Learning to Swim (9 page)

“Yeah, sometimes, but Cora, guess who he’s going out with—he has really short hair now. I think he must have buzzed it—”

“Rosie, I don’t care,” I said.

“I think he only buzzed it because Dan Lowe did his last week,” she went on. “And all the girls loved it. Casey Anderson was like
throwing
herself at him. But anyway, I was at the mall to pick up Steve and I saw Josh—”

“Rosie, I do
not
care!” I yelled.

“Oh,” she said quietly. “All right.”

I felt guilty, but not enough to apologize. I didn’t want to hear about Josh. Hearing about him reminded me that I didn’t have a boyfriend. Because Josh didn’t want to be my boyfriend. He’d said as much when Rosie had asked him outside the movie theater if he’d take me to dinner. Against my pleading, she’d asked him. And he’d said “No, thanks,” for all the world to hear.

More importantly, hearing about Josh reminded me that I
wanted
a boyfriend. But I didn’t want to be one of those girls who needed a boyfriend at all times. I couldn’t say this to Rosie, because she needed a boyfriend for Christmas and New Year’s and preferably a brand new one for Valentine’s Day. I didn’t want to be like that. But I felt like that now.

“I’m gonna go,” I finally said.

“Okay, call me, okay?” She was light and flippant again. It was hard to fight with Rosie. “I have to tell you all about Steve. The new one, he’s
so
much cooler than Steve Debrowski. And most people call him
Steven
. Like Steve-
en
. I think that’s
so
much more mature, you know?”

“Yeah, I’ll call you,” I lied.

Ag Buaila le Seamus

Meeting Seamus

That summer, the sand was suffocating. It would gather in my shoes and in the folds of my clothes, only to pile up in the laundry room where I shook them out. It stuck to my hands and my hair, and even Princess’s ears. Tiny rivulets gathered in the house where the wind pushed it a little farther in every time someone opened the door.

I didn’t go to the pier in the morning anymore. The last thing I wanted was to run into the annoyingly cute jerk, Ronan.

It was proving too easy to hide from my parents that I wasn’t going to swimming lessons. Dad flew around a lot for business and even when he was here, he was either tucked in his room on his laptop, on the phone or gone golfing. Mom was in her own world of antique shops and her new B.F.F. Linda Carlton, and I spent as much time as possible away from the Pink Palace.

I started sleeping late and meandering toward Mrs. O’Leary’s house in the afternoon, generally checking the vicinity for any sign of Ronan before joining the old woman on the porch. If he was there, I’d spin around and quickly make my exit before they saw me.

One such day, however, Princess bounded ahead of me and joined Mrs. O’Leary and Ronan on the porch before I could stop her.

“Hello there, dear girl,” I heard Mrs. O’Leary greeting her.

I briefly considered walking home and pretending Princess had run away from me, but she was my dad’s favorite daughter and I didn’t dare face him without her safely in tow.

Mrs. O’Leary was delighted to see me.

“Come sit, dear,” the old woman said. “We were just discussing kelpies and changelings.”

I turned a delightfully amused face at Ronan, hoping to see him embarrassed to be caught in a world of fantasy, but his face was impassive, completely unperturbed. Those were the hardest boys to ignore: the ones that weren’t concerned with your opinion of them, not afraid to be caught listening to fairytales. I wasn’t exactly used to boys being concerned with my opinions of them, but I was used to them haranguing me for Rosie’s opinion, and, thus, attempting to please me by association.

To my utter dismay, Ronan stood and made a gesture for me to sit in the rocking chair. I mumbled a polite refusal, but Mrs. O’Leary entreated him to fetch her jacket and ordered me to sit. Ronan disappeared into the little house.

“What’s on your mind, dear?” Mrs. O’Leary asked me, her eyes on the ocean.

“Not much,” I said. I couldn’t help wondering if Ronan was actually looking for the jacket inside or just playing along like I did. “What’s on yours?”

She sighed deeply and fiddled with the silk scarf over her hair. “What always is,” she said simply.

I was about to inquire after what this could be, but there was rarely a need for that with Mrs. O’Leary. She went on without aid.

“Do you know of Shoney, dearie?”

I shook my head. “What’s that?”

“They say he was a spirit that dwelled in the waters near Scotland. Seonaidh, my Seamus would call him. Seamus had a great love of ale; it was the Celt in him. Do you know, people used to wade into the water and give an offering of ale to Shoney? It was meant to appease him and secure them a good harvest.”

I thought of drunken old Scottish men stumbling into the ocean and draining buckets of beer—draining just as much into their stomachs as the water. I didn’t say as much.

“But of course my Seamus liked to make a mockery of it. He was Irish, you know. He would go into the water with his ale and drink it all down—some might say that was a slight to Shoney.”

“I don’t think he’d mind,” I mumbled.

“Seamus liked to enjoy his ale, right here on this beach. You know, that is how we met. Me, swimming along minding my own business, and my Seamus roughhousing with ale and good friends.”

So she had met her husband when he was stark raving drunk.
How quaint.

“I’d seen him before, of course. Every day, when I was swimming.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye, possibly to see if I was listening. The parallels of the story were unsettling. Swimmers, spying, crushes, wanting to see the world? Who exactly had this old woman been talking to?
Shit
—did Ronan know more than he was letting on? Or was this woman just clairvoyant?

“But it took me a long time to make the change. To tell my mother. So when I came to the beach and met him, there he was with his ale. He was very taken with me. We moved into this little house and had a grand life altogether. Of course, as nature will do—it stifles things. Feelings. I started to yearn for a return to the water, but my Seamus kept me here.”

The statement was chilling. As was the way she said it.

“You don’t swim anymore?” I asked feebly.

