Swim Back to Me (3 page)

“Richard,” Sasha said, and I turned and found her standing where I’d left her with a high-wattage smile on her face that told me the guys at the fence were watching. “Come on,” she said loudly. “I want to ask these guys something.”

“What?” I said, but after a moment I joined her and we continued through the parking lot and entered the dead field where the bike rack was. On the other side of the fence was the back playground of my old elementary school. The tether balls had been taken down for the weekend, and the poles stood like leafless trees in an even line.

I knew who two of the guys were: Eric Rumsen, the younger brother of a neighborhood girl who’d babysat me years earlier; and Kevin Cottrell, whose father was a colleague of my father’s in the History Department. Two of the others looked familiar: Stanford kids, too, but college age now or from the older residential neighborhood, or the offspring of faculty in far-flung departments like Physics or Art. The only one I’d never seen before was a tall, lanky guy leaning against the bike rack, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans. In place of a shirt he wore a vest of patched-together velvet, the pieces green and burgundy and navy blue, and his arms were muscled and tan.

“How’s it going?” Sasha said, and a couple of the guys laughed.

“We’re cool,” Eric Rumsen said. “How about you? A little warm? Kind of hot?”

Dismayed, I turned to Sasha, but she was smiling. I thought of Eric’s sister: she’d been nice to me, had brought me a book about fishing once, with glossy color pictures of all the fish you could catch in the western United States. She’d taken me by their house one day, to get something she needed, and I remembered her room, the walls covered with billowy cloths from India. I’d walked by Eric’s room, too, could call up the B.O. smell, the unmade bed.

“Have you guys heard of the Walk for Mankind?” Sasha said. “It’s this fund-raiser, and we’re doing it tomorrow, and we need one more pledge to get to this higher level of earning.”

Kevin Cottrell was looking everywhere but at me. I remembered a swimming party when I was about six and he was about ten—it was at the house of the then chair of the department, and while the grown-ups stood around on the patio and talked, the five or six kids all played in the pool, except Kevin. He had a book, and he sat reading by himself on a lounge chair the whole time. Now he nudged one of the other guys and turned to Sasha. “How much do you need?”

“Not much,” she said eagerly. “Thirty cents a mile—just six dollars altogether.”

“And what do we get?” said the guy Kevin had nudged. He had a pink face and a snub nose, and pale blond hair that reached halfway down his back.

Sasha glanced at me. “What do you mean?”

“You get six bucks, what do we get?”

“Yeah,” Eric said. “We need something too, here. You want to keep us company, maybe smoke a joint with us?”

“Just you,” pink-face said. “I think your little friend is too young.”

I felt my face grow warm. I turned to Sasha and said, “We’ve got the Walk tomorrow.”

Eric laughed. “Whoa, don’t want to be too tired for that.”

“Cut it out.” The guy with the vest had pushed away from the bike rack, and suddenly there was something different going on. The other guys all looked at him, and I saw that he was not a teenager after all but in his mid-twenties, maybe older: his hairline receding, the inlets of scalp it had abandoned shinier than his forehead. His mustache drooped over his mouth, and his eyes were hooded and dull, but he was clearly in charge. He sauntered over, his walk somehow telling me he was from somewhere else: he leaned back as he walked, hooked his thumbs in his belt loops.

He stopped in front of Sasha and held out his hand. “Hi, I’m Cal. What’s your name?”

She took his hand. “Sasha.”

“That’s really beautiful. Beautiful name for a beautiful girl.”

She smiled. She seemed about to speak but didn’t, which surprised me; she was not usually quiet or shy.

“I’ll sponsor you,” he said. “What do I have to do?”

She gave him her clipboard and showed him where to write his name and address, then the amount he was pledging. She said nothing about splitting the pledge between us, and I figured that with her trip to Redwood City it was too late, anyway.

“Thirty cents, that it?” Cal finished writing and handed the clipboard back to her. He asked my name, and when I told him he said, “Well, Sasha and Richard, you’re welcome to join us for a smoke.”

I’d been around pot before, had smelled it, had even seen a joint in an ashtray at a party my father had taken me to. But I’d never smoked it. Sasha hadn’t either, but she was on record with me as ready to try.

