Swimming at Night: A Novel (7 page)

When he returned home, he and Mia slipped back into their old routine, the night in the forest never mentioned again. A chorus of other girls, and later women, quietened his infatuation and he was grateful that their friendship returned to its usual tune. Yet today, when Mia had stripped to her underwear at the beach, revealing her exquisite slender body, a low note of desire had been struck and had resonated in his thoughts in the hours since.

He knew the great risk of allowing that forbidden note to sound louder, so Finn carefully eased his arm from beneath her hand and, reluctantly, rolled away.

(California, March)

K
atie pulled down the beige plastic blind of the airplane window, closing out the view. She didn’t need to see that they were flying above the clouds, that the ocean was thirty thousand feet below them, or that the white wings of a Boeing 747 were the only thing keeping them from spiraling down to earth.

The first time Katie flew, she had clutched the armrests so hard that her knuckles turned white. Beside her, Mia’s eyes had been wide, her pupils dilated, with what Katie had first imagined to be fear but then, as she’d watched the smile break over her face, recognized to be awe. She couldn’t understand how Mia could be so mesmerized, when her own insides churned with panic. Katie’s fear hadn’t been passed down from an anxious adult, or grown out of horror stories from friends or television: it was something that lived inside her. She was nine years old then. Flying should have been an adventure.

After that flight, Katie had taken two further plane journeys—and with each her fear grew into something living that would begin
hissing at her weeks before takeoff. She’d discovered that the only way to silence the fear was to avoid it: when there was a college ski trip, she signed up after learning they would be traveling by train; when their mother received a small windfall and offered to take the girls away, Katie said what she’d like to do most was a cruise; when Ed talked of visiting Barcelona, she persuaded him to go to Paris via the Channel Tunnel.

Now, as she twisted the sleeve of her cardigan, turning it tightly between her fingers and then unwinding it and starting again, it wasn’t the fear of the plane’s engine failing, or the capability of the pilot that concerned her. What made her throat tighten and her heart clamber against her chest was the boxed-in enclosure of the plane, the small seat with its fixed armrests, the two passengers—one asleep, one reading—blocking her exit to the aisle, the seat belt pinned across her lap, the eleven-hour journey that couldn’t be paused. She would be quietly trapped here, hour after hour, with nothing to distract her, so that for the first time since the news broke, she was sitting entirely still. Her mind seized the opportunity to focus on the one word she had been trying to avoid: “suicide.”

Suicide was something she associated with the mentally ill, or people suffering from a dreadful, incurable illness—not able-bodied, able-minded 24-year-olds halfway through a world adventure with their best friend. There was no logic to it. But it had happened. There were witness statements, an autopsy report, and a police account that said it had.

She had obsessively looked up the word “suicide” on the Internet and was shocked to learn that it was the tenth leading cause of death—above murder, liver disease, and Parkinson’s. She had read that one million people committed suicide each year and, staggeringly, that one in seven people would seriously consider committing
suicide at some point in their lives. She discovered that drugs and alcohol misuse played a role in 70 percent of adolescent suicides.

But what the Internet, the witnesses, and the Balinese police didn’t know was her sister. Mia would never have jumped. Yes, she could be unpredictable, swinging from energetic reckless highs to crushingly troubled lows, and sometimes it did seem that she felt things so deeply it was as if her heart lay too close to her skin, but she was also fiercely brave. She was a fighter—and fighters don’t jump.

Katie believed this wholeheartedly. She had to, otherwise she was left with the agonizing knowledge that her sister had chosen to leave her.

*   *   *

San Francisco International Airport seemed the size of a town. Katie lost herself in the crowd, letting them lead her up escalators, along advertisement-lined corridors, and down brightly lit stairways, before eventually arriving at the baggage-claim area. She picked a spot at carousel 3, standing several paces back to allow eager travelers space to reach their belongings and disappear on new journeys.

