Breathless Read online

I snort. “Right.”

  “Shut up, Katie.”

  “Is that what they called them in the hospital?” Right away I know I shouldn’t have said it. He bares his teeth at me, and even in the shade I can see the heat rising from the tarred roof, willowing around his slight figure. Behind his braces, his teeth are yellow and mossy, stubbornly crooked. Our orthodontist says Will is the worst patient he’s had in thirty years of practice. Anytime his braces start bothering him, Will pries them from his teeth with a pair of pliers he keeps stashed in his room somewhere. My parents try to do sweeps of his bedroom every couple of weeks, looking for things that could get him in trouble, but somehow he manages to keep a lot hidden—random prescription pills; cigarettes by the carton; short stories that he writes about all kinds of awful, crazy things, scribbled on yellow legal paper; and his pliers. As a result of his stealth, he’s had braces on and off for something like ten years. Which is funny when you think about it, because what’s the point anymore? It isn’t like they’ll ever get him to wear his retainers.

  He flicks his cigarette into the gutter and we both watch while its cherry eats at a dead leaf. Then Will leans forward on his knees and hocks a wad of spit onto the burning edge, turning the leaves over with his hand to hide our evidence. We’ve learned that we have to be careful, that in many ways our parents are better sneaks than we are. They pretend to be clueless to what’s going on for a while, and then they seize on you.

  The Ghost is the worst. He is a big fan of procedural television dramas and forensics. He takes sick pleasure at family meetings from producing Ziploc bags of evidence, sealed and labeled, displaying the paraphernalia he’s discovered hidden around the house. Then he acts like he doesn’t know what’s going on until we get too bored or embarrassed and finally confess what we’ve been up to on the roof. He is good at almost everything. As far as I know, he’s never failed once.

  Well, maybe once. My mom says he’ll never know how to take care of himself; he eats too much junk food. “Healthy eating and raising kids,” he likes to say. “Those are two things I could never seem to get right.”

  At family meetings, he sits in an overstuffed recliner with a glass of wine at his side, obviously enjoying our misery. He clears his throat before speaking, holding up a bag so we can all get a good look at the evidence. “In the past week, I collected three handfuls of cigarette butts from the gutter, some of which had lipstick on them—Katie? There was also an empty bottle of crème de menthe. Anybody want to take credit for this?”

  He’ll look at my mom while she’s furiously taking notes on a legal pad. We have a whole filing cabinet filled with minutes from family meetings, dating back, like, ten years, all of them in my mother’s gorgeous cursive handwriting. While she writes, she keeps her head down, her ears trained to get all the highlights, her knuckles clenched white.

  “Sweetheart?” he asks my mom. The Ghost is at his most intimidating when he’s being sarcastic. “Were you drinking on the roof again? Because I can’t imagine it could have been our children.”

  “Unthinkable,” my mother says. She looks up for a moment, bats her eyelashes at him. “It must have been somebody else’s children,” she adds, as though she feels sorry for somebody else’s long-suffering parents. “Those bad kids.”

  Even after two children and everything she’s been through, everyone knows my mother is still a real beauty, soft and calm in contrast to the Ghost’s harshness. Somehow she always seems blurred, as though to focus on anything that exists beyond a canvas might prove too difficult for her tiny frame to handle. When I was a very little girl, whenever she made me angry, I would imagine a strong wind simply blowing her away.

  “Yes.” The Ghost nods in agreement. “That must be it. Somebody else’s children wouldn’t care if they created a fire hazard on our roof that could incinerate us all, would they?”

  My mother and father have a secret language that I have never understood. They have been married since college and are still madly in love. I can’t imagine why, since they have nothing in common besides me and Will, and all the two of us ever do is cause trouble.

  As a result of these meetings, Will and I have learned that we have to be extra careful. We usually come up to the roof when our parents aren’t home, which is often, or else late at night when they’re asleep. This place has become the only place where I feel like I can know my own brother. I have never felt afraid as we lie beside each other, murmuring so as not to make too much noise. As Will says, “We wouldn’t want to rouse the Ghost.”

