The Sea of Light (10 page)

She turns to blow a kiss.

Delgado!

In the dark I rock back and forth, close the eyes and lose them all, spin dizzy without moving, open eyes and hear them again:

Delgado!

Swing the bag in one hand, red, blue, gold trim around embossed letters:
SOUTHERN—
THE BIG U. It’s heavy with wet towels, wrung-out racing suits, soap and shampoo and skin cream.

Delgado!

Look around. The empty stands have a worn, desperate feel. Shift the bag from hand to
hand, pace. The pool sparkles, golden-lit, new. But the walls are as tired as the city itself. Ceiling lights bleach them of stains.

Up near the ceiling the electronic timer displays multiple zeroes. Zero. That is you, Delgado. Bunny rabbit. Tonto. The great American hero.

There’s a bus waiting, but Sager isn’t even in it yet and it will wait a while longer. Close eyes and turn around, move in a slow and leisurely dance. Now, no tension. Now loose and full of grace. All at the wrong time. Off today, boy were you off today, Delgado.

But I pulled out whatever was there for the relay, didn’t I? Nailed that dive. Because, like she says, we are special. So we ought to have whatever we want. Anything. Just reach out to touch. Reach out. And take it.

“Babe?
Babe!”

It sounds through the door. A thin whisper and faint rapping sound, tiny fist against wood.

“Ba-
abe
!”

I freeze. Dark spins. All the bleachers gone, the lights and people and splashing gone, gone the smell of chlorine, of soggy things crushed against the bottom of a bag, echo of sneakers squishing pool decks and bus gears grinding through downtown cities for the airport. Liz and Kenny gone. Kemo Sabe gone. Alone in my room in the dark, sweating terribly, out of shape, sound frozen in my throat while Teresa knocks on the door insistently whispering my name.

“Hey,
Babe!”

It’s like my heart’s trying to get out through my chest. I fumble along the wall for the light and flick it again, remember to breathe once, twice, try to still the shaking of hands and legs, run a shirtsleeve over my face. I open the door.

Teresa stands there looking up. Her pajamas are buttoned all wrong—one hole empty at the top, an extra button undone at the bottom. She alone can make me smile. Her hair is soft, caught between hallway shadows and the sure yellow light of the room, half of it is black, half a shimmering gold. She blinks, pouty lips trembling.

“Babe, what’s wrong?”

“Wrong? Nothing’s wrong.”

“Yes it is. I heard you talking.”

“Talking?”

“Yes. Like you were talking to somebody—were you? But there’s nobody here.”

“Me? No. Oh, no.” I kneel, run a hand through my hair and steady myself until for a moment things feel almost okay, all right enough, anyway, to touch my little sister’s shoulder, touch her cheeks gently. “Listen, Toots, it’s nothing. You had a bad dream.”

“But I heard—”

“Forget about it, Toots. You see anyone here now?”

The dark eyes run cautiously around the room, uncertain. When they meet mine they’re confused—makes me feel incredibly guilty.

“No,” she says finally, puzzled. “No, I don’t.”

“Well then, there
isn’t
anyone else, okay? So you don’t have to worry. Everything’s fine.”

Sure, Delgado, it’s all just swell. Just as fine and swell as it can be.

I pick Teresa up and stand. Both shoulders ache, pain shoots along the left rib cage, across the groin, jets through both knees.

To what do you owe your longevity, champ?

To drugs. And surgery.

I kick the pain off, kick away memories, hug my sister closely so that her soft little-girl hair crushes against my cheek. It’s calming, very gentle and sweet.

“Come on, Toots, let’s put you to bed,”

“I don’t want to go!”

“Shhh! What if they all wake up? Come on, I’ll read to you if you like—”

“How come you get to stay up all the time?”

“Because I’m afraid to sleep.”

“That’s
bullshit.”

It’s not but I give a laugh anyway. Step into the hall carrying Teresa, nudge the bedroom door closed behind and move slowly with this burden, soles silent against the thick wall-to-wall carpet, silent under the ticking grandfather clock that’s been in my mother’s family for generations—since the time they were forced to free their slaves, or something like that.

