Drowning (A Short Story)

Drowning

by Matthew Stalbaum

            I don’t remember how old I was when I first asked my father what happened to my mother. But I remember light, speckled by tree branches rocking in the breeze, streaming in through a window and washing over the floor. It swirled like we were underwater, dancing chaotically but with a strange rhythm I couldn’t define; it reminded me of the ocean, its man-swallowing depths, the blue, choppy surface stretching to the horizon and falling off the Earth.

I remember being small enough to fit in my father’s arms, his bear-hugs encasing me completely, burying my face in the smell of his sweat. My own arms only reached to the sides of his stomach, and I would squeeze there tight until he conceded, sucking in his stomach and emptying all the air from his lungs across my neck, like wind from a storm. I would call him “Black Bear” for his dark brown skin and his towering figure, and he would call me “Little Cub.”

 “Little cub,” he said, cradling me. “Your mother is somewhere else.”

            I asked, “Where?”

            “In a place too far for us to reach,” he said.

            Heaven didn’t exist yet for me. There was no world outside of my father’s protective presence. I asked, “Can she visit us?”

            “We’ll discuss it another time, Peter,” he said in that baritone voice of his. Years later, he would use that voice when he needed me to listen to him closely, to trust him. “Let’s get you to bed,” he said, “come on little cub.”

            “Black bear!” I shouted, appeased enough, and his dark face descended over mine in a kiss.

During summers when I was a child, my father would take me to the neighborhood swimming pool. The waters were crowded with kids too young and parents too old to be shy with their bodies. The few teenagers there were just learning self-consciousness, staying submerged in the deep end, their torsos rippling amorphously beneath the surface. Two high school lifeguards sat on high, watching over us with bored looks, begging for and dreading a chance to take action, blow their whistles, and dive in. Circling the pool were those lounge-chairs that held you up with a succession of plastic bands, tight enough to support your weight but loose enough to lose your pocket-change through, colored sickly shades of yellow or green. I can only associate the pool with sunlight and heat, burning the soles of my feet as I ran along the edges. Whenever a storm-cloud approached, we would all scatter before the lightening could strike us down. My father was always the first, leading me along before anyone else even noticed it.

He took me on Sundays, when the house filled with an oppressive lethargy hanging in the air like molasses. I would dip my toes into the icy cold water, my gut contracting with the idea of that iciness all over. After a minute or two I’d force my feet to run against the hesitation and leap, splash, sink into the tundra-waters as they gradually turned warm and soothing. My father in his blue and green swim-trunks and an old work shirt would sit on a pool-chair by the edge, pretending to read, smiling at the sky and his pool-side neighbors and me tumbling about like a young dolphin. I could float along the surface on those buoyant pool-toys, the pool-bottom falling away, my legs hanging freely over what felt like an abyss. This, to me, was what it felt like to hang-glide. From that level the water was calm and clean, light glittering off like liquid glass.

            One day, when I was 8, the pool-toy slipped out from underneath my arms, floating away toward open water. I sank and saw the surface from below: rough, blurry, the sunlight turned dull and flat. When my toes reached the bottom, I made small leaps toward the pool-wall.

The edge felt close enough to hold on to but I couldn’t – the wall was slick, my fingers slipped every time. My eyes and mouth burned from the chlorine; I couldn’t stop choking. The sky and water dissolved into a blue chaotic blur.

Then a pair of hands grabbed at my arms and pulled me into my father’s fearful face. He patted my back as I coughed up pool water on him. “Breathe deep,” he told me while hugging me close, “just breathe in deep as you can.”

            When my eyes stopped burned, I noticed people staring at us. An older woman strolled over. I recognized her, as someone who always came alone. “Is he alright?” she asked my father. “I saw all that splashing but couldn’t make out what it was.”

            “He’s alright,” he said, eyeing her warily. “Just had a little scare.”

            She looked into my face, searching for some sign of injury or weakness, then smiled. “You should have seen your father. He saw you having trouble and he just ran over, full-speed, yelling your name.”

            My father carried me away from the woman and the pool-side, picked up his bag of towels and newspapers, and began to leave. From over his shoulder, I saw a few people still watching us leave, including the older woman, as the world lifted and fell with my father’s footsteps.

           

Soon after this he signed me up for swimming lessons. I burned with embarrassment when he told me the news, but I cooled when I saw that my swimming instructor was a high school girl named Polly. She had curly hair, dark eyes, and the longest smile I’d ever seen. Her navy blue one-piece bathing suit highlighted her lean body and the places on her mid-section where she was a little plump. She towered over me, ruffling my hair and calling me her “little man.” I was too young to know desire, but was young enough to be in love, to want her without knowing at all what I wanted. Every stroke I took was for her, every kick meant to please her, and I could only swim faster knowing, when I emerged, through the water dripping over my eyes, I’d see her there, waiting for me, smiling.

