Phantom Limbs (2 page)

Dara ordered two jelly doughnuts and a multigrain bagel. Not hard to guess which was for me.

The counter guy tried not to stare, but it’s a fact that stumps where limbs are supposed to be are riveting — a reality that didn’t escape Dara.

She waved her stump at him. “You wanna touch it?”

I would have laughed at his horrified expression if I didn’t feel so bad for him. He was a small guy, Pakistani, maybe, and he barely looked old enough to have a job. He backed up so fast, it was a miracle he didn’t end up in the doughnuts with his ass all coated in custard.

When he handed Dara her change, he said timidly, “What happened to your arm?”

Oh boy.

She met his eyes for a long moment, then said, “It just fell off. I woke up to this thud in the middle of the night. It had fallen right onto the floor.” She nodded. “Doctor said it was probably from eating too much sugar. Too many doughnuts.” She shoved the change — more than five bucks — into the tip jar. His bewildered expression as he registered her response made me want to punch her in the head.

You’d never guess by looking at her how merciless she was — she had a face as sweet as a rose, until she opened her mouth and let the knives fly out.

I followed her out to the car. “You know, you could cut people a little slack.”

“What the hell does he need slack for?” She stuck the doughnut bag under her stump and opened her door. “He has two arms and his whole idiot life ahead of him. The world’s his fucking oyster.”

“People don’t see stumps every day, Dara.”

Dara’s arm ended just above the elbow. It wasn’t horrendous, as stumps go; it was round and fairly smooth save for some scars. And it was useful, too: she could carry things with it, hold beer bottles for opening, help with steering when she needed to shift while turning — things she wouldn’t be able to do if the amputation had been higher. The problem was one of visibility. I, like most people, carried my damage on the inside. But Dara wore hers on her sleeve. Literally.

She took her doughnuts out of the bag and bit into one.

“You know,” I said, staring as she licked jelly from the corner of her mouth, “it’s not like one doughnut would kill me.”

“Baby,” she said, turning the ignition and revving the engine, “you get your hundred breast cut, and I’ll buy you all the doughnuts you want. Shift.”

I reached over and did the shifting, which was my job whenever Dara multitasked with her one good arm. “I have until next February to qualify for state,” I pointed out, eyeballing her other doughnut nestled on the white bag near the gearshift. Its sugary surface sparkled and winked — I swear it was flirting with me. My bagel tasted like a damp dog biscuit.

“State? State’s the least of my worries.” She glanced over at me. “Oh, Christ,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Here.” She held out the doughnut, using her stump to steady the wheel.

I snapped up the doughnut before she changed her mind. “Why?”

“Because you’re killing me with those fucking puppy eyes.”

“No,” I said, chomping into the doughnut, “I meant, why is state the least of your worries?”

“You’ll have no trouble qualifying for state if you get to where you need to be by the end of the summer.”

“Which is?” I was confused; I had already qualified for the summer championship meet.

“Well, you’ll have to drop about four seconds this summer to stay on track to qualify for Junior Nationals by next summer. After J-Nats, all we need is to drop three more seconds to qualify you for Olympic Trials.”

I managed to not laugh out loud. Dara was asking me to drop ten seconds in a race that took just over a minute. I just wanted to cut the two seconds that would get me to the high school state meet. And maybe make finals my senior year. But Trials? Ever? Pure delusion.

Somehow it seemed to escape Dara that this whole Olympics thing was ridiculous — I’d never be that good. She was the real talent. I’d just needed something to do after Meg left, something to get me out of the house, which had become an unbearable place, and to get me out of my head, which was even worse. Swimming kept me from drowning. I liked it. Sometimes I even loved it. And yes, I wanted to kick ass in high school swimming — maybe even college swimming if I was good enough. But that’s about as far as my swimming aspirations went. Unfortunately, I’d let myself be Dara’s pet project for three years, and she was looking for the payoff, which to her meant only one thing: the Olympics. She didn’t care if it was in one year or five or nine; it was the pot of gold at the end of her rainbow, her raison d’fucking être. And I was the leprechaun who was supposed to take her there.

