Swimming to Chicago Read online

He lowered his voice. “Because I’m gay?”

  She reached for his hands and squeezed them against her own. “Do you realize how close you and I are, right now at this moment? This is shit we’ll remember for the rest of our lives.”

  His hands slipped out of hers. “If I live that long,” he said.

  Jillian pulled him into her arms, hugged him, and made a promise. “I won’t breathe a word of this to anyone.”

  “If you do,” he whispered back, “you know what could happen to me.”

  “Say no more.”

  He pulled away from her. “Someone told me half the school thinks I’m boning down on you.”

  She grinned. “No offense, but I wish you were.”

  He shoved his hands into his pockets and lowered his eyes to the edge of the curb. “Don’t tell me you have feelings for me, Jilli.”

  “I do, but not like that.”

  He started to walk again and Jillian followed his cue. Their pace was slower now, less urgent. “Explain,” he prompted her.

  “You have no idea what it means, that you trust me enough to bare your soul. But I have to tell you…I’m really happy these dumbasses think you and I are having hot sex.”

  “Dare I ask why?”

  Jillian took a quick breath before she spoke. “Because you’re definitely the coolest guy in this awful town.”

  “There’s lots of cool guys in Harmonville.”

  “Are you speaking from experience?”

  He shrugged and laughed. “Maybe.”

  She gasped. “You son of a bitch. You’re having sex and I’m still the Virgin Queen? What’s up with that?”

  They reached the bottom of his driveway. Jillian glanced up at the old wooden front porch. For a quick second, the pale amber haze of the porch light held her attention. Strange, she thought. Why would the light be on during the day?

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it sex,” Alex offered. “I think experimenting is more like it.”

  Jillian only half heard what Alex was saying. An overwhelming sense something was very wrong swirled beneath her skin and tiptoed down her spine. She shivered. She swallowed and tried to forget the wave of nervousness rolling inside her body. She attempted to laugh it off and made the smart-ass comment that Alex was expecting from her. “You’re not giving blow jobs to strangers like Sue Ellen Freeman does every Friday night, are you?”

  “No,” he replied, “you’re sort of warm, but he wasn’t a stranger.”

  Jillian allowed herself to be distracted by Alex’s words. The chill of concern instantly faded. “I’m sort of warm and he isn’t a stranger?” Jillian’s eyes widened with disgust. “Oh God,” she said, scrunching up her nose as if she were on the verge of puking on the oil-stained cement. “Please don’t tell me you let Bunny Freeman do dirty things to you. He’s old.”

  Alex avoided her eyes at first. “I don’t know if I can talk about it yet,” he said. He held her gaze. “I really want to tell you everything, Jilli.”

  She reached for him, but her fingertips missed his arm. “Whenever you’re ready,” she said.

  Jillian wondered if she and Alex saw the light at the same time. It wasn’t the porch light causing the air in their lungs to pause. It was a dull glow seeping out from the frayed bottom lip of the garage door. It seemed like a beacon of some sort to Jillian, an SOS signal from another realm. Someone was messaging for help. Someone wanted them to see the light, open the door, and discover their dire situation.

  Alex moved first, breaking their frozen stances. He walked up the driveway and Jillian followed, almost tripping in her sandals. She felt they were moving in slow motion, stepping through knee-high molasses to reach the garage door.

  She watched as Alex’s hand wrapped around the rusted handle, twisted and lifted the door. It creaked open and rolled upward. The sound and movement were like knives slashing at their souls. The light swam across their bodies and slipped inside Jillian’s mouth when she screamed. She tasted the hot glare of the light beaming from the overhanging burning bulb in the garage and it caused her to choke on a second scream.

  When Alex broke away from her, Jillian lifted both hands up toward him. He flew across the garage to the center of it where his mother’s lifeless body dangled from a thick black rope.

  Jillian felt her heart stop the second she watched her best friend wrap his arms around his mother’s waist and beg her to come back to life.

  As tears poured down Jillian’s face, she knew it was already too late.

