The Lifeguard (8 page)

“But you will be, one day,” he whispers. “I promise you. Your whole life…it is
ahead
of you, Sirena.” He reaches out and for the briefest moment, closes his large hand around mine. Then he releases it and turns back to his canvas.

I sink back in the sand and study his hands as he works. Short, square nails. One is half black, as if it had been hit. The back of his hands have brown shadowy spots on them. Veins bulge out like worms beneath the skin. They’re strong hands that could lift the earth. Every part of him looks strong, from his thick neck to the powerful forearms. He used to be a fisherman, Aunt Ellie said. At one point he looks over his shoulder at me and smiles.

“I guess I should probably be going. You’re trying to work.”

“Stay, please,” he insists. “I don’t often have such fresh air around me—Such fresh, beautiful air.” He laughs.

“My aunt’s expecting me, but I’ll come back and see you again.” I scratch Edna’s head and she rolls onto her back so I can scratch her stomach.

“Bring your sketchbook, so you can work next to me.”

“Maybe it’ll help.”

“We’ll help each other,” he says.

I get up and turn to go when Antonio looks up peers into my eyes. “Don’t be sad,
querida
,” he says, softly.

I look at him curiously. How did he know? But by then he’s looking ahead of him.

“This,” he says, almost to himself looking at the slant of the sun. “This is the time I was waiting for.”

I ride my bike along the beach feeling calmer than I have in a long time. Did something from Antonio’s serenity transfer to me? Was something like that possible? Or was I just happy to have made a friend, even if he was the oldest one I had ever had. I laugh to myself.

Dear Marissa, well I met a really cool guy today. Only don’t get excited—he’s eighty!

When I get into the house, Aunt Ellie is cutting up a salad.

“I met Antonio.”

“I figured you would. Did you find him on the beach?”

I nod.

“And you immediately fell for him, right?”

I look at her and grin. “How did you know?”

“It’s unbelievable,” she says. “The man has that effect on everybody.”

B
y the end of the week they’ve moved Cody upstairs to a private room. I poke my head in. Is he up? His eyes look open, but when I get closer to the bed I see that he’s fast asleep, his pale brown hair now silky clean.

He sleeps peacefully one moment, then suddenly his eyes dart up, then down. What kind of thoughts are in his head? Does he know what happened to him? Can he remember? Will it scare him and make him afraid to get back on his bike?

Just after I learned to ride a two-wheeler, I fell off and fractured my ankle. For years after I’d wake up during the night with a start as my mind replayed the fall. It took me a long time to get on my bike again.

On the side of Cody’s face that hit the ground there’s a bandage, but it doesn’t totally cover the beginning of a red scab. The area around it is green, yellow, and purple and it’s swollen. The skin looks like plastic wrap pulled over the top of a bowl. An IV is attached to his arm and he’s on a heart monitor. I watch the hypnotic pattern of the green zigzag line as it goes up and down, over and over, turning the heartbeat into modern art. Is it a normal scribble? When he was first brought in, he was on a ventilator, a machine that breathed for him. Now he’s off it. That has to mean he’s better.

I read a poem to him, even though he’s sleeping, whispering the words. Can fields of yellow daffodils erase memories of blood and pain? Can he hear me? Will he turn toward me, the way a plant leans toward the sun for warmth, light, and survival? I want to know we’ve connected, but I search his face and swallow, involuntarily.

I shut the book and squeeze his marshmallow hand. He doesn’t respond. He’s a limp rag doll who I want to take home to keep on my bed, like a new stuffed animal. “Bye, I’ll visit you tomorrow,” I whisper.

I start to leave, then stop, guilty about walking out on him. I’m sure his parents are nearby, but right now he’s so alone. I’m not supposed to fall apart. I’m there to help kids, but now I’m the helpless baby trying to muffle my sobs.

Sirena, you’re such a mess.

Mary Carol must have heard me because there she is at the door. “Are you all right, Sirena?”

“I don’t know what it is that gets to me…He’s not
my
child, I don’t have a little brother or even know any kids like him.”

“We all struggle with how to deal with kids who are sick or hurt. It’s hard for all of us. It makes us realize how helpless we are to prevent it.”

“But a kid…nearly getting the life smacked out of him…”

Kids have to be protected and spared, and if they’re not, it’s unfair, and their parents have failed them.

I can’t stop crying. “I better go.”

She shakes her head. “Things around here get to all of us. It never gets easier, but eventually…you handle it.”

I walk along the corridor and spot his parents sitting together on a bench, eyes hollowed; mouths pinched as if someone has stolen their insides. Outside the building, out of view, I crouch down, dropping my head to the ground. It feels like I’m going to be sick.

I
’m glad Aunt Ellie isn’t home. I want to sleep, not talk to anyone. What I feel is too complicated for words. I get into bed, only I dream about bicycles and accidents. I fall and I’m trapped under something, something heavy, and I can’t get away. My body jerks and I wake up.

To get my mind off Cody, I take out my sketchbook and sit on the window seat. I flip open my phone and there he is, straddling the Harley, his face serene and composed, his yellow, sun-streaked hair blown back off his face.

Pilot.

I wouldn’t say his name outside, out loud, but here in my room with no one around…

Pilot. Pilot. Pilot.