  Sometimes, when we’re sure that our parents aren’t home and the neighbors aren’t paying attention, we climb around in the pine tree that bows against the house on the farthest corner, over the living room, its branches thick enough to hold us as our bare feet sting from splinters and sap.

  Even as I’m living it, something feels important about this day in particular. We’re climbing around in the tree, hopping back and forth between its thick branches and the hot roof, when it occurs to me that I never feel too close to the edge, even with my brother right behind me.

  “Willie,” I say, turning around to face him. “It’s too hot up here. Let’s go swimming again.”

  “Don’t call me that,” he says. “I’m not a kid.”

  Will, Willie, William—our father’s name. But the one thing we all know about Will, the one thing we’ve known right from the beginning, is that he will never be like our father. Not even close.

  Even for a Ghost, our father isn’t around much; he works eighteen-hour days. When he is home, he spends most of his time locked in his office. I notice him mostly late at night, when I’m not sure if I’m asleep yet, and the murmur of his voice dictating psych reports filters up through my bedroom radiator. But always he is white, white, white: he has fine, grayish white hair that puffs along a tired ashen face and deep-set white eyeballs. He is wise and disappointed and so much older than he ought to be.

  When I was a little girl, still in single digits, I’d sit on his lap in my pajamas and sip watery hot chocolate while he smoked a Marlboro; picked tobacco from his beard, which is full and also white—although he’s no Santa; and held a flabby arm across my belly. We used to have an easygoing relationship that made me feel so loved, so precious to him, it seemed impossible that anything could ever change.

  Despite all the golfing, which he does on the weekends, my father has always been out of shape, too much fat accumulated over muscles that have long since softened from his days as a college football hero. When I was a little girl, this didn’t keep him from being godlike.

  The Ghost is a psychiatrist. He calls himself a masseuse of the soul. His clients, stretched over a long career, number in the thousands. His ability to sympathize with strangers, to help them solve all their problems, has made him a wealthy man. So how is it fair that, within his own home, he became mostly quiet and unsympathetic? I know he is kind and loving and gentle. He spends his days chin-deep in other people’s trauma, and you can tell it has hollowed him, made him brittle from endless days of drinking too much coffee while he sits in an overstuffed chair, listening.

  For so many years I was his little girl. “What are you doing today?” I used to ask, peeling his grapefruit for him. All day after he’d gone, I used to sniff my hands and reconstruct the memory. I missed him constantly. Even when I was ten, I would still fit like a bundle on his lap, my toes barely touching the floor.

  He leans his head back and squints at the ceiling. “Let’s see, Kathryn.” My father is the only person who doesn’t call me Katie. “I’m at my office until noon, and then I’m having lunch with your mother.”

  “Can I come?”

  “No. You’ll be in school.”

  “Tuesday I go to the dentist. Can I come then?” And I burrow my head into the folds of his sweater to remind him that, wherever he goes, he belongs to me.

  “Tuesday I’m in court all day.”

  “But Dad . . .”

  “We’ll see.” He winks and tou
ches a tar-stained fingertip to my nose. “Maybe I’ll finish up early.” He coughs, rearranging the contents of his chest, leaning away from the ashtray. I pat him on the back. “Cough it up, Dad. You have to stop smoking.”

  “Enough, Kathryn.”

  “You do.”

  “Okay.” He snuffs out his cigarette, spreads his empty fingers like a magician. “See? I quit.”

  His eyes twinkle, pupils wide in the dimness, erasing his irises. I know how it feels to look at them, but I have no idea what color eyes the Ghost has.

  I’m not sure what he would tell you about us. Probably he’d say that it was me who changed, that as little girls grow into young women, it is natural for them to pull away from their fathers. But I remember it differently. I remember a day when he looked at me and I felt, in his gaze, an impossible pressure to be something different. I was twelve years old; it was the first time he caught me smoking a cigarette. It was a look I would grow familiar with over the next few years, not just from the Ghost but from almost everyone around me.

