Deep End

IN MID-DECEMBER, THE SWIM TEAM LEAVES FOR A SWANKY ALL-expenses-paid training trip to Hawaii. Diving stays behind, and recriminating words like second-class citizens, and redheaded step-child are thrown about.

“Less bitching at me, and more taking it up with the athletics department, okay?” Coach Sima mumbles. “And Ross?”

“Yeah?”

“You are, in fact, redheaded.”

By the time Lukas returns, I’m already in St. Louis.

Hope you manage to get to Stockholm all right, I type—then delete it, because . . . I don’t know why. But the following day, I see three dots next to his name, and it occurs to me that maybe I’m not alone, in all this not knowing.

“Are you crying?” Barb asks when she picks me up at the airport, watching me roll on the floor as Pipsqueak licks my face. Being reunited with her heals my wonky shoulder, my congenital inability to eat spaghetti without a spoon, my fifth-grade cystic acne.

“Shut up,” I tell Barb. “It’s just . . .”

“What?”

I shake my head, burying my nose in Pip’s fur. She badly needs a bath. “She’s so beautiful.”

“Can’t deny that. I would, however, like to point out that I did not receive a hug, or even a half-assed hand wave.”

I lift my eyes to hers, and my chest squeezes a little bit tighter. It’s good to be home. “I dunno, Barb. You’re just not as cute.”

“What every woman wants to hear from her adult daughter.” She hands me the leash and points at the exit. “Let’s go. Gotta hit Schnucks before the carnivorous amoeboid alien gets there in all its cosmic horror.”

“The what?”

“Holiday grocery crowd, Scar.”

Christmas is quiet and lazy, good food and movies and naps, just the three of us, just the way I like it. Barb is, miraculously, not on call. Pip snores softly and farts loudly. I’m full and happy and maybe a little reckless, because I snap a picture of the holiday spread and send it to Lukas with the caption Fika?

The reply is, as usual, instantaneous. That’s a meal.

SCARLETT: How do you even know that?

LUKAS: No coffee in sight.

I add a Pac-12 mug to the side. Better?

LUKAS: Still a meal. With an empty mug next to it.

SCARLETT: Are you the fika police?

LUKAS: Unlike you, I speak Swedish.

SCARLETT: I’m tired of this gatekeeping.

Two minutes later, my email pings with a message. Someone gifted me a yearly premium subscription to Duolingo. Lukas must not know my middle name, because he went with Scarlett Troll Vandermeer.

Most likely, he’s perfectly aware that it’s Ann.

SCARLETT: The passive aggression!!!

LUKAS: Nothing passive about it.

I want to ask him how he’s doing. If he’s freezing his ass off. How many hours—minutes, milliseconds—of sunlight he gets. But my bravery runneth dry, and the not knowing is back with a vengeance, so I download the damn app and begin my Swedish journey.

In the following days, though, Lukas starts sending me pictures.

Jan, cross-country skiing, smiling broadly at the camera.

His niece and nephews, baking with a striking blond woman.

A tree branch crystallized in ice.

The most beautiful lake I’ve ever seen, surrounded by snow-covered trees that remind me of the ink on Lukas’s arm.

I reply with snippets of my own time at home—the Arch in downtown St. Louis; the diving well where I used to train; Pip rolling over, tongue out; the mischievous grin on the face of Cynthia, our elderly neighbor who came over for tea and slipped an inch of whiskey into our mugs.

With anyone else, I’d feel self-conscious about the small banality of my life, afraid of letting slip how uninteresting I am. But my sexual relationship with Lukas is so fundamentally based on brutal honesty about our wants and needs, it bleeds into every aspect of our interactions. Second-guessing my worth hardly ever occurs to me.

If he didn’t enjoy sex with me, he’d amend the list.

If he didn’t like my pictures, he’d leave me on read.

