Jack is curled up beside me on the sofa, his head in my lap, reading something on his phone. From this angle, he looks like a sweet little boy, and my heart breaks. I lean down to kiss him, but he swats me away with the back of his hand.
“I’m still mad at you,” he says.
“Rude of them to make us wait. Make some room.” Peter squeezes in next to us on the sofa, trying not to spill his drink. “Sip?”
“After my swim.”
“I’ll have one,” Jack says.
Peter starts to hand Jack his glass.
“Don’t even think about it.” I stand up, shaking them both off me. “I’m going for my swim. Tell Jonas and Gina I’ll see them another day.”
“Should you be worried?” my mother asks from the kitchen.
“Thanks, Mum. Yes, they’ve probably all drowned. Or died in a fiery car crash.” I slam the screen door behind me.
“Your wife has been a complete nightmare since she woke up this morning,” Mum says to Peter. “Is she having the curse?”
“I heard you,” I shout, and storm down to the water’s edge.
Twelve swift strokes bring me out to the deep. I turn onto my back, arms akimbo, using only my frog legs to push me out deeper. Listen to the muffled sound of water bubbling past me.
In the middle of the pond, I turn over and do a dead man’s float, facedown, open my eyes and try to see. But my eyes can’t adjust to the pond-green gloam. My senses fail me here, in over my head. I imagine what it would be like to drown—to sink down into the underneath, trying to fight back to the surface, drink in water as if it were air.
1979. October, New Hampshire.
Outside the car window, New England autumn rushes past in a blur of yellow and red, the occasional dark punctuation of pine. It is Parents’ Weekend at Anna’s boarding school. Dixon, Mum, Becky, and I are driving up for the night to see her. I’ve never been to New Hampshire. “Neither have I,” Anna tells me when I call to say we’re coming. “We never leave campus. I’m stuck in a redbrick time warp with girls who play field hockey and live on Ex-Lax.” But the truth is, Anna is much happier now. She almost never comes home to visit. On long weekends, she stays with a roommate who lives closer to school.
Going up for Parents’ Weekend was Dixon’s idea. Mum wasn’t planning to go, but Dixon insisted. Anna is his goddaughter. He likes Leo a lot, he tells Mum, but marriages end, children don’t.
“Well, that’s not technically true,” Mum says.
“Don’t be grim. You’re starting to sound like your mother,” Dixon says, poking her in the ribs.
Frizzy Andrea and Dixon have split up. When their baby was born （at home in the bathtub）， it was immediately clear it wasn’t Dixon’s. “I am many things,” Dixon tells us. “Brilliant, a sex god, an expert on Walt Whitman. But Asian is not one of them.”
“You’ll find someone,” Mum says. “You always do. In about two seconds.”
“True,” Dixon says. “But nothing that sticks.”
“That’s because you have terrible instincts and only date morons,” Mum says.
“It’s my Achilles’ heel,” Dixon says. “If I’d had any sense, I would have married you.”
“Obviously.”
“To be fair to Andrea, she was just following her own truth.”
“I rest my case.”
Dixon laughs. “Whatever. It was a cute baby, right, Becks?”
“Kind of,” Becky says. “His head was a weird shape.”
“That was temporary. Andrea’s birth canal was very narrow.”
Becky makes a gagging noise. “Can we please not talk about Andrea’s vagina, Dad?”
Becky and I are squeezed into the back seat between Dixon’s waxed-canvas duffel and a big Mexican straw bag of Mum’s that she’s filled with last-minute things Anna forgot to pack when she left in September.
“Why can’t it go in the trunk?” I ask.
“The trunk is full of crates. We’re going apple picking on the way home,” Mum says. “We’ll make apple butter,” she says when I groan. “Don’t let me forget to pick up some pectin, Dix.”
“Cool,” Dixon says. “Apple butter.” He turns on the radio, spins the knob past several staticky stations.
“Please keep your eyes on the road,” Mum says to him.
“No backseat driving.”
The only local station he can get to come in clearly is playing “Time in a Bottle.”