Read Online How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer - Free Book Online Page B

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