Right Behind You Page 7

  “Coach, I like the idea, but let me talk to my parents.”

  When I learned to swim I learned the texture, smell, and taste of blue. The water of the pool was the blue of Alaska’s forget-me-nots and it wrapped my skin in its cool liquid embrace when I dived in. It slicked against my skin like velvet as I dolphin kicked. The splash of my strokes drowned out any thoughts in my head, and I loved the flip turn at the pool’s end, tucking under and pushing off, going deep and knowing no flame could ever touch me there.

  I was a coach’s dream. It was never a workout; it was an escape. There was no guilt in the pool, no shame in the blue, clean lanes of water.

  I hit sophomore year with a growth spurt, and with weight training by the end of that year I was exactly what Coach Tulling had predicted: long, lean, wide-shouldered. And aggressive as a shark. I attacked the water like it was the enemy. There was only one lane in the pool. Mine. I didn’t swim to beat anyone else. I swam to beat myself, or maybe to beat myself up. That’s how Dr. Lyman put it.

  I racked up good grades, good times, and blue ribbons at swim meets. I also managed my first actual date and my first actual kiss, which led to more dates and then make-out sessions. Absolutely Cutest and I were an official couple.

  The better life got, the edgier I got. So it was only a matter of time: I had no truth to feed the ghosts, and at some point they were going to demand it.

  One November afternoon of my sophomore year, I came in the house, shuffling through the mail. Carrie had a letter from a lawyer in Houston, Texas.

  Somehow I knew this had to do with Grant. Carrie had recently made contact. Grant didn’t say anything about why he’d been MIA for so long. He was glad she was in Indiana. He was glad to hear she was married and happy. But nothing about himself. He’d only e-mailed once more before he vanished from Carrie’s computer again.

  I propped the letter on the table, put some towels in the wash, and pulled the stuff out to make spaghetti sauce. Carrie had taught me to make it last year, along with a few other classics. Carrie was at every swim meet; I could help her out every now and then by making a few dinners.

  Carrie read the letter with a weird look on her face. She didn’t say anything until Dad got home and we all sat down to eat.

  “I got a letter from Grant’s lawyer,” Carrie said.

  Dad looked up from his spaghetti. “His lawyer?”

  “Yes. Grant . . . Grant died.” Carrie stopped, pressed her lips together until they turned white. Then she spoke again. “I never gave him our snail mail address and I guess I didn’t tell him our last name. It seems I told him your first names and lots of stuff about you, but never actually put in the last name. I just . . . it didn’t seem . . .”

  Dad lifted her hand and kissed it.

  Carrie cleared her throat and took a deep breath. Then another one. “He didn’t tell me he was sick. He didn’t want me to worry. He died three months ago. It took the lawyer awhile to find me.”

  She handed the letter to Dad. “Grant left me the beach house in his will. He said no one else would love it as much as I would.”

  That’s when she broke down in tears. I knew exactly what to do.

  I got up. “Move your skinny butt,” I said, getting up and perching on Carrie’s chair and putting my arm around her. She wiped her eyes and her runny nose with the back of her hand and then rubbed it on my jeans.

  “You are so gross,” I said.

  “You love me anyway,” she said.

  “Yup.”

  I thought about this Grant, a guy I didn’t even know. He gave Carrie a house and a father when she needed one, and maybe Grant’s kindness had ultimately given me Carrie.

  “We need to break up,” Absolutely Cutest said as she looked at my Christmas present.

  “You don’t like the CDs?”

  “Don’t you think you should give your girlfriend something more . . . I don’t know, personal than CDs, Wade?”

  “Personal? I don’t get it.” She had given me a leather thong necklace, which was cool, with a gold dolphin on it, which was cool, with “Love Lindsey” engraved on the back, which was not cool.

  Lindsey handed the CDs back to me. “If these were mix CDs you made for me with songs that were important to us, that’d be different. These are just from the recently released shelf.”

  I scratched the side of my neck. “AC —”

  “There!” She stamped her foot. She actually stamped her foot. “That’s what I mean. AC. You call me AC.”