“Want to?” she asked me, that same bright smile on her face.

I thought of my father, his lecture notes spread out on the dining room table. After dinner he’d produced a small box of See’s Candies and told me we’d crack it open when I got home from the Walk tomorrow night. “Hand packed,” he’d said. “Heavy on the chocolate butters.”

“I should go,” I told Sasha. She didn’t reply, and I said it again. “Well, I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said at last, and she flicked a glance at me before turning back to Cal.

“OK,” she said, and I didn’t know if she was talking to me or him.

The next morning, Dan drove us to the starting point of the Walk, the playground of a Palo Alto elementary school. In the car I cast glances at Sasha, raised my eyebrows to show I was curious about the rest of her night, but she was slumped in her seat, her knees up in front of her, preoccupied. In the front, Dan talked idly to Peter, who’d come along for the ride.

“Isn’t that funny, Richard Appleby?” Dan said over his shoulder to me.

I’d been staring out the window, thinking I’d been chicken to leave SCRA. “What?”

Dan maneuvered the rearview mirror until he caught my eye in it. “I said, isn’t it funny how Sasha, the queen of the Walk for Mankind, had to be reminded this morning why she needed to get up?”

I looked at Sasha.

“You’ll like this,” he went on. “I said to her, ‘It’s the Walk,’ and she said, ‘What walk?’ ” Dan laughed a short, mystified laugh, then turned around and looked right at me. “Funny, you have to admit.”

I shrugged.

He faced forward but caught my eye in the rearview again, and I saw that he was genuinely puzzled.

“I was tired was all,” Sasha said. “I reread
To the Lighthouse
last night.”

Dan chuckled. “ ‘And he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not.’ Well, you missed a great dinner—right, Peter? The Cohens served cracked crab and asparagus and this incredible ice cream laced with Kahlúa. We all kept saying, ‘Too bad Sasha and Richard Appleby didn’t come,’ but we knew you were busy working for mankind.”

Sasha slumped lower, and I looked out the window again, relieved when Dan let it drop.

We had to wait in line to register, and then Dan and Peter stood at the starting point and saw us off as if we were embarking on an ocean liner, Dan waving a white handkerchief back and forth over his head, Peter humming on a kazoo, a tune I recognized after a moment as “So Long, Farewell” from
The Sound of Music
.

Sasha muttered something under her breath as we headed away from them.

“What?”

“I said, I wish Daddy would do something in a normal way for a change. And Peter’s shirt was really nerdy.”

I tried to remember Peter’s shirt: striped, like most of mine. I turned and looked at her. Her hair was up in a bun, held in place by a leather hair thing she’d made in art class. Usually she anchored it with a little wooden stick, but today she’d used a gnarly pencil, tooth marks up and down its yellow sides, the segment of metal at the end bitten closed. Her face was pale, the blue of her eyes grayer than usual, doused somehow.

I said, “What time’d you get home last night?” I had turned as I left the SCRA parking lot and seen that the guys had made space for her against the bike rack, and that she was leaning back, Cal on one side of her and Eric Rumsen on the other.

“Ten-thirty.”

In my hearing, her parents had said they wouldn’t be back until eleven, and I took some comfort in the fact that she’d gotten herself home with time to spare. “So what happened? Did you smoke?”

“Yeah.”

“Did you get high?”

She held her hand out, palm parallel to the ground, and tipped it back and forth. “Next time I probably will more.”

“Next time?”

“Come on, Richard—we’re not just going to let the parade go by, are we?”

I shrugged, but I was relieved she’d used the word “we.” I decided then and there: next time for sure. “Did you cough?” I asked, and she gave me an embarrassed grin.

“I couldn’t help it.”

Soon we were walking through a part of Palo Alto I didn’t know very well, full of large old houses and great, leafy shade trees. Palo Alto was our marketplace, our office building—it was where we shopped, went out for pizza, took karate, and saw doctors and dentists—but until Malcolm and Bob I’d never had a friend who lived there, never had a friend whose father wasn’t connected to Stanford.

