Day five and Kit is again at my table. Which means she has sat here, with me, for an entire week. Five consecutive days. This makes me elated, a feeling that is as good as it is unfamiliar, especially at school.
“So I just want to say something to you and it’s kind of embarrassing, but I think I just need to get it off my chest,” Kit says, and I can’t help it, I look right at her chest, which is small and round and perfectly proportional. I have imagined what she’d look like without her shirt on, what is hiding there under her bra, which I guesstimate is a size 34B, and it takes effort for me not to think about that right now.
Of course, it’s disrespectful to think about her breasts when she is sitting directly across from me and trying to tell me something. I’ll think about them later, when there’s no chance of her knowing about it.
“I’m sorry about licking your ice cream cone yesterday. That was sort of, I don’t know, inappropriate,” she says.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” I say, wondering if this is the equivalent of her taking back her flirting, and a tiny, immature part of me wants to scream out: No backsies! “I’m happy to share my ice cream with you anytime.”
I look at the food in front of me—my chicken sandwich, a bag of chips, a banana—and wonder if I should offer up something as a gesture. I like sharing food with Kit. It makes me feel like we are in cahoots, an expression that had little meaning to me until recently.
“Okay, then,” she says.
“Okay,” I say, though I have no idea what it is, exactly, we have just agreed on.
“You’ll be proud of my lunch. It’s exceptionally well balanced.” Kit takes a paper bag from her backpack and presents me with one small cup of Greek yogurt.
“That’s it?” I ask, suddenly worried that she is not taking proper care of herself. I preferred it when she was overeating. “No leftovers today?”
“Nah. We had cereal for dinner last night. It’s like my mom has forgotten how to cook or something. Not that she cooked all that much before, you know, before, but now it’s like feast or famine in my house. Excessive amounts of takeout or nothing at all.”
“Do you know how they make Greek yogurt?” I ask her.
“No, and I don’t want to know,” she says, and the smile still on my face gets a little bit bigger. I like that Kit tells me what she does and doesn’t want to talk about. It keeps me from going on about stuff she’s not interested in, which according to my mom and Miney is one of my biggest problems: I don’t always notice when other people do not share my fascinations.
“Okay, then,” I say, a callback to her earlier use, since that technique is often used in movie banter. “We could discuss string theory instead.”
“Nope. Not that either.”
“We could start on the Accident Project,” I say, because I am eager to help Kit understand what happened to her dad. I’ve read all about the five stages of grief and I assume this endeavor means she’s already moved passed denial.
“Not here. Not at school.”
“Okay.”
“So that history quiz? If you tell me it was easy I will smack you.” I think about Kit hitting me, and it doesn’t sound altogether unpleasant, because it would mean her hand would have to touch my face. We have only touched twice. On Monday, when I helped her stand up in the concession hut, and yesterday, when she linked her arm with mine on Main Street.
“It wasn’t hard,” I say. And then she does it. She really does it. Kit leans across the table and playfully taps my face with the palm of her hand.
One early summer morning, when I was four, my mom took me to the Y to go swimming. Before then I had refused to get into the pool: too many kids screaming, and splashing, and throwing around fluorescent polyethylene foam cylinders—Miney called them “noodles,” but they were neither edible nor harmless. That day the pool was deserted and I was wearing Wonder Wings, which disappointingly bestowed neither the gift of wonder nor of flight and were tight and unfamiliar. I complained, already imagining the red ridges they would leave behind on my arms, but then my mom held my hand and we stepped into the water, and I felt that first cold gasp. I somehow got the courage to put my face right into the pool, all the way past my ears, and the world went blue and dimmed and muffled and finally, finally quiet.
This is my home, I remember thinking. This. Here. Where there is room to breathe but no air. This is my home.
And that’s exactly how it feels when Kit’s palm touches my face. Like swimming for the very first time. Like discovering the magic that is water. Like coming home.
It turns out clichés are clichés for a reason—they are true. And this one is most definitely true: You never know what you’ve got till it’s gone.
Jack and I are in my dad’s den, which is half office, half man cave, and it smells like before in here. We are looking for papers. A life insurance policy, information about our mortgage (though I don’t even really know what a mortgage is), bank account passwords. All important stuff Jack claims will likely be found in a single file. My mother, who has clearly reverted back to stage one, denial, or maybe pre–stage one, bacon, has taken to her bed, stuffed with an array of pig products. She’s left us alone to this masochists’ exercise.
Too many memories in here. On my dad’s desk, there’s a photo of me at the age of eight proudly holding up a rainbow lollipop the size of my head at Disney World. One of my dad and me all dressed up at my elementary school’s father-daughter dance, which I turned around as soon as we walked in so I didn’t have to look at it. Another of just him and my mom, on their honeymoon, looking ridiculously young and in love, my mom’s arms, still elaborately hennaed from the wedding, thrown around my dad’s shoulders on top of a mountain. And last, my favorite picture of my family taken at my mother’s fortieth-birthday party, which is now face down: My dad is holding me on his hip, even though I’m ten and way too big to be carried, and we’re all laughing at a joke he just cracked about my mom getting too old for him. We look happier than anyone deserves to be.
Jack and I shouldn’t be in here violating this sacred space, but my mom needs our help. When I was little, I used to beg to play in this office, right here on the beige carpet by my dad’s feet. I’d promise—cross my fingers, hope to die—not to make any noise and to let my father do whatever mysterious things he came in here to do. Of course, I never kept my mouth shut. I’d ask inane questions—did he know that octopus blood is blue? that male sea horses carry their babies?—just because I wanted to hear my dad’s voice, I guess.
I loved the sound of his voice: deep and gravelly. The sound of home.
“Sea horses can carry up to two thousand babies at a time, though it’s usually closer to fifteen hundred. And octopus blood is blue because it has a special protein to make them able to live in extreme temperatures. Now out, Kitty Cat. This is a no-kids zone,” my dad would say, ushering me through the door.