Aquanauts

By Leiani Brown

“Can I ask you a question?”
 Jared's fingers played tug-of-war beneath the ledge protruding from the pew in front of him. He stared down at his shoes, fidgeting uncomfortably. His soft, messy hair seemed to be the only part of him that survived this grownup version of dress-up: his legs were covered in slightly wrinkled slacks, his neck strangled by the discomfort of a paisley tie he'd bought only two days prior. 
 A total of sixteen people were there. He, his mom, the preacher whose name he never learned but would always remember for his lisp, the little girl who walked up and down the aisles with her rose-colored face and white-yellow curls, and his grandfather, whose limp body looked like the morticians had molded out of wax and stuffed in life-sized doll's clothes—these were the only people Jared would remember. 

"Can I ask you a question?"

His ears felt plugged and kept ringing at the same frequency as his persisting headache. The preacher's mouth was moving. Presumably he was saying something holy, consoling the congregation about Jared's grandfather and some bullshit ascent to a "happier" place. But Jared couldn't think of a time when he'd seen his grandfather happy.

He could remember the first time he met his grandfather, mostly because it was the day he moved in, but also because it was only a year and a half ago, three days after Jared's sixteenth birthday.
 “Your grandfather is coming to live with us. He'll be here in a couple of hours, so clean up,” his mother had said, abruptly turning off the TV show he and his sister had been watching—the word “grandfather” as foreign to her tongue as it was to her kids' ears.  
 “Well, where's he gonna sleep?”
 Ella, nineteen at the time, and sensible beyond her years, always asked the practical questions. Their mother could've said all the mannequins from town had suddenly come to life and were pillaging houses and eating babies, and Ella would've asked, without a moment's hesitation, which mall they had come from and whether or not the parents had baby monitors. 
 Turns out their grandfather didn't even need a bed. He rarely slept, and when he did it was seated in an old recliner in front of the TV, the light of muted infomercials lullabying his tired eyes shut. Jared had never talked to him much, mostly because he didn't know what to say. 
 “Jared,” his grandfather would sometimes say, quietly. 
 “Uh, yeah?”
 Then he'd move his arms or jerk his head, silently signaling Jared to either grab the remote or give him the newspaper.
 Now as he stared at his grandfather's makeup-smothered, waxen face and lifeless limbs, propped up by cream-colored cushions and surrounded by bouquets of flowers, Jared wondered why he had understood the man's wordless talking as though it was a language he'd learned long ago.
A nudge from his mother seated next to him pulled Jared from his thoughts. Pallbearers were shuffling toward the casket, and Jared quickly, clumsily stood up to join them. As they carried his grandfather out the side door, he stared down at his thumb, which stuck out awkwardly from its position on the handle.

Music played as the procession followed. But everything seemed muted, as if Jared was hearing it from far away, underwater. 
 “Can I ask you a question?”
 Jared played out the scenario in his head as they made the ten-minute walk to the cemetery, imagining his sister's look of innocent ignorance. He knew he should still be thinking of his grandfather, or his mom; it was a funeral, after all, and isn't that the decent thing to do? But he couldn't stop picturing his sister's face, wondering what she'd say. Wondering what he would do to keep the contempt from crawling up his throat when the time came. Wondering if she'd brush aside the seriousness of his tone, the heaviness of his looming inquiry, as she so often did. 
 It was only two months since he had last spoken with his sister. They'd been at the bus stop, the only one in town. He had sulked even then, quietly hoping the bus driver was feeling rebellious or had developed Alzheimer's and lost his keys. Quietly hoping he'd never see those big grey wheels stumble up the hill, pumping its black exhaust without remorse into the surrounding blue. 
 “Did I remember to grab my glasses?”
 “They're in there,” he had replied, irritated. 
 Ella had worn her blue sweater, the wool one with holes and fraying edges. Jared knew it was her favorite, but right then he wished she hadn't worn it. Mostly because it reminded him of the night a month before, when he had woken up screaming (again) and found her in his bed, arms wrapped around his bare chest—wearing the sweater, soaked in rainwater, and squeezing him as though she feared he might fade. 
 Normally on the bad nights she would shake him until he came to himself, then tell him everything was fine in her soft, knowing tone. But that night, Jared remembered, was the first time she'd had no words. She had situated herself behind him, folded her arms around his shoulders, crossed over his chest, and buried her face in his neck. She had rocked him slightly, tiny sobs escaping her muffled mouth, and hugged his rough, sweaty neck. And Jared had, once the lucidity of his night terror faded, heard the rain slamming against their bedroom window, and almost asked her why she'd been outside. But he couldn't bring himself to speak.    
 Later Jared would learn, through piecing bits of information together, that she had just come from her boyfriend Michael's house, where they'd argued about the future and plans and decided to end it because, in Ella's words, "long distance relationships are setups for breakups." But Jared knew his sister—always two steps ahead of her own feet—and, walking home in the rain, she must've already known she would leave. 