“You want me to read to you?”

“Yes.”

“What do you want me to read?”

‘The Cat and the Rat.”

On my shoulder the kid’s dark hair is messy, floats around her face like a halo in the dim glow of nightlight, and I tuck her in.

“All right, Toots, I’ll read for a while. But then you have to go to sleep.”

“It isn’t fair.”

“What isn’t fair?”

“It just isn’t.”

The lampshades on her dresser are decorated with happy clowns and rabbits that have pink noses and these perpetually cheerful grins. I turn one lamp on and search the floor for books, find
The Cat and the Rat,
then read quietly for a while until I give a glance sideways sitting there on the edge of Teresa’s bed and see that she’s about to doze off, lips parting, eyelids sagging, hint of a snore in each breath, one more page will do it.

“‘I say,’ said the Rat, ‘it’s getting almost impossible to live in this house with that mean old Cat!’”

That’s the ticket. Turn the page but she’s already asleep, drooling a little onto the pillow. Her face is smooth and innocent. I turn out the dresser lamp when I leave.

*

The light in my room is still on. For a moment I’m grateful. Then I hate the light and the stark flat way it shows my face in the mirror. Fat, Delgado, you are fat. Big fat paleface, I mean totally out of shape.

The day washes up through the hole, floods over. Closet beckons once more feebly but the plea is too weak this time, I am too tired to listen. So I do the usual: Head for bed and kick off my shoes and snap a bedside lamp on before turning the overhead off, grab a thick novel from the shelf and crack it open, slide under the covers fully dressed. Just get into that empty blank place, Delgado, that place deep inside the hole where there is nothing—no thought, no image, no feeling or memory.

There, yes. You can do it automatically now.

And you can deal, right?

This thick book sits uselessly next to me on the bed. A decoy. In case my dad pokes his head in and sees me, he’ll think I fell asleep reading, too tired to turn off the light. How many mornings have I fooled him like that? Kept the eyes closed, pretending? Too many to count.

The day swarms up and out, sick flood in my guts.

What did I promise Brenna Allen? To try? And accepted a free ride?

What I want now is to erase the promises and signatures as if they never were, take everything back and say, See, I can’t possibly do any of this, it has all been a terrible mistake, I am sorry. But I sat there over lunch instead, even managed to make some kind of small talk. Sat there in the office with the good calm lights and shelves stocked with books, took a black pen in my hand and signed a letter of intent. All these things I did, for real. Like, it’s going to be so easy.

You and me, Kenny. Things ain’t what they used to be.

Delgado!

What the air sounded like after a while. I held onto him and the flotation cushion, ripped through the outer cover with my fingers to moor his hands inside it to make a stronghold.

Delgado!

It was the wind, yes. Because neither one of us spoke. We couldn’t. I thought that maybe he was dead. Broken body bent against one cushion, circled by another, neck at crazy angles, I couldn’t even tell if he was breathing. Things punched down my throat into the hole—water, salt, wind, the sick seesaw motion and ugly fire of thirst, sudden crunching agony when sharp things knocked into me and him, and for some reason I do not even remember I clutched the torn shreds stuffing the flotation cushion and refused to let go. Until everything blew up swollen inside, burning pain of mouth and lips, each soggy breath fought for, resounding like a scream.

Kenny, I said, what about sharks.

The cold. Made me shiver until I could hardly breathe, could barely keep holding on. Then heat. Sunlight glinted off metal on the water, wormed its way through the swollen slits my eyes had become. In the middle of the heat and light I started to shiver again, to shiver so hard I thought my fingers would rattle free of the cushion and leave me to sink, to drown.

Dog meat.

Shoulders and legs not working right. Something broken. I could not swim. Could not see, because of what shone blindingly off the water and surrounded us, making everything shudder and blaze. This light. This light.

And I asked, Kenny, where are we? Asked, in a croak I could not hear: Do you see it?

