Deep End

THE FOLLOWING WEDNESDAY SAM IS OUT SICK—HEART-swooping relief and unspeakable tragedy.

Inevitably, no Sam equals no progress. Then again, the discipline of psychology may have done all it could for me, and it’s hard not to see therapy as the squillionth thing I’m failing, especially after the mutterings I overhear through Coach Sima’s ajar door.

I’m stopping by his office to let him know that I’ll be late for afternoon practice, when something in his tone halts my knuckles just inches from knocking.

“. . . a waste,” he’s saying. “But it’s out of her control.”

“For real.” It’s Coach Urso. “It sounds like her shape is otherwise pretty good? There might still be some hope for higher levels of competition, since only five groups of dives are required.”

“She ain’t qualifying for nationals, though,” an assistant says.

A few more mumbles I cannot make out. Then: “. . . that she’ll just grow out of it?” It’s Bradley. The conditioning director.

“Well,” Coach Sima says, “mental blocks are common, but this long-lasting . . .” More unintelligible words, and I should leave. It’s not good that I’m here. “. . . great talent that’s just . . . I feel for her . . . bad injury, but physically she’s fully recovered. There are no excuses.”

“She’s seeing a professional?”

“The second in six months. No progress.”

“. . . a junior, right?”

“Yup.”

“We’ll have to think long and hard if she should continue taking up a spot on the team—”

I push away, hands trembling, throat full of something that could be tears or bile.

I hate it—I fucking hate it.

I hate them, these men talking about me like I’m a malfunctioning waffle maker that should be harvested for parts and landfilled.

Most of all, I hate myself, because—what choice have my constant failures given them?

“Hey.”

I nearly walk face-first into Pen. I must have autopiloted my way to the locker room. “Oh. Hey.” I push my knot of self-loathing under the surface. “Hi.” I sound high-pitched and way too cheerful. Definitely overcompensating. “Did you get everything sorted out?”

“Everything?”

She seems confused. It occurs to me that the last time she saw me, she’d been hopping off a podium after a stellar diving performance. She probably has no idea that I was with Lukas when she called, and that he dropped everything—dropped me, to go help her. She simply reached out to her ex, with whom she still has a great relationship. For all I know, the two of them are still—

“Vandy? You okay?”

“Yup.” My smile stretches. “Ready for synchro training?”

“No. But does it matter?”

I take several deep, calming breaths, and change into my suit. I may be at my worst, but I can masquerade as someone who’s doing perfectly fucking fine.

In the following days I’m at once despondent and jittery. Messed up. All wrong, like I’ve lost all say in the person that I’m supposed to be. Entropy personified—just a tangled skein, unraveling, impossible to rescue.

I try not to think about Lukas too much, but the universe seems to be conspiring against me, because while I’m endlessly doom-scrolling before bed, the algorithm feeds me a video that has me slapping a palm against my mouth.

It’s simply . . . adorable. The boy adjusting his goggles is Lukas—the serious set of his brow, his full, downturned lips, those cheekbones—but a miniaturized version. Skinnier. Long torsoed, long armed, strong legged. The proportions are there, and he was probably already taller than I am now, but he seems so . . . young.

The video is in Swedish, so I find another. One hundred meter. Freestyle. Semifinal. World championship in France—no, Montreal, Canada. Lukas is a bit older. He must have broken a speed record, because when his hand reaches the touch pad the audience explodes out of their seats. “Fourteen-year-old Lukas Blomqvist looks positively shocked by how fast he swam,” the commentators inform me. Lukas just takes off his goggles and stares at the board, as if to make sure it really happened. The camera pans to a group of people in the stands, and—oh my god, Jan, looking so different but also the same. His other brothers are there, too, applauding, clapping each other’s backs. A man who’s a middle-aged template of them wraps an arm around the shoulders of . . .

Lukas’s mom.

She doesn’t look too much like him, but I know it’s her, I just do. The image zooms in on her, shows tears brimming in her eyes, and then—she leans in, over the plastic barrier, and lets two glistening shoulders envelop her in a strong hug.

Fourteen-year-old Lukas. Breaking records. Celebrating with his mom. I’m trying to wrap my head around it, until another video starts, leading me down twisted paths.

It’s the individual medley at the last Olympics, a race I know he’ll win from sniffing around his Wikipedia. Lukas would have been eighteen or so, the summer before enrolling at Stanford, but the video could have been taken this morning at practice. Except for the sleeve of tattoos, which is not yet complete.

He doesn’t really go for most of the pre-competition gimmicks the other swimmers seem to like—large headphones, shaking triceps, meditating breaths, random words written on his palms to show to the camera. Just takes off his warm-ups and sits, quietly focused, unbothered by the chaos. He’s in lane four, and whoever’s directing this airing . . . they try to care about the other athletes, but Lukas is so obviously the favorite, the video keeps traveling back to him. Then it shifts to the bleachers, and there’s another familiar sight. Jan. A woman next to him, and then another, holding a beaming toddler in her arms. Lukas’s two eldest brothers. His dad, and . . .

That’s it.

I click out of the video, wondering why my heart feels wrapped in stone. I can’t assume. I have no idea. It’s not my business. Why am I even . . .

“Idiot,” I chastise myself, and switch to Google, remembering something I’ve been meaning to look up. The word Lukas taught me. Mi? My? I cycle through ten or so spellings, and then I find it.

Mysig.

Swedish adjective. Cozy. Warm. Soothing. The quality of sharing a comfortable moment with a person whose company one enjoys.

“Mysig,” I whisper at my phone, like I’m the kind of person who has meaningful tête-à-têtes with fire hydrants. “Mysig,” I repeat with a small smile.

I’m a mess. A failure. A ball of anxiety. All twisted. But also cozy.

At least, one person in the universe seems to think so.