We didn’t say anything more for a while. We bobbed in the water, the sun bright against our faces. The longer we stayed, the more distant the shore seemed. I found the openness both terrifying and intoxicating — a part of myself fighting the impulse to swim back to solid land, another part wanting to plunge myself into this kind of vastness again and again. I was afraid of so many things, I had come to realize during my traveling year. My mother seemed to have an immunity to fear, the way she hurled herself into foreign lands and the arms of men, while I was always entangled in ideas about penalties and peril.
I was about to ask Daud if we could swim farther when he disappeared, leaving only a blanket of ripples where his head had once been. I spun around, looking for him, waiting to feel his hands graze my knees. I stared across the water, one hand cupped over my eyes, and shouted his name. When he didn’t surface, my body grew heavy with dread, with thoughts of sea creatures and underwater black holes. Then, without warning, he appeared in the distance, grinning and flapping his arms. Before I could call to him, he vanished again, this time staying under even longer, until I felt vibrations around my legs and he reappeared right in front of me, bursting through the water with the force of a sea god.
“How did you learn to do that?” I asked. “To hold your breath for so long?”
He told me that when he was young, he’d go swimming in the ocean with his brothers after school. “Some afternoons we’d race,” he said. “You need to be strong. And to be able to hold your breath for a long time. We’d take turns pushing each other underwater.”
“Can you show me?” I drifted closer to Daud, wondering if it was possible to cure someone of fear. “Teach me the way you learned?”
He rested his hands on my shoulders, our noses nearly touching. Water had beaded in his eyelashes, making them darker and longer. He stared at me for a long time. Then he thrust me underwater and held me there until I felt like my heart was going to explode. He released long enough for me to take a single breath, then pushed me down again. I opened my eyes the second time, saw dense shadows in the water and Daud’s legs, and by the time he pulled me up, my lungs were aching. His hands slipped down my chest, his fingers momentarily clinging to my breasts, before he took me underwater again. Each time, he kept me there longer, his palms like stones against my shoulders. I twisted and squirmed, getting wild with panic, my fists thumping his chest and stomach. The last time he took me under, the back of my brain went fuzzy and I imagined death swooping down from the sky like a great black bird and just as a weightlessness started to wash over me, he let me rise for air.
“It’s good for you to struggle against the water,” he said when it was all over. We swam back to shore slowly, Daud’s hand on the center of my back. “In case you ever get sucked down by a strong tide. You have to know how to fight.”
When we reached land, I lay in the sand, exhausted. It was late in the afternoon. The sky was darkening. Daud sat next to me, asked if I was okay, and I nodded. My shorts and tank top were soaked, my white bra straps exposed. I looked down and saw the small ridges of my nipples. I didn’t try to cover myself, feeling too tired and too brave. Daud’s body was lean, his forearms and calves roped with muscle. He had a pale scar in the shape of a horseshoe on his chest. I wanted to press my hand over it, but sensed I should not. I told him about the lists I’d started keeping on my own, different from the ones my mother encouraged me to memorize. The one I thought about the most was famous disappearances: Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, Ambrose Bierce. I wondered if the mysteries of their lives would ever be solved, how long someone would look for me before my name was added to such a list. He didn’t ask me questions, just let me talk. We stayed there — close but never touching — until it was nearly dark.
We returned to the hotel an hour late for dinner. My mother was waiting for us on the terrace, her plate empty. As Daud and I took our seats, I noticed our plates were heaped with food. My hair, still wet, stuck to the back of my neck; my clothes were dusted in sand. Before I started eating, I tucked my bra straps back underneath my tank top. I was relieved Daud had put his shirt on before we arrived at the hotel.
“Turnips with garlic and ginger tonight,” my mother said. “I’m sure it tasted better when it was hot.”
“How did it go this afternoon?” Daud asked.
“I got amazing footage of the Red-Ruffed lemurs,” my mother said. “When you see the clips, you’ll wish you’d been there.”
“It sounds like you managed well enough without me,” he said.
“I always manage well on my own.” My mother sat a little straighter in her chair before telling us meaningful scientific research was best done in solitude, that collective thought only diluted the strongest ideas. “Did Walter Buller have research teams?” she asked us. “Did William Swainson?
“June,”Daud said. “They were working at the turn of the century.”
“That’s not the point,” she said.
In the dusk, I couldn’t see my mother’s eyes through her sunglasses, though I suspected she was looking at me. I focused on scooping turnips with my spoon.
“Celia took me swimming today,” Daud said. “I didn’t realize she had such talent.”
“You do have a few trophies at home, don’t you?” My mother tapped her upper lip with her index finger for a moment, pretending to not remember.
She stood and dropped her napkin. “I already checked with the cook, and there’s no dessert tonight.” The sky was dark, the terrace lit only by the dim glow of lightbulbs hanging from a wire. She walked away from the hotel, towards the tall grass and trees. Daud looked at me, started to say something, then followed her.
I called my father once from Madagascar, a month into our stay. The hotel owner let me use the phone in his office. Lana answered and passed the phone to my father without saying anything. He asked after my mother and I told him that I didn’t think she’d be returning to New York after all. I had been longing to tell someone about the way she was changing, how much she seemed to have aged in the last year and how hard she was pushing against it.
“She’s not changing,” my father said. “She’s just laying her cards on the table.”
“But why now?”
“Because she doesn’t have to pretend she wants to live the same life that I do anymore.”
“She’s making me call her by her first name.”
“When your mother turned thirty, she took off to Mexico for two weeks. She’s never taken aging well,” he said. “And I never understood why she was so interested in those lemurs. I always thought they looked like deformed cats.”
“It’s because they’re starting to die. Too many trees are being cut down.”
“It’s just like your mother to pick something like that,” he said. “It’s not the lemurs she really cares about. It’s being able to alter something bigger than she is.”
“But couldn’t she find another purpose? Something closer to home?”
“That’s the problem,” my father said. “She only has one. And it’s not you or me, either.”
I pressed the receiver against my forehead. Even in the hotel owner’s office, the windows and door closed, I could still hear the Indris faintly. “I’ve decided to become a professional swimmer,” I told my father.
“You mean like the competitions you did in high school?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I mean long-distance, open water.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“To go as far as I can.”
“Celia,” my father said. “Couldn’t you pick something a little less dangerous?”