Swimming to Chicago Read online

  Without a second thought, John sat down on the front lawn. The sprinklers jetted across him, shooting across his chest like bullets. An unexplained smile flashed across his face. This behavior was ridiculous. The neighbors—especially Mrs. Gregory next door—would surely think he’d lost his mind. It was an impulsive, spontaneous thing to do. As water splashed into his eyes and mouth, he felt himself sinking lower into the dirt.

  John realized the moment was crucial. It reminded him of who he used to be: fun, wild, unpredictable. Wasn’t that why Siran had fallen in love with him nineteen years ago in Chicago?

  John lay down on the grass, grazing his fingers through the tips of the wet blades. He looked up to the sky and found faces and figures in the clouds coasting over his neighborhood. He felt a sense of calm, a surge of euphoria, an adrenaline rush. He closed his eyes, welcoming the water against his skin.

  He recalled the first time he saw Siran. The two of them had come face-to-face on the steps of the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue. Since that afternoon, they’d rarely spent a day apart from each other.

  Now John was sprawled across the front lawn, soaked to the bone and trying to drown the overflowing sorrow reverberating inside his soul. He closed his eyes and focused on the whoosh of the sprinklers, chugging and anxious. John hoped he’d hear his wife’s voice, calling to him from somewhere in the middle of the cold water.

  Martha

  Martha wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. She first spotted him when she decided to take a break from unpacking. She walked down her driveway to the edge of the road, checked inside the curbside mailbox—it was empty. Turning back toward her new home, she glanced quickly across the quiet street. At once, his body caught her eyes. She peered harder, squinting and trying to get a better look at the figure on the lawn. She breathed deep, feeling a wave of contemplation rumble through her body. She’d never been an impulsive woman before, but she was curious.

  Martha crossed the street.

  She hated Georgia. She already regretted the move. Harmonville was not the same as Pittsburgh. She missed the rush of the crowds, the urgency in the faces of strangers, sandwiches at Primanti Brothers, the collapse of each day when the lights from the bridges floated across the surface of the merging rivers.

  It was this feeling of hollow emptiness that was plaguing Martha when she approached the man in the grass. She was homesick and lonely. But she’d been both of those things long before she ever reached the state of Georgia.

  He was wet, the stranger on the lawn. His undershirt was stuck to his body like a second layer of white cotton skin. His jeans were worn through at the knees and his work boots were caked with red mud.

  “Excuse me?” Martha said from her nervous position on the sidewalk, near the edge of the grass. “Hello?” He didn’t respond, didn’t move.

  Martha inched closer. She welcomed the drops of water sliding between her toes and licking the edges of her white sandals. She nervously patted the back of her head, smoothing loose strands of her almost platinum-blond hair up toward her high ponytail.

  Her husband Harley often chastised her, saying she dressed too young for her age. He said she was obsessed with looking glamorous, she lived in a fantasy world, she wanted life to be like a magazine. But Martha ignored him. Instead, she waited until he was locked inside his home office, grading papers or reading Kafka while listening to that ridiculous opera music. Then she would sit by a window—usually one facing the Pittsburgh skyline—and imagine her escape.

  Over the years, Martha often thought about packing a bag, slipping out in the middle of the night, and disappearing to a seaside town—maybe a postcard place in Florida—and she’d start a new life, without Harley and his constant need to correct everything she said or did.

  But now escape seemed impossible. In Pittsburgh, Martha could’ve dived into the sea of strangers and floated away with them, hopping a Greyhound bus headed for the ocean and the sun. Here—in a small town in Georgia—Harley would certainly know her every move. Here, she’d have to pretend she loved her husband, for the sake of appearances. He was, after all, the new English teacher at the high school. It wouldn’t be long before everyone knew him—and his lovely wife, too.

  The thin man on the lawn didn’t look like Harley. No paunch. No receding hairline. No permanent, arrogant smirk. No five o’clock shadow. Instead, Martha found herself captivated by the stranger. As the tips of her toes reached the side of his torso, she prayed silently he was indeed alive.

