Dive Read online

  Dive

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Lucky

  Unlucky

  Let the Wind In

  Are You Talking to Me?

  I’ll Tell the Truth

  Vertigo

  If We Were Buffalo and We Ate Grass

  Ha Ha

  Swallow Before You Speak

  Who Can’t Fly Yet

  So Pale

  Where Are the Windows?

  What Is and Is Not

  Not the Piano-Strings Again

  Hush-Hush

  At Least I Can Hold On

  Can’t Stop Looking

  And Think It Were Not Night

  Maybe I’m Not Ready

  Bigger Than Both My Hands

  When the World Comes Back

  At the Path

  Landing

  Welcome Hurry

  Just by Being There

  When the Wave Comes

  Roaring

  Rush

  Danger

  Deep

  Dust

  Dive

  D i v e

  Stacey Donovan

  Dive

  All Rights Reserved © 1994, 2013 by Stacey Donovan

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the author.

  First Edition published 1994 by Dutton Children’s Books. This digital edition published by Smudge Publishing c/o Authors Guild Digital Services.

  For more information, address:

  Authors Guild Digital Services

  31 East 32nd Street

  7th Floor

  New York, NY 10016

  ISBN: 9781625360304

  Untalked of and unseen,

  in constant memory,

  to John

  Come hither, man.

  SHAKESPEARE

  These questions are the simplest in the world.

  From the stupid child to the wisest old man,

  they are in the soul of every human being.

  Without an answer to them, it is impossible,

  as I experienced, for life to go on.

  TOLSTOY

  Dive

  Prologue

  Lucky

  My dog was almost dead. Some goon in a green VW Beetle went careening along the road and slammed poor Lucky. Ripped open the dog’s leg and drove away. I was chewing a slice of toast in the kitchen when some kids from the bus stop leaned against the doorbell. As I opened the door, I thought Lucky could fly. He leapt from somebody’s arms to the step, his whole body in a tremble like it was sixty below zero. Blood spattered everywhere.

  As soon as the kids saw me, the one who had carried Lucky, obvious from his ruined shirt, yelled, “The car was green! It was going a hundred miles an hour at least!” Then they all ran away. I couldn’t swallow the last bite of toast. It slid across my tongue as my throat closed and I reached for Lucky. It was not even eight o’clock in the morning.

  I was barefoot, standing on the cold slate step, my hands deep in Lucky’s sleek fur. I lifted him and he groaned wearily, the sound creaking from his small black body. My throat knotted at the sight of the bloody lump. So close to my hand. Don’t hurt him. Bits of skin swung in clumps and pieces from his leg. The air somersaulted in a frantic rush. Oh—my breath. I wondered what to do.

  Up the driveway rolled a big gold Cadillac. A gray-haired man pushed the door open. “How’s the dog?” he called.

  I couldn’t say, not even if I’d wanted to.

  “I saw what happened,” he said. His eyes were as bright as flashlights.

  I still couldn’t swallow.

  “Is anybody home?”

  For an instant it felt like he had come to the house to sell something—flashlights? In another instant I realized everybody in my family was on their way somewhere else, nowhere I could reach them. The man took a few quiet steps toward me. When I looked down, I saw loafers on his feet.

  “They’re gone,” I said, my chin lightly brushing the moaning Lucky’s head. My arms held him so that he rested, in a cradled way, against the soft flesh of my inner elbows.

  “I can take you to the vet. What vet do you go to?” “The closest one,” I said. Lucky’s regular vet was miles away, but there was a new one in town.

  I was afraid to move. My poor groaning dog. His endless, seeping blood. I stepped to the driveway. Lucky writhed in my arms.

  “But you . . . you’re not wearing any shoes,” the man said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  And for a moment I wondered if this was who had hit Lucky. A gold Cadillac? Figures, the one moment in my life it would be useful to have a family, I don’t.

  The car owner gunned the engine, the fingers of one hand tapping his stomach as if something alive was there. “Now which way do we go?”

  “Just before the train station, on the right. You can take the back way.” I wished he would steer with both hands.

  “The back way? I don’t live around here.”

  “Can you get to town?” I asked. “Make a left here, and another at the stop sign down the road.” Lucky panted.

  He nodded, then shook his head. “I was a few hundred yards behind. The absolute gall of people is hard to believe; it’s simply beyond me.”

  “You couldn’t see the driver?”

  “Only the car, one of those old Bugs, you know which one I mean? A real jalopy. I didn’t even see any brake lights.”

  “Thank you” was the last thing I said, other than giving him simple directions to the new office complex I’d passed on my way to school. Be polite, my mind said. Don’t talk to strangers.

  A black CLOSED sign hung below Dr. Wheatie’s name in an otherwise empty window. The place was so new there wasn’t even a curtain. Dr. Wheatie? I kicked the door anyway, since my hands held Lucky, until the vet himself appeared, shrugging into a white lab coat. The stranger was still behind me, wiping at the red mess on his beige deep-dish car seat. My jeans were soaked, and brown foam oozed from Lucky’s jaws. The vet’s sleepy eyelids lifted with surprise. I opened my mouth, but my voice didn’t follow.

