Learning to Swim (3 page)

If I told authorities an adult-sized sweatshirt had been tied around this child like a straitjacket, they would smile pleasantly and tell me I must be mistaken, that the arms had simply been twisted or tied around his waist. Because that sweatshirt was now at the bottom of a four-hundred-foot-deep lake, I couldn’t prove anything.

And this boy was clearly not going to tell them what had happened.

I gave up leafing through the phone book and called Information, thumbed in change, and punched in the number for the Burlington police. When a woman answered, I said distinctly, “Someone threw a small boy off the ferry from Burlington to Port Kent. Less than an hour ago. He’s age five or six, dark hair, brown eyes, thin, speaks French.”

Questions squawked from the receiver. I ignored them and repeated what I’d already said. I didn’t have any answers, other than my name, and I wasn’t about to tell them that. Next I called the police in
Elizabethtown, which I knew had a police station, told them the same thing, and hung up.

I looked over at the boy, watching me through the windshield.

I got in the car. “Let’s get going,” I said, gesturing for him to fasten his seat belt. He freed his arms from the sleeping bag and obediently clicked the belt into place. As I pulled out of the parking lot my wheels gritted on the gravel.

A few miles down the road my phone gave that beep that says it’s back in cell tower range. I glanced at the car clock. I had been on my way to Burlington to see Thomas, to go to a piano recital he’d wanted to attend, and he’d be wondering why I hadn’t arrived. I picked up the phone and hit his speed dial.

“Tommy, it’s Troy,” I said, working hard to speak clearly through my fatigue. “Look, I’m really sorry, but something came up, and I can’t make it.”

A moment’s silence, then he said calmly, “Okay.” His careful lack of reaction annoyed me—it’s not always easy dating someone this determinedly understanding.

“Look, I can’t explain right now,” I said. “But I’ll call you tonight.”

Another pause. “Are you all right?”

“Fine, I’m fine.” I tried to sound reassuring. Thomas would be sitting on the sofa in his apartment, sandy hair neatly combed, looking like a Lands’ End model in his crisp khakis and button-down shirt. Diving off the railing of the Burlington ferry was not something I wanted to explain to him, not now and probably never. “Talk to you later,” I said, and clicked the phone off.

I looked at the boy. “Men!” I said. He smiled faintly, and I felt a little twist inside me.

We were approaching Keeseville, where I could turn south for Elizabethtown and the police station. I thought about it; I really did. I envisioned us traipsing inside in our motley clothes, damp and bedraggled, me trying to explain, insisting someone had tried to drown this boy, then watching him being carted off, never knowing where he was being taken or what happened to him.

But I wasn’t going to let him be sent back to whoever had tossed him off the ferry like an unwanted kitten. I wasn’t nineteen anymore.

What I didn’t admit to myself was that I was already beginning to think of this child as mine. I’d found him, I’d saved him. I wasn’t about to hand him off to a stranger.

I passed the turn and headed for home.

I
PULLED INTO MY PARKING SPOT IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE
. The boy had sat quietly during the forty-mile drive, waiting when I’d gone into a small store for hot chocolate, then clasping the cup in both hands, drinking in tiny sips. Neither of us had spoken.

“We’re here.” I gestured at the house.
“Ça, c’est ma maison.”
I’d rented a room here when I’d first arrived in Lake Placid, and when the speedskater running the place moved on, I bought the furnishings and took over. I rent out the extra bedrooms to athletes in town to train and people who end up here because they love the lakes and the mountains and the ski trails. Some are here a few months; some a year or more. We share the living room and kitchen, and everybody does their own dishes. If not, I put them in a paper bag and set it outside their bedroom door. They catch on pretty fast.

My family would consider this place a dump, but I like it. And I have a houseful of guys willing to go biking, running, or dancing, so I have company when I want it, and escape to my rooms when I don’t.