As she waited for Mia’s backpack to pass beneath the heavy plastic teeth of the carousel, she played a game with herself, trying to match pieces of luggage to their owners. The first couple were easy; she knew that the padded black ice-hockey bag belonged to the broad teenager with a lightning bolt shaved into the back of his sandy hair, and that the pair of ladybird-print cases would be passed to twin girls in identical blue coats. It was a small surprise, however, when the gentleman in a tired panama hat reached not for the tan leather suitcase she had predicted, but a sleek silver case with the sheen of a bullet. But then, neither would she have
matched the smartly dressed blonde woman in charcoal ankle boots and a fitted blazer to the tattered backpack that she reached for.

Grabbing a worn strap, Katie hauled the backpack from the carousel using both hands. She struggled to put it on, bending her arms in awkward contortions to force them through the straps, and then jumping a little to shift it into position. She felt compressed by the weight of it, and bent forward at the waist to balance out the load.

She trudged through the arrivals gate where a crowd watched eagerly for their loved ones, their eyes moving quickly beyond her to see who followed. A heavyset man in a Giants sweater ducked beneath the barrier and ran forward, throwing thick arms around the boy with the hockey stick. Katie didn’t rush to leave the airport, excited to see San Francisco, as Mia and Finn might have; instead, she joined the crowd on the other side of the arrivals barrier, set down her backpack, perched on top of it, and watched.

Time ran away as Katie sat perfectly still, hands placed together in her lap. She began to understand the rhythm of arrivals, anticipating the empty space alongside the barriers between flights, which filled in correlation to the overhead screen announcing the next set of arrivals. If a flight was delayed or there had been a holdup, then two groups of passengers could arrive at the same time, and the barrier would be pressed taut.

There were fathers collecting daughters, girlfriends being met by boyfriends, husbands waiting for wives, grandparents beaming at grandchildren—but the reunions she searched out were always those between sisters. Sometimes it was difficult to tell which women were friends and which were siblings, but more often Katie knew instinctively. It was in the casualness of how they embraced, the way their smiles were completed when they saw each other, or how a joke quickly passed from one pair of lips to a smile on
the other. It was in the same angle of their noses, a gesture they both displayed, or how they walked arm in arm, as they left together.

A woman with fox-red hair spilling over the shoulders of her kaftan placed a hand to her mouth when she saw her sister. A purple silk scarf partly concealed the sister’s bald head, but the strain of illness showed in her sallow skin and gaunt cheeks. The redhead reached out and squeezed her sister’s fingers, then lightly touched her empty hairline, and then, finally letting go of whatever composure she’d privately been battling to maintain, embraced her in a long clasp, sobbing over her shoulder.

If someone had watched Katie and Mia, she wondered whether they’d have guessed they were sisters. Katie’s fair features were distinct from Mia’s strikingly dark looks, but someone paying attention might have noticed that their lips shared an equal fullness, or that their eyebrows followed the exact same arch. If they had listened closely they would catch crisply articulated word endings from years of good schooling, but might have noticed that they still mispronounced the word “irritable,” both placing the emphasis on the second syllable, not the first.

Vivid memories of Mia flew into her thoughts, details from their childhood she hadn’t thought of in years: lying together in the sun-warmed rock pools that smelled like cooked seaweed; doing handstands in the sea with saltwater filling their noses; their first bike, cherry red, which Katie would pedal while Mia perched on the white handlebars; fighting like pirates on winter-emptied beaches with seagull feathers tucked behind their ears.

Katie had loved being an older sister, wearing the role like a badge of honor.
At what point
, she wondered,
did our closeness begin to fade? Was it triggered when Mum was dying? Or maybe it had begun long before. Perhaps it wasn’t one incident, rather a
series of smaller incidents, an unraveling, like a favorite dress that over time becomes worn: first a thinning at the neckline, then a loss of shape around the waist, and finally a loose thread opens into a tear.

“Ma’am?” A porter in a navy uniform, with dreadlocks tucked beneath his cap, stood beside her. “You’ve been here since I came on shift.”

She glanced at the time displayed on the bottom of the arrivals board. Two hours had slipped away from her.

“Somethin’ I can help you with?”

She stood suddenly, her knees stiff from holding the same position. “I’m fine, thank you.”