  He must have sensed her presence. He cracked an eye open and it was so blue, Martha wondered if the sky had flipped upside down and crash-landed into his gaze. He licked his lips and opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something but the words got stuck in his throat. Thick strands of his salt-and-peppered hair were wet and stuck to his forehead.

  Martha offered a smile and said, “You’re alive.”

  The man lifted himself up and rested the strength of his body on his elbows. “My God,” he whispered. “You look like…like…an angel.”

  In truth, his words were the gentlest and most sincere ever spoken to Martha. They were filled with awe and enchantment. They caught her by surprise and they danced in the humid air around her and they kissed her neck. It was no wonder that inside her body, Martha felt a shiny twinkling—a beautiful shimmer.

  As if the city lights from Pittsburgh had somehow found their way back to her.

  Robby

  Robby knew his mother was unhappy. She’d been desperate for affection for as long as he could remember. She was always asking him for a hug or to sit closer to her. She hated being alone and she said so. “My days are lonely, Robby,” she’d tell him after school. She held him so tight she pushed the air out of his lungs. “This house is too quiet for me. But when I go downtown, it’s too loud.”

  That afternoon, Robby stood at the window inside his new bedroom and watched his mother cross the street and approach the man lying on his front lawn. She stood over his still body, and Robby’s breath stuck in his throat. He swallowed a lump of fear, worrying their new neighbor might be dead. But within seconds, the guy was up and shaking her hand. He was practically tripping over his feet to talk to her.

  After watching their giddy first meeting, Robby predicted his mother would have an affair before the summer was over, and leave her husband by Christmas.

  If not sooner.

  If I was married to Harley, I would have left him a long, long time ago.

  Robby was no dummy. He knew his mother was hot. The men who lived on their old block in Pittsburgh would stare at her like she was something they always wanted but knew they’d never have. They watched her like a kind of supernova lighting up their dark lives with her electric smile and white-blond hair. They opened doors for her. They tipped their hats. They wiped their dirty palms on their jeans whenever she was around. They smiled too much, laughed at their own jokes. And they waited. Just a few soft words from her would spin them out into a spiral of bliss. And it showed all over their love-struck faces.

  That’s what I want, Robby thought, staring through the glass. I want to be love-struck.

  Like his mother, Robby felt alone in the world. “You’re just a misfit,” she told him when he was six after a playground bully had labeled him a “sissy” and punched him so his nose bled for nearly an hour. “You’re a beautiful misfit…and you’re all mine.”

  She took him home from school that day, made him a cup of Ovaltine, and stared at him for hours. Whenever he glanced up at her, she always looked like she was about to cry.

  The word “sissy” followed Robby through the rest of his childhood. The playground became a battlefield and Robby was the eternal survivor. No matter how hard they hit him, he wouldn’t cry. He wouldn’t scream out for help or yell for a teacher. He took their punches and kicks and refused to let them know how much they hurt him. He wore his bruises and cuts with pride, brandishing them like badges of honor won by withstanding beating after beating.

  H
e was seventeen now. The words were angrier and the fists were more violent. He couldn’t escape the teasing, no matter how hard he tried. The locker room and P.E. class were the worst. The coaches would look the other way, and a couple would even chuckle when he was pummeled and taunted. Robby grew accustomed to it, until being beaten up became normal and routine.

  Robby had become a moving target for the guys who hated him because they knew he was gay. The truth was Robby had never even kissed a guy before, let alone messed around with one. He knew he wasn’t attracted to women, but men…they were still a mystery.

  He knew he was the reason they had left Pittsburgh. Robby knew Harley blamed him for the move. “I guess we don’t have a choice,” he said looking down at the word “faggot” spray-painted in bright red on the sidewalk outside of their home one morning. “We have to leave.”

  Robby’s father had gone inside, but his mother stayed outside with him. She held him and caressed his hair. “It’s okay,” she told him. “I’ve always hated Pittsburgh.”

