Diane Chamberlain - Before the Storm

“Thanks.”

I looked for Andy at the end of the pool and found him right away. Even though he was on a team with kids his age, he was a little shrimp and easy to pick out. He was jabbering to a couple of kids who were, most likely, tuning him out. Ben put his hand on Andy’s shoulder and steered him to the edge of the pool in front of lane five.

Andy’s burn was so much better. I looked at him lined up with the other high schoolers. I would have felt sorry for him if I didn’t know his skill. His tininess always faked out the other teams. He was ninety pounds of muscle. He had asthma, but as long as he used his inhaler before a meet, no one would ever guess. I watched him at the edge of the pool, coiled up as tight as a jack-in-the-box. Ben called him his team’s secret weapon. I smiled, watching him lean forward, waiting for the whistle. Next to me, my mother tensed. I thought we were both holding our breath.

A whistle lasts maybe a second and a half, but Andy always seemed to hear the very first nanosecond of the sound and he was off. This time was no different. He leaped through the air like he’d been shot from a gun. In the water, he worked his arms and legs like a machine. I used to think his hearing was more sensitive than the other kids’, that he could hear the sound of the whistle before they could. Then Mom told me about the startle reflex, how babies have it and outgrow it, but how kids with fetal alcohol syndrome sometimes keep it until their teens. Andy still had it. At home, if I walked around the corner from the living room to the kitchen and surprised him, he’d jump a foot in the air. But in the pool, his startle reflex was a good thing. Ben’s secret weapon.

Mom laughed as she watched the race, her hands in fists beneath her chin. I didn’t know how she could laugh at anything so soon after the fire. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to laugh again.

“Hey, Mags.” Uncle Marcus suddenly showed up on the bleachers. He squeezed onto the bench between me and the father of one of the kids on Ben’s team.

“Hey.” I moved closer to Mom to give him room. “I didn’t know you were here.”

“Just got here,” he said. “Sorry I missed your team. How’d they do?”

“The usual,” I said.

“Looks like Andy’s doing the usual, too.” Uncle Marcus looked toward the water, where my brother was a couple of lengths ahead of everyone else. “Hey, Laurel.” He leaned past me to look at my mother.

“Hi, Marcus,” Mom said, not taking her eyes off Andy, which could just be a mother-not-wanting-to-look-away-from-her-son kind of thing, but I knew it was more than that. My mother was always weird about Uncle Marcus. Cold. Always giving him short answers, the way you’d act with someone you were tired of talking to, hoping they’d get the hint. I asked her about it once and she said it was my imagination, that she didn’t treat him differently than anyone else, but that was a total crock. I thought it had to do with the fact that Uncle Marcus survived the whale while Daddy didn’t.

Uncle Marcus was always nice to her, pretending he didn’t notice how bitchy she acted. A few years ago, I started thinking of how cool it would be if Mom and Uncle Marcus got together, but Mom didn’t seem interested in dating anyone, much less her brother-in-law. Sometimes she and Sara went to a movie or to dinner, but that was it for my mother’s social life. I thought her memory of my father was so perfect she couldn’t picture being with another man.

The older I got, the more I thought she should have something more in her life than her part-time school nurse job, her every single day jogs, and her full-time job—Andy. I said that to her once and she turned the tables on me. “You’re a fine one to talk,” she said. “Why don’t you date?” I told her I wanted to focus on studying and coaching, that I had plenty of time to date in college. I shut up then. Less said on that topic, the better. If Mom knew how my grades had tanked this year, she’d realize I wasn’t studying at all. That was the good thing about having a mother who only paid attention to one of her kids.

The race was down to the last lap and I stood up along with everyone else on the bleachers. I spotted Dawn Reynolds in the first row near the end of the pool. She had no kids on the swim team; she was there to watch Ben. I followed her gaze to him. Ben had on his yellow jams with the orange palm tree print. His chest was bare, with some dark hair across it. He was tall and a little overweight, but you could see muscles moving beneath the tanned skin of his arms and legs.

“Go, Pirates!” Dawn yelled, her hands a megaphone around her mouth, but she wasn’t even looking at the swimmers. She was so obvious that I felt embarrassed watching her. It was like watching someone do something very personal, like inserting a tampon. I imagined climbing down the bleachers when the race was over to sit next to her. I could ask her how the fund was doing. I could ask if there was a way I could help. I wanted to in the worst way. I knew Mom put in three thousand, and I gave five hundred from the money I was saving for extra college expenses, although I told Mom I only gave a hundred. Andy gave thirty from his bank account. Money was not enough. I needed to do more. I watched Dawn cheer on Ben’s team, imagining the conversation I’d never have with her.

The race was almost over. Andy was in the lead. Surprise, surprise. “Come on, Andy!” I yelled. Mom raised her fists in the air, waiting for the moment of victory, and Uncle Marcus let out one of his ear-piercing whistles.

Andy slapped the end of the pool, and the applause exploded for him, like it had two days before in the Assembly Building, but he just turned and kept swimming at the same insane pace. Mom laughed and I groaned. He’d never understood about ending a race. At the end of Andy’s next lap, Ben leaned over, grabbed him by his arms and lifted him out of the pool. I saw him mouth the words You won! to Andy, and something else that looked like You can stop swimming now.

We all sat down again. Andy looked at us, grinning and waving as he walked to the bench.

Uncle Marcus leaned forward again. “I’ve got something for you, Laurel,” he said.

My mother had to break down and look at him then. “What?”

Uncle Marcus pulled a small folded newspaper article from his shirt pocket and reached across me to hand it to her.

“One of the guys was up in Maryland and saw this in the Washington Post. ”

I looked over my mother’s shoulder to read the headline: Disabled N.C. Boy Saves Friends.

Mom shook her head with a laugh. “Don’t they have enough of their own news up there?” She looked at Uncle Marcus. “I can keep this?”

“It’s yours.”

“Thanks.”

Uncle Marcus took in a long breath, stretching his arms above his head as he let it out. Then he sniffed my shoulder. “You wear chlorine the way other women wear perfume, Mags,” he teased.

He was not the first guy to tell me that. I liked that he said “women” and not “girls.”

The pool had been my home away from home since it was built when I was eleven. Before that, I could only swim during the summer in the sound or the ocean.

Daddy taught Andy and me how to swim. “Kids who live on the water better be good swimmers,” he’d said. He taught me first of course, before Andy even lived with us. One of my earliest memories was of a calm day in the ocean. It was nothing major. Nothing special. We just paddled around. He held me on his knees, tossed me in the air, swung me around until I practically choked on my laughter. Total bliss.

When I was a little older, Andy joined us in the water and he took to it the same as I did. Daddy’d told me that Andy probably wouldn’t be able to swim as well as I could, but Andy surprised him.