  August/Ogostos

  Alex

  After his mother hanged herself in the garage, Alex didn’t say a word for a week. When he did speak, a few days after his mother’s casket was lowered into the ground, his words were in his mother’s native Armenian: “Haskanum em.” His American father, whose rail-thin body often betrayed his quest for strength, repeated the words back to him in English. “I understand.”

  They were on the sagging front porch, heavy and swollen from the August heat. Alex stood, pressing his weight against the waist-high balustrade. His hands were wrapped around the edges of the chipped white wood, his knuckles scraped and bruised. He’d punched a wall at church, denounced his belief in God, and fallen into a self-imposed muteness.

  He looked up. The sky reminded him of melting ice cream—a dish of drippy oranges and pinks, swirls of purples, and a beautiful, haunting blue.

  His father was close by, down on one knee and holding a scrap of sandpaper in his left hand, bent over some old wooden relic he’d found that day on his garbage route.

  Alex made eye contact with his father for the first time in seven days. “I understand why she did it, Dad.”

  Alex shoved his hands deep into the front pockets of his faded jeans. He’d spilled a bite of meat loaf at dinner, leaving a splash of tomato sauce on the chest of his white T-shirt. He shifted nervously from one foot to the other, his big toes wiggling inside his black and white Converse. He felt excited, as if he were reveling in the aftermath of an epiphany—a discovery that had the power to change his life forever.

  Alex turned back to the sky, and a thin tear slid from the corner of his eye, trickling down to the tip of his nose. “She was homesick,” he said. “She wanted to go home, Dad.”

  His father’s throat made a strangling sound, as if he were choking to get words out. “Alex, I would’ve taken her to Armenia. I could’ve…we would’ve gone to Alaverdi for a visit. I would’ve done anything.” Alex thought his father sounded desperate. It wasn’t what he wanted to hear. He stepped back, wiping his eyes with a flash of his hands.

  Alex’s words were short and choppy, fused with anger. “Dad, that’s not what I’m talking about. She wanted to go home to Chicago. She hated Armenia…and so do I.”

  “Alex…” His father reached for him, crumpling the sand paper in his hand. His fingertips brushed against Alex’s forearm. He pulled away quickly, as if scalded. The touch was like the firing of a starter pistol for Alex. He bounded off the porch, hoisting himself up and leaping over the balustrade. His shoes landed smack dab in the middle of a family of wilting marigolds, heaving beneath thick layers of humidity. From there, he was off and running.

  The front of the house stood back at least twenty yards from the picturesque residential street they lived on. Alex’s first impulse was to head toward the street, zip past the standing mailbox, and race to Jillian’s house.

  Or he could go to the swimming pool, stare at a stranger and hope one of them felt sorry enough to touch him. Instead, he ran toward the back of the house.

  Alex nearly tripped over a tangled garden hose. He moved on, across the cement patio and the backyard. He flew past an old marble birdbath, a barbecue grill in desperate need of cleaning, cheap patio furniture fading in the sun. Beyond the house, the earth sloped down and led him into a forest. The twenty acres standing before him had become his personal terrain, a place he could explore and seek refuge in. The land was overgrown, populated with huge clusters of trees, knee-high weeds
, wild dandelions that tickled his ankles, and thick red Georgia dirt dampened from humidity and the frequent summer storms.

  Alex loved to run. He liked the feeling of going somewhere. He’d always been restless, even as a child. He’d been unable to sit in the seat of a shopping cart, couldn’t be content sitting in a movie theater or a church or a doctor’s office. He had to be on the move. Nothing displeased him more than being idle.

  Alex felt bad for leaving his father on the porch, but he was overwhelmed. The house was suffocating with its choking grief and the sad look of pity in his father’s eyes. Since the funeral, home had become an emotional prison. Alex had watched his father’s soul disintegrate, as if someone were letting water out of a bathtub.

  Down a slow, slow drain.

  Alex ran with intensity. His thin, long arms jetted at his sides, punching the air, propelling him farther and farther away from the house and his father. His black and white sneakers pummeled the red dirt as he charged on, racing with the speed and prowess of a jaguar.

