Leftover Sun
PROLOGUE
My
father knew I was drowning. He was three houses away,
twisting a plump pepper off a vine, and the way Mama tells
it, he froze and wrenched his gaze in the direction of the
Frost house, then took off running. Mama yelled to him and
hurried to follow. He barreled through our rickety wooden
gate and across the neighbors’ yards, flattening thick
blades of St. Augustine grass, then darted past a pickup
blocking the sidewalk and disappeared around the corner in
a flash of light. I used to think that flash of light was a
product of Mama’s overactive imagination, an embellishment
that gave the story a kind of mystical aura. Or maybe it
was a play of the sun, which at three o’clock in the
afternoon would have been bold and brazen and capable of
tricking the eyes. Whatever the reason, the light is always
a part of Mama’s story. That, and how my father didn’t even
break stride as he dove into the water to discover me face
down in the deep end of the Frost’s pool.
I
awoke splayed out on the Chattahoochee rocks with my father
hunched over me, his breath spurting and stammering, his
expression bound by shock and grief and exhaustion.
Rivulets of water spun off the ends of his wiry, black
hair. He squinted in the bright sun. Craggy trails of worry
had formed around eyes as dark as storm clouds. The image
of him was like a mirage, wavy lines and soft focus, and I
blinked and blinked to clear my sight, which had as its
prior image the dappled blue pool water and the hasty
shadow of my own mortality stealing in at the edges.
When
I coughed violently, a gush of chlorinated water spewed
from my lungs into my father’s face. I almost panicked,
until I saw the smile stitched between his cheeks, a smile
carved around lips that trembled and fought to form words.
He jolted me upright and into his arms, wailing,
“Anastasia. Oh, my Anastasia.” I thought he would never let
go.
When
he did, the smile was gone, his features suddenly hardened.
“What are you thinking, Anastasia? Huh? Two lessons and
you’re a fish?” He cast a deadly scowl at little Michael
Frost, a knock-kneed toothpick of a kid who stood bundling
his arms at the diving board. “And you, where are your
parents? What kind of people leave a boy alone with a
pool?” A yellow stream trickled down Michael’s leg.
I
gathered my father’s sleeves in my fists, and as he rose, I
held on and was hoisted to my feet. A breath shuddered
through him. He pulled me roughly into his belly. Beneath
his layered paunch of flab—an effect of age and too many
good meals—a rigid mass of muscles tensed. The wet dirt on
his clothes smelled like copper. “Goddamnit, Anastasia.”
Squeezing me tighter now. “Goddamnit.”
My
father stroked my matted hair, combing through the ends
with his fingers, gently one moment and tearing at a knot
the next, then yanking me toward him again. His belly
billowed and his breaths were short and when a fit of
coughing caught me, he swung me into the cradle of his arms
and carried me out of the yard. Beyond his shoulder, I
caught sight of a ripe green pepper with a stout stem
bobbing in the fading waves of the pool.
Later
that night, I lay in bed feeling the bob and weave of waves
that were no longer under me, around me, drawing me down. I
saw myself on the diving board, palms pressed together,
fingers stretching toward the shallow end, toes curled over
the rough edge, the chant of Michael Frost and his
friends—“Scaredy Cat, Scaredy Cat, Ana Banana!”—and the
bare sun dappling diamonds of light across the pearly
bottom of the pool.
“It’s
like a big bathtub,” my father had said on my first day of
swim lessons. I repeated those words as I closed my eyes
and dipped my head toward my knees and then the board fell
away behind me and the water stung my face and shot up my
nose and suddenly down was up and up was down and a
six-year-old girl who was supposed to be riding her bike
straight home from Jenny’s house was panicking in a big
bathtub and sucking in water while the slick membrane of
death closed around her.
Mama’s
soft touch brushed my cheek. “Fish have gills,” she said.
“Because they don’t have fathers to rescue them.” She
smiled then, but her eyes were wet. And in them, I saw a
longing to hold onto this moment, as though if she looked
away I might vanish. It was the quiver in her lips, the way
she tried to smile her fear away. Mama stroked the length
of her braid, a loosely wound rope of hair that ended in a
frayed point just past her breasts. “Get some sleep.” Her
palm against my cheek, held there. In the six short steps
to my bedroom door, she paused twice to glance back at me.
“You’re safe now,” she repeated, so softly that I realized
the words were as much for her benefit as for mine.
Before
she switched off the light, I asked, “Is Baba still mad at
me?”
She
blotted her lips and shook her head slowly. “You scared him
today. You scared us both. Baba...he just, he’ll be okay in
the morning.” With a nod, she flipped the switch.
“How
did he know?” I asked to the darkness.
Mama
didn’t answer, and I tried to make out her filmy
silhouette, wondering if she had already slipped down the
hallway. Several seconds passed before she answered. “You
and your Baba, you have a connection that this world
doesn’t understand. No matter what, you don’t forget that.
You never forget that.”
I
fell asleep that night to the sight of my father hovering
above me as I sputtered back to life. My mother’s words
rang true. Even as my body, resigned to its fate, had
drifted slowly toward the bottom of the pool and the last
vestiges of consciousness escaped my mind, I knew that my
father would save me.
