Learning to Swim Read Free Page A

his arms from the sleeping bag and obediently clicked the belt into place. As I pulled out of the parking lot my wheels gritted on the gravel.
    A few miles down the road my phone gave that beep that says it’s back in cell tower range. I glanced at the car clock. I had been on my way to Burlington to see Thomas, to go to a piano recital he’d wanted to attend, and he’d be wondering why I hadn’t arrived. I picked up the phone and hit his speed dial.
    “Tommy, it’s Troy,” I said, working hard to speak clearly through my fatigue. “Look, I’m really sorry, but something came up, and I can’t make it.”
    A moment’s silence, then he said calmly, “Okay.” His careful lack of reaction annoyed me—it’s not always easy dating someone this determinedly understanding.
    “Look, I can’t explain right now,” I said. “But I’ll call you tonight.”
    Another pause. “Are you all right?”
    “Fine, I’m fine.” I tried to sound reassuring. Thomas would be sitting on the sofa in his apartment, sandy hair neatly combed, looking like a Lands’ End model in his crisp khakis and button-down shirt. Diving off the railing of the Burlington ferry was not something I wanted to explain to him, not now and probably never. “Talk to you later,” I said, and clicked the phone off.
    I looked at the boy. “Men!” I said. He smiled faintly, and I felt a little twist inside me.
    We were approaching Keeseville, where I could turn south for Elizabethtown and the police station. I thought about it; I really did. I envisioned us traipsing inside in our motley clothes, damp and bedraggled, me trying to explain, insisting someone had tried to drown this boy, then watching him being carted off, never knowing where he was being taken or what happened to him.
    But I wasn’t going to let him be sent back to whoever had tossed him off the ferry like an unwanted kitten. I wasn’t nineteen anymore.
    What I didn’t admit to myself was that I was already beginning to think of this child as mine. I’d found him, I’d saved him. I wasn’t about to hand him off to a stranger.
    I passed the turn and headed for home.

I PULLED INTO MY PARKING SPOT IN FRONT OF THE HOUSE . The boy had sat quietly during the forty-mile drive, waiting when I’d gone into a small store for hot chocolate, then clasping the cup in both hands, drinking in tiny sips. Neither of us had spoken.
    “We’re here.” I gestured at the house.
“Ça, c’est ma maison.”
I’d rented a room here when I’d first arrived in Lake Placid, and when the speedskater running the place moved on, I bought the furnishings and took over. I rent out the extra bedrooms to athletes in town to train and people who end up here because they love the lakes and the mountains and the ski trails. Some are here a few months; some a year or more. We share the living room and kitchen, and everybody does their own dishes. If not, I put them in a paper bag and set it outside their bedroom door. They catch on pretty fast.
    My family would consider this place a dump, but I like it. And I have a houseful of guys willing to go biking, running, or dancing, so I have company when I want it, and escape to my rooms when I don’t.
    This is a part of my life Thomas finds unendearingly irregular, although he’s far too polite to say so. He’s too reserved to let me know that my athletic male roommates make him uneasy, and I’m too obstinate to let him know I have a hard-and-fast personal rule against house romances. Which I was tempted to break only once, but that’s another story.
    I walked around the car and opened the passenger door. I reached over the boy to click open his seat belt and pulled off the sleeping bag and towel to free him. He glanced at the ground and then at me,wanting to know if it was all right to walk in his sock feet. I nodded. He put his small hand in mine, and stepped carefully up the porch stairs in the big wool socks.
    The front door was unlocked, as usual. I’d given