“You hopin’ to find someone?”

She glanced to where two young women were embracing. The taller one stepped back and took the other’s hand, raising it to her lips and kissing it.

“Yes,” she answered. “My sister.”

*   *   *

Later that day she heaved the backpack onto the bed and looked around the motel room, hands on hips. The walls, glossed beige, were decorated by two framed prints of tulips, and the windows wouldn’t open, so the warm fug of other people hung in the air. She noted the television remote bolted to the Formica desk, and the Bible and phone directory stacked on the bedside table. It wasn’t the sort of room that encouraged a lengthy visit, but this was where Mia had stayed, so Katie would stay here, too.

Her first impulse was to unpack, but she was a backpacker now following Mia’s route, moving on again tomorrow, and the next night, and the night after that. As a compromise she fetched out her toiletries bag and placed it in the windowless bathroom next
to the thin bar of soap provided by the motel. Exhausted from traveling, she wanted to lie down and rest, but it was only five o’clock in the evening. If she allowed herself to sleep now, she would wake in the night, battling to keep the dark memories at bay. Deciding she would get something to eat instead, she splashed cool water over her face, reapplied her mascara, and changed into a fresh top. She grabbed her handbag and Mia’s journal, and left.

The receptionist gave her directions to the Thai restaurant where, according to the journal, Mia and Finn had their first meal. Katie wound her way through San Francisco’s wharf area as the sun went down, stopping only to call Ed to let him know she’d arrived safely.

Evening fog hung like smoke over the water and she pulled her jacket tight around her shoulders, wishing she’d worn another layer. In the journal, Mia had noted that San Francisco was a
“melting pot of artists, musicians, bankers, and free spirits,”
and that she had loved
“the electric pulse of the downtown.”
In another time, Katie might have agreed and found herself smitten with the quirky architecture, the winding streets, and the eclectic shop fronts—but tonight she hurried on.

She arrived at the restaurant, a lively place where circular tables were packed with people talking, laughing, eating, and drinking. A waiter led her towards a window seat; a group of men looked up appreciatively as she passed, conversation only resuming when she was well beyond them.

She straightened her jacket on the chair back while the waiter removed the second place setting. Jazz played through sleek speakers in the corners of ocher walls and above the music she tuned into a wash of American accents. The smell of warm spices and fragrant rice reached her and it struck Katie how hungry she was, having not managed to eat anything on the plane. She ordered a
glass of dry white wine and by the time the waiter returned with it, she had chosen Penang king prawns.

Without the prop of a menu there was nothing to occupy her attention and she felt faintly conspicuous dining alone. It would be one of many small hurdles she’d need to face each and every day of this trip and suddenly the scale of the undertaking daunted her. She locked her legs at her ankles and tucked them beneath her chair, then flattened her hands on her thighs, consciously trying to relax. She congratulated herself: she had boarded a plane for the first time in years, and was now sitting alone in a restaurant, in a country she’d never visited.
I’m doing just fine.
Reaching for her wine, she drained half of it, then set Mia’s journal in front of her.

On the plane she’d only read the first entry, enough to learn where Mia and Finn stayed and ate. She had promised herself that she would savor each sentence, breathing life into the entries by experiencing them in the places Mia had been. Opening the journal, she felt oddly reassured by the company of Mia’s words, as if it were her sister sitting in front of her. She smiled as she read,
“Even Finn blushed when the waiter swapped his chopsticks for a spoon. Not even a fork—a spoon!”
She pictured the remnants of Finn’s dinner spread across the starched white tablecloth, Mia laughing the infectious giggle Katie had always loved.

She thought of the times she’d heard Finn and Mia’s explosions of laughter through her bedroom wall, great whooping sounds that would go on for minutes, each of them spurring on the other. If she went next door, she might find Finn with a pair of pants belted at his ribs, imitating one of their teachers with uncanny accuracy, or see that they’d drawn handlebar moustaches and wire spectacles on each other’s faces in black felt-tip. She wished she could step into the room and laugh with them but often she found herself frozen in the doorway, her arms folded over her chest.