Night Swimming
“A Void Between” by Cal LaFountain
The dopesickness lasted almost a week. I was puking and crying and seeing things. I saw my mother tying off as she says to me, Erin, never do it like this. I held on to this image of her and bent over it like a shrine, spoke to her like it might keep a part of her alive and soon enough she began speaking back. This was how Jack found me. He said, Let’s get out of here, and he took me from the city to the mountains where our mother grew up.
I smoked the whole way, made Jack stop for cigarettes twice. He took one when I offered, and we smoked together in his Volvo surrounded by a rush of green. He pulled over so I could puke in the woods and I saw a doe and her fawn deep in the thicket. Jack saw them too and he said, Come on, Erin, and we drove the rest of the way in silence.
In the house in the mountains the walls were covered in photos of our mother and a family we never knew. My grandfather resting his hands on her shoulders. She never spoke of him, so I always pictured her fatherless like me. The images amplified the visions, and I saw her everywhere and I heard her voice echo through the halls. I saw her as a young girl running into the woods outside. A barefoot, wild mountain girl. And I chased her, sick, the taste of bile on my tongue. I chased my girl mother into the woods.
I tripped over a branch and fell and scraped my arm and my mother disappeared and her voice went from me and I laid there on the forest floor in the leaves and detritus. I saw a fallen tree, half-sunken into the ground, covered in moss and mushrooms and I wanted to become like it. I wanted to become part of the ecosystem.
It was almost dark when Jack found me, curled up and shivering on the ground. Goddamn it, he said. He picked me up and carried me back to the house. The next morning, he made coffee and we sat at the table and he said, I don’t know what I’m doing.
I said, No shit.
He drank his coffee. He went on about how he knew things were bad but he had no idea they were this bad. He wished I had called him.
I’m sorry I wasn’t there, he said.
I lit a cigarette and blew smoke across the table.
That night Jack brought his telescope out into the backyard and he fiddled around with it and I built a fire in an old overgrown firepit we found while exploring the property. I tore pages out of a phone book from 2006 and lit the bundle under a pile of sticks I had gathered from the ground around a big walnut tree. As the fire consumed the sticks I fed it more. The flames started to leap out of the pit as if trying to escape. Then Jack called me over and he showed me the rings of Saturn and Jupiter’s moons.
When I was younger, I thought he was my uncle. Our mother had him when she was so young. He was raised by his dad’s family in the mountains, but when he would visit us, he’d always bring something to show me. His arrowhead collection, his baseball cards, his space atlas. And I would show him my dolls and stuffed animals and he’d learn their names.
I peered through the telescope’s eyepiece at Jupiter’s stormy surface. Like a perfect round marble. Jack talked about stars so far away they could have already collapsed into black holes or bloomed supernovae and we would have no idea for thousands of years. We ate dinner outside around the fire. We watched the stars and I saw fireflies for the first time. Jack cracked jokes and made me laugh. I almost forgot I was sick.
The next day, Jack rented a pontoon, and we spent the afternoon on the lake, swimming and napping in the sun. A boat with a group of high schoolers my age pulled up beside our boat and they swam with us for a while and they invited me to a party that night at a house on the lake.
Jack didn’t want to let me go, but I told him that making friends would be good for me. I wore him down. At the party, I found some of the girls from the boat and one of them hugged me as if we had been friends for years and said she was so happy I had made it. I smiled like her and let her make me a drink. I downed the whole thing as soon as she handed it to me.
Her eyes widened and she laughed and said, Come on!
She took me outside where her friends were swimming in the dark lake. They had floating lights and loud music.
Have you gone night swimming before? the girl asked.
I shook my head.
Oh my god, it’s so fun!
We stripped down to our swimsuits and some boys took beers out of a cooler and handed them to us. We sat on the dock for a while and drank and listened to one of the boys tell us about his vacation in Japan. The shinto believe everything has a spirit, he said. The trees, the lakes, the mountains.
We finished our beers and a girl already in the lake started to splash water at us and told us to get in. So we jumped off the dock and we swam and laughed and when my head started spinning from the drinks, I floated on my back and looked at the stars. Jack had taught me some of their names. There was Sirius, there was Orion's belt. The Pleiades. I tried to find my mother's shape in them. A constellation no one had discovered before. But she wasn't in the sky. I began to drift away from the other swimmers and the floating lights into the darkness. There the water was ink black and the noise of the woods that surrounded the lake drowned out the noise of the party. I lifted my head and shook the water from my ears and listened for her voice in the hum of cicadas and crickets. But she wasn't in the woods either. I leaned back again and looked up. A fish nibbled at my toes. I could see the light from stars long dead.
About the author
Jacob Dimpsey is a writer living in Central Pennsylvania with his wife and his dog. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Cotton Xenomorph, Necessary Fiction, and Wigleaf, among others.
about the artist
Cal LaFountain works with technology and cultural memory. He cut the cloud at callafountain.com.