’d better not fuck up. Then it’s his group’s turn to fall in, and he crouches at the edge and goes backward at the count of three. It’s true that I could learn something from his confidence, if only he weren’t always using it to smash me down.
Finally it’s my turn. The instructor gives me a smile and pats my shoulder. I stand at the edge of the pool and pretend there is no water behind me at all, but instead my bed with the quilt I wrap myself in when I get depressed, and there will be no moment when the water covers me, and I will not remember the plunge in the car as we hit the surface and started going down. The instructor begins the countdown. I bend my knees. The flippers on my feet are cold and awkward. Somewhere at the other end of the pool, my brother is watching.
“Go!” cries the instructor, and I push off the edge. There is a whirling moment as the high-up natatorium ceiling flies by, and then I plunge backward into the cold shock of water and sink almost immediately. My arms and legs go numb with panic, and my mouth fills with the bleach taste of pool water. It feels like I’m going down to that place where I was before, the cold dark pond on that November night, and if I go down farther still I will reach Isabel, her hair floating mermaidlike around her. Up above there is a commotion of water, and the echo of shouting, and then the shadow of someone following me down.
In the car on the way home, Sage says nothing. He might as well be made of igneous rock. I keep thinking of the way the red-suit girl looked, scared and sorry for me, when they heaved me up onto the deck of the pool. Through the rest of the class, as everyone finished the laps and played water polo, I was in the locker room getting dry and dressed and then waiting on a wooden bench. All I could think about was how mad Sage would be on our way home. Once again I’d given him evidence of what a non-hero I am. Both of us can plainly see how I might have failed at a crucial moment, missed my chance to pull Isabel out of the car. The thing the police told him, the thing the autopsy confirmed, was that she was already unconscious and wedged into the crushed driver’s side, the steering wheel pinning her ribs. It might have been possible for me to pull her out, but if I’d tried I might have drowned too. And she might not have survived anyway. Everyone says I did the right thing by swimming up and climbing out to run for help. Still I know Sage blames me, and in my heart I agree.
At home Sage goes upstairs and closes the door of his room, leaving me in the hallway to explain everything to my dad with his anxious smile, and our mother in her nightgown and socks. After I tell them, we sit down together on the couch. They wedge me in between them the way they used to when I was little. My dad puts an arm around my shoulder. My mother looks miserable, as if she’s done this to me herself.
“You swam, though,” my father says. “Didn’t you?”
“I fell in the water and sank.”
“That’s a start,” he says.
My mother gives him a stern look. We all know that falling in the water and sinking is hardly an accomplishment, and my mother’s not the kind of person who pretends something is what it’s not.
“I don’t think scuba’s for me,” I say. “Maybe someday, but not now.”
“But think about the fish you’ll get to see in St. Maarten if you do finish the class,” my father says. “Otherwise it’ll just be me and Sage diving, while you and your mom play tennis.”
“Don’t push her, Robert,” my mother says. “She knows what she can do.”
“I’m not. I’m just stating the facts.”
“Anyway,” says my mother, “what’s so bad about tennis?”
“Nothing,” my father says. “But it doesn’t have quite the appeal, for some people, of seeing a coral reef with triggerfish and orange spiny tangs and things of that nature.”
“It’s up to you, Maddy,” my mother says. “We’re not going to make you dive if don’t want to.”
I tell them I’ll think about it, and that seems to satisfy them. We get up and they hug me goodnight. Then my mother goes up to check on Sage, who is undoubtedly sitting in his room thinking about Isabel, and my father kisses me on the top of my head and goes into his study.
When I climb the stairs, I see a line of light at the bottom of my brother’s door. From inside I can hear the rise and fall of his voice and my mother’s. I stand still outside the door, listening. “It’s not my responsibility,” I hear my brother say, and my mother says something too quiet for me to make out. Very faintly, from the crack at the bottom of the door, come the fumes of cigarette smoke. I imagine them both in there smoking, my mom trying to blow it out the window so as not to smoke up the carpets and furniture, Sage not caring. I’m not much of a smoker. Once or twice I had puffs off Isabel’s cigarettes in the garage during band-practice afternoons, but it was never as great as she made it look. Sometimes my mom would come out and smoke a thin cigarette of her own, sitting there on the car bumper and telling us about high school and old boyfriends, stories that tended to embarrass me. But Isabel laughed like my mom was another high school girl, and my mom, who always secretly seemed to distrust Sage’s girl-friends, liked Isabel in return.
