Under, Still Breathing

The pool was empty at 11 PM, just how I liked it. When I saw him in the locker room—Charlie, my college roommate, the one person I'd spent three years avoiding—I almost turned around. But I'd driven twenty minutes out of my way for this night swim, and I needed the water like I needed oxygen.

He didn't see me at first. Standing there in swim trunks, older now, chest sagging, hair thinning. The Charlie I remembered was twenty-two, throwing strikes, shouting himself hoarse at our intramural games, convinced he'd go pro if only the scouts would look. We'd played baseball every Sunday that last semester, drunk on cheap beer and the certainty that we'd be friends forever.

Then the shoulder injury happened. Then I got the job offer in Seattle. Then he stopped answering my calls.

"Tommy?"

I'd just stripped down to my suit. He looked at my tattoos—at the dates inked on my forearm, dates he wouldn't recognize—and I saw him do the math.

"Charlie," I said.

He nodded toward the pool. "You still swim?"

"Keeps me sane."

We didn't say what we were both thinking: that the last time we spoke, he'd called me a coward for leaving, and I'd called him a child for refusing to grow up.

"Remember that weekend in Corpus?" he asked suddenly. "When we rented the boat and you fell overboard trying to catch that foul ball?"

I remembered. I remembered his hands pulling me up, how we laughed until we cried, how sure I was that friendship was the one thing that couldn't break.

"I'm getting divorced," he said.

The pool lights flickered. Somewhere, water dripped.

"He has the house. He has the dog." Charlie laughed, short and hollow. "Turns out hitting a baseball and being a functional adult are two different skill sets."

I thought about telling him about the panic attacks. About how I'd moved back home after losing everything in the crash. About how I'd spent two years feeling like I was drowning every time I left the house, until I forced myself back into the water, learned that if you stop fighting, you float.

Instead I said, "Want to race?"

He looked at me, really looked at me, and something in his face cracked open. "Laps?"

"Laps."

We entered the water together. By the third lap, he was keeping pace. By the tenth, we were breathing in sync, two men who'd once been boys, swimming through everything we couldn't say, staying above surface however we could.