  Later that night, Robby overheard a conversation that broke his heart. “You don’t know what it’s like, Martha,” Harley said behind the closed bedroom door. “He’s my stepson and everyone at school thinks he’s a freak. You should see how the other teachers look at me.”

  “What do you want me to do, Harley? He’s my son. There’s nothing wrong with him.”

  That was two months ago, before they packed up their belongings, loaded boxes and furniture into a truck, and headed south to a little town called Harmonville—a place where Harley’s dead grandfather had once spent a summer years ago and christened “a perfect place.”

  Robby’s mother was now sitting next to a stranger on his front porch. She was laughing and tossing back her head, shielding her eyes from the setting sun.

  Or maybe she didn’t want the stranger to see the ache inside her soul.

  He was mesmerized by her—the tall man in the wet clothes. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. It seemed like he wanted to drink her laughter, sip it right out of her mouth.

  Robby’s eyes suddenly shifted. The dark-haired boy seemed to appear out of nowhere. He came from the side of the house and stood in the center of the lawn. He stared at the adults on the porch and shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans.

  There was anger in his tense posture and a rebellious flair in the way he smashed the grass with each step he took. There was something in the way the boy stood that intrigued Robby, beckoning him like a secret invitation slid beneath his door. Come here. You’ve been waiting for me.

  Robby couldn’t move fast enough. He searched his unpacked room for a pair of flip-flops, fishing them out of an overstuffed duffel bag. He stepped into the shoes without realizing they didn’t match. He collided with stacks of cardboard boxes covered with his nearly illegible scrawl in permanent marker.

  He almost slid down the carpeted stairs, skipping the last few steps altogether. He leaped off the third to the last stair and landed in the marble-tiled foyer. He yanked the front door open and forced himself to stop and take a breath. Otherwise, his mother might freak out and think the house was on fire.

  Robby crossed the street to the white house with the pale blue shutters. He slowed his pace when he reached the curb and almost turned back for home when he reached the driveway.

  But then the boy with the wet dark hair turned and looked at Robby over his shoulder. Their eyes met. In that second, Robby knew nothing in his life would ever be the same. He felt his chest tighten, his pulse quicken. He just took my breath away.

  Behind Robby, the August sun began its final descent and slipped beneath the horizon.

  “Hey,” the boy said. His voice was deeper than Robby expected. Tough, even. Like no one could mess with him.

  “Hi,” Robby replied, after finding the courage to look the beautiful boy in the eyes.

  He pulled a hand out of his back pocket and offered it to Robby. “I’m Alex.”

  Robby placed his palm against Alex’s and an invisible charge was lit. They shook. “I’m Robby.”

  Alex glanced down at Robby’s chest, and it made Robby blush instantly. He could feel Alex’s breath tickling his face. It was warm and smelled sweet. The baggy T-shirt Robby was wearing suddenly felt twenty sizes too big for him. “You like Metric?” Alex asked, tapping the letter “M” on Robby’s concert T-shirt with a fingertip.

  “They’re the best band in the world.” Robby beamed, still watching Alex’s mouth. “I mean…other than Garbage, of course.”

  Alex glanced down and laughed a little. Robby was tempted to ask him what was so funny. As if he could read Robby’s thoughts, he explained. “Your shoes. They’re two different colors.”

  Robby looked down to his toes and wiggled them. “Black and blue,” he noted, feeling embarrassment continue to tinge his cheeks.

  “Black and blue,” Alex repeated. “You just move here?”

  Robby nodded. “Yesterday.”

  “Where from?”

  “Pittsburgh.”

  “Wow,” Alex breathed. “Why in the hell would you come here?”

  “My stepdad. He made us move.”

  Alex cracked his knuckles and stretched. His T-shirt lifted up and Robby couldn’t help but catch a quick glimpse of the tiny trail of dark hair on Alex’s stomach. “Your stepdad sounds like a real dick, if you ask me,” he said.