So it continues. A cat’s tail peeking through two inches of snow, like a shark’s fin. Barb’s office at the hospital, her lab coat draped over a chair. Ice-skating. A cronut.

Sometimes, we say nothing. Sometimes, we ask questions. (Is that a wolf? Was he just outside your door? We went to Gävleborg and tracked it. Oskar’s a pro.) Sometimes, I laugh at us. Shouldn’t we be exchanging nudes and flowery masturbation recounts? He should tele-dom me. Order me to suck his cyberdick. And yet, the only parts of our bodies that travel across the Atlantic are my dimple, from the day Pip wouldn’t stop licking my cheek, and the long-fingered grip on the rod he uses for ice fishing.

I write new drafts of my med school essays, and shadow Makayla, my favorite of Barb’s colleagues. “You should do an internship here next year,” she suggests. “Maybe in the spring quarter? Would look amazing on applications.”

The inevitable happens at Costco, two days before New Year’s Eve. Barb and I are debating whether it’d be amoral to pass up on a stellar deal that would provide Biscoff to the next four generations of Vandermeers (or, more likely, to the two of us, for the next week) when someone calls our names.

It takes me a minute to place Josh’s mom’s face, and another to realize that he’s standing next to her. Barb and Juliet have, unfortunately, always liked each other, and when they start chatting, Josh moves closer to me.

“Hey, Vandy.”

“Hi.” I expect my heart to speed into a race, but my sympathetic nervous system must be on a fika break.

Did I use it correctly, Lukas? My smile softens into something sincere.

We catch up for a few minutes. His classes. Mine. Still premed? I changed my major four times. I play the bass in a band. Is it true that you’re going to the Olympics? Ah, world’s. My bad. Still awesome.

Then, out of the blue: “I missed this.”

I blink up at him, trying not to think about the many ways he feels so . . . insubstantial, now that I’m used to Lukas. It’s not a fair comparison. “Yeah.”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d be angry.”

You could have asked, I think.

“We should get together sometime. Aurora wouldn’t mind, and . . . I care about you,” he adds.

Something inside me switches on. “Nice way of showing it,” I say.

His stare is confused. “What do you mean?”

“You didn’t act like someone who cared about me.”

“Vandy.” He has the audacity to look hurt. “If you think our breakup was easy for me—”

“You can’t control who you fall for. You can, however, decide not to break up with your girlfriend on the day of her NCAA finals.”

He sighs. “I’m sorry about that. I was so busy with . . . It didn’t occur to me. I didn’t even remember until Jordan told me that you got hurt.”

Jordan. Former classmate. Josh kept custody of her—and everyone else—in the split. “So you knew I was injured, but never reached out?” I think I got him, because his eyes are wide and his skin too pale. God, what a waste of time. “Listen, we haven’t talked for the past year and a half. I don’t know you anymore. And it wouldn’t have worked out, anyway.” I can say this with the utmost certainty now. “But here’s a reflection prompt: if it never occurred to you that you could have acted less selfishly, maybe you’re not the nice guy you think you are.”

Later, in the car, Barb doesn’t bring up Josh, but she does ask me if I’m seeing someone.

“There’s this guy.” I drum my fingers at the base of the window. “He’s . . .” Great. Perfect. My friend’s ex. I like him. He likes me, too, I’m sure. Not just because of what we do. Maybe there’s something here. But what if there isn’t? I should ask him. It makes my stomach hurt. “It’s needlessly convoluted.”

“Sounds like a rom-com premise.”

I shrug. “We’re just having fun.”

Her eyebrows lift.

“Oh, shut up.”

And lift.

“You’re terrible,” I laugh.

“I just hope you have fun safely, consensually, and contraceptively.”

“You’re a physician. You know that’s not a word.”

“All I know is that I’d be the best step-grandmother in history.”

“You would.”