  What could I do? How was I supposed to be? I had no idea. The only thing I knew how to do, with any certainty, was swim.

  chapter 2

  I feel more drawn to the water than ever this summer. I blame the temperature and my boredom, but still I force myself to really move beneath the surface, to keep my pace so swift that I sometimes feel like my heart might explode. I’ve always done well in school—I get all As—but the only thing I really love is swimming. Sometimes I feel like I don’t really exist outside the water.

  Once in a while, my mother takes a break from painting to chase me around with a bottle of sunblock. She’s lucky if she manages to do much more than swipe a few gobs onto my back. My suntan is uneven because of her, finger trails of her attempts to protect me left in stark white marks surrounded by bronze flesh. Each time she comes and goes, my brother and I follow her appearance with a slew of backhanded comments as she walks away. It isn’t even noon yet, but her upper lip is already stained a deep crimson. Merlot, Pinot Noir, Cabernet—they’re like grape juice in our house.

  “She probably doesn’t remember our names by now,” Will says.

  I jump in the water again before the sunblock has a chance to absorb. “After twelve,” I say, putting a dramatic hand to my forehead, mimicking her breathy voice, “time for a little catnap.”

  Will dangles his feet from the diving board into the water, watching me with half interest and squinting into the sun, smoking cigarettes that he flicks onto the cement deck. He doesn’t care that he’s making a mess. The last thing I see before my head disappears underwater is his grin.

  I am a swimmer by birth. I’ve been on some kind of team since age three, and I’ve always been the fastest. I swim every day, and every day I can feel myself getting a little better. After every twenty laps today, I get out of the pool. Will and I pretend to take a great interest in the ants mobbing the rhododendron bushes in the garden, keeping watch for each other while we take quick drags from a joint, giggling, feeling the sun bake the moisture from our skin, and it feels so good to be bad that I can hardly stand it.

  “Hey,” I say, “should you be doing this? Is it okay?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know—is it going to hurt you? Because of your medicine?”

  His head comes forward, and he gives me a long, shaky look. His eyeballs look radioactive. I detect a small, almost imperceptible tremor from within the muscle fibers. “Don’t worry about me, Katie. You’re being dumb.” He rubs his eyes with tight fists. The whites have turned the color of underripe watermelon. “You’re just a kid.”

  After a few hours, the sun begins to creep down toward the horizon, and my vision starts to blur from keeping my eyes open underwater for so long. Will has fallen into a trance on the diving board, splayed on his back with a lit cigarette burning downward, its ashes breaking and falling into the water. I paddle over to him and swipe at his arm, his skin dry as a dead bat baking on the pavement.

  “Hey.”

  When he doesn’t answer, for a minute I think he might be asleep. But then he murmurs, “Hmmmm?”

  “Let’s go up to the roof again.”

  He sits up, squinting at me. “Are you sure? Mom’s home.”

  I lick my lips in contemplation. I can be tough; I’ll show him. “I don’t care. What’s she gonna do about it?”

  “Huh.”

  “Huh.”

  He shrugs. His squint breaks into a grin. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  We’re dancing around on the roof—me in my bathing suit, him in an old pair of sweatpants cut off at the knees, shirtless, doing the robot to a Beastie Boys CD and shifting our feet on the hot roof to keep our soles from burning, when, from out of nowhere, the cat we saw earlier falls from the pine tree and lands right between us—smack—and the music skips, slows down, as though it’s keeping up with the mood.

  “Oh my God,” I say, trying not to laugh in spite of the cat. “We’re in the Bible. It’s raining creatures.”

  We kneel down to get a better look. It’s a sorry sight. Since we last saw it, just a few hours ago, the cat looks like it has been in a fight—its tail is bent at a painful angle, its breathing is too quick, and its tabby fur is matted and sad. Will picks it up and cradles it in his arms. He walks to the edge of the roof, looking around kind of panicked like somebody might see him and think he’s done something wrong. I have never known him to be anything but gentle with animals.

  “I’m going to drop it. Onto the ground,” he says, licking his dry lips, nervous. His gaze flickers to our neighbors’ windows, to the surrounding houses. Even though it hasn’t happened yet, I feel the kaleidoscope turning, the whole summer and then some ready to spill and sour.

