Aldo shakes his head. “You can’t race. At all.”
“Why not?” I clench my hands into fists. “They raced Bay. Why am I any different?”
“You just are,” Aldo says. “There’s something wrong about you.”
If they only knew. Everything is wrong about me.
How am I supposed to get faster—and stronger—without anyone to race?
There’s nothing I can do about it.
Except, there is.
I could speak to Aldo, putting barely any sound behind the word; it could be made mostly of air, my breath against his neck as I leaned in. I would hardly have to use any of my real voice. But he’d hear a hint of it, close to him and only for him. “Please,” I’d whisper, and in spite of himself he’d close his eyes. He’d do whatever I said. I know he would.
But I don’t do it.
In that moment I remember the money I brought with me.
“Then I’ll rent a lane,” I say. “Right now.”
“For what?” he asks. “You’ll waste your coin. No one’s going to race you.”
A few of the bettors and other racers have gathered around to listen, to see what I’ll do. I don’t look at any of them. I keep my eyes on Aldo.
“I’ll swim against myself,” I say.
Aldo laughs. “No one will watch that,” he says. “No one will bet on it.”
“That’s fine,” I say. “I’m not doing it for them.” My mind buzzes with ways to make swimming harder, to push myself. Should I use some of my money to buy one of the fancier training suits, the kind with resistance to make you stronger? And then I realize I’m already wearing the perfect suit. My machinist’s gear from work will weigh me down. It will be hard to swim in this, and I can let it dry overnight so I can wear it again tomorrow.
I step down into the lane. The water drags on me and it’s hard to walk. I hear people laughing, someone saying that I’d do better to take everything off, someone else saying that there’s always been something odd about the other Conwy girl. I duck my head under the water and I no longer hear anything they say.
I can barely swim the first few strokes after I push away from the wall. The weight of my clothing pulls me down. But then I remind myself. It’s going to be harder than this to get to the surface. And you don’t know how far you’ll have to swim once you get up there. This is nothing. This is the very beginning of what you’ll have to do.
I look down at the black line along the center of the lane, the one that keeps you away from the sides if you follow it. I keep to that line, with all the drag and pull from my suit weighing on me, and I don’t stop until I’ve made it all the way down and back, over and over again, until I’m afraid that I will actually drown.
I climb back out. My clothes are soaked, and my muscles tremble from the effort.
People are watching. Some of them laugh. Some of them cheer. But they’re all paying attention, and I fight down a smile. They have reminded me of something I have always known, something that my mother knew how to play upon. People love a spectacle, an event. Give them something to watch and you will make them happy. “So much of life is in the smallness of moments,” my mother said. “But they are harder to mark. So we need the grander celebrations and occasions. People like to feel significant.”
Maybe if I give them something good enough to watch when I swim alone, they’ll pay me for it. What if I made it so interesting that I could draw a crowd? The thought terrifies me, but then my time in the lanes would serve two purposes: I could train for the swim to the Above, and I could make money to buy the air tank I need.
“I’ll rent a lane again, same time tomorrow,” I tell Aldo. “Tell anyone who’s interested. And I’ll do something new next time.”
“You think they’re going to care?” he asks.
“They already do,” I say, pointing at the crowd. They think I’m odd. No one wants to swim against me. But they don’t mind watching me take risks myself.
I don’t have extra clothes with me, so I have to drip my way home. I pass one of the stalls that sells pastries cut into wedges, with flaky crusts and nuts and raisins and brown sugar inside. My stomach rolls with hunger. But I need to save my coin. Every bit of it. I worry already about how much I’ve spent. I need to make all the money back, and much more besides.
I pause for a moment near a stall where a vendor sells tiny bottles of dirt (marked as REAL AND FROM ABOVE). In spite of the labels, I feel certain that the dirt must be counterfeit, and I want to say something to the woman who counts out coin with shaking hands to buy a bottle from the smarmy-looking vendor. I’ve seen the real thing up close, I want to tell her, and this isn’t it.
I know what dirt looks like because my mother let us look at the large jar of earth that sits on top of the altar. She even let us open the jar. We couldn’t touch the dirt, but we could certainly see how dark and rich it was, and sometimes I felt that the smell of it was the smell of home.
But not everyone is as lucky as I was, and if this woman wants to think she has a tiny jar of real soil, perhaps it’s worth it. After all, I liked believing that my sister and I told each other everything, and that turned out not to be true.
Was it ever true?
I know it was.
When did it change?
I have no idea.
I don’t realize that I’ve stopped walking until someone bumps into me and tsks at my waterlogged clothes. A few children point and laugh at me.
Everything is heavy.
I want this pain off my back. I want to stop thinking about why Bay left and whether or not I can believe Maire. The swimming has worn me out, which is good, because I didn’t have to think of Bay while I was doing it, but it’s also when I’m exhausted that the dark loneliness breaks in.
And I realize that in order to go up through the floodgates, I have to trade places with someone else. I have to slip into the morgue and arrange myself like a body. I have to hide the real corpse, whoever it is they mean to send up. And, of course, in hoping for the floodgates to open, I am hoping for someone to die. I am hoping for someone to die so that I can leave.
I pass the vendors who sell jewelry—ornate silver; round, carved beads; puddles of stone and glass held together with wire and metal—and then I see something that stops me in my tracks.
It’s a ring, arranged on black velvet in a glass-lidded case, and even though I don’t care anything about jewelry, I know that ring.