My one difficulty was treading water. I had no problem with motion, mastering every kind of stroke she threw at me. Even diving, which frightened me to no end, I managed to pull off, to her applause and my blushing. But floating in one place was beyond me.

“Move your arms and legs like this,” she told me, “the water will hold you up. Smoothly, you barely have to try.” I couldn’t seem to summon whatever instinct allowed her to bob so effortlessly in the water. Kicking my legs, waving my arms, willing myself to float – gravity always got the best of me. The glassy surface broke and I turned my face to the sky as the water pulled me under, watching the sun become a rippling spark. She’d lift me out with her soft hands, sit me on the edge of the pool, and ruffle her hand through my wet hair. “It’s okay my little man. You’ll get it someday.” I forced myself to face her eyes, lovely and caring, and all I felt was a painfully clear sense of all the things I couldn’t do.

           

At ten I had my first asthma attack. In the car, rushing to the hospital, I gasped for breath, slowly wheezing, air thick in my lungs. My father took one hand off the wheel whenever he could to rub my back. “It’ll be okay,” he repeated like a mantra, “we’re almost there.” When we arrived, my father lifted me into his arms, a sensation I never thought I’d feel again. I had begun rebelling against being a child already, craving the open world of the adults around me. For a moment, as he shut the door, he squeezed me in a way that cramped my already suffering lungs. But as we went inside, my head against his chest, I found it a bit easier to breathe.

The doctor put me on a nebulizer, a small beige box with a tube – breathe in medication, breathe out smoke. We took one home with us, and as soon as my father got the medicine for it, he placed it in the living room and plugged it in. There, like an ugly beige headstone among our stereo-system, TV, and all the fragile figurines my father had found at yard-sales, sat my nebulizer. I put up with it that day, too tired and breathless to struggle. The smoke billowed out around my head as Tom and Jerry played. I blew smoke after them on the screen but could hardly keep my eyes open. I dozed off at some point and woke up to the feeling of my father carrying me again. I pretended to still be asleep until he laid me on my bed.

He was determined to pull me out of my asthma with a regimen of three fifteen-minute nebulizer treatments a day. My attention span could barely last one. I couldn’t have asthma – I was ten, it was summer. I had to run, race, chase, wrestle, leap, and fly. Instead, our living room filled with smoke.

My father always sat across from me in the living room, pretending to read but never flipping the page. I couldn’t pay attention to any TV; I was too consumed with catching his eyes jutting over his book. He reminded me of a warden I had seen in a glimpse of a prison movie once. The man had sat on top of the prison wall with a rifle. A prisoner tried to run, and the warden, with the same look as my father’s, calmly picked up his rifle, aimed carefully, and fired. The prisoner went down. Sitting in the living room with that nebulizer, I was reminded how large my father was. Black Bear.

He worked from home, usually in an office room. After I was confined, he moved his laptop into the living room, typing up office documents and spreadsheets, reading the screen calmly through my smoke. This let him keep an eye on the heat advisory and air quality forecast on the weather station, his new favorite channel. The world was no longer blue skies and green grass but colored in codes and warnings, Oranges and Reds, like a nightmare. On Code Red days I was forbidden from leaving the house, and on Code Orange days could only leave minimally.

Outside my friends played happily, not burdened by the weight of their lungs. Sometimes I would even see Polly walking by on the sidewalk, short-shorts letting her show just how long her legs were. Whenever she passed by I felt my chest shrink in a strange way, an asthma attack without the loss of air, and as she drifted out of sight I would get lost in dreams of escape, walking alongside her out there, suddenly her height, her age, no longer her little man.

It was inevitable that I’d try sneaking out, if only to see an open blue sky over my head and not our cracked ceiling. I crept close to the door, toes pressing lightly into the carpet as I tried willing myself to float. I was absolutely silent, a ghost, air.

“No going outside,” my father shouted from the living room. “Code Red today.” It had been so all week.

“I want to play outside,” I said. I was already so close to the door, only needed to turn the handle and pull and I’d be there, outside. My father’s heavy steps came trotting down the hall. By the time he arrived, I had the door open, watching him defiantly.

“You can’t,” he said.

“It’s not fair!” I shouted, “I hate this! I’m going outside!”

I turned to face the doorway, but the streets were empty, the sweltering heat casting waves in the air. Everything was still and quiet. I felt the asthma like a jacket on my lungs, ready to tighten and pull me back down under.

“Peter,” my father said, and I knew I wouldn’t get out, that I would only be tossing myself into the sea to drown again. And my father couldn’t lift me out so easily anymore. We both knew that. He put a hand on my shoulder and pulled me back inside, and the door swung shut on the world.

