Breathless Read Free Page B

have an easygoing relationship that made me feel so loved, so precious to him, it seemed impossible that anything could ever change.
    Despite all the golfing, which he does on the weekends, my father has always been out of shape, too much fat accumulated over muscles that have long since softened from his days as a college football hero. When I was a little girl, this didn’t keep him from being godlike.
    The Ghost is a psychiatrist. He calls himself a masseuse of the soul. His clients, stretched over a long career, number in the thousands. His ability to sympathize with strangers, to help them solve all their problems, has made him a wealthy man. So how is it fair that, within his own home, he became mostly quiet and unsympathetic? I know he is kind and loving and gentle. He spends his days chin-deep in other people’s trauma, and you can tell it has hollowed him, made him brittle from endless days of drinking too much coffee while he sits in an overstuffed chair, listening.
    For so many years I was his little girl. “What are you doing today?” I used to ask, peeling his grapefruit for him. All day after he’d gone, I used to sniff my hands and reconstruct the memory. I missed him constantly. Even when I was ten, I would still fit like a bundle on his lap, my toes barely touching the floor.
    He leans his head back and squints at the ceiling. “Let’s see, Kathryn.” My father is the only person who doesn’t call me Katie. “I’m at my office until noon, and then I’m having lunch with your mother.”
    “Can I come?”
    “No. You’ll be in school.”
    “Tuesday I go to the dentist. Can I come then?” And I burrow my head into the folds of his sweater to remind him that, wherever he goes, he belongs to me.
    “Tuesday I’m in court all day.”
    “But Dad . . .”
    “We’ll see.” He winks and touches a tar-stained fingertip to my nose. “Maybe I’ll finish up early.” He coughs, rearranging the contents of his chest, leaning away from the ashtray. I pat him on the back. “Cough it up, Dad. You have to stop smoking.”
    “Enough, Kathryn.”
    “You do. ”
    “Okay.” He snuffs out his cigarette, spreads his empty fingers like a magician. “See? I quit.”
    His eyes twinkle, pupils wide in the dimness, erasing his irises. I know how it feels to look at them, but I have no idea what color eyes the Ghost has.
    I’m not sure what he would tell you about us. Probably he’d say that it was me who changed, that as little girls grow into young women, it is natural for them to pull away from their fathers. But I remember it differently. I remember a day when he looked at me and I felt, in his gaze, an impossible pressure to be something different. I was twelve years old; it was the first time he caught me smoking a cigarette. It was a look I would grow familiar with over the next few years, not just from the Ghost but from almost everyone around me.
    What could I do? How was I supposed to be? I had no idea. The only thing I knew how to do, with any certainty, was swim.

chapter 2
    I feel more drawn to the water than ever this summer. I blame the temperature and my boredom, but still I force myself to really move beneath the surface, to keep my pace so swift that I sometimes feel like my heart might explode. I’ve always done well in school—I get all As—but the only thing I really love is swimming. Sometimes I feel like I don’t really exist outside the water.
    Once in a while, my mother takes a break from painting to chase me around with a bottle of sunblock. She’s lucky if she manages to do much more than swipe a few gobs onto my back. My suntan is uneven because of her, finger trails of her attempts to protect me left in stark white marks surrounded by bronze flesh. Each time she comes and goes, my brother and I follow her appearance with a slew of backhanded comments as she walks away. It isn’t even noon yet, but her upper lip is already stained a deep crimson. Merlot, Pinot Noir,