Free Up Through the Water by Darcey Steinke Page A

sandals with the darker sunken spot for each toe. But rising water wasn't really what he worried about. He thought mostly of her and how restless she would be during the winter rainstorms. He wondered if she missed him. It bothered Eddie that she never asked to see him in the winters. He wondered if she drank too much, if she was careful in the ocean, and what the men she was with were like.
    Eddie interrupted Lila and asked her what it was like on the island in the winter.
    “You never listen to me,” she said.
    “Yeah, I do.”
    “You act like I'm some kind of ape or something,” Lila said.
    Eddie thought of her being a delicate baby ape. Like the tiny monkeys in lace dresses he'd seen on talk shows.
    “Everything closes,” Lila said, “and we all sit around and stare at each other.”
    Gulls were edging closer. With heads cocked they eyed the sweaty Coke cans and bag of chips.
    ‘'I'm sorry,” Eddie said. He waited for her to answer. “Want to come to my house tonight? I got some beers. And my mother won't be back until late—she's deep-sea fishing.”
    “Sure,” Lila said lazily. “I got nothing better to do.” As if she just thought of it, Lila leaned up and moved her lips close to his ear. “I heard they found that pony.”
    Eddie said, “No one knows . . .”
    “Just you and me,” Lila said, lying back down. They were quiet a moment. “If you want, we could go to the lighthouse after.”
    “Really?”
    “My father helped paint it last year and he still has keys.”
    “But let's drink the beers first at my house.”
    “Okay.”
    She got up quickly and went to the water. He followed, thinking of it like a movie: high steps through the waves, then in slow motion diving into the sea.
    “The waves come in sevens,” Lila said. She breaststroked toward his open hand. Eddie pulled her to his lap where she floated light as balsa wood above his knees. She noticed his hair curled up around his face and how the longer pieces on the back of his neck waved. “Do you ever tell lies?” she said.
    “No,” he said, looking way off to the blurry horizon. But swift as a good pin, he thought of the time he was caught shoplifting albums under his shirt, and how the cellophane had stuck to his chest. Also the fibs he'd told this summer, mostly to tourist girls, that he played tight end at college, had been an extra in a movie.
    “I do, all the time,” she said.
    “Why?” Eddie said. He held her as gently as possible. Cigarette-thin fish turned together toward them, their pale underwater legs an obstacle, then the school formed like geese and headed back to shore.
    “Nearly everything I say is a lie,” Lila said, her arms in a loose ribbon around Eddie's neck. “I just start going and I see whatever I'm talking about like usual. But then it has on a new dress, or a green ring, or maybe the words somebody said are funnier.”
    “Lying's for kids,” Eddie said.
    Lila said, “Your mother lies.”
    “She never lied to me,” Eddie said, seeing thousands of his mother's lies coming out from her mouth in written words as if she was a sword swallower pulling out a hundred swords.
    Lila snuggled her head into Eddie's neck. He liked the easy motion of the waves breaking behind them. His mother still had a few bruises the color of bird eggs and one heart-shaped scab on her temple. He put his cheek to Lila's wet hair. “Meet me at the dock tonight. Then we'll go to my house.”
    “Then to the lighthouse,” Lila said. She slipped her arm down around his waist and they floated, pulled by the ocean but anchored underwater by Eddie's toes sunk into liquid sand.
    *  *  *
    Eddie rode his skateboard into the few funnels of street lamp light and through the dark connecting spaces of night. He pumped fast in jeans, black high-tops, and a BOBCAT sweatshirt. He rolled off the asphalt and onto the cement walk. At the first dock, Lila sat swaying her feet above the water. Around her the lit cabins of boats shined like