This is a part of my life Thomas finds unendearingly irregular, although he’s far too polite to say so. He’s too reserved to let me know that my athletic male roommates make him uneasy, and I’m too obstinate to let him know I have a hard-and-fast personal rule against house romances. Which I was tempted to break only once, but that’s another story.

I walked around the car and opened the passenger door. I reached over the boy to click open his seat belt and pulled off the sleeping bag and towel to free him. He glanced at the ground and then at me,
wanting to know if it was all right to walk in his sock feet. I nodded. He put his small hand in mine, and stepped carefully up the porch stairs in the big wool socks.

The front door was unlocked, as usual. I’d given up trying to get the guys to lock it. All too often one of them would forget to take a key when going out for a run or a bike ride and would end up climbing on the fuel tank and through the downstairs bedroom window. I’d installed individual locks on the bedrooms, but I was pretty much the only one who used them.

Two of the guys were in the front room watching TV and eating pizza from a box on the battered coffee table. The smell made my salivary glands tingle.

I leaned into the room. “Zach around?” I asked.

“Nope,” said Dave, without looking up. He was a quiet guy, a kayaker working at a local sports shop. Zach, who had been here the longest of the current batch of roommates, had my spare room key. I motioned to the boy to sit on the bottom of the staircase and went up to Zach’s room, where my fingers found my key on the nail in the back of his closet.

On the way downstairs, I kept my hand on the fat rounded banister to steady myself, then took the boy’s hand and led him through the kitchen and up the narrow private staircase into my rooms. I use the outside room as an office, and my bedroom is at the back, with a tiny bathroom to the left. My own little suite.

The small fingers gripping mine were cold, and I was chilling fast once out of the heated car. My wet ponytail had soaked the back of my sweatshirt, and my underwear and bra had soaked through, so I was pretty damp.

“I think a hot bath is next,” I said. I couldn’t remember the French word for
bath
, and the boy looked blank. I led him into the bathroom, turned on the faucets, and squirted in shampoo to make bubbles. Without hesitation he shrugged off the baggy jacket onto the floor and held his arms up for me to pull the T-shirt off, as if this were routine, as if he were used to a parent saying
Time for your bath
every evening. We struggled to get his damp jeans off, and finally he sat on
the bathroom floor and pushed at them while I worked the narrow cuffs over his bare feet and pulled. I would have had him bathe in his underwear, because I wasn’t going to ask a small child I didn’t know to strip, particularly since my brain recognized the possibility that a thrown-away child could have been abused. But he matter-of-factly pulled off his briefs and reached for my hand to steady himself as he climbed into the tub, as if he’d done it a thousand times.

His body was thin but unmarked. I handed him a soapy washcloth, and he started running it over his arms. I didn’t know if he could wash his own hair, but it seemed safer to do it for him, so I squirted shampoo on my palm and gently rubbed it in. He held his head back for me to rinse it, and as I poured clean water over his head, water ran down my arms, soaking the sweatshirt. Suddenly I was nearly shaking with cold.

“Will you be okay for five minutes?
Cinq minutes? Je vais aller dans l’autre salle de bains.
” I pointed downstairs and pantomimed showering, and he nodded. I ran more hot water into the tub so the water would be warm enough for him, then grabbed a towel and clean clothes, leaving the bathroom door ajar.

I stepped carefully down my stairs, which had been built by someone who didn’t comprehend rise-run ratio—they’re so steep and narrow there’s barely room for your foot. Once I’d slipped off and bounced painfully down the last few steps on my tailbone. Now I hold on.

The smell of the pizza from the living room beckoned. If ever a day called out for splurging, this was it. From the front hall I dialed Mr. Mike’s across the street, reading the number from the flyer taped to the wall. The two guys in the living room were intent on Vanna White, who was spelling out a phrase that even to my fuddled mind seemed obvious. “Dave, would you get my pizza from Mr. Mike’s in ten minutes?” I asked. “I’ll leave the money under the phone. You can have whatever I can’t eat.”

“Sure,” he said, without looking up.