She was, after all, an excellent mom. Busy, for sure. Scatterbrained. But that never mattered. After Dad, what I needed wasn’t someone who’d come to my meets, memorize dives’ names, pack me nutritious lunches. Vandy’s mom is a little absent, huh? I once overheard, bored parents gossiping in the stands. But that was dumb. Barb was there when I needed her, always, without me having to ask, ever. She put me first in any meaningful way. Reminded me that adults could be trusted, that they didn’t have to be scary and unpredictable—they could protect and nurture and allow freedom.

Well, she’s not her real mom. Vandy calls her Barb.

I remember being eight, scolded by Dad for introducing Barb to a teacher as my mommy. Sent to bed without dinner. Sneaking downstairs for a glass of water. A conversation in the kitchen.

“. . . don’t see the problem, Alex! I’m committed to her. I’m not going anywhere. If she wants to call me Mom—”

Dad’s response, in the tone that made my guts churn and my skin goose bump. Not being hungry anymore. Crawling back upstairs and drinking from the Dixie cups in the bathroom, the ones Barb had bought for me to rinse my teeth.

She is, indisputably, the best thing that ever happened to me. I wondered for years why she kept her married name after the divorce, and at eighteen I realized that it wasn’t because it was Dad’s—but because it was mine.

I turn to her and say, “You can just say grandmother, you know?”

“Mm?”

“If I ever have a kid—which for the purpose of this conversation would be grown from the mitosis of cells scraped from my cheeks, since I conduct myself very contraceptively—they wouldn’t call you step-grandma.”

“I know, honey.” She lets go of the steering wheel and wraps her fingers around mine. Barb and I rarely do this. Have moments. Sap. “They’d be required to call me Dr. Vandermeer, of course.”

I snort and pull my hand away.

That night I stream a movie, and send Lukas a picture of my computer screen. I get a reply when the credits start rolling—eleven for me, 6:00 a.m. in Stockholm. Yup, I can calculate the time difference like a pro by now.

LUKAS: I knew it would come to this.

I laugh.

SCARLETT: “This” being me watching Midsommar?

LUKAS: I should have taken preventative measures.

SCARLETT: Mandatory follow-up question: do you actually celebrate Midsommar?

LUKAS: Yes.

SCARLETT: And do you . . . ?

LUKAS: Go out of town to dance around the maypole, play sack races, eat pickled herring? Yes.

SCARLETT: Interesting.

LUKAS: Just ask about the sex rituals, Scarlett.

SCARLETT: I don’t want to be culturally insensitive, but I need to know if they happen.

LUKAS: How disappointed would you be if I said no?

SCARLETT: Immensely.

LUKAS: Problem is, we mostly celebrate Midsommar with our extended families. Siblings. Parents. Grandparents.

SCARLETT: That’s too kinky even for me.

LUKAS: Figured. You should come visit next summer. See for yourself.

SCARLETT: You’re luring me there with the promise of depraved sex rituals, while planning to use me for depraved human sacrifices.

LUKAS: It’s a real invitation. Ideally you should come when Jan’s here.

SCARLETT: Why?

LUKAS: Keeps telling everyone how amazing you are. Pulling up videos of your dives to show every Blomqvist in a thirty-kilometer radius.

SCARLETT: You need to stop him.

LUKAS: Why? I like watching you.

It’s not normal, the speed of my heartbeat even though I’m lying down. I’m an athlete in peak physical condition, goddamn it.

SCARLETT: He probably thinks we’re dating. We should set the record straight.

LUKAS: Or maybe we should just start dating.

I stop breathing. Freeze. Did he really—

LUKAS: I checked. This year Midsommar overlaps with the US Olympic trials, and as much as I want you in Sweden, I want you to come to Melbourne with me more.

I force my heart to slow down. My head to stop spinning.

SCARLETT: You’re optimistic, huh?

LUKAS: I’ve just seen you dive, Scarlett.

LUKAS: Come after the trials. Taper here. You’ll love the quiet. And the hikes.

I fall asleep with my phone in my hand, and dream of the midnight sun.