On our way home in the car, I wait for Dad to say something about getting a call from Mrs. Jones, but he doesn’t. Maybe he’s waiting for me to mention it, or maybe my getting in trouble is not even on his mind.
“I have to spend time in detention at recess tomorrow.”
He looks in the rearview mirror. “What happened?”
“Thought Mrs. Jones would’ve called you.”
“She did.”
“So you already know what happened with Bailey and me.”
Dad nods. “I wanted to hear your side of the story.”
“We were playing soccer, and we wanted to finish the game. It felt good to play soccer with … It won’t happen again.”
“I haven’t seen Bailey in a long time. How’s she doing?”
I shrug and turn toward the window. “Okay, I guess.”
Dad seems like he wants to say something, but he lets it go.
When we get home, there’s knocking coming from the hallway.
“Kimberly,” Mrs. Collins is saying, “please open the door.”
Dad and I freeze and watch Mrs. Collins come into the living room, then move into the kitchen, without noticing us. A drawer opens, and there’s the sound of rustling spoons, forks, knives. That, or Mrs. Collins has opened the junk drawer and is searching through who-knows-what.
She comes out carrying a screwdriver, rushing straight down the hallway. I hear the jiggling of a doorknob.
Dad throws down his lunch pail and coat. “Mrs. Collins?”
The jiggling stops. “Oh, Mr. Rodrigues, I’m so sorry. Kimberly has locked herself in the bathroom, and she won’t open the door. She was taking a bath, and …”
Dad uses the screwdriver to unlock the door. “Kim …”
Mom’s sitting in the bathtub, her legs folded against her chest, chin resting on her knees.
“Kim.” Dad grabs a towel. “Come on—it’s time to get out.”
But Mom doesn’t move. “I want to stay here.”
Dad scoops the water to check the temperature. “It’s getting cold.”
“I want to stay here,” Mom says again.
I wait for Dad to do something. He always does. He fixes things or cleans up messes. He’s always able to convince Mom. But not this time. He looks up at Mrs. Collins. Then at me.
“Mrs. Collins, you can go ahead and go,” he says. “Thank you. Cassie, we’ll take turns sitting here with Mom, okay?”
“She’s going to get too cold,” I say. I step inside the bathroom and check the water myself. “Can’t you lift her out? Dad …”
His hands are covering his face. He’s crying.
“Dad, it’s okay. I’ll help you.”
I give him a second. He drops his hands and rests them on his hips, then wraps his arms around me. “It’s going to be okay?”
Dad says it like a question. I don’t know what else to say but, “Yeah, we’re going to be all right.”
He pats me on the shoulder and turns to Mom, back to being the grown-up. “Kim, can you stand up?”
Mom doesn’t move.
“Cassie and I are going to lift you out of the tub,” he says. “You have to be getting cold.”
Dad slips his hand under Mom’s arms. As he lifts Mom to her feet, water splashing, I wonder if she’s been preparing herself, building her tolerance for cold water.
“The water in the English Channel is around fifty-eight to sixty-five degrees,” she told me once, “depending on the season, so it’s better if you get your body acclimated first. But it’s also important to pay attention to the currents. They’re strong and can push you to the side, off course, and you could spend hours swimming and not moving forward at all. In those conditions, it’s a little hard to find your way across.”
I hold out my hands to help her step out of the bathtub. Dad wraps the towel around Mom and kisses her on the cheek. There are tears still in his eyes. “Let’s go get dressed,” he says.
I don’t want to cry.
I’m tired of feeling sad.
I don’t want to think about Mom fading away.
She always told me to not let my sadness dictate my actions. “You can definitely be sad,” she said, “but try to keep moving.” Like the Albert Einstein quote in our classroom.
I know Mom’s own dad died when she was seven years old. Swimming, she said, was a way to keep moving forward. It was her way of keeping sadness from weighing her down.
I sit at my desk and find pieces of dolphin that match. I’ve put together six, and the bowl is still full. Two out of the six have different color flukes, a green fluke with blue pectoral fins and head, a pink fluke with a red-pink body and blue head. They’re whole, though, and that’s what matters.
Hanging on the wall above my bed is a framed photograph of Mom and me. We’re standing by a sign, OVERLOOK TRAIL—10.4 MILES. Both of us have our arms up in the air, flexing them to show our muscles, with serious, determined looks on our faces.
I take down the frame, unhook the back, and slide out the photograph. Walking to the extra bedroom, I use the scanner on the printer to make a copy.
Back in my bedroom, I grab scissors and glue and take my sketchpad out of my backpack.
Staring at the photograph, I think about that number Mrs. G wrote on the board, 0. 000000000001.