So until I rustled up the cojones to kill Dara’s dream and face the consequences, I’d be getting up before the freakin’ roosters.

“Hand me my bag,” Dara said, gesturing toward the backseat. When I gave it to her, she leaned forward and stuck her stump into the wheel to steer and dug into the purse with her right hand. As the car veered perilously out of the lane lines, she pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to me. It was a schedule, mapped out day by day to the smallest detail. “We’ll do dryland three times a week and work on technique between morning and evening practice. If we don’t cut corners and don’t skip Sundays, we can do it — I know we can.”

The girl was certifiable. The Senior Championship meet was two months away!

I stared at the paper. My whole summer, sunrise to sunset, right before my eyes.

It’s not like Dara had never done this before — pushed me to my limits, taken over my every waking hour. And I’d always let her. Even during summer, when everyone else sort of takes it easy. But Meg’s message had changed everything. If she was coming back for three weeks, there was no way I’d be spending all my time with Dara. Not if I had anything to say about it.

“You’re not gonna be here to train me next year,” I pointed out. “What happens then?” It was going to take a hell of a lot more than just a summer’s worth of hard work to get me to Junior Nationals — and an absolute miracle for me to qualify for Olympic Trials. And Grinnell would be waiting for Dara in August, which actually kind of surprised me because I didn’t think she had the grades. But I was relieved they wanted her. Sometimes to me Dara going to college sounded like the beginning of a long, relaxing vacation.

“Don’t worry about that.”

“Why not?” It seemed like a fair question. Why push myself to chase the impossible if she wasn’t going to be around to see this through?

“Because, don’t worry about it!”

Dara logic.

As she blathered on about my summer in her POW camp, my thoughts lingered on Meg.
What happened to her?
We’d been practically inseparable for nearly three years. Did she really just forget me? If I was supposed to give up on her at some point, I never got the memo. I guess a guy with half a brain would consider the long silence “the memo.” If not that, then the football player might have driven the point home.

Since last year, when she finally appeared on Facebook, Meg had been posting pictures of herself with some padded Neanderthal. That they weren’t just friends was agonizingly clear. I, on the other hand, had been a lone wolf this whole time, unless you count the companionship of an eighteen-year-old dictator of frankly indeterminate sexual orientation.

“. . . and between practices we can grab lunch at that pizza buffet a few blocks from the pool — they have a salad bar . . .”

We were almost at the high school. The sun rose over the horizon, streaking orange and yellow through the remaining purple. It was a new day, in all sorts of ways. And as much as I was loath to bring up Meg to Dara, I knew that Dara, with all her grand plans for me this summer, would need to know sometime.

“So guess what?” I said, shifting into second as Dara slowed to turn into the parking lot. “Meg’s coming back to Willow Grove.” It felt weird to say it, like I was making it up. “For three weeks. Apparently.”

“You know what that means?” Dara asked, tires squealing as she rounded the edge of the lot and sped into a parking space, stopping so suddenly that the seat belt nearly sliced me in half. She thrust the gear into first and yanked up the parking brake.

“It means,” she continued, grabbing her stuff from the backseat, “you need to knock off more than two seconds in the next three months. Do you realize how much work that’s going to take? Your turns still suck, and your starts aren’t great, either. Sometimes your breakout is sort of fucked up.”

She wasn’t even listening to me.

She got out of the car, slammed the door, and strode toward the school, her muscular little ass doing its famous
swish-swish
. I grabbed my bags and ran after her.

“Did you hear what I said?” I asked. “Meg’s coming back. So I might be kind of busy while she’s here.” I hoped that wasn’t just wishful thinking.

“Meg who?” She yanked open the door to the athletic entrance.

Man, she really knew how to piss me off. Dara knew perfectly well Meg who. She’d heard plenty about Meg, although it hadn’t taken long before she lost patience and told me that love was for chumps and to get over it already.

