Swimming by Nicola Keegan

Irish sweater. I’m not responding. That’s the news. I’m steadfast in my resistance. Can you believe it? Another minuscule mystery in a vast sea of … are you listening to me?
    It’s between very early in the morning and horribly late at night. The moon is low, spilling a yellow-gray light through a vertical shaft of open curtain. She’d been lying in bed all day thinking with her eyes shut. Now she’s awake, standing like a ghost in the middle of the room.
    I’m half-asleep. Yes, yeah, I am, and quit always asking me that; my ears work .
    She’s energized by the moon. Well, quit always not looking at me when I’m talking to you. It aggravates me when I can’t tell what you’re thinking .
    My eyes are adjusting to her form. Like you can tell what I’m thinking .
    She’s whacking a leather belt against a skinny thigh. I can even tell what you’re not thinking .
    I look at the belt. What am I not thinking now then?
    She throws the belt on the floor, turns back to her bed, lies down on her side with her face to the wall, not bothering to reply.
    There are pictures of her winning state debater three years in a row. She’s standing in front of the Gold Cup; first in braids and triple-striped pants, then in a high ponytail with a red ribbon, smiling with big lips and no visible teeth, then in her navy suit, her long blond hair pulled up into a knot and stabbed with two chopsticks. Her Uganda triumph. She must have been talking when they snapped the last picture; you can see her molars, followed by a dark tunnel of throat.
    When is all this going to stop? I ask my mother the next day.
    She’s writing out checks with a frown on her face. Soon .
    I watch her hand slash out signature. You said that before .
    She looks up. Soon; I said soon. Go do something .
    I run water, brush my teeth, fill up the sink, stick my face in with both eyes open. Afterward, my eyes are cooler, my breath is minty, my hair unattractive, my vision impaired.
    Manny moves his bed from the armchair in the kitchen to the foot of Bron’s bed. When she’s home, he follows her. When she’s at her appointments, he lies waiting for her, head on the ground, ears alert. When she becomes difficult to approach, he lies down with her and doesn’t make a sound, sometimes for hours. We watch him walk into the kitchen, eat, stretch, lap up some water, look up at us, smile, shake his head, nod, then go back to lie with Bronwyn, who’s thinking with her eyes shut.
    June says: That dog is the truest dog I’ll ever know .
    When I ask Bron what she did all day, she says: I was thinking with my eyes shut . Every day the same thing: You can talk to me; I’m not asleep. I’m just thinking with my eyes shut . But sometimes she is asleep and I’m talking to Manny, who looks back without blinking, his pond eyes shining from the inside out.
    Manny has difficulty finding solutions to practical problems and does not recognize people he knows by heart if they have something on their heads. I tried to cure him by putting a hat on in front of him, but the minute it was on my head he no longer recognized me and started barking and snarling and backing away, foaming in fear even as I dog-talked in my familiar dog-talking voice: It’s me, my man; it’s just me, me, me . His fear can be measured in degrees; he runs away from anyone in a fedora, cowboy hat, baseball cap, straw hat, helmet. He barks and snarls at berets, wool caps, large sunglasses. He will accept scarves and, later, Leonard’s scary beard, but we have to lock him in the basement for Halloween.
    I walk into the room and Manny reacts, stirring Bron. He’s just protecting me; he knows. Death is animal , she says without opening her eyes. I hate it when she does things like this, leaving me with nothing to say back, nothing that won’t sit in the air like a piece-of-shit lie. I just stand in the doorway, my backpack on my shoulder, my hair melting onto my face, hungry, my wool cap in my hands.
    I have