Swim

neighboring tables.“WhenI was three my parents were driving on the Mass Pike to Boston for Thanksgiving. They were both teachers, they’d gone to school in Boston, and they were going to have Thanksgiving with some friends. Their car hit a patch of ice and rolled over into a ditch. They died, and I went through the windshield, in my car seat. That’s what happened to my face.”
    Charlie twisted his head toward his sister, his mouth working. “Do you remember it?” Caitlyn translated.
    I shook my head. “I really don’t remember it much.”
    Caitlyn wiped Charlie’s face with a napkin. “So who took care of you?”
    “My grandmother. She was living down in Coral Gables, but she didn’t think that was a good place to raise a little girl, so she moved up to my parents’ house in Framingham, and we lived there.”
    They seemed to think this over while Charlie chewed another french fry. He had the same brown eyes and rounded chin as his sister. There was a smear of pink glitter on his cheek, where, I thought, she’d kissed him.
    I got up.
    “Well, Caitlyn, I’ll see you on Saturday. Nice to meet you, Charlie. Have a good day.” It sounded so stupid, so trite. I wondered what Charlie’s life was like, trapped in a body he couldn’t control, able to understand what he was seeing and hearing, unable to communicate. I was halfway out of the food court when I turned around and went back to their table and tapped Caitlyn on the shoulder. “You should write about this,” I blurted. She looked up at me with her shiny brown eyes. Her tiny pink purse was hooked over one of the arms of Charlie’s wheelchair, which had NASCAR stickers on the sides. “I was wrong about you,” I said.
    She nodded, unsurprised. “That’s okay,” she said.
    I skipped my swim that night.After it got dark, I pulled on a sweater that had been my mother’s. It was frayed at the elbows and unraveling at the hem. In a few of the pictures I had, she was wearing this sweater, and I imagined that even after all this time it still held some trace of her—a strand of her walnut-colored hair, the lavender smell of her skin, invisible handprints where my father had touched her, pulling her close. I curled up in a corner of the couch and told my grandmother about Caitlyn and Charlie. Halfway through the story I started to cry. Grandma pulled a wad of tissue paper from her sleeve and handed it to me.
    “What’s wrong, honey?” She was dressed in a white nightgown with mounds of lace at the neck and the wrists, and she looked like a baby bird peeking out of its nest.
    “I don’t know.” I wiped my eyes. “People surprise me sometimes.”
    She considered this. “Well, that’s good,” she said. “As long as people can still surprise you, it means you’re not dead.”
    At midnight I was still awake, nerves jangling, muscles twitching, missing the water. I flipped open my laptop, clicked on “Documents,” double-clicked on the file called “The Little Family.” It was a screenplay I’d started years ago. I read through the first ten pages slowly. It wasn’t as good as I’d hoped, but it wasn’t as bad as I feared, either. It had potential. I hit “save” and then scrolled through my in-box, opening a missive from Lonelyguy that had arrived the day before. “Maybe we should have dinner.”
    I hit “reply,” then scrolled up to find an e-mail from Caitlyn that had come that afternoon. “New Essay,” the subject line read.
    “My eleven-year-old brother Charlie will never visit Paris,” she’d written. “He won’t play Little League baseball or run on the beach. He was diagnosed with cerebral palsy when he was three months old. Cerebral: of or pertaining to the brain. Palsy: a disorder of movement or posture. My brother sees the world from his wheelchair. When I grow up, I will see things for him. I will go to all the places he can’t go, places where they don’t have curb cuts or wheelchair ramps, to flea markets and mountaintops, all the places in the world.”
    I buried my face in my hands. How did Caitlyn get so brave? Why was I so afraid? I opened my eyes and closed the window containing Caitlyn’s essay, leaving up my unwritten reply to Lonelyguy’s letter and remembering what I’d told her the first time we’d met. We’re still early in the process. It’s not too late to change your mind.

Chapter One
    The telephone rang.
    If it’s good news, there’s going to be a lot of people on the call, Dave had