  “Will, don’t. You’ll kill it.”

  He sounds certain. “No, I won’t. Cats can fall long distances. They always land on their feet.”

  I lean over the edge and take a good look at the drop. Even I don’t think the fall will be too far—it can’t be more than ten, maybe fifteen feet. I almost give up trying to stop him then—he’s older, after all, and I usually do what he says. But I can’t help myself from trying, just this time.

  “Why not get some help?” I ask. “Why not take it downstairs and give it some milk and food? We could call a veterinarian.”

  “No,” Will says, “we shouldn’t get involved. We should just drop the thing. Trust me, Katie, it’ll be fine.”

  I watch him drop the kitty. He does it carefully, releasing his hands from around the torso, and I expect it to fall softly onto the mulch below.

  For a moment, I believe everything is going to be all right. It seems to fall in slow motion, its legs limp beneath it, a wide bed of soft mulch ready to break its fall, and then it will jump to its feet again and be on its way.

  We underestimated. Maybe we couldn’t really tell how far it was—we were so large up there. Everything else looked so small and close and meaningless.

  The cat hits a big, flat rock in the mulch with a dull thud and goes instantly still, its big empty eyes looking up at us with nothing behind them, and there’s no movement anywhere, not even from us. It feels like the stillness begins from the cat on the ground and moves outward, holding on to us tightly, keeping us from breathing. It feels awful.

  Somebody might have loved it. Somebody might be looking for it, and my brother has just killed it.

  After what feels like a long stretch of time, Will puts a shaky arm around me. I feel his fingernails on my sunburn, a tingle that goes down my arm and spreads to my whole body, like I’m going to shiver until I throw up.

  “Katie.” His voice is scratchy. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “What should we do?”

  I don’t know why, but I giggle. “There’s nothing we can do now. Bury it?”

  And he’s giggling, too. “Maybe Mom will want to paint it first.”

  Flick. Swoosh. Out of no
where, the Ghost appears behind the window. He has obviously been looking for us, has appeared with perfect, omnipotent parental timing. For a second I think maybe that’s why I am cold—you can sense him sometimes like that. We turn around, hands behind our backs, shoulder to shoulder while the Ghost opens the window and clumsily climbs out. He wears tinted bifocals with lenses that turn black in the sun. A cigarette is held between his teeth, smoke billowing around his features, sunlight obstructing our view of his face.

  Will snorts at him, nudging me. “You look like the devil, Dad.”

  The Ghost is not amused. “What are you two doing out here?”

  I stare at my feet, biting the inside of my mouth. I can still feel the silent pull of what’s on the ground beneath us, and I can feel tears forming at the corners of my dry eyes.

  “We aren’t doing anything, man. We’re just hanging out.” Will takes a defiant drag from his cigarette.

  “Kathryn? What’s going on? I thought I told you kids not to come out here anymore.” Our father is more concerned about the neighbors seeing us than he is about our personal safety. Even though everybody in the whole town knows otherwise, my father likes people to believe that our family is doing just fine.

  I shake my head. “I just wanted to get some sun.”

  “Go to your room.” He’s rough, grabbing my arm and shoving me toward the window, but he’s really interested in Will, you can tell—Will thinks our dad is out to get him. Sometimes I think he’s right.

  The Ghost snaps his fingers at Will, who is trying to follow me inside. “Not you, William. Stay there.”

  “Aw, man, it’s hot out here.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Ha.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing.”

  The Ghost starts pacing back and forth on the roof in full business dress, looking around for some evidence that we’ve been up to no good. God, he must be burning up in those clothes, but I don’t remember ever seeing him in anything different, not since we moved to Hillsburg. He looks ridiculous in the light: weathered, faded, in need of a haircut and a good night’s sleep. I can’t see him from the window when he makes it over to the edge where Will dropped the cat, but I can tell he’s seen it by the way Will’s shoulders droop and the sweat that has gathered on his brow seems to heat up and seep down his face.