Then thought I heard someone call my name.

Delgado.

But I don’t remember.

Closet door. Photographs. The little notes scrawled. Names on a calendar.

That light.

I’ve forgotten so much.

“Delgado,” I whisper, just to hear someone say it.

My fingers are cold. I run them over the cover of the paperback on the bedspread. Maybe I have read this book, too, and just don’t remember. Maybe this is life from now on, fatso, and everything will be like this: You will crawl through all the seconds; all the minutes, managing smiles to protect everyone else from the hole you know is there waiting for you, making promises that cannot be kept, in a world of sick guts and frightened longing, until it will seem that there has never been anything inside of you but the failure. It will seem that you have never been capable of any motion at all except to rip into something and grab and cringe, dig your fingers in and hold fast to the pain, have never carried anything off with sureness, or elegance, or grace.

*

My big, graceful girl.

Señorita de mi corazón!
He’d call me that, too—every night as soon as he got home from work, toss me in the air. He twirled me in circles like an airplane, dangled me upside down, played bucking bronco while I perched astride, digging in imaginary spurs. It was pretty outrageous. I mean, I don’t think the other kids got that—not Jack, for sure, not Roberto.

Señorita de mi corazón!
He said it, for the last time, when I was six years old. The year I started to swim.

It was my dad who drove me places. To clubs, to different coaches. Because, they said, I had talent, had to be developed. But I’d bug him on those drives, stick a hand out the window until cold wind whipped through my fingers into the car with a moaning sound.

Why do we have to go so far away to swim?

Because. It’s too cold at the beach.

No it’s not.

It is, Babe. It is. If you got in the water there now, guess what would happen?

What?

You’d turn into a terrible
chica de hielo.
Do you know what that is? A
chica de hielo?

No.

An
ice girl.
A girl who turns into frozen white forever, and makes everything she touches cold. That’s what you’d be—a terrible ice girl.

No
way.

Yes indeed,
señorita.
Just remember that. Never turn into an ice girl, Babe. Promise me. Don’t ever turn into an ice girl.

Okay, I told him. Okay, I promise.

Now we’re here together for another long drive. But Jack is with us, stuck between suitcases and things in the backseat like a slob, plugged into his Walkman. Glancing sideways at my dad while he drives, I can’t say for sure that I’ve kept the old promise at all.

*

“Why do they call it
Indian
summer? Do they mean American Indian or, like, Pakistani?” Jack unplugs himself, rummages in the trunk, hauls out a couple of bags and a box packed thickly with books, drops them on the ground. I give him my disgusted look.

“You shouldn’t take it personally, honey,” my father bugs me. It’s the thing with Mom again—he can’t get it off of his mind and I wish he would.

“I don’t.”

“She thought too many cooks would spoil the broth.”

Jack’s struggling across the parking lot already. I head him off and fight. He doesn’t put up that much resistance—no upper body strength—and I grab the heaviest suitcase. Hear my father locking doors and trunk, coming after us, and I hurry ahead to avoid him.

I couldn’t give a damn about the whole mess, really. He and she can slug it out at the country club. On the new patio. In their bedroom. Either way, I’m out of it.

There are carts full of suitcases, opened cartons of notebooks and records and clothes, music ripping from a dozen rooms, kids with parents or with each other hauling things around. The place looks like some airport in time of war. At Southern, things were pretty nice and calm until all the parental units left. Then shit flew from the slingshots to the walls.

Seventh floor, Delgado—your brand-new Division II home, all expenses paid.

Hold the elevator! he yells.

We don’t.

*

He gave me a check this morning.

But I signed the letter, Dad. It’s a free ride, I told you.

Take it,
he insisted.
Take it, open a bank account somewhere, I just don’t want you to worry about anything, honey.

I’m not worried, I said.

Well, I almost said it. But I saw there were these tears in his eyes. So I just told him thanks and kissed his nose, folded the check in squares and stuck it into the pocket of my jeans.