Geese Are Never Swans Read online

  For S.C.

  —Kobe Bryant

  Part

  One

  1.

  Okay, here’s what pisses me off: when people don’t fucking listen. Like right now. I’m standing in this country club driveway and I don’t have a car or the gate code. I’m also sweating like crazy—it’s got to be at least ninety out—there’s an Escalade creeping up my ass, with the driver laying on the horn and everything, like that’s going to help. I’ve already explained myself at least three times. But the girl on the other end of this call box still. Won’t. Let. Me. In.

  Jesus.

  The Escalade driver honks again and shouts something. I flip him off. Stupid, but who knows? Maybe he’ll be bothered enough to drag his shitty dad-bod down out of his air-conditioned paradise and try to make me show him some respect or whatever. I’d kind of like that, to tell you the truth, but I came here for a reason and don’t have time for screwing around.

  I need to remember that.

  “I’m here for Coach Marks!” I shout into the intercom. “The swim coach. He’ll want to see me.”

  “Sir, I already explained. I can’t open the gate unless—”

  “Tell him I’m Danny Bennett’s brother.”

  “Who?”

  I grit my teeth. Ignore the headache simmering in my skull. “Danny. Bennett.”

  “Hold on.” The girl sounds flustered, and it’s because she’s just realized who I am and why it’s important. I figured she would—that’s why I said it—but it’s also the exact reason I’m here in the first place. I’m sick of being Danny Bennett’s brother. I was sick of it before he became a goddamn martyr, and I’m even more sick of it now.

  And yeah, sure, it’s ironic—my lamenting that without him here I can’t do my usual thing of pretending my brother doesn’t exist. But these days it’s fallen on my shoulders to have to comfort all the people I run into who insist on telling me how sorry they are that he’s gone. Supposedly they’re sorry for me—that’s what they say—but I’m the one who’s forced to listen to all their sobby what could have beens and oh God what are we going to do nows, and it’s pretty clear the only person they feel sorry for is themselves.

  Bottom line, I hate it. Every second. I wasn’t born to be a dead guy’s brother, I can tell you that much. My name is Gus Bennett, I’m sixteen years old, and I happen to know for a fact that I’m meant to be someone else. Someone better.

  So I will be.

  2.

  Look, I get that there are probably all sorts of ways you’re supposed to feel when someone close to you dies. Just like there are probably all sorts of people willing to tell you that however you feel is the right way.

  But you should know I’m the kind of person who doesn’t want to hear about shit like that. Ever. To my mind, the only thing worse than having to talk about my feelings is listening to someone else pretend to understand them, which is exactly the kind of crap that counselor at my high school tried to pull back in April when I was forced to go see her.

  This was also where she confided that the reason we were meeting was that some of my teachers had expressed “concern” over how I was adjusting. Apparently, this concern didn’t include coming and talking to me, which says a lot about who they were really concerned for. It’s not like my silence meant I was planning on shooting up the school or anything. Kind of the opposite, although according to the counselor, the one thing you’re definitely supposed to do when your older brother comes home from college to hang himself is blab to a stranger about it.

  “It’s okay to feel angry. Or guilty,” she told me in that well-trained-therapist voice of hers, the one that’s meant to go down easy and get you to puke up a bunch of tears or confessions or life-affirming moments of brilliance and insight. “It’s all part of the grieving process.”

  “I’m not angry,” I told her, pushing my chair back, getting ready to leave. Plato once said the measure of a man is what he does with his power, but I believe the inverse to be true. What matters is what he does with anything. At any time. Isn’t that where power comes from? “And I don’t feel guilty, either. You know what I feel right now? Good. Better than good. Because I’m fucking free.”

  3.

  And then finally, there it is—the best damn feeling on earth. Well, barring sex, I’ve been told, but I’ll have to get back to you on that when I actually . . . know. That’s not likely to be anytime soon, however, and there ought to be a word for the paradox of wanting so badly to be with another person while at the same time needing to be completely alone. Regardless, this moment is sweet. This moment is what I live for.

  Victory.

  The club’s six-foot-high wrought-iron access gates swing open, granting me entrance. The girl from the call box doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t have to; we both know I’ve won. Never the type for false modesty—or any other kind—I square my shoulders and hold my head high as I walk onto the property, marching straight beneath carved lettering that reads Lafayette Country Club ~ Members Only.

  For better or for worse, I have arrived.

  But because life is shit, and other people even shittier, that idiot SUV follows right on my heels. My instinct is to walk slowly—the universal passive-aggressive symbol for fuck you—forcing Mr. Escalade to either run me over or allow me to be the object of his petty ire for a few minutes more. But it’s not worth it. Not today. There are ways to win by cutting your losses, and to this end, I veer off the main road and hoof it down the dirt trail leading to the aquatic center.

  The clubhouse, tennis courts, and main parking lot are all situated on the opposite end of the grounds, so my walk to the pool is a solitary one. Sweaty, too. A June morning in California means sprinklers on the golf course, our five-year drought be damned, but the sun is unforgiving. A fellow grudge holder, I admire this in a way, but it’s not like I don’t know the UV rays are killing me. It’s not like I can’t admire that, too.

