Phantom Limbs Read Free Page A

of water. But even while she was swimming, Dara managed to keep an eye on me, occasionally even alerting me with her shrill two-finger whistle, which confused all the swimmers. That morning she paused on her way to the fountain to holler, “More rotation, Mueller! And quit breathing so much, you pussy! It’s a twenty-five, for Christ’s sake!” Everyone — including Coach — found this hysterically funny. I wasn’t laughing, though. I was wishing she’d go fuck herself.
    It’s not that I was ungrateful. Dara had transformed me, both physically and mentally — I knew that. When I met her, not long after Meg left, my daily calendar was divided into a triad of moping, writing depressing poems, and shoving my face full of the pies my mom kept making. If baking pies was my mom’s coping mechanism during those dark days, eating them was mine. If my therapist hadn’t pushed her to get me out of the house that summer, my mom, lost in a dark vortex of her own, probably never would have hauled me to the pool for some fresh air and exercise, and I probably never would have met Dara and ended up her unlikely protégé. She could spot a sucker a mile away, even as she swam laps with her sort of mesmerizing one-armed technique. I had walked to the end of the diving board in my billowy board shorts, held my nose, and jumped. When I surfaced, I flailed my way to the side — to call it “swimming” would have been generous. Enter Dara Svetcova, who flattered me with her attention. She was almost sixteen, which felt a lifetime older than my thirteen and a half years, and it didn’t take me long to realize she was the subject of the tragic news story I’d seen a couple of years earlier. Even with one arm, the girl was epic; I couldn’t imagine what she’d been like with two. She gave me some swimming tips and encouraged me, and the rest was history.
    Looking back, I could see that she was the human equivalent of a Venus flytrap. Hindsight is indeed twenty-twenty.
    I was approaching the wall for a turn when Coach stopped me with a kickboard. When I came up, he pointed toward the deck, his expression grim.
    Dara huddled near the pool, clutching her stump, rocking.
    Phantom limb pains. The sensation that the amputated limb is there, hurting, itching — sometimes even that it’s moving or picking things up. The drugs only helped so much. The most reliable relief came from her mirror box: a rectangular wooden crate divided by a mirror. When she put her right hand in, what she saw was a pair of hands, which somehow caused the phantom pains to subside. But if she wasn’t at home with her box, sometimes watching two hands rubbing together could help. And to see two hands, she needed someone. And in Dara’s world, “someone” was me.
    I climbed out of the pool and moved toward her, pulling off my goggles. Abby Stewart knelt beside Dara, rubbing her back, her forehead folding into lines of concern.
    Dara looked at me, grimacing. “I need the box.”
    Abby stood, rising almost to my height. She had to be close to six feet tall. Her long hair, balled up under her cap, looked like a giant tumor on the back of her head. “Box?” Abby asked me.
    “I’ve got it,” I told her. “Thanks, though.” I couldn’t explain the box, especially not then. Abby was easily the most thoughtful, good-hearted person on the entire swim team, and I felt bad pushing her away, but even if anyone other than me
could
help Dara, they’d first have to penetrate her field of barbed wire.
    “You don’t need the box,” I told Dara, sitting down across from her. “I’m here.”
    “It was swimming,” she said into her knees. “It was stroking. I hate it when it does that. It fucks up my timing.” Her stump twitched and jerked. “Jumpy stump” she called this phenomenon, and there was no controlling it: it was a ghost limb seemingly controlled by a ghost brain. “God, make it stop!” she said through clenched teeth, trying to wrestle it