I say it again and again to see what it sounds like to my ear, to try it on my tongue. Pilot. Pilot, as if the more I say it, the more he becomes mine. It suits him, but why? I brainstorm with myself. Associations? Guide. Leader. Driver. Explorer. Initiator. Someone independent. It works. It’s perfect for him. The alternatives are laugh-out-loud funny. Boring names. Common ones. George, Jack, Steve, Thomas, Allen, Jed, Fred, Martin, Mark. He wouldn’t have any of those names. He couldn’t.

He isn’t
like
anyone else.

I work at transferring the face in front of me to paper, never mind that his eyes are hidden behind sunglasses, as if he doesn’t want me to see or know his eyes and his soul. The shape of the head first, then the mouth, which is easier because his lips are full, almost bowed.

How would he kiss?

I put the pen down. How much of himself would he put into it? I dream of making out with him for hours, feeling him next to my skin and burying myself against his warmth, inhaling his sweetness like a drug I can’t take enough of. I think about seeing his green eyes flood with longing and watching his face come alive as we kiss harder and harder. We’d spend the night on the beach inside a tent, zipped into a sleeping bag. My initiation. My innocence offered up to him and no one else.

La petite mort
, the little death.

When we read about
la petite mort
in a book about literature, Marissa and I laughed so hard we were in pain. It’s the euphoria, or altered state, you’re left with after reading something astounding, it said. Then we looked it up. We saw what it really meant: the spiritual release after orgasm.

“Omigod.”
Marissa burst out laughing.

Now I sit staring out at the water, hugging my sketchbook to my chest, my eyes burning, my throat dry with longing, thinking of that now. Thoughts of him flood my mind, taking it over. I’m his robotic toy, remote controlled.

A car horn blast brings me back to reality.

Focus, I tell my head. I keep on drawing. The mirrored aviator sunglasses on the bridge of his nose. That impenetrable, unflinching coolness. His body armor.

The harder I try to sketch him, the worse it looks, as if hard work is at odds with inspiration and creativity. Everything is wrong. It looks nothing like him. It’s awful, terrible, stupid, and embarrassing. I’m not an artist, I’m a kindergartner and a fraud. I have no talent, so why am I pretending?

You have to struggle to make art, Sirena.

But Antonio isn’t sixteen, he’s eighty. Will I have to struggle that long? Pinta, an oversized Calico, sidles up and sits next to me. She looks at the picture and yawns.

“You’re being kind.”

Trust your eyes, they tell you, only mine aren’t seeing. It doesn’t help that the picture in the camera is tiny and indistinct, worse than a fleeting image on a surveillance video. For some freaky reason I wonder if the problem isn’t the matchbox-size cell phone picture, it’s that some elusive quality of his can’t be captured, which makes no sense, but maybe it comes with living in a house with ghosts and suspecting that everyone in the whole world may have a supernatural presence.

I rip the papers from my sketchbook and crumple them up. I try over and over. I can’t get his face. I can’t see it, I don’t know it. How can I capture something I’ve never been close to for more than minutes? Even then I felt lost in a fever dream. The picture is useless. Did I really think it would help me to know his face? That’s like trying to come up with the formula for the chemistry between two people attracted to each other.

I fold a sheet of paper into a plane and shoot it across the room. It crashes against the wall and slips to the floor.

What I need is a close-up, otherwise I’ll have to park myself in front of him, and how likely is that in this lifetime? I throw down my notebook. I want to punch something.

Flashback to months back. Me on the couch of a shrink. I went to her after they told me they were separating. My parents’ brilliant idea, not mine.

She looked at me, a searching half smile on her face. “What are you feeling, Sirena?”

I was sitting on her brown suede couch, at arm’s length from a box of Kleenex. The whipping tick of the gold alarm clock on her desk, the only sound in the room.

I leaned forward, about to explode. Go screw yourself, I wanted to shout, that’s what I’m feeling. I felt like putting my fist through her door as I ran out of it. Why was it
her
business what I was feeling? And anyway, what possible good could come of
me
telling
her
what was inside my head? Could she change my life? Was talking about it going to make everything suddenly better? I met her patient stare.

HATE ME, DON’T PITY ME, I wanted to scream. I showed up for one last futile session.

I get on my bike and ride to town. I haven’t been to Antonio’s gallery yet, and I want to see his work up close and study what he does—even use him as my model. I smile at the thought of him in his red canvas director’s chair surrounded by his quirky props, most of all Edna, benignly watching and waiting, wise to the world around her.

Not hard to find the gallery. Only one store in town sells paintings and crafts. The door is open, but I don’t see anyone.

“Hello? Hello?”

A glass counter in the front holds earrings, pins, woven bags, and wall hangings. I walk past it.

In a large city, someone greets you, even takes you around. But here when shopkeepers leave for lunch or coffee, they don’t bother locking up. You can roam free and if you need help, you just try back later.

I wander around the gallery. Most of the paintings are seascapes that look like they were done by beginners. It wouldn’t surprise me to find numbers beneath the patches of color.

I turn and see a doorway down a small corridor to my left. The office? But it’s not, it’s a separate gallery room. On the opposite wall, there’s a painting that’s different from all the others.

It’s Antonio’s, I can feel it.

It’s dreamlike and romantic, a pastel of hazy clouds in a blush pink and tangerine sky, veined with faint streaks of turquoise. I want to be lying on the beach under that sky, or at least seeing the painting first thing in the morning.

Art changes the way you see the world
, my art history teacher said, and Antonio’s magical picture opens my eyes to the sky as a changing canvas and nature as the world’s most brilliant artist.