  Alex zipped between the trunks of magnolia trees, peach trees, oaks, pines, and maples. By the time he reached the water’s edge, his left side was aching and his heart was beating like a rapid-firing machine gun. He gulped in air, feeling it burst and explode in his throat like fireworks. On instinct, he started undressing. He kicked his shoes off, tossed his jeans to the ground, and flung his T-shirt onto a hovering branch.

  Without a second thought, he dove into the lake, a hidden and secluded body of water shaped and curved like the waxing crescent of a moon. The water sent a sharp, electric shock through Alex’s body. He welcomed the sensation, feeling his senses spring to life simultaneously and every nerve ending ache with alertness. He swam with the same precise, smooth and effortless animal grace he ran with.

  It was exactly fifty-two yards to a small island. Nothing more than a patch of land, no larger than a living room. The island was home to a powerful burr oak tree, its only inhabitant. Quercus macrocarpa. Alex said the scientific name for the tree over and over in his mind like a mantra. He did this each time he swam to the island, paying homage to the tree, his shelter.

  Alex made the swim in less than a minute. He emerged from the water, his bare feet sinking deep into the red clay dirt. Indian soil was what his grandfather had called it. It was messy and thick and stained everything it touched, including Alex’s skin.

  Alex collapsed at the base of the tree. He pressed his shoulder blades against the gray bark. The backs of his bare legs were gouged by discarded acorns. He closed his eyes, listening to the water lapping against the shallow shore.

  “Quercus macrocarpa,” he said aloud, announcing his arrival to the tiny island. In Alex’s mind, the tree whispered back to him, “Everything’s going to be all right.” It was a soft voice, a woman’s. His mother’s?

  “Mom?” The urgency in his voice surprised Alex. He hadn’t cried. Through the whole ordeal—from finding her dead in the garage, to the phone calls to friends and family members, to editing the obituary for the newspaper, to picking out the blue dress for her to be buried in, to losing his temper and denying God in church—Alex hadn’t shed a tear. The sadness rising in his throat made him angry, made him feel weak. He’d almost cried in front of his father on the porch when he realized why his mother had killed herself.

  Like her, Alex secretly wished to leave Georgia and return to the Windy City. It wasn’t that he hated Georgia. Atlanta was only thirty minutes to the north from Harmonville. He lived in a great house. Sure, it was old and needed countless repairs, but it was a comforting place. He felt safe there. He had a handful of friends, Jillian being the closest. His grades were decent. But there was this ache he felt right before he fell asleep at night. It was the desire for something larger than life, something that left him trembling with inspiration and answers to his inner questions, no matter how minute or fleeting they were. He wanted something more, but he couldn’t describe what it was.

  Alex had been in Georgia since he was six. Harmonville was definitely his home. But those yearly trips up north, to the Midwest, were what he lived for. The relatives, the traditions, the customs, and the overwhelming feeling of belonging and being loved. Alex knew it was this powerful feeling that prompted his mother to step onto an ice chest, drag a dirty rope across the floor of the garage and wrap it around her neck.

  She wanted to go home.

  Alex’s eyes fluttered open and his dark, thick lashes brushed against his cheekbones. He glanced out, scanning the surface of the water, hoping to see his mother’s face in the murky reflection. Defeated, Alex allowed his tears to fall. He sat on his island, braced against the trunk of the solid oak, and sobbed for the death of his mother. The sadness felt like waves, wild and angry. They crashed inside him. He released them, giving them to the lake, where they drifted away. His chest rose and fell with a pounding relentlessness as he felt a cave begin to form in the center of his soul. Gutted, Alex feared the empty space left behind would not fill again for years—if ever. It would leave him embittered and jaded and envious of those who even appeared happy. It would leave him motherless, seeking comfort and nurturing in a world he’d grown to despise in the last week.

  As the sun dipped behind the earth, Alex fell asleep, lullabied by the gentle rhythm of the water and the tender embrace of the burr oak. In his dreams, he swam. His arms cut through the water like human scissors, his legs kicking and propelling him, faster and faster, all the way to Chicago.

  But he wasn’t alone. He felt a presence on his back, soft and warm, radiating. With his mother’s arms wrapped around his neck, he guided her home, where she had known love.

  Much like Alex used to imagine heaven to be, when he still believed in such a place.