  “It stands for Absolutely Cutest. How can that be a bad thing?” I wasn’t sure if I was bored or annoyed.

  “Do you even know my name?”

  “Sure, I do. You make sure of that. You want me to wear it around my neck. Do you have to tag me like your gym clothes?” I yanked the necklace off and flung it on the floor.

  “Wade, you’re not emotionally invested enough in our relationship.” She said it like she was reciting from a self-help book. And then she finished it. “That’s it. We’re done.”

  AC must have been right because I didn’t really miss her that much. Dave and I foraged for dates the rest of the year. Three dates in a row with the same person was the longest “relationship” either of us had. We doubled on almost every date. He had moved from best friend to brother-of-a-different-mother status.

  The dating habits of the three B’s dumbfounded me. They dated only within their church. But it was sort of a round-robin. One B would date girl X, then move on to girl Y, and then another B would date girl X. When the first B tired of girl Y, the third B would date girl Z. When he tired of girl Z, he might go to girl X or Y and maybe girl R would enter the picture. What I didn’t get was that nobody was jealous, none of the girls felt used, and there were no hard feelings. Everybody thought all this handing off was normal. It looked incestuous to me.

  My real love story was still the water. The blue that soothed me. No matter what happened that day, the water could wash it out of my system if I swam hard enough. I practiced longer, harder, and more often than any of my teammates. Again and again I made the water prove its value by slicing through it, kicking hard, pushing off, and diving under.

  It paid off early in my junior year.

  “Madison, get out of that pool. Son, you’re growing a set of gills.”

  Coach Redmon stood at the double doors. I tread water and shook my head, clearing my ears.

  “My office, pronto.”

  I toweled off as I headed to the office.

  Coach pointed to the hard plastic chair. “Madison, I’m moving you to varsity. I’ve clocked your workouts for the last two weeks. Compare that to the guys I have coming back and you rack up the best time for the two hundred in the crawl and the butterfly. I’ll make a final decision, but I’m thinking you’ll anchor the eight hundred relay.”

  I draped my towel over my head.

  “That’s what you got to say? Isn’t this what you’ve been working your butt off for?”

  I pulled the towel off. “Sure, Coach, but it scares the hell out of me.”

  “Just swim like the devil’s chasing you in that lane, Madison, and it’ll work out fine.”

  I think that was the moment swimming turned from my savior to my demon. After that I poured my hyper-activity into workouts and into stroking and kicking in the lanes. I shaved seconds, not tenths of seconds, off my time. But it didn’t soothe me anymore.

  “Wade, I’ve noticed you’ve paced the entire hour,” Dr. Lyman said. “You did that last week. And you’re avoiding talking about anything school related. Would you like to discuss that?”

  “I’m not sleeping, lately. I feel antsy all the time. Like I can’t settle. I can’t even stay in my bed. I pace around my bedroom.”

  “What’s making you so anxious?”

  “Anxious? Nothing. I’m not anxious. I’m just . . . uh, a little tense. The swim team. It’s a lot of pressure.” I paced a few more circles around the office. The Grasshopper kept trying to get me to open up, but
all she got from me were more symptoms: the feeling of a weight on my chest, hyperactivity, and dread.

  “What are you dreading?”

  “I need you to tell me that.”

  “Are you afraid that life is too good?”

  I punched the door of her office as I passed it. My pacing gathered speed. My stride lengthened. “Don’t start that again. It doesn’t even make sense.”

  At the end of the hour, The Grasshopper held out a prescription for antianxiety meds. It was one more pill in my arsenal, but I still found myself pacing at night, unable to sleep. I tugged my hair until it hurt. I considered cutting myself, but those swimsuits don’t leave much skin to hide scarring.

  I also found alcohol.

  An accelerant.

  Chapter 17

  GOING UP IN FLAMES

  By the end of January, Absolutely Cutest had reassessed and decided that the other side of the fence was not her choice of green. After a year apart, we were back together. Hot and heavy. She wanted sex. I wanted sex. But I wasn’t sure I wanted sex with AC.