There was a check-in station every mile, where refreshments and first aid were available, and where you had to get your sheet stamped to prove you’d been there. By the third station I was hot and tired, and my water bottle was heavy. I said, “Want to stop for a few minutes?” There was a bench under some trees and near that a lemonade stand.

“Why?” she said.

“To rest.”

“Let’s rest after five miles, then we’ll be a quarter of the way done.”

We rested after Mile Five and then again after Mile Eight, sitting side by side on a curb and drinking our warm water. I had a piece of beef jerky each time, just because I could, but Sasha only picked raisins from her gorp, ate three or four, and put the bag away.

The other walkers near us were mostly adults, balding guys with beards, fattish women with tie-dyed T-shirts and hairy legs. Occasionally we’d come upon a group of kids our age and we’d talk to them for a while. At Mile Ten a bunch of high school kids were standing around the check-in station drinking Gatorade, and without talking about it Sasha and I arranged ourselves close enough to them that we could eavesdrop on their conversation. A girl was telling a long story about someone named Cappy, and for the entire time she was talking I tried and failed to figure out if Cappy was an adult or a kid. Then another girl said that someone named Paul was being a real asshole, and a short guy with a big nose said, “That’s ’cause he’s not balling Kathy anymore.”

“Ready?” Sasha said, and though I wanted to hear more I said yes.

“Hang on one sec,” she said, and she moved to a low stone wall, sat down, and took off her shoe. “Ewww,” she cried. There was a blister the size of a pea on the end of her toe. “Shit, now what am I going to do? I have to pop it. You have to pop it for me. Get a rock or something.”

“I’m not going to bang your toe with a rock!”

“You’re so scared of everything.”

I turned and walked away from her. One of the high school girls wore a purple tank top with no bra, and I let myself stare at her breasts for a moment, almost wishing I’d get hard. Malcolm and Bob had boners all the time and laughed at each other for holding their binders over their crotches and wearing loose, untucked shirts. I had hard-ons in my sleep and frequently woke with one, but that was about it. I’d never even had a wet dream.

The girl caught me staring, and I looked away and then went back to Sasha. Over at the check-in station, two adults sat behind a folding table, and I said, “I’ll go ask them what to do.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They might make me stop. You saw that man.”

A few stations back we’d seen an older man on a stretcher, his face bright red: a little later we passed someone who told us that the check-in woman had taken one look at him and made him lie down.

“It’s a blister,” I said. I remembered having one when I was seven or eight, and how my mother had pierced it with a needle and drained it. “If you want to pop it, you need a sterilized needle.”

She pulled her sock back on, then her shoe.

“You’re just going to walk with it?”

“We’ll ask in there.”

“Where?”

She angled her head across the street, at a little white cottage set back in a weedy yard.

“You can’t just go up to someone’s house.”

She set off, and I followed, across the street and up the steps to a small porch. A tall, skinny guy answered her knock; he had light brown hair and weirdly pale blue eyes. He looked about the same age as my father’s graduate students, maybe late twenties.

“Excuse me,” Sasha said. “We’re doing the Walk for Mankind, and I have a blister I need to pop. Do you have a needle and a pack of matches?”

The guy frowned. “A what?”

“A needle and a pack of matches. I have to sterilize the needle or I might get an infection.”

He had a long neck—very long, and thin. Also long arms, long legs—he looked like what a stick figure would look like if a stick figure were an actual person, except his face was long, not round.

“I’ve got matches,” he said. “I guess I can look for a needle.” He stood there for another moment and then headed inside, leaving the door open and heading down a hallway. I saw a dark living room with a sagging couch, a fireplace containing a single charred log.

“Come on,” Sasha said, stepping up into the house.

“What are you doing? Stop.”

She kept going, crossing the room and looking at something on the mantel before moving to the TV and lifting a framed picture from its surface.

I stepped over the threshold. In addition to the couch there were two huge, disheveled armchairs and several small tables, all piled high with books. I wondered if he might
be
a graduate student—or an assistant professor, for that matter. My father had chaired the History Department hiring committee the previous year, and he said the candidates were getting so young the University was going to have to start requiring the daily wearing of academic regalia, just so everyone would know who was who.

The guy came back in, the top of his head just missing the doorframe. He saw me first. “Whoa. Did I say to come in?”