If this picture of Mom and me were a math problem and I had to explain my strategy for cutting it into pieces, I’d say this: maybe my mom can’t recognize the whole picture, but she might be able to recognize one part of it. She might remember what color socks she wore, or how it started to rain, or how the shoestring on one of my hiking boots kept coming untied.
I have to remind myself that breaking down a memory doesn’t mean she’s going to remember any of it.
But I have to try.
I start with me. I cut around my arms, and my fists, and glue it to a page in my notebook.
Under the picture, I write, “This is Cassie.” I do the same with the picture of my mom and glue it to a different part of the page. Under it, I write, “This is you.” The last part of the photograph I cut out is the sign. I glue it to another part of the page and write, “We had just finished a hike.”
The parts of the photograph tell a simple story. I was there. My mom was there. We went on a hike.
One photo divided by three parts. I scribble the equation. Three goes into one zero times; then three goes into ten three times, and it keeps repeating. 3.33333333 …
It’s an irrational number, the kind that goes on forever. I like that. I call the photo collage 0.3333333. It makes sense that the three parts of my mom, me, and something we did together have a value that is endless.
In the living room, Mom is now dressed, her hair still wet. Dad’s making dinner. On the television, the camera shows a close-up of a dolphin’s eye, then zooms out, farther and farther, so that the image is a pod of at least fifty or so dolphins swimming in the open ocean that goes on for miles and miles. Dad put on her favorite DVD to calm her down.
“Are they going somewhere?” They look like they’re swimming with purpose.
“They’re just swimming,” Mom says. My question brings her out of her trance. “That’s what they do.”
I hold my sketchbook in front of her and point to the piece of photograph that shows just the sign. “We used to go hiking a lot.”
Mom points at the photograph, too, and rubs it with her fingers. Then she slides her fingers over to the next piece, a pair of untied shoelaces.
“Those hiking boots I wore always came untied,” I tell her.
Mom’s fingers move up and down our faces, like she’s trying to release them from the picture. “We loved to hike,” she says. “We could hike forever. Like how I could swim forever.”
I kiss her on the cheek. The photograph sparks something in her memory. Not enough to remember my name, but it was one photograph, only one decomposed memory, a piece that found its way.
In the extra bedroom, there are shelves filled with trophies. They all belong to Mom. She really was a great swimmer. The butterfly was her best stroke.
Next to one of the trophies is a framed picture from when she was about nine or ten years old. She stands on top of a diving block holding another trophy. She has short, blond, almost-white hair that reflects the sun. Her smile is just as shiny.
On a bottom shelf, there are boxes filled with photographs Mom never framed. I take the lid off one of the boxes and sort the pictures by who’s in them. One pile is just me, one pile is Mom and me, another pile is Mom and Dad, another pile is all three of us. There aren’t many of just Dad and me.
Then I make a pile of the ones I think are the best. Where we look the happiest.
I choose ten to scan and spread the printouts on my bedroom floor.
The first one I start to cut was taken at a lake. Mom and I are in our bathing suits. Mom’s wearing a hat, and I have zinc oxide on my nose.
I cut the sides off first, making my way to our faces. I cut around Mom’s hat and around my head. Between us, I glue a piece with water and sand. The picture I create is just our faces, the water, and the ground under our feet.
The next photograph I cut into pieces is one of the three of us camping. Dad must’ve set a timer on the camera. He and Mom are sitting in beach chairs with their arms around each other, and I’m standing by Mom with my arms raised to the sky.
Before cutting, I look at the photograph hard and deep. I zero in on my smile. It’s big and toothy. I can’t remember the last time I smiled like that.
I pick up the photo of ten-, eleven-year-old Mom, standing on the diving block, holding the trophy. Everything about the picture is bright: her smile, her yellow shirt, her eyes, the future.
I have to find a way to get Dad to take us to San Diego.
Dad loves art as much as I do, so it might be a way to get him to change his mind. I have a piece of poster board in my closet. I have poster paint, too.
I sit on my bedroom floor. I’m going to keep it simple. Using the brightest color paint I have, I write “WISH WE WERE HERE.” Then I draw a sketch of Mom and a dolphin, their heads breaching the surface of the water, Mom waving to Dad and me. We have our arms in the air, cheering for her. I add one big talking bubble above us. Inside I write, “WE MADE IT!”
When I’m finished, Dad’s still in the kitchen making dinner, so I have a chance to hang the poster in the living room. Every once in a while, I catch him staring at the portrait of Mom I sketched last year. I tape the poster next to it.
I hope this doesn’t make him mad, and now I think maybe I should go out and give him a heads-up about it.
I sit down next to Mom. My heart is beating fast, loud, interrupting the narrator on the documentary she’s watching. I reach out to her hand, which is resting on the couch. I hold it. I squeeze it. She squeezes back. She won’t take her eyes off the TV, but I rest my head on her shoulder, and she leans in to me, too.
