“Come with me.”
I looked up and she was already leaving. Sure steps, steady pace, no hesitation, bag already slung over her shoulder and the classroom door slapped open with one hand. And I mean, she was absolutely right – I wasn’t going to ignore Janet when she asked – but she could’ve been less rude about it.
Then again, it was more than I’d gotten out of her all summer. I’d take what I could get.
***
The ice underfoot was so sheer and slick. One boot slipped – and they had good sharp cleats, she’d been very careful when buying, she’d done her research – and the other stuttered and sent her forwards with a jerk and a snap of rope and then hands reached for her as she tilted and tipped and fell over and over and over, so dizzy and numb with adrenaline and fear that she didn’t even feel the water until the light was fading out of sight above her.
***
Janet drove more recklessly than I remembered from…spring? Just spring, that was all, not too long ago when she never did a rolling stop; never went more than eight above the limit, never took an intersection without turning her head every which way.. She didn’t speed, but that was about it: traffic lights, changing lanes, taking corners, none of it seemed to register as even a suggestion. We were through downtown in record time and I was sure that the only reason we hadn’t been arrested was that we’d moved so smoothly and surely that nobody had managed to notice us.
The windows were wide open and the wind off the ocean made me shiver; winter was a long way off, but summer was no closer. “Where are we going?”
Janet’s expression hadn’t changed, but if you looked at it right she could’ve been smiling. “Swimming.”
***
She’d tried to swim up, but it was gone: the direction, the somatic sensation of her limbs, the energy to move, all of it.
Instead she sank, like a rock, like her heartbeat, down and down and down until her eyes were as good as shut open wide and the cold was almost warming and the world was just so tiring, so heavy, so draining that it slipped away overhead without a sliver of regret.
Then she touched something, and it touched her.
***
“This is crazy,” I said to my best friend that had spoken to almost nobody since she’d gotten out of the hospital two months ago following a ‘miracle’ recovery from nearly drowning in hypothermic waters, only to then suffer the death of one of her parents.
I still MEANT it, but I really regretted saying it.
“That’s okay,” Janet said with that same easy calm she’d kept on her face ever since she’d come back. I’d gotten in a few fights (not all verbal) with people who’d called it ‘creepy’ or ‘psycho’ but I was forced to admit that at this particular moment it was – at the very least – kind of frustrating. I should try to get her into poker again, put it to good use.
“Why don’t we go do something else instead?” I suggested subtly.
“Like what?” Oh god her shoes were already off, when had she taken off her shoes. One toe entered the water, then both feet.
“Like…I don’t know, play poker?” Maybe not that subtly.
“No.”
“Janet, this water has to be almost freezing.”
“Yes,” she said happily. “It’s okay, come on in.”
“But-”
“Kamala? I almost froze to death. I won’t let that happen to you.”
She was only lying half her ass off: yes, it was almost freezing; no, it was NOT okay.
We really should’ve done poker.
***
“Hello,” she said with the last of her air, and even though she couldn’t see them the shimmering sensation of the little bubbles rushing out of her lips and up her face was the only hint she had of which direction everything else in the world was.
Hello, said the shape. It was thick and heavy and impossibly rough, scraping away her skin where it brushed against her in an unhurried amble, investigating her with idle thoroughness.
“Am I dead? I’m out of air.”
No and yes, said the shape. Or yes and no. Pick one each. What are you doing down here? I have never known a thing like you.
“I fell. I slipped. I think.” It was really hard to remember, the incident was at once too fresh and too faded in her mind. “I’ve never met you either, whoever you are, whatever you are. I can’t see and I can’t hear and I can barely feel anything and I’m going to die now.”
Maybe, said the shape. Or you could not.
“How?”
You could be my daughter. It has been a long time since I had children. My children live here and they do not freeze and they do not breathe and they do not die, only sleep and swim and grow older and older. Be my daughter and you will do those things.
“But I need to breathe.”
Not to live.
“But I don’t want to live here.”
Then I will give you a piece of it, and it will travel with you.
“But I don’t know what you are.”
Every child is born this way.
“But… I don’t want to.”
Choose.
She couldn’t be sure if she’d shut her eyes or not. It was all the same here. “Yes.”
***
“I’m crazy,” I said. Or tried to say; my teeth were shaking violently and my lips were too numb to move.
“You aren’t,” said Janet. She was practically holding me up in the water at this point, even though she was swimming in what probably felt like fifty pounds of soaked clothes and I’d self-consciously stripped down to my underwear. Right now I was feeling naked in more ways than one and if hypothermia wasn’t my main concern I’d be embarrassed as all hell.
“I’m freezing to death.”
“It’s okay, I won’t let you. Just relax.”
I groaned. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I think I’m cramping.”
“That’s okay, just don’t kick too hard. My mother’s here.”
That woke me up, even through the cold. “Janet,” I said with as little chattering as possible, as gently as clenched jaw muscles would let me, “your mother is dead.”
“Yes. This is my sleeping mother. Look.”
I opened my mouth to say something about how maybe metaphorically Janet’s mother was always with her but she looked at me and reached out one hand to brush my cheek and then turned my entire head down until I was almost eating the seawater.
I looked. Then I looked harder, and harder, and harder, and finally when I gave up and just looked again, I saw it.