  John

  As usual, John smelled from a long day of work. A combination of red Georgia dirt and rotting garbage reeked from his pores. He’d grown immune to it, as most men do who collect trash for a living. His son, who had an overly sensitive sense of smell, often held his breath when John was close to him. Tonight was no exception. Alex turned away on the porch, said something in Armenian, and exhaled.

  Was he about to cry? John wasn’t sure, so he moved forward, taking a cautious step. He was terrified he might say the wrong thing or move too quickly, and Alex would return to his state of self-imposed silence.

  John stared at the back of Alex’s head and noticed his son had grown at least two inches since Christmas. The boy was the spitting image of his mother. The smooth, olive, sun-kissed skin. The full mouth frozen in a permanent pout. The deep-set eyes, dangerous and sorrowful. The wild mass of black hair, framing his sharp, defined features with thick, loopy curls. The thin body, long neck, and sharp nose. Their similar features were a reminder to John that his beautiful wife was gone. Every time he looked at Alex, he saw her. He felt his chest tighten—a gnawing throb pulsed in the middle of his back.

  Dinner had been insufferable as the two men sat across the table from each other, picking over lima beans and leftover meat loaf. No words were shared between them, only grief. The silence was agony for John, who ached for the sound of his wife’s gentle laughter and her spurts of broken English. He looked at the blank stare in his son’s dark eyes and was terrified Alex might not ever fully recover from finding his mother’s body in the garage. He wanted to hold his child and comfort him, but it wasn’t in John’s nature. He wasn’t a cold man, but he’d never known affection from his own father.

  John needed sound, something to fill the heartbreaking silence engulfing their lives. He stood up from the dinner table, grabbed the heart-shaped wooden chair he’d brought home from work and dragged it out to the front porch, letting the legs bang against the screen door as he escaped the grief-stricken house. Sand against wood. It was a rough, grating noise, but it was loud enough to kill the quiet. John sanded the chair down, ridding it of a horrible lavender paint and revealing its original pale hue. Alex followed him outside, picking bits of meat loaf out of his teeth. He cl
eared his throat, as if to say something, but remained silent. Instead, his attention shifted up to the sky, as if he were searching for something lost or for a hidden message snaking in and around the slowly drifting summer clouds.

  Finally, Alex spoke, his words cracked and dry. “Haskanum em.” John froze at the Armenian words. His hand stopped an inch away from the wood. He tightened his grip on the sandpaper, felt the roughness pressing into the center of his palm. He stood slowly and said the words back to Alex in English.

  John, still cautious, moved closer. The urge to embrace his son returned and John silently cursed himself for not following through with his instinct. Siran had been the nurturer. She was always hugging Alex, kissing his cheek, even holding his hand on occasion. John worried if he attempted to offer affection, the moment would seem forced and leave them both feeling awkward. It would be just another reminder of what they’d lost.

  Alex shouted at him—something about Chicago—leapt over the porch railing, and started running.

  Once his son was gone, John accepted defeat and sat down on the top step of the porch. He wiped a bead of sweat from his left temple with the back of his hand. He sighed and felt his shoulders droop a bit. There was nothing he could do where Alex was concerned. The only option was to wait and hope his emotional state improved with time.

  John thought about his wife. What had she been thinking when she knotted the rope around her neck, tossed it over a wooden beam in the garage, and then lifted off like a misguided rocket to heaven? Had she any idea of the pain she’d cause? Did she even care?

  John felt sweat drip between his shoulder blades. The days were becoming unbearably hot, suffocating. Another summer in Georgia would soon come to an end. A summer that was very different than the previous ones. Summer had always been Siran’s favorite time of the year. She never minded the heat.

  John glanced across the front lawn as the sprinkler system turned on with a gurgling sound. Water began to pirouette across the neatly trimmed grass, splattering in whimsical, transparent patterns. John sat, mesmerized for a moment by the effortless grace of the water. Suddenly, he stood up and moved across the lawn, water spraying the legs of his jeans, soaking into his shoes and socks. The feel of the cold liquid caused him to breathe sharply. It awakened him with a jolt, creating a sudden sense of alertness.