Underwater(12)

“So. I have to admit, your excitement about meeting Evan the last time we talked made me hopeful you might be ready to try something new. Something simple.” She pulls out her notebook and looks at me to make sure I’m following. “But now I’m wondering if it’s the right time for that. What do you think?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Well, there’s a mailbox. It’s just down the block. I was thinking we could try to walk there sometime. We could send something.”

“What? Like a letter?”

“Anything. Even something for your mom. But a letter is a great idea. I can help you with it.”

I think of the outdoors and how good fresh air and warm sun used to feel, but there’s no way I can make it to the mailbox. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay. I hear you.” She looks at me with her soft eyes. “But please think about it. I’d be right there with you. We could do it together. Baby steps.”

“I don’t even know who I would write to.”

“You can write to anybody.”

“Why would someone care if they got a letter from me?”

“I’m sure lots of people would be thrilled. Sage. Your grandmother. Your dad.”

“I don’t even know where my dad is.”

“You could still write him a letter as an exercise.”

I think of all the letters I wrote to my dad through his multiple tours in Afghanistan. In middle school, I’d tell him about my collection of first-place ribbons hanging on the knob of my top dresser drawer. I’d tell him about my mom and Ben and chocolate chip cookies. When I was fifteen and high school was new, I’d send him detailed accounts of all the things I was doing and seeing and being. I’d tell him about my swim meets and how I’d clocked the fastest time on my 4x100 freestyle relay team. I’d tell him about my straight A’s. I’d tell him about an AP exam. My letters took weeks to get to him. When I was younger, he’d write me back long, detailed accounts of the hot desert and the sandstorms that whipped up around him in the middle of the day. He would tell me he missed me and to give my mom and Ben the biggest hugs I could. But as I got older, I’d be lucky to get back a quick postcard. And eventually, I didn’t hear back from him at all. He pulled further and further away.

I definitely took it personally.

He didn’t even try to get in touch with me after everything that happened at my school on October fifteenth. And he wasn’t even deployed at the time. He was just too far gone. He was drunk and had disappeared.

“War is a mindf*ck,” he said when he got back from Afghanistan at the end of September a year and a half ago and drank more than he ever had before. As a kid, I remember my dad being a person who’d drink a beer or two at a party or a sporting event or a weekend barbecue. But by last year, he had become a person who constantly reeked of hard liquor. He was spiraling and numbing the pain of whatever flashbacks were giving him nightmares and making him cry out in his sleep. He was short-tempered and made scenes in the courtyard of Paradise Manor. He yelled at me because I hadn’t done the dishes or mopped up the water puddle Ben made when I pulled him out of the bath. It was exhausting and embarrassing. By Halloween, after he tossed all our jack-o’-lanterns over the railing in front of our apartment in a drunken rage while everyone in the building watched them smash to pieces below, my mom told my dad they needed to take some time apart. My dad moved in with my uncle Matt six hours down the coast. I’d always liked my uncle, but a part of me was jealous that my ten-and seven-year-old cousins were getting to spend more time with my dad than Ben and I. I assumed he was getting help—he wasn’t—and they were getting a better version of him.

Ben asked about our dad a lot, which is probably why my mom invited my dad for Christmas that year.

A last-ditch effort.

He didn’t come, of course.

My mom filed for divorce the very next day.

If I wrote my dad a letter, I would definitely have a lot to say. But I’m not sure I want to put that down on paper at the moment.

“Will you at least think about going outside?” Brenda asks when I walk her to the door.

I nod. I think she thinks I’m really going to think about it. Maybe she sees something in me that I don’t.

*

After Brenda’s gone, I sit at the computer and scroll through Facebook for the first time in a long time. I see the things my old swim teammates are doing without me. They are at new schools on other swim teams. I didn’t even bother to look into joining the team when I transferred to Ocean High after October fifteenth. It’s like I had some innate understanding that I wouldn’t last there until swim season. And now the people I used to swim with have made other friends. Better friends. They have smiles on their faces that make them look like they’re not afraid to keep living. I wonder if it’s a lie. I wonder if deep down inside they feel something other than what they’re saying.

Like Sage.

After the vigils and before she would’ve switched schools, Sage moved to Montana with her parents and younger sister. They had family there. Her move made it easier for me to push her away even though the last time I talked to her, she was suffering, too.

“Today was a bad day,” she murmured, confiding in me the way one best friend should be able to confide in the other. “I kept seeing my classroom and that boy who fell over on the desk in front of me. Did I tell you about him? His eyes just rolled right up into his head. Don’t you see it all the time, too?”