Finally I hear Sage tell my mom he’s going to bed, and I skeet off down the hall before I am discovered. In my bedroom the fish are awake, making their rounds. The pink anemone is shut tight, and the purple one waves smoothly. The loaches are mouthing algae from the side of the freshwater tank. Beside them, my science-experiment fish seem to be sleeping in their plastic containers. Even when they’re still I could watch
them all night—the red-purple of their bodies, the tiny flick of their gills. The control-group fish look particularly tired, their fins not even finning. Perhaps their natural aggressions have exhausted them. I’ve tried to learn everything they can teach me about the chemistry of anger, what makes it ebb and flow, how it can be controlled. Twice a day I give them their special food and make behavioral observations and take their blood pressure. It’s easier than you might think to take the blood pressure of a fish. Hewlett-Packard makes a sensor that can feel the force and rate of their pulse through the water. My father likes to ask me where’s the little cuff, where’s the little stethoscope. He thinks it’s a big joke that some fighting fish seem to die of heart attacks from so much aggression, but it’s no joke if you’re a fighting fish.
To be professional I tried not to name my science experiment fish, but then I realized the coincidence of there being twenty-six of them, one for each letter of the alphabet, and now they all have names. Amy, Ben, Carl, Dan, and so forth. I won’t, of course, use any of their names in my report; they all have scientific tags like “Control 17.” The Isabel fish is in the experimental group, fed a calming drug a couple times a day. She has a blue mark at the center of her dorsal fin, a distinction I happen to know is very rare in members of her sex and species. The Sage fish is a control, reddish-brown in color, mean and small with high blood pressure. At times, when I have been particularly mad at my brother, I’ve been tempted to give the Sage fish little zaps with an electrode. As a scientist, though, I have refrained.
I roll up my sleeve, put an arm down in the marine tank, and tear off a leaf from one of the underwater plants. After rinsing it in a stream of distilled water, I use it to stroke the backs of the experimental fish. No one pets fish, I know, but these fish seem to enjoy it. It calms me, anyhow. I pity these fish, them not knowing what’s going on and being in isolation except during the aggression trials. As I stroke them I think about the girl in the red bathing suit, the look she gave me as I lay coughing on the pool deck, and then later, in the locker room, how she said in her Romanian accent that she hoped I was ollright. That is the normal way of things, trying to make a person feel less bad about a stupid thing they’ve done, as opposed to Sage’s way, which is to make you feel worse.
He wasn’t always that way, particularly when Isabel was around. One time the two of them caught me singing “Louie Louie” in the garage when I thought I was alone. Isabel laughed, but not in a mean way. She had her electric bass there in the garage beside Sage’s drum kit, and she picked it up and asked what other songs I knew and did I want to sing while she played. She was like that, taking something I considered embarrassing and trying to make it into something cool. She said I had a retro voice like girl bands in the sixties, and she convinced Sage to play the drums while she and I belted out a couple of verses of “Respect.” We sounded good. Even Sage said so. Nowadays he would sooner spit in my face than let me sing with him. I keep telling myself he cannot be angry at me forever, though maybe I am wrong.
The next morning at the breakfast table, Sage does not appear. My father, eating oatmeal with honey, tells me Sage has one of his headaches and that I’ll have to catch the bus to school. Sage gets random migraines that lay him out flat for days.
As I eat my Cheerios I feel bad for my brother, even though he’s been mean to me for months. Being sick is something he and I have tended to do together. Last spring, when neither of us could imagine anything like the accident ever happening in our lives, we both came down with mononucleosis. We spent a week at home by ourselves, ordering videos our parents would never have let us watch and shooting Chloraseptic into each other’s throats. Years before that, we had the chicken pox together. Sage made an oxygen chamber for us out of blankets and couch cushions and told me I was not allowed to leave. We stayed in there for hours, watching cartoons and sweating through our fevers, while our mother brought us soup and juice and Children’s Tylenol. This was in our house in Baltimore, with one very small room for both of us. We slept in bunk beds and played with the same toys and even wore some of the same clothes.
When I finish breakfast my father asks me to take Sage some Imitrex and a glass of water. I go up to his room but he’s in the bathroom, so I leave the pills and water on his desk. As I’m leaving I see Isabel’s bass lying beside the bed. Her parents let Sage keep it after she died, which makes me think they must have known how much she loved him. I pick it up and touch the smooth neck and the polished black body. The name ISABEL is painted on the bass in silver paint, my brother’s work, the letters long and crooked and childlike. I pull the strap over my head, feeling the weight of the bass in my shoulders. Then the bathroom door opens. Sage comes out in just pajama pants, his hair wild. When he sees me with the bass he crosses the room in three swift steps, grabs the bass by the neck, and jerks the strap from around my shoulders.
“Don’t ever come in here,” he says, his ribs pumping, his eyes glassed with hate and headache. “Get out, or I’ll fucking kill you.”
I go to the door. “There’s some medicine on the desk.”
He gives me a shove toward the hall. When he slams the door behind me, the whole wall shakes.