The old woman started and stared at me for a long moment before laughing. “No, no.” The laugh faded and she spoke seriously again, though this time without looking at me. “That is not to say that had I the choice once more, I would not make the same decision.”

It was an echo of things she’d told me weeks ago, during one of our first talks. “To … to ‘see the world,’ you mean?”

“Yes, oh yes.”

“Is this it?” Ronan reappeared then with a deep purple sweater.

Mrs. O’Leary looked up rather hopefully but shook her head. “No, I am afraid not.”

Ronan slung the sweater across the porch banister, and the old lady settled down into her seat with a sigh. The scene had a practiced air.

“You can have your chair back,” I said, rising. I had been wandering in a salty dreamland and his reappearance had dropped me back into the stifling world of teenage angst. I was determined not to be indebted to this jerk on
any
account.

But he shook his head. “I’m going to get back to work.” For the first time I noticed the pile of tools and metal objects strewn about the far end of the porch. He settled on the floor among them and immediately began prodding and twisting unfamiliar gadgets.

“Ronan is fixing my Seamus’s collection,” Mrs. O’Leary explained. “Fishing gear. All know I couldn’t be called upon to give the name or use of a single one of those things. I told him he could have it all if he fixed it.”

“Delightful,” I said, to please her. Ronan looked up and gave me a tight-lipped smile.

“He’s a fantastic fisherman, Ronan is,” Mrs. O’Leary said.

“Are you?” I said overly sweetly.

“Almost as good as he swims. He swims quite fabulously.”

“Do you?” I threw the same feigned smirk at him again.

“Every morning,” he said. I was startled out of my sarcasm. It could have been a simple retort to match my sarcasm—or it could have been a hint that he knew I was a semi-stalker. I preferred the term
admirer
. But any admiration was definitely gone now.

In any event, I decided to stay quiet until Mrs. O’Leary finished heralding Ronan’s various merits.

“He’s going to Ireland this year,” she said. Her brows furrowed and her eyes grew sad. “He’s getting so very, very old. How very many years he’s seen and yet still so young.”

Not only did that not make sense, but Ronan couldn’t have been older than me.
Drama queen
, I thought.

“It would have been a great comfort to my Seamus,” Mrs. O’Leary went on, “seeing the return of so many to the homeland. So many leave, never to return.” Her eyes appeared to be welling up. A sincere display of emotion at the memory of her husband, I assumed. “Seamus was a proud Irishman. As Ronan here. Aren’t you, lad?”

“My parents are Irish,” Ronan clarified.

“You could tell, of course, by the name,” Mrs. O’Leary went on. “Such a blatantly Irish one his father chose.” She wiped at one of her eyes.

I made a noncommittal noise, trying to sound less interested than I was. But Ronan offered no further commentary.

“What about you, dear?” Mrs. O’Leary said. She sniffed softly. “Cora.
Cora.
” She rolled the name around. “It is a strangely formal name for a young girl, isn’t it?”

“It’s an old family name,” I explained a little defensively. When people would question my name (which was often) I instinctively felt they were criticizing it. And I was sure that presumptuous boy in the corner was using it to validate his assumptions about my family’s excessive pride. “It goes back several generations on my mom’s side.” I again waited in vain for him to offer some sarcastic comment.

Nothing happened, but Mrs. O’Leary used the topic to springboard into a monologue on generations of faeries. I took the opportunity to sort out my complicated feelings about this difficult boy. He sure looked nice enough sitting there fixing rusty metal things. More than nice, actually. He was the definition of hot. In a way completely different than Owen Carlton. Owen knew he was hot. But Ronan acted like it was the last thing on his mind. He merely went about his work, occasionally looking up politely at Mrs. O’Leary to show the attention he was paying her.

But I couldn’t get past the feeling that he looked at me with amusement, as if I was there solely to provide him with a few laughs.

My mother’s dream kept coming true. Owen kept inviting me to spend time with him and his friends, and out of a lack of anything better to do, I always accepted. I didn’t want to admit it to anyone, least of all myself, but I wasn’t so very against Owen’s presence anymore. Filthy rich and dressed to the nines or not, he was polite and sometimes even funny. I just wished it didn’t please my mother so much.

He was always a gentleman, walking me home when it was late, and though he talked a bit too often of water polo, it was better conversation than anything Blondie or the bimbo could offer. All in all, he helped the weeks flutter away instead of dragging on like I’d expected them to.

Having stopped going to the pier altogether in the mornings, I felt a pang of regret for losing my special spot. So it became custom for me to wander there at dusk. I’d stay until a little after dark, and wander back home when I was sure my mother would be asleep—passing out from the margaritas—and my father, if in town, would be in the process of passing out in front of the TV.

One such night Princess came with me. I was sitting as far out on the pier as possible without sinking with the flimsy end and threw a tennis ball repeatedly onto the beach. Princess would run down the pier and find the ball in the sand before running back and dropping it at my feet. Then I’d throw it again and wait for her to come bounding back.

Twenty minutes into the game, she found something in the sand that wasn’t her tennis ball. She dug at it for a minute before dislodging it and running to drop it at my feet. It was another recorder.

I picked it up as Princess bounded back for the tennis ball. The recorder was wet and sandy, like the last one I’d found, and now covered in dog drool. This one was a dull bronze color. I wiped it on my t-shirt and, throwing caution to the wind, blew into it. It puffed sand and dirt out before making a loud off-pitch screech. Princess approached me hesitantly, her ears perked and dropped her ball at my feet.

I wasn’t quick enough and the ball rolled straight off the wooden plank into the water. Princess and I both stared longingly at it, bobbing in the water, just over arm’s length away.

“Sorry, girl,” I said. “It’s a goner.”