  So when it was time to go for the goal, I backed off. Carrie had recently blown me off my sexual-assumption map by informing me that guys can be sluts. And she pretty much convinced me. Sometimes AC got mad, some-times she thought it was sweet that I “respected” her so much. Sometimes she got weepy and sobbed that I hadn’t changed and still wasn’t “emotionally invested.” I thought that if this kept up, AC was going to grow up and be-come The Grasshopper. Maybe that’s what made me back away.

  Sexual tension mixed with my underlying edginess had my motor revving in the red. I huffed and puffed and paced and ticked and tocked.

  The B’s had been getting wasted since last year, puking Friday and Saturday nights and praying on Sunday morning. They had a cooperative church friend who was twenty-one. For a small “finder’s fee” he was happy to keep them supplied.

  I knew from Anger Management classes on the ward that alcohol and managing anything is a no-go, so I had always passed on it. But one night we were all piled into Brett’s SUV after we’d taken our dates home, and I was coming off another frustrating round with AC. Brett offered me a beer for the hundredth time, and this time I took it.

  Never one to do anything slow and easy, I upended it and guzzled. It was cold and soothing as it gentled its way down my throat.

  Brett slapped another longneck into my hand. “Slow down, bad boy. If you pass out, we’re leaving you here.”

  I drank the second one slower and took a third from the cooler myself. By the time I drank it, the alcohol was catching up. Since my system was chock-full of mood-altering meds, the effect was a full-on buzz and light show.

  I became an advocate.

  But I was also an athlete. I had learned from the highly educated how to reign myself in. I rarely drank during the week. And I didn’t let it interfere with workouts. My grades were good enough that a little slippage wasn’t a problem. I’d pull them up after swim season.

  The flameout started with the district swim meet. The big one. It was go-for-broke time and my head hurt. The lights over the water sparked glaring reflections that drove spikes of pain through my eyes and into my brain.

  Coach stalked in front of four of us.

  “Okay, the individual events are history. Madison, just because you won every one of yours doesn’t mean it’s time to retire. You’re the anchor for the eight hundred relay. Kevin, Andy, Robby, it’s your job to put Madison in position, and Madison, you pull out the win. Do that and the whole meet is ours. And I want it.”

  Coach Redmon planted himself in front of me. “I want this district win, you got that, Wade?” He strode away without an answer.

  The bleachers were full. Screaming, cheering, and whistling. It almost made me sick to my stomach. My head throbbed in time with the chants. The whistles were full-on assaults. I couldn’t wait to get in the water and drown out the sights and sounds. To be alone in the blue.

  I shook out my arms and shoulders and tried to ease the tension from my neck. The hours in the chlorinated water had paled and scaled my skin and it goose-pimpled in the air.

  Kevin, our first swimmer, set up on the platform, the buzzer sounded, and the swimmers hit the water. Kevin hit second and dolphin kicked hard and steady, then broke just behind the lead, his stroke smooth but robotlike. His time never wavered. He hit the wall and flipped, gaining on the leader and stroking out in his deadly pre-cision, eating up the lead. He finished his two hundred leading by half a length, and the home crowd was nuts.

  Andy hit clean, but his kick lacked thrust.

  “That sissy kick of his always gives up my lead,” Kevin muttered.

  “Like you don’t say that every meet,” I said. “All he has to do is keep Merrillville or Hammond from running away.”

  “I’ll bring it back so Wade can bring it home,” Robby said.

  Andy powered through, but despite his strong arms, he lost the lead and dropped into third, then into fourth. Disaster. He hit the wall after his two hundred, sobbing.

  Robby had a long, stretched-out dive and a huge kick. He went after the water like he owned it.

  “There he goes again. Coach is already screaming at him,” Kevin said.

  Robby had a habit of looking for the other swimmers; he wanted to see his opponent. Coach screamed that the head swivels slowed him down. But I knew that an enemy in his water gave Rob the urge to conquer. He had made up two places when he finished his two hundred, and I hit the lane.

  I swam to punish my body. I stretched out long, I kicked hard, and I held my breath until my lungs burned. It was me, the lane, the water, and in the end, the wall.

