Breathing Underwater (25 page)

“Hearing it?”

Mario walks to me. “Don’t let that voice be your elevator music. Turn it up ’til it’s like you’re by the speaker at Lollapalooza. Then, turn it off and listen to something else.

“For me, the voice stopped when I decided to teach these classes, to work with men like myself. I told my father about my new life plan and got his voice in stereo. I watched him, yelling, hopping like a live fish on a frying pan, and I thought: If I met this idiot at the supermarket, I wouldn’t ask his opinion about whether the tomatoes were fresh. I stopped listening that day, and after a while, the voice moved out.” He looks at me. “You can’t respect yourself if you’re letting someone beat you up—inside or out. What you learned here is only half the equation. The other half is self-respect.”

He stops talking. He sits, staring at his hands a long moment. I have something to say but, rather than interrupt him, I raise my hand. When he acknowledges it, I say, “I think I know what you’ve been trying to teach us.” This time, I have the words I want.

He nods for me to go on, and I say, “It’s about being a man, isn’t it? A real man. Not just about who’s bigger or stronger or who gets more women. But…” I stop. Everyone’s looking at me, and I don’t like it. I sound like a wuss.

But Mario says, “Go ahead. You’re on the right track.”

I think about not liking to talk with everyone’s eyes on me, and I say, “It’s about doing the right thing even if you don’t want to do it. About taking responsibility for your actions, like you always told us.” I think of Caitlin and add, “It’s about letting go when you really, really want to hold on so bad.”

Mario looks at me a second, then nods. “You passed the test, Nick.”

I glance away. It wasn’t what I wanted to learn. What I wanted was Caitlin back, not the knowledge I’d lost her forever. But I have. How will I learn to deal with it?

Now, Mario’s talking again, saying he’ll report back to the court that we all completed our requirements. He dismisses us for the last time.

After everyone else leaves, I approach him.

“I want to retake the class,” I say.

I expect raised eyebrows—I haven’t been a model student—but he says, “Yes. I’d like that.”

I tap my toes, silently, inside my shoes before saying, “See you next week, then.” I start to leave, then turn back and shove my journal toward him. “Could you read this? I mean, if you have time.”

He takes it. “I’ll find time.” Then he does something shocking. He puts the notebook on his desk and holds out his arms. I hesitate a moment before stepping toward him and letting him take me in. I’ve never hugged a guy before, never really held anyone but Caitlin. The warmth of it surprises me.

We finally separate. I’m out the door before I remember all the things I wrote about my father. I reach for the knob, wanting to ask for my notebook, say I was kidding about coming back.

Then I decide I don’t care—I’ve been trying to breathe underwater too long. It’s time to get some fresh air into my lungs.

I’m watching television, remembering, maybe, what Mario said about self-respect or maybe my point-of-no-return gesture of giving him that notebook. That’s the only way to explain the following:

My father is asleep;

A Marlins game blares on television;

My sneakers rest on the hand-carved fruitwood coffee table;

Along with a juicy can of Mountain Dew.

Thus summoned, my father enters. I don’t move. He storms to the television, slaps the off button three times before it works, then kicks my feet off the table. Except he misses and hits the can instead. It flies toward the ceiling, drenching the sofa, the rug, the table, and my father in a tidal wave of piss-colored liquid. He starts yelling.

I don’t move. I feel my brain short-circuiting, trying to carry me to an alternative reality. I can’t go. I concentrate, instead, on Mario’s words.
Respect yourself
. Mario’s yelling louder than my father, and to shut him up, I look in my father’s eyes. For the first time, I don’t see myself.

“Clean it!” he screams between obscenities. His face is a mask I wouldn’t recognize if it didn’t haunt my dreams. “Clean it, you little shit!”

“No,” I say.

Outside, Biscayne Bay runs dry.

He stops midsentence then says, “What do you mean, no?”

He leans forward, his voice a roar encompassing every insult, slap, and backhand, every emotion I’ve felt. Memories fly, spilling evil and hope like Pandora’s box, and my mind tries to avoid him, tries to run, hide even as my body won’t let it. I can’t go.

I can’t go.

Don’t go.

Don’t.

I stand.

“I didn’t spill it.” My voice is cold.

“What?”

“I’m not cleaning it, because I didn’t spill it.”

The green eyes are wild with disbelief. He starts to say something, stops, then starts again. His head shakes involuntarily, his face purples. He raises his hand. I grab it. Then, the other arm. It takes all my strength to hold him, but somewhere, I find more, and I say—no—I scream:

“You are not going to hit me anymore!”

Silence.

“You are not going to hit me anymore!

“You are not going to hit me anymore, you bastard!”

I don’t know how many times I scream it until, finally, I stop. His mask falls. He makes a small noise, maybe a chuckle, in the back of his throat. Our eyes meet. His are cold again. Mine burn. My face aches as if he hit me. I loosen my hold on him, and feel him pull free, arms, wrists, fingers slipping from my grasp. Not strong, not powerful, just a man. Why did I think he was so strong?

He walks away.

I sink into the Mountain Dew fallout and sit, quiet, until his shoes reach the landing. I lean back. Sun off the water streams through French doors. I hide my eyes.