She was tall, my mother, with skin as dark as my father’s and light brown eyes that seem to glow in every picture of her. She was born in Virginia and raised in DC, exploring the city streets with her cousins, never staying out past dark. She enjoyed reading and running most of all, tearing through adventure books faster than her parents could buy them, sometimes stealing them from a nearby used bookstore and returning them when she was done two days later. She met my father in college, introduced by a friend who knew they both liked The Rolling Stones and foreign films. She died while delivering me, and I’ll never know if she ever got the chance to see the baby she loved so deeply.

I discovered all of this in journals my mother kept since high school, two pages written everyday for twelve years. They were buried in a storage closet I had never bother exploring until my asthma developed. She wrote in cursive, her handwriting flowing across the page like a stream, like a melody. The last entry is marked a couple days before I was born, and she wrote about her bulging stomach, how she wanted it gone, wanted her body back, smooth and athletic, and she wanted her baby, me, in her arms. The last half of the journal is empty.

It took me years to read through all of them, from that summer of my asthma to my first year of high school at fourteen. I’d read a couple entries every night before bed, the box hiding safely underneath my mattress. I suspected my father knew but couldn’t bear saying anything. I hunted our house for their Rolling Stones records, carrying them and an old record-player up to my room. As I learned how to use the device on Sticky Fingers, I heard, for the first time in my life, my father’s door down the hallway closing shut. I attached some headphones to the record-player and closed my eyes, shut off in my own personal world as Brown Sugar started to play.

I saw Polly again just before I left for college, walking through the neighborhood. The years that had passed were written on her face in wrinkles and worry lines, and her belly bulged with the beginning visible signs of pregnancy. I wondered if it was planned or an accident, instantaneous and irrevocable.

Despite this, despite having gone through a bad break-up weeks before and feeling spiteful and lonely, I still felt the old pangs of longing, the strange desire to impress her without fully knowing why. Her long legs, her lean body, her dark eyes, all had me as entranced as from those days at the pool, and I hated myself for it. I wanted to not want anything, least of all a girl I hadn’t seen since I was a child. But it wasn’t my choice.

I was walking in her direction. In one instant, she was giving the ground a worried look; the next, she gave me a small, polite smile, and I felt the instinctive pain of not being recognized. Up close, her eyes were still lovely. I could have tried to bring it all back, could have called out to her, her little man. But I let her go along, submerged in her thoughts, fears, and longings, and I stayed smothered by mine.

I was taken in by Boston College, over 400 miles away from my father. During the first two years I called weekly; by junior year, every other week, more or less; by senior year, monthly. I omitted the flu’s and hangovers, the work stress and school stress, the asthma attacks, migraines, and panic attacks that all required medication. “What’s going on with you?” he’d ask.

“Oh, nothing,” I’d say, glancing at the various pill bottles on my desk, sterile white and dark orange, sitting next to my sky-blue inhaler.

In senior year, during one of our typical conversations of his questions and my one word responses, he asked, “How’s your asthma doing?”  

“I think it’s going away,” I told him. I hadn’t used my inhaler in over a year; there were panic attacks to care for instead.

“Are you sure?” he said. “Be careful anyway, I’ve never believed it really goes away.”

“Sure it can,” I said, thinking to myself, it goes to a place too far for us to reach. It didn’t surprise me that he’d think of asthma like cancer, going into remission only to reemerge years later. He didn’t need to know how I’d place my hand tight on my chest at times, breathing rapidly, taking in as much air as possible and never feeling it was enough; he didn’t need to know that his son, hundreds of miles away from home, was still drowning, would always be drowning. “I’m fine,” I said.

When the attacks hit, I always do the same thing. I lie in my bed and face the ceiling, getting lost in the white paint. “Breathe deep,” I say calmly. I think of my mother. I think of open spaces. I think about how free I’d feel outside this body of mine. I close my eyes. “Breathe deep.” 

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This story originated from an assignment in a fiction-writing class to write a two-page short story about a physical fear we had. The 1st draft was limited to the initial pool-drowning and maybe the asthma as well, and was more non-fiction than anything - in fact, every single significant detail was pulled straight from my life. But I tried writing it from a different voice than the voice I'd write in for non-fiction, so, to me at least, it was still fiction. Every draft after that I distanced from myself more and more - my Dad is white (not "Black Bear"), my mother's very much alive, I didn't go to Boston College, etc. I mention all of that because the basic idea behind the whole story is still very much true to me, which I think applies to all my writing really. 

I should thank my fiction class for the suggestions they gave me in class on this story. It's still somewhat of a work in progress, but overall it's something I can post here with a smile. After a few more trimmings and dressings I even plan on submitting this to a short-story contest - not expecting 1st place or anything, but they give out prizes for up to 10 or 15 stories, which isn't bad (and still promises money I believe!). Anyways, if you have any thoughts or criticisms on the story, feel free to share. I hope you enjoyed reading it, au revoir!