There was a shark there. Right beside us, just beneath us. It wasn’t coming closer, it hadn’t appeared as if from nowhere, it was just… there. It was always there. How had I missed it, it was the size of a fucking pickup truck.
“Janet-”
“Yes,” she said calmly. And she let go of me.
***
She rose.
Not quickly, like she’d fallen. Not tumbling, like she’d sunken. She swam up from below inevitably, unflinchingly. Her mother’s body beat the water with long, slow sweeps, and she moved without effort, without apparent cause, just rose and rose and rose until horrible bright glare shattered her gaze and the glistening fangs of ten thousand dangling ice spires reflected from above her into her eyes.
There was a hole. And she was thrust through it, crying and spitting and reeking of something that made piss smell like roses, thrown upon the cold ice amidst shocked exclamations and strange lanky things with hands and feet and warm blankets and heat packs and emergency radios.
It was a miracle.
Not that she got better; her mother had promised her that. That she could stare all of this in the eye and remind herself to breathe.
For appearances.
***
I immediately thrashed and sank and gasped and swore and kicked and floundered. I couldn’t have looked more like an injured seal if I’d taken mime classes, and I wondered if all the stories I’d heard were true and you couldn’t feel your legs being bitten off until you looked at them.
Then, just like someone who’d been told not to think about pink elephants, I had to look at them. And just past my flailing limbs, still not moving, the shark. God, it was even bigger underwater; huge and round and blunted like the world’s biggest cigar; it lacked the pale belly of the white sharks that fed on the seals off the point. It also lacked their grace, their speed, their big black eyes – it loitered there in midwater, a special kind of inelegant motionlessness. Trails of something unpleasant and chitinous dangled in the current from the corners of its blind eyes, and inside its mouth glimmered no beautiful teeth, just a blank round hole, gaping.
I was being very poetic for someone who was sure she was about to die. My bladder, who was faster on the uptake than my brain, had already abandoned ship.
The mouth was closer now, which was impressive because the shark wasn’t moving. It was sliding closer without moving, like a rogue piece of scenery, and even as it slid past and around me and brushed me with its rough knuckle-busted snout hard enough to scratch and scrape it was hard to keep my eyes on its grey gnarled skin.
It circled twice more, and then it closed its jaws around my middle, bit down enough for me to feel the squeeze, then turned on its tail and went down, down, down until the water was as empty as it had seemed to be all along.
Janet was holding me again, which was good because at some point I’d stopped swimming.
“She likes you,” she told me.
***
After the airlift, after the hospital, after the long trip home, she finally slept, really slept, truly slept.
And in her dreams, she swam without effort, underneath the world, awake and dreaming, moving without notice, sliding beneath notice and without stopping and without end, on and on and on and on.
Hello, said her sleeping mother.
Hello, she said.
They moved through the waters and in the night they rose up and covered all the streets and all the lights and flooded through the windows and placed every dreaming head on every pillow on every corner deep, deep under the waves, where she and her sleeping mother felt them and they quaked under their shape, like sleeping dogs cringing from an imagined predator.
When she woke up, she’d forgotten to breathe again. And there was a faint whiff of something that smelled like rotten urine.
***
The towel in the trunk of Janet’s car was thick and soft and had been wrapped around what seemed to be a hot water bottle. She’d always been good at planning ahead, and I was so grateful for it that I couldn’t think or speak until I was nearly dry again and she was rubbing down my hair.
There was a neat semicircle of tiny puncture wounds all around the perimeter of my torso, armpit to hips. They were just shallow enough to only hurt when the towel brushed them the wrong way; just deep enough to bleed a little. The beautiful fluffy towel was probably irrecoverable.
“Who knows?” I asked.
“Just you. And my parents.”
“Oh.” I felt flattered, and then I noticed an important inflection. “Wait, both of them?”
“Yes,” said Janet. She squeezed my hand.
“Janet,” I said, with all the care and delicacy of someone who’d been completely sure she was going to die ten minutes ago, “did that shark eat your mother?”
“Yes. For revenge.”
“For-”
“My cleats were sharp the day before we went for our walk on the ice,” said Janet. “She checked for me. And my rope came loose when I fell. She tied it for me. And when I was falling, she reached out. And didn’t catch me. We saw it in her sleep.”
I should argue that those could have been accidents, but that felt like a cruelty that would’ve made all the whispers of ‘crazy’ and ‘psycho’ and ‘freak’ seem like head-pats. So instead I squirmed around in my seat and hugged her.
She hugged back without hesitation, and that was the very first thing she’d done since spring that felt completely like the old days, like the same Janet I’d known since grade nine. She always squeezed exactly almost too hard.
“So why me?” I mumbled into her shoulderblades. They smelled a bit like rotten piss, but after what I’d gone through I’d cherish anything that wasn’t saltwater. “Why tell me now?”
Janet pulled back, just enough to look at me nose to nose. Nothing dangled from her eyes, and I hoped that habit of her mother’s wasn’t hereditary. They were very pretty eyes.
“I really love you a lot and don’t want to hide things from you. Any things.”
“Oh.”
“Mother told me that the best way to find something I want is to go up to it and take it.”
“Your mother is a very wise fish.”
“She is,” said Janet, and I could definitely read the smile in that expression now, so I kissed it.
***
After thirty seconds I caught on that she didn’t need to breathe. This seemed like an unfair advantage.