“
Meg
Meg,” I answered.

“You mean the girl who landed you in therapy?” she said without looking back. “The girl you write all the froofy poetry for?”

I followed her down the hallway toward the pool, gritting my teeth. Calling my poetry “froofy” was one of Dara’s cheap go-to’s for emasculating me. And I was in therapy before Meg even left.

“Yes,” I said, catching up with her. “And it’s kind of a big deal. If you were my friend, you’d be happy for me.”

She whirled around and faced me. “You know what? Fuck you. I’ve been here for you every fucking day since that girl left you in the dust. So don’t give me that
if you were my friend
shit — don’t talk to me about who your friends are.
I’m
your fucking friend. Which is more than you can say about her.”

She started walking again. When she reached the locker room, she turned back to me. “God, Mueller.” She shook her head at me like I was pathetic, tragic. “She never even looked back.”

IN THE POOL, WE WORKED ON SPRINTS. TO my eternal amazement, there were people who voluntarily showed up to practice before school in the off-season. Most of them did it because they wanted to stay in shape, but they had actual lives and couldn’t make the evening practice.

There were six girls and eight other guys at the pool, despite the ridiculous hour, including — always — my medley relay team, because we were determined to set a school record, if a strong enough backstroker emerged to replace D’Amico, who was graduating. And of course there was Coach Brian, who oversaw the entire swim club, head-coached us senior swimmers, and who, I was pretty sure, never slept.

If Dara hadn’t been there, I could have spent the whole time thinking about Meg as I put in my yards, lost in the blue blur and muffled echo of water. But even while she was swimming, Dara managed to keep an eye on me, occasionally even alerting me with her shrill two-finger whistle, which confused all the swimmers. That morning she paused on her way to the fountain to holler, “More rotation, Mueller! And quit breathing so much, you pussy! It’s a twenty-five, for Christ’s sake!” Everyone — including Coach — found this hysterically funny. I wasn’t laughing, though. I was wishing she’d go fuck herself.

It’s not that I was ungrateful. Dara had transformed me, both physically and mentally — I knew that. When I met her, not long after Meg left, my daily calendar was divided into a triad of moping, writing depressing poems, and shoving my face full of the pies my mom kept making. If baking pies was my mom’s coping mechanism during those dark days, eating them was mine. If my therapist hadn’t pushed her to get me out of the house that summer, my mom, lost in a dark vortex of her own, probably never would have hauled me to the pool for some fresh air and exercise, and I probably never would have met Dara and ended up her unlikely protégé. She could spot a sucker a mile away, even as she swam laps with her sort of mesmerizing one-armed technique. I had walked to the end of the diving board in my billowy board shorts, held my nose, and jumped. When I surfaced, I flailed my way to the side — to call it “swimming” would have been generous. Enter Dara Svetcova, who flattered me with her attention. She was almost sixteen, which felt a lifetime older than my thirteen and a half years, and it didn’t take me long to realize she was the subject of the tragic news story I’d seen a couple of years earlier. Even with one arm, the girl was epic; I couldn’t imagine what she’d been like with two. She gave me some swimming tips and encouraged me, and the rest was history.

Looking back, I could see that she was the human equivalent of a Venus flytrap. Hindsight is indeed twenty-twenty.

I was approaching the wall for a turn when Coach stopped me with a kickboard. When I came up, he pointed toward the deck, his expression grim.

Dara huddled near the pool, clutching her stump, rocking.

Phantom limb pains. The sensation that the amputated limb is there, hurting, itching — sometimes even that it’s moving or picking things up. The drugs only helped so much. The most reliable relief came from her mirror box: a rectangular wooden crate divided by a mirror. When she put her right hand in, what she saw was a pair of hands, which somehow caused the phantom pains to subside. But if she wasn’t at home with her box, sometimes watching two hands rubbing together could help. And to see two hands, she needed someone. And in Dara’s world, “someone” was me.