I go into my bathroom, close the door, and sit down on the edge of the bathtub. Though I don’t have time to cry, I cry anyway. My father says goodbye to me through the bathroom door, and I say goodbye back, trying to make my voice sound normal. To my surprise, he buys it. I wait until I hear the garage door go down, and then I wash my face, say goodbye to the fish, and get my books and lunch money. I am late again. I have to run through the snow to catch the bus, and along the way my shoe comes off and I take one cold wet step. Everyone finds this hilarious, even the bus driver.
School offers me no comfort today. In History we watch a movie about the Civil War, with cheerful fife music and reenactments of people being shot to pieces. During Biology there’s a fire drill. We all stand outside shivering for half an hour. In Math I find out that the two sisters I usually eat lunch with, Salma and Meena Padmanabhan, are out of school for a Hindu holiday. So at lunchtime I go down to the loading dock near Auto Shop to smoke a crushed cigarette stolen from Sage’s pack. It’s bent at the end and smells like raisins. I try to light it with someone’s thrown-away Bic, but the lighter won’t stay lit and the cigarette’s too wet and stale to do anything. I sit down on a milk crate and watch the wind blow dead leaves and bits of hard dirty snow.
This afternoon there are only two other kids out smoking: Mike Milldow, a tall stringy kid in a plaid flannel shirt, and Althea London, a girl with chopped black hair and a purple eyebrow ring. Althea, a senior, used to be friends with Isabel. She’s talking to Mike about some band called Manila, which she likes and he hates. “They’re even worse than Hangtooth,” Mike says, and Althea says, “Hangtooth rocks.” She blows smoke and flicks ashes in my direction, her eyes narrow and green and ringed with black makeup.
I know she’s thinking about Isabel when she looks at me, maybe wishing it had been me who died instead. Althea was one of the last people to see Isabel alive. She’d been with us earlier that night, when we sneaked into the backyard of a new house and used the hot tub. It was Ty Thibodeaux’s idea, a friend of my brother’s. Ty worked weekends as a hot tub installer and knew where all the tubs were, the places where people were building houses on the north side of town. Sometimes he got the tubs hooked up weeks before the owners moved in.
I would never have gone along if I hadn’t been standing around in the garage with Sage and Isabel and Althea London when Ty drove up in his old Buick. He and a couple of other guys came into the garage to fool around with Sage’s equipment and smoke cigarettes. There was talk about going to check out a new hot tub. Everyone was excited except me. I’d been having a great time there in the garage, and now everyone was going to leave. I turned to go inside, and that was when Isabel said, “Hey, Maddy, you can come if you want.”
“No she can’t,” Sage said, looking up from his drums.
“Sure she can,” Isabel said.
“Yeah, why not?” said Althea London, who had no reason to hate me then.
“She’s just a kid,” Sage said. “She can’t.”
“Go get your jacket, Maddy,” Isabel said, and that seemed to settle it. If Sage had been driving he probably would have fought harder, but this was before the black Pinto. So I ran inside to get a suit and towel, and then we were off, me and Sage and Isabel and Althea London, all piled in Isabel’s Toyota, Isabel singing along with the radio. I felt lucky and cool and older, and a little nervous. I wished Sage would stop sulking and act like it was okay for me to be there. He sat in the passenger seat with his feet up on the dashboard, scowling.
“Sit normal,” Isabel said, but he refused.
We followed Ty past broken-down farms and wooded hills and a water tower lit up yellow, all the way to the new developments, where half-built houses stood on bare dirt lots. Out on one of the cul-de-sacs there was an almost-finished house, a blue two-story with white shutters and a three-car garage. They hadn’t put down sod in the yard or finished pouring the concrete of the walkway, and one wall of the garage still had to have its siding put on. But around back, in the middle of a redwood deck, was a brand-new eight-person Jacuzzi. Ty unclipped the cover and hit a switch on a control panel, and the tub lit up and started bubbling. Everyone cheered. We were out in the middle of nowhere, with no one around to hear us.
I unrolled my bathing suit from the towel and looked for a place to change, but suddenly all around me people were taking their clothes off—shirts, pants, underwear, everything. I couldn’t keep myself from staring at Sage as he pulled off his shirt and jeans. I hadn’t seen him naked since we were kids, and suddenly there was the dark hair between his legs, and his pale penis. Isabel was naked too, her arms crossed over her chest. She looked nervous at first, but then she opened her arms and let the wind hit her and she laughed and shivered, her hair all loose and messed up, her skin going pink. She was so beautiful that for a minute I forgot to be freaked out by what was happening. I started taking off my clothes like everyone else, feeling the wind hit my skin. Then I saw Sage looking at me, waiting for me to take my shirt off, his mouth curling as if he were getting ready to say something mean. So I went down some stairs to the side of the deck and put my suit on. It was freezing down there, in no clothes, with nothing but hard ground beneath my feet.