Free Last Things by Jenny Offill Page B

always said that one day she would swim to Canada and I worried that this was that day. I thought about how Alec had gone underwater and seen a secret bird. I made myself limp and slid off her back. I closed my eyes and tried to drop like a stone to the bottom of the lake. The water grew colder and colder the farther I sank. I pretended I was blind. I pretended I was a fish who could breathe through my skin. I thought that soon I’d touch the bottom ofthe lake and it would be soft like moss. Then I could push myself back up to the surface and surprise my mother.
    Something sharp scraped across my foot. The monster’s claw. I opened my mouth to scream and the water rushed in. It tasted of mud and silt and filled up my lungs until there was no air left. I tried to swim to the surface. The water felt like a stone on my chest.
You’re going to die, Grace Davitt
, I thought, but it was as if the voice came from somewhere outside me and whispered in my ear. Then I felt my mother’s arms around me and suddenly I was pulled out of the water and there was air again, cold and clean. My mother dragged me to the floating dock and hoisted me on top of it. Then she pounded me on the back until water flew out of my mouth in a dark stream. I had swallowed a small leaf and this seemed amazing to me. I picked it up from the dock and held it in my hand.
    “Why did you do that?” my mother said. “What’s gotten into you?” Her face was red and the vein in her forehead was pulsing the way it did when she was mad.
    “I fell asleep,” I said. “I woke up and I was underwater.” My mother turned away. When she was mad, she refused to look at me. If we’d been home, she would have told me to get out of her sight.
    My throat hurt from all the water I had swallowed. I tried not to cough and remind her of what I’d done. It was almost light out. The sun was a thin red line in the sky like a piece of thread you could pull.
    My mother dropped back into the water and I followed her. I put my arms around her neck again. “This time, hold tight,” she said.
    We started back toward shore. Clouds covered the moon, but I didn’t care. I didn’t like to look at it anymore because my father had told me it was just a piece of rock in the sky, beautiful but dead. Nothing ever grew there and there was no weather, not even rain. “Poor moon,” my mother said when I told her what I’d learned.
    When we reached the shallow part, my mother set me down. “If you ever try a stunt like that again, I’ll kill you,” she said. I tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. We walked down the beach to the spot where we’d left our things. We looked beside the pier where we’d put them, but they weren’t there.
    “What in the world?” my mother said. She walked back and forth across the wet sand, looking for our clothes, but they were nowhere to be found. Nightgown thieves, she said.
    The sky was the color of cement. I looked out at the lake. I had an idea that birds might have carried our clothes away. We stood there shivering in our underwear. My mother’s breasts were bare and in the gray light they looked as if they were made of stone. I was sorry now that I’d agreed to come to the lake. I thought of the monster gliding through the water, eyes wide open in the dark.
    There was sand in my underwear. I took it off and threw it into the lake.
    My mother laughed. “Shall we be nudists, then? Is that what you have in mind?” She stripped off her underwear and tossed it in the water too. “Race you to the car,” she said. As quickly as that, she’d forgotten she was mad at me.
    I was out of breath when I reached the car. My mother beat me there. She always beat me at races because she ran as fast as she could and never gave me a head start. “Catch me if you can,” she’d say just before she streaked ahead. It was the same thing when we played checkers. She bet me a nickel a game and always won. Already, I was six dollars in debt to her.