  “This way—let’s hurry now.” We followed Dr. Wheatie through the office into the examination room, the stiff bottom of his coat flapping. The new stainless steel of the heavy table was like a spotlight. Its brightness hurt my eyes as I bent over with Lucky, as I said unending stupid stuff, like “Hey boy. My boy boy baby.” Just to say something. For my dog’s sake.

  The vet leaned over too. Lucky was panting like he’d run a big race. Dr. Wheatie tried not to tug at the pieces that were once his leg, and I tried not to let Lucky bite the vet, though his attempts lacked steam, and eventually his most menacing growl became a whimper. I felt my face drain each time Lucky yelped. What happens to the heart when it forgets to beat? Can it catch up later or is the moment lost forever?

  The car owner appeared, wincing in the background, his eyes dim. The vet finally said Lucky needed an operation and turned to the stranger. The air, so still with tension, stank.

  “No, no, not me. Not related. I just drove her here,” the Cadillac owner said, both hands up like he surrendered. Dr. Wheatie nodded and looked at me. His eyes were blue. “You’re underage. I’ll need your parents’ permission—and soon.” He started to scratch behind the dog’s ears. Lucky let him.

  I grabbed the phone behind the table. I remembered my mother’s unfamiliar work number without a thought, which to me was a feat as good as lifting a car with one superhuman hand. I was yelling “Hello” into the phone when she answered, but then my voice became strangled. All I could get out was a meager “Lucky . . .” My throat tumbled into a
sob. I couldn’t help it.

  The vet’s hand left mine, the one that still held my dog’s trembling collarbone. I hadn’t been aware of his hand until he removed it. If I had been, I would’ve moved my own hand sooner. Don’t touch me. What was no longer there had more impact once it was gone. That was something. Like memory was sturdier than reality. I closed my eyes to stop the tears in front of everybody.

  He reached for the phone. I must’ve missed a few words.

  “…Vital signs good. The hind leg is badly torn, probably fractured….It could be some time . . . hard to say . . . maybe five hundred dollars. Yes … that would be the end of it.” Dr. Wheatie hung up. What happened to ‘Good-bye’?

  The vet’s shoulders stiffened as he walked, no, shuffled, across the room. A drawer opened and Dr. Wheatie removed a syringe, which proceeded to roll on the desk top until he grabbed it. He shut the drawer and took a small bottle of some clear stuff from the back of a shelf overhead. The vet’s shoulders were like rocks. He didn’t look at me. Is it possible to climb out of one moment into the next? I wanted to. Being in that room was like being inside a cannon.

  I held Lucky tighter. He growled as Dr. Wheatie looked at him, as he came toward us with a frown on his face. “What’s his name?” said the vet. Why did he sound that way, like something stood on top of his voice, weighing it down?

  “Lucky.”

  “So it’s Lucky.” Dr. Wheatie looked at the Cadillac owner. There was something crushing the air. They stared at each other. Like I wasn’t really there. Like it wasn’t my dog and I wasn’t covered with blood, standing between them in this room. No, no, not my cold feet on that cement floor sensing the stupid this-is-not-as-serious-as-it-looks moment adults like to pull. Sure, life’s a dream. Anybody home?

  “Hey,” I said, “what’s going on?” Was that my voice? Dr. Wheatie coughed, which allowed his shoulders to return to the position they normally occupy on a body, rather than crowding his ears. “You’ve got to hold Lucky,” he said, “and I…pretty soon…he won’t feel anything.”

  The stuff in his hand clattered onto the shining table. I saw his narrow, tentative fingers. His smooth hands. Dr. Wheatie was new at this.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. Lucky flinched.

  “The dog’s going to sleep.” The vet tried to smile. Instead, his mouth looked like a cracked rock. “I mean … I’m sorry.”

  “Then what?” Sorry to interrupt. Lucky began groaning again.

  “Then … your mother . . . I have no choice. We’ll let him go.”

  “Let him go? Like what, off to heaven?” I think I was loud. Nobody spoke. Lucky didn’t move. I gathered him more snugly in my arms.

  “Now, now. Can’t there be another way out of this?” said the Cadillac owner, his absurd hands waving through the air. Where was he from, anyway?

  The vet just looked at the stranger’s hands.

  “She won’t pay? Fine. I can pay,” I said. I noticed my feet were cold. How dumb. “If you, if you would let me work for you—animals love me.” I stopped. “Please.”

  The vet’s hand rubbed his chin. “Well, there’s a thought.” And then he really smiled. His teeth were white as snow. “I need help. Now let’s see if we can get this poor guy out of pain. We’ll need X rays first thing. Good!”

  My feet froze. “Let’s see,” I said. Had I truly spoken? A part of me felt like I wasn’t really alive. But I could taste it, the question was so bitter.

  Who hit my dog?

  Unlucky

  I am alive. At fifteen, I find myself staring at the shelves of food in the refrigerator. What, I’d like to know, are celery hearts?

  There are simple questions. Like, why did the chicken cross the road? Knock, knock. Who’s there? Then there are the ones that make no sense. Who ran my dog over yesterday? What kind of person wouldn’t even hit the brakes?