  Mt. Diablo and a handful of other craggy peaks hover in the distance, rising tall against the cloudless sky. In contrast to the club’s eighteen-hole emerald lushness, the grass and brush on those faraway hills have all turned yellow, which is another word for dead. And while it doesn’t surprise me that rich people believe they’re owed more than what nature’s willing to give, I still think it really fucking sucks.

  Christ. This whole thing’s taking too long. Hopping over a smiley face–adorned Please Stay on the Path! sign so cheerful I could barf, I abandon the trail and cut across the green, taking care to trample a few flowers in the process. My shoes are wet in seconds, petals smashed and stuck everywhere, but that’s the least of my concerns. I need to focus on the task ahead. I need to get what I came for. Like my brother used to say: practice is where intent is born. And for all his failings, he definitely got that one right. So in my mind, I go over the things I want to say.

  The way I want to say them.

  Don’t be a dick, the good part of my brain warns.

  Be polite.

  Be humble.

  I keep walking, my shoes keep tearing up turf, and before the swim complex even comes into view, I can hear pool noises—the wild clamor of voices, the shrill blast of a whistle, the near-constant smack-splash of humans leaping from land into the depths of a watery underworld.

  These are sounds I know well. Too well, you could say, and it’s almost as if they’re a part of me, living in my bones, writhing up my spine, able to kick-start a force within me so primal that reality as I know it pales. For a shimmering instant, I can actually smell the pool—the sharp sting-scent of chlorine fumes and zinc oxide, the must of wet clothes,
the reek of stale rubber, and the sticky sweetness of melted Otter Pops—although I know that’s impossible. But this is how memory works, I guess: honesty rubbed raw by anticipation, by what matters, and while it’s clear that every cell in my body lies primed and gut-loaded with the past, I also believe that the truth lies in the present.

  It has to.

  And yeah, in case you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m a swimmer, too. No, I’m not the one you’ve heard of, but that’s not due to lack of talent—only access. In fact, I’ve spent the last two years on my high school’s team, swimming my ass off and setting school records. Our medley team even went to state last month on account of my performance. Well, I didn’t get to go, actually, because of all the shit that went down, but I should’ve been there. It could’ve been my moment. My breakout. My time to prove my brother wrong, once and for all.

  But I wasn’t able to be there. Thanks to him.

  So now, motherfucker, I’m here.

  4.

  Skimming along the far edge of the golf course, I make my way through the trees, the shade, the fiddlehead ferns. Dust and pine needles cling to my wet shoes, and as I come around a sharp bend, that’s when I see it—the LCC aquatic center, in all its pristine and sprawling glory.

  There’s the red tile roof and stucco walls.

  The bobbing lane lines.

  The blue, blue depths.

  Nothing about this place has changed, and it makes me sick. Every goddamn inch of it.

  There’s a saying among swimmers that each pool’s the same so long as it’s filled with water. But I don’t know. There’s something different about this one. It’s the history, I guess. The club itself is a place where the ultra-rich can waste the finite hours of their lives alongside tennis pros and caddies rather than their families. But admittance to the elite LCC swim team—and its peerless reputation—is based on merit. Okay, it’s based on money, too. I’d be a fool to suggest otherwise. But it’s the place where talent meets means. And it’s where it all happened for Danny. The good stuff, at least.

  The rest came later.

  My sickness intensifies, edging up my throat as I slip through the spring-close gate and step into organized chaos. I’m able to swallow it down, but being here is Dante’s-ninth-circle-of-hell bad. It’s peak training time—kids are everywhere, shrieking, flailing, in the water, on the deck—and I know where I’m going and what it is I need to do, but I kind of can’t take it. Which is pathetic. I brought myself here, didn’t I? But logic eludes my nerves as I squeeze past the diving team training off a row of springboards set in increasing height, and I do what I have to in order to keep my shit together.

  I stop to watch.

  Naturally, their pool is the deepest, stretching twelve feet beneath the earth. That’s far enough to make your ears pop, or 5.2 pounds per square inch, if you want to get technical. Not exactly an insignificant amount of pressure, although no one’s climbing the platform tower today, a full twenty-five feet from the ground. They’re just working the three- and six-meter boards, and even so, it’s a thrill to see their acrobatic feats of daring, those fatalistic twists and turns. Only it’s not long before the spinning hurts my head, a queasy-making ache born from my more rigid nature. This makes sense, if you think about it—divers embrace gravity, the fact that our bodies are made to sink. Us swimmers, on the other hand, work by way of avoidance; we’re doing all we can to forget it.

  I once tried explaining this to Danny, on some rare occasion when I got the urge to bond with him over this thing we both did. He was lifting weights in the garage while I watched, and I told him I thought swimming was a sport of delusion. That madness was what fueled greatness and that that was the fire we walked by delving beneath the surface and daring to come back up again.

  But he just laughed in response—in truth, he hardly considered what I did actual swimming, as if we weren’t both doing our best not to drown—and told me that wasn’t the way he saw it. Not in the least.

