“Finish her!” yelled the Bitch.
He might have.
I only stayed up because Ethan’s body kept me from falling.
He rammed me again. My legs thrashed and my feet left the floor. He was bearing all my weight now, driving me into the concrete so hard that I didn’t have time to fall.
“Put him down, honey!” yelled Daddy.
If I’d had the use of my hands I could have taken out Ethan’s eyes. If I’d had the use of my teeth I could have ripped out his throat. I only had my legs, which didn’t have the proper angle for a worthwhile kick.
But I didn’t need to kick him to put him down, not when the wall was right behind me.
Not when he was keeping me from falling.
I braced the bare soles of my feet against the concrete, took another skull-rattling impact with the wall just to gather my fading strength, and at the moment when he pulled back for another power-driving charge pushed off with everything I had.
It wasn’t enough to send him flying backward, as I’d hoped. But it did throw him off balance. His greased skin lost traction against mine. He tried to shift, but then he fell left and I fell right and we both hit the bottom of the pool in a tangle.
I landed on top, driving my knee into his shriveled balls with a force that made him double in two.
“That’s a girl!” Daddy yelled. “Now finish him!”
But I was in no shape to risk more close contact, not with my vision going gray from the beating I’d taken. I rolled away, got my feet under me again, and managed to get to the opposite wall just as Ethan was also getting back to his feet.
He looked like hell, sweaty, out of breath and the entire lower half of his face gleaming with blood. I don’t know what I looked like, but as he went in and out of focus I knew that I had to look worse.
He shouted something through his gag, something that emerged as a series of bubbly roars. He could have been telling me to fuck myself. Or he could have been saying that I was his sister and he was sorry he couldn’t love me. Or he could have been describing all the ways he wanted to make me suffer before I died.
It didn’t matter what he wanted to say. Or what I wanted to say. Our vocabulary was limited. This fight was the only conversation we had left.
Fortunately, he’d had enough for now.
He looked away and staggered toward the Deep End.
I went for the Shallow.
Dad shouted encouragement from above. “That’s good, honey! Pick your opportunities! Don’t waste yourself going after him until you’re ready!”
The Bitch cried, “I love you, honey!”
And so came the night.
The stars surprised me.
It wasn’t the first time I’d spent the night outdoors. I’d had that summer in the Sierra Nevadas, and the endurance treks in the Mojave, and long nights shivering in tents on Alaskan glaciers. I’d been so far from cities that if anything had happened to me it would have taken days or weeks to make my way to the first emergency room capable of giving me so much as a single stitch. I’d learned just what the sky could look like in the rarefied places untouched by smog or the glare of neon lights. I’d seen those distant suns glowing by the thousands, each so bright that they might have been tiny campfires just beyond my reach. I had grown bored by them.
I had never seen stars as bright as the stars looked tonight. They were so brilliant that the sharpest stung my eyes and made my vision blur. Whenever I moved, some twinkled out of sight, eclipsed by chain-link. I had never seen them so close, so mysterious. I had never seen other eyes looking down, from those distant places, wondering about us the way I wondered about them. I had never known that some of them had to be fighting for their lives, to settle conflicts begun long before they were even born.
There was no moon. Daddy and the Bitch had decided that we shouldn’t schedule this for a night with a moon. But the stars still provided enough glow to reveal the shape of the cracked white concrete walls. I could see the way the concave side curved off into the distance. The shadows were deep enough and large enough to provide any number of possible hiding places for my brother, but I could hear his bubbling snorks—representing a constant effort to keep his nostrils clear—and as far as I could tell it came from all the way around the bend. We were still at opposite corners.
I was thirsty. When I leaned the back of my head against the wall, my skin stuck, revealing a dried clotted mass back there. My teeth ached from biting into rubber for so long. My arms were in agony. I was nauseated, but didn’t dare throw up, not when the gag would have forced me to swallow it or choke. I hadn’t heard Daddy or the Bitch shout their little encouragements for quite a while, and couldn’t tell from the shapes of lifeguard chairs silhouetted against the night sky if they were still up there watching.
It must have been about midnight that I squirmed away from the steps, which had been the closest thing I had to a refuge, got my feet underneath me, and padded over to the gentle curve to my immediate right. I crouched there, hesitated to make sure I was alone, and peed. Drizzle ricocheting off the puddle peppered my right ankle. A rivulet flowing downstream puddled against my heel. I wondered not for the first time how female dogs managed to keep their paws dry. After a few seconds, feeling better, I straightened out and put some distance between myself and the only toilet I’d have for as long as this battle lasted.
A million miles away, Ethan snorked again.
With his nose obstructed by the break, just breathing had to be exhausting him. It would deny him sleep, deny him rest, deny him even enough air to stay strong. He could get some around the gag, but it wouldn’t be enough to keep him going forever. Even if I did nothing at all, and stayed out of his way, his probable life expectancy in the pool must have already been cut in half. I only wished I could be sure that what was left was still shorter than mine. After all, I’d suffered a head injury. The nausea and dizziness was a sure symptom of a concussion capable of deepening into coma as soon as I drifted off.
I had to make another go for him.
Padding along the warm concrete floor of the pool, which had not yet given up all the heat of the day, I made my way toward him, stopping every step or so to keep him from triangulating my position from the sound of my breath. Not that stealth mattered all that much. The thin layer of grit at the bottom of the pool made every step crunch like an old-fashioned soft-shoe.
I tried not to think about how big he was and how badly he’d hurt me the last time we’d faced each other.
In my head, he’d grown to twice his actual size.
In my head, he was an ogre, towering over me like any other creature of old fantasies, with arms the size of tree trunks and a head that blotted out the sky. In my head, I only came up to his waist.
An image from an old stop-motion movie intruded, painting Ethan as a roaring Cyclops, scooping up badly-imposed sailors to bite in half with one chomp of his oversized jaws.
I cursed my imagination. This was stupid. He was nothing but a big, stupid, overdeveloped boy too clumsy for his own good.
He was just my brother.
Daddy had said, “You’re better than him, honey.”
He had said, “You’ll win as long as you have heart.”
He had said, “I have faith in you, Jen.”
The Bitch might have said any number of things like that to Ethan, but then, she was the Bitch, and she was used to lies and deceit. Just look at all the things she had done to Daddy.
When Daddy said things like that, he told the truth.
I made it to the line that separated the Deep and Shallow ends. The bowl ahead of me was inkier and, it seemed, deeper than it had any right to be. I couldn’t see the far wall. There was too much shadow there even to admit the distant light of the stars. It was too black to see Ethan, but I could still hear his breathing, somewhere ahead of me. It was ragged, wet, and labored. It didn’t sound like he was lying down. I got the clear impression that he was standing against the far wall, beneath what would have been the diving board, confident in his own ability to meet my advance with a strength that trumped my own.