  Some poet said April is the cruelest month. Now that’s something. That stuff can be true without even making sense. And oh, my poor vexed mind. It’s everywhere at once. In the fridge stinking with vegetables, under the tires of that awful green car that slammed my Lucky. My mind is like a bad neighborhood: I should not go into it alone.

  No, life doesn’t make sense.

  But I am alive anyway. I live in the suburbs, land of car rides to the Dairy Barn. Around here, nobody ever walks. Everybody does walk to the end of the driveway to get the mail, and now that it’s the end of April, everyone mows the lawn so early in the morning it’s like a contest to see who can start first. Everyone does the same thing, yet everybody looks at everyone else in a suspicious way. A northeastern suburban existence. Sub means “under.” Under life. So where are we?

  I live in a big gray house. No matter how big, the sorry truth is that the house is inescapably small. There’s always somebody around to bother me, or somebody’s forgotten socks to remind me that they were around. There’s not a house big enough in the world to hold us, I’d say, if anyone asked. People call the place lovely. But what is lovely? We have a lawn that looks like it just rolled out of a truck.

  In my youth I wondered how the JOHNNY’S PERFECT LAWN trucks that roamed the neighborhood could roll great, sprawling lawns out of them. I decided the bigger trucks must arrive in the middle of the night, so we are dizzedly surprised when we wake up and look through our windows at our new, perfect lawn. Dizzedly. Our lives are complete. That’s a good one.

  When I mentioned this to Edward, my brother, he said I was an idiot. As if he’s in any way smart. I admit it was dumb of me to let down my guard like that. When people are a few years older, they sometimes think they know everything. He’s seventeen.

  Look who’s talking, I say. Edward, aka the Wad, received his eloquent moniker in recognition of his ability to jam entire hamburgers into his barbaric mouth. Now that’s lovely. My dad started calling him Wad, and it stuck because it fits. I’m V. Victory comes to mind, since I have actually survived life with my brother. I like to remember that I was much younger when I had the lawn thoughts.

  Certainly younger than my sister, Baby Teeth, who is eight. Hers is not a nickname, but a fact. Not one loose tooth in all these years. Not even a single Tooth Fairy sighting. Though her dental development may be lax, Baby Teeth is an otherwise progressive kid. Her favorite activity this year is to drop by other people’s houses. People she doesn’t know. Generally she will call home before dinner to say where she is, not that she’s ever actually been invited anywhere. Then somebody has to collect her. Usually it’s me.

  I’ve met many people because of Baby Teeth. Though she has a lot to say after her visits, like whether or not there is any baloney in someone’s fridge or if a certain stranger wears slippers, she will not disclose why she does it. My mother grinds her teeth when the phone rings. Otherwise, we’ve accepted it. Perhaps our house is too small for Baby Teeth as well.

  At least the lawn is big enough. Old apple trees surround one side of the house. Trees that were here, no doubt, long before the house was built. Before any happy family moved in.

  Now that it’s spring, baby rabbits wobble beneath the trees every time I look outside. They somersault in midair and end up facing the direction they were hopping from, all shocked, like they don’t know how they landed there. I guess they don’t. How much can any living thing know that’s been around only for a few short weeks? It makes me wonder how much I knew when I was a tiny, wobbling baby. I admit I feel pretty confused now. I have hazel eyes. They go green when I cry.

  They’re still green today. Can my eyes have their own memories? It was yesterday I wept, the reverberations of a car crashing a hundred miles an hour, crashing into my bones. Vast amounts of blood dry incredibly fast, I discovered. Then it’s sticky, like glue. The discovery twisted like glue in my stomach as I peeled off my jeans, after the extremely kind stranger from Wyoming, Bertrand Utley, dropped Lucky and me back home.

  Maybe my eyes know more than I do today. Maybe they’re preparing for what’s next. It seems yesterday
was just a tipoff to the fact that life has some unspoken and probably incomprehensible plans of its own. Because today, after I arrived home from school, my parents drove off in our car with my dad’s brown leather suitcase tossed in the backseat. But it’s not a vacation. My dad’s on the way to the hospital. And what’s wrong with him? Nobody knows.

  I wish I could just shut my eyes. But even when they’re closed, I can still see it. Now there’s something else that doesn’t make sense but is true. In my guts I can see it: the beginning of the Dunn downhill slide.

  | | |

  So my eyes are open, and I stare into the yellow fridge, which always smells like egg salad though there’s never any of that, looking for something delectable that will entice Lucky to eat. In the den, Baby Teeth is keeping him company as I search. Lucky hasn’t eaten since yesterday’s breakfast, not even a spoonful of vanilla ice cream or a busted-up potato chip, his favorites. Mine too.

  Dr. Wheatie said a lack of appetite wouldn’t be unusual. It takes time to recover from shock. Not to mention Lucky’s inability to walk. The cast on his left leg starts above the ankle and ends at the hip. When we try to walk again tomorrow, we’ll just pretend it’s natural to hobble like we’ve only got three legs. His paw was miraculously unharmed, or else we wouldn’t be pretending. Maybe there is something in a name.

  But celery hearts? Really.