We cut through the heart of downtown, which was designed to echo a time no one I knew could remember. The streets were narrow, built out of brick, and had names like Delaware and Cherokee, in honor of the people the settlers had captured and killed. They were dotted with the same old lights that first lit the city when it wasn’t a city, when it was just a nice town growing fat with hope. On each side there were small-time shops and the occasional bank, and when the streets were empty, like they were this morning, I liked to imagine them as the site of a showdown, an old western gunfight. I could almost see the old-time outlaws terrorizing the town until my dad rode in, the new sheriff, and put every trouble to bed.
Once out of downtown, we drove past the city’s park. It was windy and gray, and there were no kids playing. There were men in orange jumpsuits, however, prisoners, spearing trash as armed guards looked on. This sort of sight wasn’t uncommon. Whenever we drove through the city, I couldn’t count to ten without seeing some sign of a prison: the big billboard at the end of the city that read, “Come Do Some Time in Leavenworth”; the guards in uniform who crawled out of their houses at all hours and unlocked their cars with countless keys attached to the hip, the teary-eyed out-of-towners who asked for directions to a given prison, where they would visit their locked-up loved ones. It was all part of where we lived. Still, common as it was, sometimes, if my brother and I had been bad that morning or the day before, our mother might slow the van down, point at the men in jumpsuits, and say something like, “See, that’s why you do what I tell you. You don’t want to end up like that, do you?” Today she drove by without a word.
Past the park we turned onto Tenth Avenue, and from there to Limit Street, which stretched the entire city and had its west end at our apartment. When we first moved in, our complex was called Oak Valley. But a month later, before he left us for a different, safer city, the owner changed the name. He tried to spin the fact that we lived on a street called Limit at the limit of a sad city, and renamed the complex the Frontiers, as if the world around us were wide open and not surrounded by prisons.
* * *
At home we all took our after-church hangovers our separate ways. My mother went to her room and shut her door for a nap. She had to work that evening and tomorrow at noon, and wasn’t to be disturbed. Unless someone is bleeding, she said, let me be. My brother had a contest with himself to see how many push-ups he could do. I wasn’t sure why he did this, but guessed that a kid at school had teased him about being a taller, nearly as skinny version of me. My brother didn’t say it, but I think he had visions of showing up to school in the fall a newer, better version of his spring self.
I lay in bed with a pillow over my head and fell asleep. It was a hard sleep but no dreams stuck around my brain. In the real world, a rustling sound found my ear. Something tickled. I felt my body start to wiggle. I opened my eyes and my brother was sitting over me, dangling my swim shorts.
He was singing a jingle. “Let’s go to the pool. Let’s go to the pool.”
“Mom?”
“Mom,” he said, still singing, “Mom is gone.”
* * *
We had never gone to the pool while our mother was gone. We had never gone without her giving us the OK to go. I thought about mentioning this to my brother while we changed into our trunks, but was certain he would beat my point with his own better point that I could not predict. This was why I never could argue with him. The times I tried, when I thought my thoughts were good, he would put my point in some other light, and soon I would be on his side.
I was able to stay quiet until we reached the bottom of the stairs, where the guilt caught up.
“Does Mom know?” I said.
“Does Mom know what?”
“You know.”
“Mom knows lots of things,” he said. He pulled out a sheet of paper he had folded in his trunks and pretended to read. I imagined the paper had a detailed drawing of a diver doing a Gainer, and wondered if he would ever let me see it.
“The pool,” I said. “Did you ask her if we could go to the pool?”
“I did ask her.”
“You did?”
“Yes.” He put the sheet back in his pocket and held open the pea-green door. “Can we go?”
It took me until the pool gate before I realized my brother had not said whether my mother had said yes or no.
“Of course she said no,” my brother said. He laughed at me, and opened the gate. It felt like we were breaking in, like we were sneaking into a prison, instead of escaping with everyone else. I stayed in the shallow end and watched my brother do move after move. Before each bounce off the board, he looked around to see if anyone was watching. A guard. A cop. Chris. The pool was silent. There was no one but us.
“I guess I’ll work on my front flip,” my brother said. “You should work on it with me. That way, when Chris comes back, he’ll be like, ‘You guys have gotten good!’” That argument didn’t appeal to me, but I liked the idea of doing something with my brother, and him inviting me.
Though I had only been off the diving board once before. And I was real scared then. We had just moved into the apartment. Our mother was with us, but she had gone inside to get a book and never came back. To get me to jump, my brother had to narrate a long tale of the sea, starring himself as a famous pirate captain whose waters stretched the entire pool. I was the former best friend who had betrayed the captain by breaking the one rule obeyed by all of the sea’s wayward criminals: Thou shall not covet thy captain’s wife (a take on the commandments my brother was forced to memorize back when we still suffered Sunday school). The story ended with me, the first mate, having to walk the plank. My brother let me keep my eyes open then, which he said real pirates wouldn’t do. I think he felt the eyes of the few adults who were watching the entire performance from pool chairs.
I felt that memory in my stomach when I stepped onto the board.
“First, let’s try a dive,” my brother said. I could tell he was enjoying the role he was playing, the substitute Chris. I stepped to the edge of the board and looked out over the deep end. The sun hung low over the tops of the trees. My brother stood as close to me as he could without being on the diving board. So this is what it was like.
“Put your arms up,” he said. “Hands together.”
I did.
“Squeeze your head.”
What?
“Pinch your head with your arms. Like this.”
Oh.
“Now jump.”
Um.
“Fall.”
Well.
“Do something!”
His last shout pushed me off, though I didn’t jump. I just kind of fell, and as I fell I saw my brother’s face — surprised, but also smirking.
There was a loud pop, a punch in the stomach. I didn’t go into the water right. The world around me became a blue dream. Water rushed up my nose and into my lungs, but I couldn’t make it stop, or tell my body to float to the top. I hung underwater, thinking of nothing, feeling the same.
Chris was the one who pulled me to the pool ladder, after I don’t know how long. All I knew was that I was in a pool chair and Chris’s hands were all over me, pressing my chest, cupping my face.
“Just checking for leaks, little man,” he said. “Nope, no holes. She’ll float.”
He sat me up. My brother stood behind him, wearing his concerned face, the one that also said he was annoyed.
“What were you doing down there?” he said. “Why didn’t you come up?”
“I don’t know. I thought I would.”