Male athlete roommates don’t know the meaning of the word “leftovers.” Sometimes I’ll smell pasta in the middle of the night, and
if I roll over and look through the vent in my floor, I’ll see one of the guys cooking, too hungry to wait for morning.

I shampooed vigorously to erase any lingering reminder of my lake swim, and then did it again. I yanked on my clothes, not taking the time to comb out my thick hair, and headed back upstairs.

“You okay?” I called out softly as I approached my bathroom.
“Comment ça va?”

He was stretched out, head resting on the sloped back of the old tub, thin limbs just visible through the water. He looked as he had in the lake when I first saw him, eyes closed, more dead than alive. His eyes sprang open, with a flicker of fear that receded when he saw my face. I felt a pang of something like pain.

“Guess you’re waterlogged,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could. I pulled the plug and wrapped him in a towel as he stood, and as I lifted him out he seemed incredibly small and frail. I began to gently towel his hair dry. Of course part of me wanted to blurt out,
Who did this to you? Why would someone throw you off a ferry?
But I didn’t think he would answer, and neither was I ready to know.

I pulled an old rugby shirt over his head to use as a nightshirt. It fell past his knees, making him look like the youngest kid from
Peter Pan
. I rolled the sleeves up and drew my comb slowly through his hair. He just watched me.

We heard Dave call my name. “Back in a minute,” I told the boy, holding up one finger, and went downstairs for the pizza. I balanced a carton of milk and two plastic glasses on the steaming box and climbed back up.

“I hope you like pizza.
Tu aimes la
 … pizza?” Pizza must be a universal word, like McDonald’s, because his face brightened. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I took a bite, and three slices went down fast. The boy ate delicately but quickly, and we were just starting to slow down when we heard footsteps and then a clatter on the stairs. His eyes widened and he stopped mid-chew, pizza slice gripped tightly in his small fingers.

“It’s okay.
C’est mon chien.
” I barely got the words out before Tiger
erupted into the room. She’s half German shepherd and half golden retriever, and because having a golden retriever is sort of a status symbol in Lake Placid, I say I’m halfway there. Mostly she looks like a shepherd with a retriever-shaped head, a little rotund from being fed too many pizza crusts by too many roommates. Now she was very excited and very wet.

Zach poked his head around the railing of the stairwell. “Can I come up?”

“You’re already up.” My rooms are off-limits to the guys, but the rules never quite pertain to Zach. He lives in Lake Placid year-round, cross-country skiing in the winter and biking in the summer, eking out a living at odd jobs. He’s tall and rangy, with a stammer he hasn’t quite overcome.

“Not really,” Zach said, grinning as he bounded up the last few steps. He was wearing running shorts and shoes and a T-shirt that looked like it had been used as a paint rag. “Only part of the way. Say, wh-wh-who’s this?”

“A friend, visiting tonight.” The boy had scooted closer to me, eyes wide.

“Pl-pl-pleased to meet you.” Zach stuck out his hand. The boy shyly let Zach shake his fingertips. “Hey, pizza!” Zach said, and took a slice. Without warning, the whole tableau—boy, pizza, dog, Zach, room—shifted and shimmered as if my vision were blurring or the whole scene about to disappear, like a faulty
Star Trek
holodeck program. As if this were a safe ending I’d dreamed up while in the lake struggling to hold my breath, wondering if I were alive or dead.

After what seemed a lifetime I heard Zach say something and laugh, and with an almost tangible
ching
, I shifted back into the here and now. Tiger had shaken herself and sent water droplets flying.

“So Tiger took a swim.” I grabbed a towel to start rubbing her down.

“Yep, after we went around the lake. Hey, I thought you were going up to see old Thomas.”

“He’s not old,” I said automatically. “I was, but this young man is spending the night instead.”

Raised eyebrows. Zach knew something was up but didn’t ask. The boy was tentatively reaching out to touch Tiger’s black fur. I was suddenly exhausted and no longer hungry. “Hey, Zach, would you take the rest of this down to the guys?”