The graveside service ended (and with it Jared's nagging guilt for not paying attention), forcing him back into the role of mournful grandson and grateful neighbor as strangers blundered through their mandatory condolences. He shuffled home with his mother attached to his arm, her body weightless and empty. They stumbled inside the house. Jared stood, immobilized. He walked out of the kitchen and down the hallway to his room. He looked over to the side of the room where his sister’s mattress lay shoved into the corner—dusty and untouched—grabbed his dirty pillow, then threw himself onto her bed. But did not sleep. 

Hours went by and Jared didn't move. Just stayed in bed, staring at the wall. 
 “You know you can’t do this. You can’t just lie in bed waiting for everything to be okay.”
 He heard his thoughts in Ella’s sensible tone, and he knew she was right, but he couldn't bring himself to move.

“Hey.”

His mother was standing at the door. She turned on the lights, and Jared groaned, shielding his eyes in protest. He must have dozed off; he couldn’t see any other way it could’ve gotten so dark outside without him realizing it.

“We need milk.” 

“So why don’t you go get it yourself?” Jared mumbled inaudibly into his wrist. 

“What?”

“Nothing. I’ll leave in a minute.”

“Okay. I’ll leave the keys on the counter.”

“No… I’ll just ride my bike.”

“Are you sure? It’s dark out,” he imagined his mother saying. But she hadn’t expressed concern in his well-being since before he cared to remember. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about him, she just didn’t know how—at least that’s what Ella had always told him. 

Their mother had suffered from severe depression since before either of them was born. It worsened when Jared came along, and, out of necessity, Ella quickly learned the sporadic patterns and reasonless currents that colored their mother's moods. She was the expert of the depression that sometimes manifested itself as anxiety or sometimes a pile of pitiful tears or sometimes an immobilized empty bottle, or whatever shape was its present obsession. And she tried her best to shelter her younger brother, to give him as normal a childhood as she could, but some things she just couldn't prevent. 

Jared slammed the door, immediately hit with a wave of cool night air. He zipped up his thin grey jacket and pulled his rusty bike from its designated spot in front of the house. The metal was cold, the semi-ripped seat of his eleven year-old bike slightly itchy. He pedaled fast, wind whipping at his face, rousing his sleep-crusted features. The local grocery store was only a few blocks from their house. He took the long route, the one he and Ella had walked, rode, and drove down on countless occasions.
When he reached the store, he stopped in front of the sliding doors, the lights from inside illuminating the darkness of the night. A few people meandered to their cars in the small parking lot decorated by stray carts and displaced empty grocery bags. Jared stopped, halfway on his bike still, but standing on the asphalt just before the curb. He watched a little girl through the giant store windows, tugging at her mother's shirt, mouth moving in the shape of whining. 

“Can I ask you a question?”

The bus stop was a fifteen minute ride from here. Jared knew the way. He rubbed his fingers against the crisp five dollar bill in his jacket pocket.

He thought of his mother, who was currently lying in bed, waiting for a gallon of milk or maybe a reason to live. 