  Robby couldn’t help but smile. “You have no idea.”

  Alex leaned in close and their mouths were close enough to kiss. “I think I do know,” he whispered.

  Although Robby wanted to turn away out of shyness and his fear of the unknown, the intense euphoria shooting through his body gave him a shot of courage—enough bravery to take a leap of faith. “Yeah,” he replied, without hiding the gleam of lust in his eyes, “I bet you do.”

  “Come on,” Alex said, reflecting back the same desire in his smile. He tugged on the sleeve of Robby’s shirt. “The summer isn’t over yet.”

  September/September

  Jillian

  Jillian didn’t want to like Robby LaMont. In fact, before she met him in person, she’d already decided he would replace Sue Ellen Freeman and become her new nemesis, her enemy numero uno. For the last few weeks, he was all Alex talked about. It was “Robby is so funny.” And “Robby is so cool.” And, finally, “Robby is so cute. I think I’m in love.”

  Jillian tried to sound happy for Alex during their few-and-far-between phone conversations. She wanted to sound convincing but was certain Alex saw right through her feigned insistence that “You met someone. Great. I’m really happy for you.”

  Jillian’s mind was made up before Saturday afternoon at the Labor Day church bazaar, when she and Robby came face-to-face for the first time. Whenever their first meeting took place, Jillian wasn’t planning on being an outright bitch, but she wasn’t going to go out of her way to be nice to him, either. Obviously, he was trying to steal her best friend away from her. Did the boy even know who he was messing with? She was determined to make sure he received her message loud and clear.

  Jillian was miserable and hot. The bazaar was crowded and never-ending. Behind the church in a grassy area, twenty or so tables had been set up in the shape of a horseshoe. Each one offered an array of homemade crafts, bottled jams and pickled fruits, hand-woven baskets, and baked goods. In the near distance, the minister and his plump wife were having a low-level argument while flipping burgers and hot dogs on a grill. Jillian watched intently, secretly hoping the self-righteous woman would lose control, freak out, and make a hilarious spectacle out of herself.

  Jillian stood behind a table selling red raffle tickets to anyone she could sucker into buying them. She collected dollar bills, taking them from sticky fingers and sliding them into the blue double-pocketed apron she wore around her hips. “Raffle tickets! Get your raffle tickets here!” she hollered.

  Each time a car arrived or drove away, loose dust rose up from the gravel parking lot next to the chur
ch and drifted in Jillian’s direction. She coughed, rubbed her eyes, and fanned the air, but there was no relief. The dirt was choking her to an early death.

  Yet from where she stood, she could see everything and everyone. She noticed the fresh hickey on Sue Ellen Freeman’s neck when she strutted by the ticket table in a miniskirt and tank top (two sizes too small for her, like always) and muttered, “Dirty bitch.” Jillian replied with a wicked smile and the words “Fuck you very much, fat ass.”

  Tommy trailed behind his older sister. He offered Jillian a gentle wave. At once, she saw loneliness lingering deep in Tommy’s eyes.

  Jillian began to take great delight in her observations. Bunny Freeman was going bald and walked like he had a ginormous stick wedged up his ass. Hunter Killinger thought he owned the place when he walked in wearing fake sunglasses and way too much imposter cologne. His ridiculous wannabes followed him around like he was Jesus carrying a cross—especially that idiot Eric Lowe, whom Jillian suspected was suffering from an undiagnosed case of Tourette’s Syndrome. Mrs. Gregory—the old bat who still believed the South won the Civil War—kept trying to push her gaudy macramé plant holders on everyone, even though the style hadn’t been popular in decades. She was practically threatening people to buy them, blackmailing them with their own family secrets.

  Jillian’s eyes widened. Alex’s father apparently already had a new girlfriend—a stunning woman with blond hair and a toothpaste-commercial smile. They giggled at each other, strolling through the bazaar and speaking silently with their eyes. But the beautiful woman stepped away from John Bainbridge and joined a dark-haired man Jillian assumed was the woman’s husband.