I remember, now, how to cry.

Junior year, my first-day déjà vu is dulled by the sense that everything’s different, starting with my car. It’s a silver BMW roadster, my father’s latest acquisition. A week after the Mountain Dew incident, I got back from the beach with Kelly and Tiny (can you believe it?) and found my father in my room, sober, calm, almost shy. He sat on the bed, hesitating a long moment.

Finally, he said, “It is not, perhaps, the American way to be hard on one’s children. I have raised you with discipline. How your
Papou
raised me.”

I blurted, “How old were you when you left home?”

His eyes met mine and filled, for one instant, with crystal understanding. He walked out. I knew the answer, though. My father left home at sixteen. Never saw his family again. That day was the only time he’d mentioned my grandfather.

He didn’t bring it up again, but a week later, he brought me the car keys at breakfast. For the first time in my life, he stammered. “I shouldn’t have sold… I should … for your birthday.” He never apologized, but the title was in my name this time. That’s the best he can do.

Today, I pull beside a familiar car, Tom’s white Jeep. He’s alone, but I pretend not to see. Avoiding him is less gut-wrenching than being ignored. I slide my backpack off the seat and head for school.

Tom’s behind me. “Nick!”

Why is he bothering me? I keep walking. He runs behind, yelling my name.

“Funny,” I say, finally. “Thought I heard a voice, but no one here’s speaking to me.”

He catches up. “Nick…”

I turn to face him. His hair is short as the day I first saw him in kindergarten. He’s clutching something, the spring
Seagull
literary journal. He stares at me a moment, not speaking. When I start to walk away, he says, “Caitlin thinks you wrote this.” He points to a page.

“Wrote what?” But I know. It’s my poem, which Higgins agreed to publish anonymously. In the fall edition, there will be two more under my name.

He points again. “This.”

“So? You’re breaking your vow of silence to congratulate me on my writing?”

“So, you wrote it?” When I don’t answer, he adds, “Caitlin doesn’t go to Key anymore. She’s living with her dad. She’s at some special performing arts school.”

It takes me a second to hear that. Then, a minute longer, to understand I’ll probably never see her again. Finally, I say, “That’s great. She loved to sing.” I think I mean it. “That all?”

“You’re not making this easy.”

“Everything’s easy for you.”

“Think so, huh?” He reaches for my arm. I pull away, walking faster. We’re at the chain-link fence that separates the student lot from Key Biscayne High Drive. He runs ahead and blocks the entrance. “Think it’s easy finding out my best friend never told me anything about himself?”

“What are you talking about?”

“This!” He jiggles the paper in his hand. “Caitlin says you wrote this about
me
, this crap about being alone and not wanting to tell your secrets. She said you apologized, she thought you meant it this time. She told me other stuff too, about you and your dad. How could you not have told me that shit?”

“Um, I don’t know. Why don’t I look at you and your perfect life and just open a vein for your entertainment?”

“My life’s not perfect. You know it isn’t. I
told
you.”

“It looked pretty perfect from where I stood.”

He thinks about that and, above the anger in his eyes, I see pity I never wanted from him. I turn away. The late bell rings and, except for a few stragglers, the parking lot is silent. “Look, I have to go.” I push past him and walk toward school.

He speaks to my back. “I thought we were friends.”

“Some friend.” I turn. “First sign of trouble, you took off.”

His eyes avoid mine. “You hurt Caitlin. You hurt her bad. That’s all I saw. I didn’t know you were hurting too. I told you everything, and you kept this huge secret from me.”

“If you’d known, you’d just have found a new best friend sooner—someone more your class.”

Tom looks at me like I loogeyed in his face. “That’s what you think? I’m some snob?”

“Pretty much.”

He bites his lip. “Yeah, that’s what Liana’s family thought too. Called me the Golden Gringo, bugged her until she dumped me. But you, Nick?” He turns away, his voice a strangled whisper. “Screw you for thinking that.”

He starts to cross the street, and suddenly I don’t want him to leave. I yell after him, “What do you want, Tom?”

He stops, blocking traffic. “I want things like they used to be.”

“They aren’t.”

He finishes crossing and sinks onto the curb. I follow him. I can’t say why. “I want to forgive you,” he says, touching his hair. “I want you to forgive me.”

I stand over him. “Why? What Caitlin told you—it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t excuse it. You think I’m some mental case who’s not responsible for my actions?”

“No. I don’t know.” He tips back his head, closing his eyes against looking at me. “Maybe it doesn’t excuse it. Maybe it explains it. I don’t know, maybe I wasn’t a good enough friend, but I want to be.”

I watch Tom, leaning back, staring at the sky now. I’ve always known Tom, but I never looked at him, never saw him before now. He was always Tom the athlete, Tom the most likely to … everything. How could I expect him to see me when I didn’t see him?

“I should have told you,” I say finally. “I just… I didn’t want to lay that on you.”

“You were my best friend,” he says.

“I should have told you.” I gesture at his hair. “You did that for Liana?”

“Doesn’t matter.” But he nods. “She said my dating her was a phase, like the long hair. I needed to rebel against my parents with an
oye
girlfriend.” He runs a hand across his shorn head. “Sure didn’t feel like a phase.”