How to Breathe Underwater Read Free Page A

strangers.
    “Your mother is upstairs,” Delilah said, her eyes swiveling toward some distant hidden room. “She felt a little swimmyheaded. Your dad just took her some special tea. Maybe we should let her rest, hmm?”
    Ella slipped out from beneath Delilah’s hand and ran to the hall, remembering the stairway she’d seen earlier. There it was before her, a curve of glossy steps leading to nowhere she knew. Her mother’s cough drifted down from one of the bedroom doors. Ella put a foot onto the first stair, feeling the eyes of the adults on her back. No one said anything to stop her. After a moment, she began to climb.
    In the upstairs hallway, toys and kids’ shoes were strewn across the floor, and crumpled pants and shirts and dresses lay in a musty-smelling heap. Two naked Barbies sprawled in a frying pan. A record player sat in the middle of the hall, its vacant turntable spinning. Ella stepped over the cord and went into the first room, a small room with a sleeping bag on the bare mattress ticking. In a cage on the nightstand, a white rat scrabbled at a cardboard tube. A finger-painted sign above the bed said CLARIES ROOM. Her mother’s cough rose again from down the hall, and she turned and ran toward the sound.
    In a room whose blue walls and curtains made everything look as if it were underwater, her mother lay pale and coughing on a bed piled high with pillows. Her father sat on the edge of the bed, his hands raised in the air, thumbs hooked together and palms spread wide. For a moment Ella had no idea what he was doing. Then she saw the shadow of her father’s hands against the wall, in the light of a blue-shaded lamp. A shock of relief went through her.
    “Tweet-tweet,” Ella said.
    “Right,” her father said. “A birdy.”
    Ella’s mother turned toward her and smiled, more awake, more like her real self than earlier. “Do another one, Gary.”
    Ella’s father twisted his hands into a new shape in the air.
    “A dog?” Ella guessed.
    “A fish!” said her mother.
    “No,” he said, and adjusted his hands. “It’s a horsie, see?”
    “A horsie?” said Ella’s mother. “With fins?”
    That made Ella laugh a little.
    “Hey,” her mother said. “Come here, you. Smile again.”
    Ella did as she was told.
    “You lost your tooth!”
    “It’s gone,” Ella said. She climbed onto the bed to explain, but as she flopped down on the mattress her mother’s face contracted with pain.
    “Please don’t bounce,” her mother said. She touched the place where her surgery had been.
    Ella’s father gave her a stern look and lifted her off the bed. “Your mom’s sleepy. You should run back downstairs now.”
    “She’s always sleepy,” Ella said, looking down at her muddy feet. She thought of her tooth lying out in the weeds, and how she’d have nothing to put under her pillow for the tooth fairy.
    Her mother began to cry.
    Ella’s father went to the window and stared down into the yard, his breath fogging the glass. “Go ahead, Ella,” he said. “We just need a few minutes.”
    “My tooth,” Ella said. She knew she should leave, but couldn’t.
    “It’ll grow back bigger and stronger,” her father said.
    She could see he didn’t understand what had happened. If only her mother would stop crying she could explain everything. In the blue light her mother looked cold and far away, pressed under the weight of tons of water.
    “I’ll be down soon,” her mother said, sniffling. “Go out and play.”
    Ella opened her mouth to form some protest, but no words came out.
    “Go on, now,” her father said.
    “It fell in a bush!” she wailed, then turned and ran downstairs.
    The other children had come in by then. Her brother stood in line at the downstairs bathroom to wash before dinner, comparing fingernail dirt with the boy in purple overalls. Hands deep in the pockets of her velvet dress, Ella wandered through the echoing hall into a room lined from floor to ceiling with books. Many of