Sing You Home

3

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Refugee (3:06)

VANESSA

I haven’t given much thought to Zoe Baxter until I find her drowning at the bottom of the YMCA pool.

I don’t know who it is, at first. I am swimming my laps at 6:30 A.M.-just about the only exercise I can drag myself out of bed for-and am midstroke doing the crawl when I see a woman slowly floating down to the bottom, with her hair fanning out around her head. Her arms are outstretched, and she doesn’t look like she is sinking as much as just letting go.

I jackknife and dive, grab her hand, and yank her through the water. She starts fighting me as we approach the surface, but by then the adrenaline has kicked in and I haul her out of the pool and kneel over her, dripping on her face as she coughs and rolls to her side. “What the hell,” she gasps, “are you doing?”

“What the hell were you doing?” I reply, and as she sits up, I realize whom I’ve saved. “Zoe?”

It is quiet at the Y. Pre-Christmas, the lap lane occupants have dwindled down to me, a few elderly swimmers, and the occasional physical therapy/rehab patient. Zoe and I are playing out this little scene on the tile edge of the pool without anyone really paying attention.

“I was staring up at the lights,” Zoe says.

“Here’s a news flash: you don’t have to drown to do that.” Now that we’re both out of the water, I’m shivering. I grab my towel and wrap it around my shoulders.

I heard, of course, about the baby. It was horrible, to say the least, to have the guest of honor at a baby shower rushed to the hospital to deliver a stillborn. I wasn’t even planning on going to the shower, but I’d felt bad for her-what kind of woman has so few friends that she has to invite people who’ve contracted her music therapy services? Afterward, naturally, I felt even worse for her. I’d helped her bookkeeper clean up the restaurant, after the ambulance screamed away. There had been little baby-bottle bubble wands at each place setting; and I’d collected them on the way out, figuring that I’d give them back to Zoe at some point in the future. They were still somewhere in my trunk.

I don’t know what to say to her. How are you? seems superfluous. I’m sorry seems even worse.

“You should try it,” Zoe says.

“Suicide?”

“Once a school counselor always a school counselor,” she answers. “I told you, I wasn’t trying to kill myself. Just the opposite, actually. You can feel your heart beat, all the way to your fingers, when you’re down there.”

She slips back into the pool like an otter and looks up at me. Waiting. With a sigh, I throw down my towel and dive back in. I open my eyes underwater and see Zoe sinking to the bottom again, so I mimic her. Twisting onto my back, I look up at the quivery Morse code dashes of the fluorescent lights, and exhale through my nose so that I sink.

My first instinct is to panic-I’ve run out of air, after all. But then my pulse starts beating under my fingernails, in my throat, between my legs. It’s as if my heart has swelled to fill up all the space beneath my skin.

I could see why, for someone who’s lost so much, feeling this full could be a comfort.

When I can’t stand it anymore, I kick to the surface. Zoe splashes up beside me and treads water. “When I was little, I wanted to be a mermaid when I grew up,” she says. “I used to practice by tying my ankles together and swimming in the town pool.”

“What happened?”

“Well, obviously I didn’t become a mermaid.”

“Classic underachiever…”

“It’s never too late, right?” Zoe pulls herself out of the pool and sits on the edge.

“I just don’t know what the job market’s like these days for sirens at sea,” I say. “Now, on the other hand, vampires are absolutely to die for. There’s a huge demand for the undead.”

“It figures.” Zoe sighs. “Just when I’ve rejoined the world of the living.”

I stand up, and hold out a hand to pull Zoe to her feet. “Welcome back,” I say.

Because it is a YMCA, there’s no fancy juice bar, so instead we get coffee at a Dunkin’ Donuts, which are scattered so frequently through Wilmington that you can stand in the doorway of one and spit into the doorway of another. Zoe follows me in her car and parks in the spot beside me. “Quite the license plate,” she says, as I get out of the car.

Mine reads VS-66. It’s a Rhode Island thing to have a low-numbered license plate. There are people who bequeath two- and three-digit plates to relatives in their wills; at one point a former governor made fighting plate- number corruption part of his electoral platform. If you have your initials and a low number-like me-you’re probably a mob boss. I’m not a mob boss, but I know how to get things done. The day I had to register my new car, I brought each of the clerks a six-pack and asked them what they could do for me.

“Friends in high places,” I reply, as we go into the coffee shop. We both order vanilla lattes and sit at a table in the back of the store.

“What time do you have to be at work?” Zoe asks.

“Eight. You?”

“Same.” She takes a sip of her drink. “I’m at the hospital today.”

The mention of that place feels like a net thrown over us, a memory of her being whisked away by ambulance from her own party. I fiddle with the lid of my cup. Even though I counsel kids every day, I am uncomfortable here with her. I’m not sure why I asked her to grab a cup of coffee, in fact. It’s not like we know each other very well.

I had hired Zoe to work with an autistic boy several months ago. He had been in our school district for six years and had never, as far as I knew, said a word to a single teacher. It was his mother who’d heard about music therapy, and asked me to try to find someone local who could work with her son. I am the first to admit I wasn’t expecting much when I met Zoe. She looked a little misplaced, a seventies child who’d been dropped into the new millennium. But within a month, Zoe had the boy playing improvised symphonies with her. The parents thought Zoe was a genius, and my principal thought I was brilliant for finding her.

“Look,” I begin, after a long, weird silence, “I don’t really know what to say about the baby.”

Zoe looks up at me. “No one does.” She traces the edge of her fingertip around the plastic lid of the coffee cup. I think that is just going to be that, and I’m about to look at my wristwatch and exclaim over the time when she speaks again. “There was a death coordinator at the hospital,” she says. “She came into the room-afterward-and asked Max and me about where we wanted the body to go. If we wanted an autopsy. If we knew what kind of coffin we wanted. If we were going with cremation instead. She said we could take him home, too. Bury him, I don’t know, in the backyard.” Zoe looks up at me. “Sometimes I still have nightmares about that. About burying him, and then the snow melting in March, and I’d walk outside and find bones sitting there.” She blots her eyes with a napkin. “I’m sorry. I don’t talk about this. I’ve never talked about this.”

I know why she is opening up to me. It’s the same reason kids come into my office and confess that, after every meal, they make themselves throw up; or cut themselves in the privacy of the shower with a straight-edge razor blade. Sometimes it’s easier to speak to a stranger. The problem is that, once you turn your heart inside out