He thought of his grandfather, not as the silent, solemn stranger he had been, but more so as the big, goofy golden retriever six year-old Jared had found and named Chet. Their friendship had lasted a day and when the dog died, his sister had taken his arm and explained that things and places and dogs and even people get old sometimes and death is just what happens. 

He thought of his mother, how she had stayed locked in her room for days after Ella left. How he hadn’t seen her smile. How when he was younger he had wondered if some people just didn’t have the muscles to do so.
 He thought of his sister, and wondered why she hadn’t explained that things and places and dogs and even people sometimes are too weak to take life's incessant beatings and die inside before their bodies finally give up the fight. 

“Can I ask you a question?”

Jared crumpled the money in his pocket and hopped back onto his bike. He pedaled as fast and as hard as he could in the opposite direction. In just under ten minutes he could see the bus stop in view, and within twenty he had stacked his bike on the front of bus and climbed the stairs to a seat in the back corner. 

“It’s only three hours away, really,” he heard Ella’s words in his mind. “I’ll be able to visit a lot.” She had repeated the sentiment over and over in the weeks before she left, as if trying to convince herself she would. But they had both known she wouldn’t. She would find something to keep herself busy, she always had. And Jared knew that a three-hour trip to the disconnected, slightly less exciting version of hell that she had grown up in was not something even Ella would make the time to do just out of the blue. 

The ride was quicker than Jared had imagined. He drifted in and out of sleeplessness, his head against the window. He knew he had reached his destination when he could feel the lights of the restless city seeping through his lightly shut eyelids. He followed the directions on the GPS on his phone to the address Ella had texted him a week after she moved away. 

Their apartment was dumpy, like most things in that part of the city. Jared approached her door, the painted 6061 positioned slightly off-center and peeling. 

“Can I ask you a question?” He closed the map on his phone and shoved it into his jean pocket. Quickly, quietly he rapped his knuckles on the door.

Minutes passed, and he wondered whether he’d gotten the right address. At last the sound of shuffling and unlocking spiked his heart rate, and he shifted in anticipation.

The door opened, revealing a groggy-eyed Ella, and Jared cursed silently for not thinking of the time; it was almost one in the morning. 

“I’m sorry,” he began to mumble. 

“Jared, oh my god, what are you doing here?”

His body went numb. His chest felt heavy, the way it did when he awoke some mornings, as though someone was weighing it down, daring him to breathe. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking, I just wanted to… I’m sorry I’ll just go—”

“No, don’t be ridiculous. Come inside! I just wasn’t expecting you, did you call?”

He followed her, mumbling answers to her confusion barely loud enough to hear. She led him to a spot on the couch, and he sank into its folds gratefully. 

“Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. Everything’s fine.”

She sat in a chair opposite him, looking concerned, but not as confused as Jared imagined most people would be had he shown up on their doorstep at one in the morning. His sister had always been the sensible one, even when nothing made sense.

“How’s mom?”

“Fine.”

“Were you guys able to figure everything out with grandpa and the funeral okay?”

“Yeah,” Jared's mind was buzzing. He could’ve sworn his mother had told her when it was. It wasn’t like Ella to be forgetful. His thoughts kept spinning, but it was like someone shut off the power in his tongue. Like someone had sped up time to fast forward, leaving his vocal cords with no power to make any of the sounds his mind had wrestled with  for the past 48 hours.
 “That's good…”

Whatever words came next came out muddled and fuzzy; Jared could hear nothing but the sound of his own heavy breathing.

Her phone went off, and she excused herself from the room. When she returned it was to say that Michael was working the night shift at the hospital and forgotten his badge at home.

“I’ll just go drop it off, it’s like a five minute drive. You wait here. You look exhausted, you should get some rest,” she said as she hurriedly grabbed a sweater and car keys.

The door shut behind her with a gentle thud, and Jared stared at the space where his sister had been just moments before.

“Why didn’t you come?” he whispered to himself.