  I knew nothing until I came up and my teammates were hauling me out of the water and hugging me. I couldn’t hear anything but the roar in the gym. Finally Coach made me understand. I had passed the two leaders and beaten them by two lengths and set a state high school record.

  “You’re a hero, Madison!”

  Coach had his district meet and a state record. I had a headache that was making me see double. Soon, Dad and Carrie were hugging me, Absolutely Cutest was kissing me, and people I didn’t know slapped my back or shook my hand. The roars and cheers and whistles were nothing but pain.

  I gulped down a handful of aspirin before a hot shower and my headache eased enough to officially celebrate with the team and our girlfriends (if we had any). Later the guys-only celebration with my real friends was well under way in a fallow cornfield. We had cheap beach chairs and a small fire and lots of beer and vodka. We also had weed. The B’s weren’t smoking, but Jay was showing Dave and me the glories of our first marijuana buzz. We were righteously trashed.

  Brett held up his beer. “Here’s to our hero.”

  “Buzz B, buzz!” Dave said.

  “Cut the crap. It’s a swim meet. I didn’t discover the cure for cancer.” God, how did that slip out of my mouth? My mother’s pained, wasted face at the end of her life flashed in front of me. My headache came back screaming. I rolled the cold beer bottle against my forehead.

  “The Wade man is too ugly to be a hero,” Dave said, and took another hit of the weed. “Hey, I heard something tonight. But it’s so ridunculous . . .” Dave stopped. “That doesn’t sound right.”

  “Toke virgins. You gotta love ’em,” Jay said. “The word is ‘ridiculous,’ but go on with your story, blockhead.”

  “Anyway, it’s too ridunculous to believe for a minute,” Dave continued, still not in control of words any more than three syllables.

  “Just spill,” Brandon said. “At this rate you’re going to pass out before we hear anything.”

  “Anna Thompson. I think all of you dated her?”

  “Not me,” Jay said.

  “You don’t count. You’re not of their religious preposition.” He pointed his roach at the B’s.

  “Me neither,” said Brandon. “Haven’t been there yet. I’m still dating Jen. Brett was the last one to date Anna.”

  “W
hatever. Anna says Brett is dating out of your prayer circle. Way out.”

  The dope must have kicked in because I thought it humorous that one of the B’s had finally stopped incestuous dating.

  Brandon snorted. “Now you see why I never dated Anna. She’s mean and a gossip.” He took another big swig of his beer. But Brendan lowered his bottle and stared at Brett. “Anna might be a little mean, but Brett’s been pretty secretive lately. And not hanging with us so much. So, what’s the deal, Brett?”

  Dave waved the roach back and forth, dismissing Brendan. “You didn’t let me tell you the rest. It’s too stupid. Anna says Brett is doing the dirty deed. With . . .” He paused, dragged hard, held the smoke, then exhaled. “Kelley Hamilton.” Total silence.

  Kelley Hamilton had been one of my classmates in Indiana history in ninth grade. She had tats on her arms and legs and had shaved her eyebrows and replaced them with rows of rings and studs. She had nose rings, a tongue stud, more earrings than I could count, and probably some personal piercings I didn’t want to think about.

  “Bible Boy and Tattoo and Piercing Queen did the No-Pants Dance?” This from Jay. “No shit?”

  Dave chuckled. “Like anyone would believe . . .”

  “Believe it,” Brett said. He looked across the fire at Brandon, who rose to his feet, his knuckles white as he clutched his longneck beer bottle.

  “Brett.” Brandon said the word low and hard. A warning.

  Brett looked at each of us before he spoke; his voice was firm and steady.

  “She works at the coffee shop, and I got to know her. She’s not what you think. She’s sweet and she cares about me. And if you’re my friends, I’m asking you to be a friend to her.”

  As he talked and I watched his face, something occurred to me. He looked like Carrie had when she talked about Dad. Brett had found his “hunk o’ love.” And I knew something else. I had never felt that way about Absolutely Cutest.

  “Brett, if she’s your girl, Kelley is good with me,” I said.