This is why we should help her with the list. She’s not a robot.
Behind the faraway eyes, Mom is still there. We shouldn’t give up on that. We still have places to go.
“Do you know why dolphins swim in groups?” Mom asks, focusing on the TV screen.
“For protection?” I say.
“Yes, but did you know they can leave the group anytime they want? They can go join a different one. There’s a lot of freedom in being able to do that. The other pods will protect the new dolphins, too.”
Sometimes I think the best thing that could happen to Mom would be to turn into a dolphin. That one day we’d come home and Mrs. Collins would have had to move her to the bathtub to keep her safe. Then Dad would have to buy a giant tank and fill it with water. But it eventually wouldn’t be big enough, so we’d have to drive her to the ocean.
We would carry Mom to the water’s edge. She’d give us a click and nod her head up and down, her way of saying, “Goodbye. I love you.” We’d give her an extra push into the water, and the waves would rock her back and forth. We’d watch her swim out, her dorsal fin visible from shore, and she’d lift her head one more time, give us another nod and click, and then disappear underwater, swimming out to the wide-open space. We’d miss her, but we’d know she was happy, that she was where she belonged.
If Mom did turn into a dolphin, there might be a chance she’d get her memory back.
Since dolphins can recognize sounds unique to others, right before she dived down into the water, I’d say “Cassie” one last time, and she would hear it. And one day, in fifteen, twenty, twenty-five years, I’d stand on the same beach, and I’d say my name out loud, thinking I’m just saying it for the ocean to hear, but maybe my mom, the dolphin, would breach the water’s surface and whistle at me.
She’d have recognized my unique sound.
Soon as we sit down for dinner, I keep working on Dad. “You know how Mom really likes dolphins? Well, there are places people can go and pay to get in the water with them. I was thinking it would be a great thing to do for her. Maybe …”
I’m about to say, “Maybe it would bring some of her memory back …” but the idea wouldn’t sound reasonable to Dad at all. He’d think it was impossible.
“I don’t know, Cassie,” he says. “I don’t know how she would react once we got there or even how she would respond to the dolphins. It might put a lot of stress on her. None of us needs more stress.”
But what if the opposite is true? That it doesn’t bring us more stress, that seeing Mom with the dolphins, whether she’s actually swimming with them or just standing in the water with one, will make us the happiest we’ve been in a while?
“Well, I can make the reservations.” I pretend to ignore him. “And everything, if you don’t want to be bothered by it. And I’ll help you if anything happens. I’ll even help pay for it. I’ve been saving money …”
“You’ve been saving money to go to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.”
“So the museum can wait.”
“I have work, and you have school,” he says.
“We can go on a weekend.”
“What if she walks off?” Dad starts the what-if game again. “What if she doesn’t like something and gets mad? What if we’re in public, and she starts throwing things?”
“Then you’ll have me to help you. And what if we did go”—I’m going to play the what-if game, too—“and nothing happened? What if it turned out to be a normal trip? What if Mom loved it? What if we had one of the best times ever? And what if …”
I’m about to say, “It was the last time we got a chance to go anywhere all together?” but I don’t. It wouldn’t be fair to Dad.
“It’s a good thought, Cassie. Your mom would love to swim with dolphins. I should’ve taken her before.”
I’m glad he agrees it’s a good idea, but I know it’s one more way of saying no. “We can still have good times, you know?” I say.
“Maybe,” he says. But the look on his face says, “This might be impossible, too.”
I’ve never liked the word “maybe.” That’s why I like math. There’s no “maybe.” Math is precise. There might be different ways to get to an answer, but there’s only one answer.
“I made something for us.” I get up from the table and lead him into the living room. He follows me right away. He probably thinks he’s going to see something I’ve done for the art show.
At first, Dad looks at the photos glued to the poster and has no real expression at all; then he smiles a little. But then his smile goes back to being a straight line, 180 degrees of “This is not a good idea.”
He goes back to the kitchen to finish his dinner. “Cassie,” he says, “I understand what you’re doing, but I’ve made my decision. I’m sorry. I’m doing what I think is best for your mom. I know this is hard, and it’s not going to get easier. This is our life now.”
I know this is our life now, and it’s hard. “But we don’t have to make it harder,” I say.
Dad just scrapes a fork against his plate.
You’re wrong, I want to tell him. You’re afraid. There isn’t any reason why we shouldn’t be who we were before. We can at least try.
After I clean the dishes, I take down the poster and hang it in my room. In my desk drawer, I find an envelope that I decorated with Georgia O’Keeffe flowers. I take out all the cash I’ve stashed in it and start counting.