“My arm did it because it’s so strong and healed,” I said.
Mom was scrunched on the floor cleaning milk. Sometimes when I talk, she looks like she’s going to laugh but doesn’t. This was one of those times.
I put my napkin on top of the spinach to clean off the milk.
“Andy,” Maggie said, while she got five or maybe six more paper towels. “I know you’re upset that you might not be able to swim, but you’ve got to think before you react.” She sounded exactly like Mom.
“I do,” I said. That was sort of a lie. I try to think before I act, but sometimes I forget.
Mom stood up. “We’ll check your arm again in the morning.” She threw away the milky paper towels. “If it still looks good and you feel up to it, you can swim.”
“I’ll feel up to it, Mom,” I said. I had to be there. I was the secret weapon, Ben told me. I was the magic bullet.
The pool was the only place where my start button was a very good thing.
Chapter Eight
Maggie
I WAS SPACED-OUT AS I LINED UP MY TEAM of ten little Pirates at the end of the indoor pool. Aidan Barber pranced around like he had to pee and I hoped that wasn’t the case.
“Stop dancing, Aidan,” I called to him, “and find your mark.”
He obeyed, but then Lucy Posner actually sat down on the edge of the pool and started picking at her toenails.
“Lucy! Stand up! The whistle’s going to blow any minute.”
Lucy looked surprised and jumped to her feet. I usually loved these kids. I was good with them. Incredibly patient. That’s what the parents always told me. You’re so much more patient with them than I am, Maggie, they’d say. Now that I was floating through this meet like I was in a weird dream, I had no patience at all. I wanted it to be over.
People talked about canceling the meet, since it was only a week since the fire. It was like Mom had called me to say the church was on fire minutes ago instead of days; I was still that shaken up. I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing flames and smoke pouring out of the church and was afraid of what I’d dream if I shut my eyes.
Since I coached the little kids’ team, I had some say about if we should hold today’s meet between our team, the Pirates, and the Jacksonville team, the Sounders. I voted for canceling. I told Ben, who coached Andy’s team, that it was totally insensitive to hold it, but mostly I didn’t think I could concentrate. Ben wasn’t much in the mood for a meet either. He still had a bandage over the gash on his forehead, and he was on pain meds for his headache.
One of the girls who was in the burn center at UNC was on Ben’s team, though, and her parents wanted us to have the meet. The kids need it, her mother said. They need the normalcy. They persuaded Ben, and I didn’t have much choice but to go along.
The whistle blew and my kids were off, paddling furiously through the water in a way that usually made the people in the bleachers laugh, but either there was less laughter today or I couldn’t hear it through the fog in my head. I shouted encouragement to my kids without really thinking about what I was saying.
I got through their event—they lost every match and that was probably my fault—but they didn’t care. I hugged every one of their cold, wet little bodies as they came out of the pool and told them they did great. I was so glad it was over. I pulled my shorts on over my bathing suit and headed for the bleachers. Ben passed me as his team came together at the end of the pool.
“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