Page 10 of Hold Me Under (Water, Air, Earth, Fire 1)

I clearly remember the day her father collapsed from a heart attack four years ago. “Shit, Pey. I’m sorry.” I sit down next to her.

She takes a deep breath. “I got the news in class and made it here just in time to say goodbye. If the traffic had been different, I wouldn’t have been here at all.”

“I sense a point coming,” I say with a weak smile.

“How prescient of you.” She bumps my shoulder with hers. “Look. I lost my dad in an instant. You’re going to lose your mom tomorrow, and again next week, and again next month, over and over. Sometimes I don’t know how you cope.”

By pretending I have a choice in any of this.

“But Ethan, I got one chance to say goodbye. Some people don’t get any. You get a hundred, a thousand; you get to make every one matter, find every possible way of sayingI love you. Ugh—” Cheeks reddening, she swipes moisture from her eyes. “My point is, you’re bleeding yourself dry trying to find answers that don’t exist as those chances are passing you by.”

Standing up, crossing to the window, she gives me a moment. But I don’t know what to do with it, besides stare at the wall with a numb kind of pain eating at my heart. Whether I fight for Mom, whether I give up and “make her comfortable” as the doctors say, I’m always doing the wrong thing. So I just work harder, sleep less, give my mother more of myself, hoping that someday, someone will come by and tell me it was enough, that I can finally rest and everything will be alright.

“We have a trip planned,” I say when the silence goes on too long. “A whole month, maybe more. Everywhere in the world she wants to see.”

Peyton smiles. “June’s so excited about it. She brings it up every time we hang out.”

Except by the time I can afford it, it will be too late.

Unless.

Unless twenty thousand dollars just came out of nowhere.

Like a freak coincidence. Like a story you’d never believe. Like fate.

After I tuck Mom into bed that night, I help Ana carry her bags to the car. The silence feels heavy; after her appointment, the doctor told me Mom and I should start visiting care facilities before her needs go beyond what I can provide.

“I’ll speak to my boss,” Ana says as we stand by the car in the damp night air. “We’ll find the most affordable option for you.”

I shake my head. “She can’t go to a nursing home. She’s not ready. I’ll pay anything, whatever it takes, to keep her home as long as possible.” I’m just spewing words, promises I can’t back up, and Ana knows it. But she doesn’t argue, just gives me a motherly hug and climbs into her car.

I go back inside and stand in the doorway of Mom’s room for a minute, listening to her even breathing, a sound which has always comforted me on a primal level. Tonight, it makes my throat clog up with tears I never shed. I kiss her lightly on the forehead and sneak back to my room.

Before I can think too hard, I dig under my bed and pull out a small cardboard box carefully sealed with wide strips of packing tape. I didn’t have to label it because I could never forget what’s inside. The sound of tearing cardboard can’t drown out the voices in my head as I pry open the flaps.

It’s Danny and the faint smell of his deodorant, my cousin and the happy, lazy years we spent together. Plastic Transformers we played with when we were ten. The paper air rifle target with the bullseye he scored at summer camp. My high school perfect attendance award, on which he scrawled “you’re a loser” with a smiley face. His third-place swimming medal.

My mom and her sister both ended up as single parents, so Danny and I grew up as brothers. We shared a room for years when our moms rented an apartment together. I set the box next to me on the bed and pull out what I’m looking for: a battered scrapbook.

It’s a shrine to Victor Lang. Danny hunted down every news story, every stat sheet, every magazine cover. He started swimming lessons at fourteen thanks to Victor, and always talked about the day they’d face at the Olympics, even though Danny kind of sucked at swimming. His big dreams always awed me, as someone who didn’t really know how to dream at all.

I flip slowly through the pages, studying each one. It’s a beautiful story: an unknown kid comes out of nowhere to win the junior national championship, unseating a world record set by a boy two years older than him. The announcers were yelling their lungs out as it happened—an iconic YouTube clip with eight million views, half of which came after the scandal.

At the end of that swim, Victor faced a crowd of frantic reporters without an ounce of fear. In response to the prevailing question—whoareyou and where did you come from—he announced that he was going to destroy the Olympic gold medal record in men’s swimming.

He was a force of nature, consuming one record after another, eclipsing his rivals, achieving the impossible. He specialized in the most technically demanding stroke, the butterfly, and pushed until he could go 25, then 50, then 75 meters, without air. Sports analysts argued if it was possible to reach 100 meters or more and pointed out that his mind game was just as potent as his physical ability, if not more. He swam like he didn’t care if he ever breathed again.

He was gorgeous, a bright flame, a perfect physical specimen. The first openly gay athlete to reach this level of fame, forcing everyone’s homophobic grannies to admit that “some of those people are alright” when he asserted US dominance at every international competition.

In reality, I guess it was all a lie, a false promise that hard work and passion can make you invincible. Lying back on the bed, I close my eyes and wonder if Danny would still be alive today if he hadn’t swallowed that promise hook, line, and sinker.

We drove five hours east to Lake Chelan once every summer, at the tail end of wildfire season. Aunt Cath and Mom and Danny and I shared a tent, while my uncle and his second wife towed in a camper. I always thought it was kind of an ugly place, dry scrub and rattlesnakes and smoke so thick in the air you could taste it.

Danny and I would get ice cream sandwiches from the camp store and eat them on the dock, watching little kids play in the shallows and waiting for one of the big boats full of college students to launch. They’d let us on and give us turns on their inner tubes and water skis. When we fell off, they’d offer us hard lemonade or beer and let the boat go where it wanted between the indigo sky and the bottomless water, talking about art and philosophy and sex.

That last year, Danny had just watched the 2001Planet of the Apesfor some sociology project and was trying to convince me that it had my favorite actor, Matt Damon. I told him Damon had never been in a fuckingPlanet of the Apesmovie. So when the adults said they were driving down to town for some cell service, I said I’d go with them and find out what lookalike schmuck had actually starred in the damn movie.

Danny was pissed at me, so he didn’t want to come. He needed to practice his butterfly stroke, he said. He had a seizure once, years ago, that doctors could never figure out and even though he was healthy as a horse, Aunt Cath never wanted him to swim unsupervised. My mom said she’d stay behind and watch him. Just in case.

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