  “Then how do you see it?” I stared up at him from where I sat on the cold cement floor, foolishly wide-eyed and eager for his answer. I was still a dumb kid then. I still believed he was something more.

  My brother didn’t pause in his set. The weights were huge—those plates weighed more than I did—but he kept curling his biceps while sweat poured from his body, dripped onto my shoe. “You know how they call horse racing the sport of kings?”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know.

  “Well, they do,” he said between gasps. “But swimming, it’s something even better.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  Contract and release. Danny grunted, squeezed his eyes shut tight as he grimaced through the pain. “It’s the sport of gods.”

  5.

  Well, if gods are man-made, then this is the place of creation. The divers break, and I edge past the huge glass-boxed display chronicling the club’s forty-year history of aquatic bragging rights. It’s tacky, but they’ve earned those rights, launching no less than nine Olympic medalists, six of whom brought home gold. My brother was supposed to be the tenth, the seventh, and the best, of course, and maybe it’s just me, but I’m picking up an air of rebellion from this collection of accolades: the bold showcasing of flag after flag, banner after banner, and trophy after trophy. A whole glittering trove of glory. Danny didn’t make it, but our excellence is not in doubt, it all says.

  How could it be?

  Well, for my part, I’m neither intimidated nor impressed. I don’t need trophies to know what they’ve done. I just need them to keep doing it so I can reap a little of that glory for myself.

  Arriving at the far end of the lap pool, I close in on the blocks where the swim team is training. This late in the morning, swim lessons are winding down; all that remains is a group of ten- or eleven-year-old girls who are practicing their starts. For good reason: the dive from the blocks is one of the best predictors of overall performance, and it’s clear their parents know this. Keeping watch from the bleachers, they’re huddled like birds on a wire, with their hands clasped tight, their eyes wide, every one of them searching desperately for a sign, any sign, that their kid is special. Distinctive, in some way.

  They aren’t, from what I can tell, and that’s not me being a total asshole. I’m sure these girls are some of the best swimmers in their age-group. I’m sure they have walls of ribbons and years of lessons behind them, and they’ve been told they have what it takes. But I see the way they keep glancing at their parents, and I know whose dream it is they’re here to fulfill. Trust me, Danny never looked at our mom that way when she was up in those bleachers. He never looked at anyone, except the one person he trusted to help make his dream a reality.

  This also happens to be the person I’m here to see. I stopped watching Danny do anything years ago, but it’s only been six weeks since I last ran into Coach Marks. That was at the funeral, and for an elite coach renowned as he is for his alleged stoicism and strength, he was a lot weepier than I expected. Or personally cared to witness. He ended up staying in the church after everyone else left, with his head down, a Bible in his lap, and he was just sobbing. I don’t even think my mom cried that much and she’s a fucking fountain these days.

  He pulled it together somehow, though, because he showed up at the wake hours later. Even then, his eyes were red and puffy, his dove-gray suit all wrinkled, and he didn’t let up on the bourbon the whole time he was in our house. To be fair, I didn’t either, and there were a couple times that afternoon where I got the feeling he wanted to talk to me. But a lot of people did that day, and you know, I’m not dumb. With the exception of a couple of classmates who dropped by to offer their condolences, the person everyone wanted to talk to wasn’t me. They all wanted a piece of Danny, however small or fleeting or flat-out wrong, and figured I’d just feel lucky for the chance to step into that role.

  I bailed on that shitsh
ow as soon as I could. I’m not totally unsympathetic to other people’s pain, but I needed time alone with my own. That night, when I left, I took the bourbon with me, riding my bike down to the reservoir and crawling onto the rocks by the shore, not far from the pier. I stayed there until well after dark, listening to the water lap against the pilings, while getting piss-drunk on Knob Creek and wishing my brother had never been born so no one would feel compelled to make such a fucking tra­gedy out of his death.

  But still, there was something about seeing Coach Marks that day that got me thinking. About my life. My future.

  About what it is I need to do and how he’ll help me get there.

  6.

  “Hey, Coach,” I say as I approach.

  Remember the don’t-be-a-dick thing, I warn myself.

  Be polite. Be respectful.

  But get what you came for.

  He’s standing poolside in full sun, LCC visor shading his face, clipboard in hand, watching his girls and demanding perfection, and this is the Coach Marks I remember—tall, weathered skin, gray hair, impossible to read but with squinting eyes that see everything. And I guess I assumed the call-box girl would’ve told him I was coming after she let me in because that seems like the normal, decent human thing to do. But what do I know about decent? Not a lot, it turns out, because it’s clear by the way Coach Marks looks up at me that the girl didn’t tell him shit.

  “Danny,” he says.

  “Gus,” I reply.

  He falters, his chill-as-fuck mask slipping momentarily as he realizes his mistake, and if I were the kind of guy who knew how to feel guilty for the things I did or the ways I hurt people, I’d probably feel that way now.

  But I don’t.

  Coach Marks stammers. “Right! Gus. Of course. I’m sorry. It’s just, you look like him. I thought . . .”