Page 18 of Breathing Under Water

“Berry.”

I can hear everything he hasn’t said. He wants to know why we have to do this again, why I can’t just leave him alone, let him be, stop nagging. But I hold my ground and stand there, waiting.

“I don’t know what you want from me here. I’ve got a lot on my mind, okay? I don’t understand why you can’t give me the space to deal with these things. Not everything is a group project.”

“Give you the space.” I throw my hands in the air in exasperation. “I’ve been giving you space for the past ten months, Phil.”

When his mom first passed, he asked me to let him process everything his way. Talking about his feelings was too hard, he said. So instead of coming closer, leaning on me the way I’d have hoped, he retreated into himself. The more I tried to be there, the more he pulled away, and now it feels as though we’ll never get back to the place we were before. Recently, there seems to be more to it. He’s been increasingly evasive, and it’s starting to feel like he’s keeping secrets, not just bottling up emotions.

“You can’t even have a conversation about my colleague’s love life? You need space from that?”

“No,” he groans. “Yes. I don’t know, Berry! I need space from just... a lot.” He stands and walks out of the room, leaving me to wonder what it is that’s pushing us even further apart.

10

McKenna

June 2023

When I walk into the house at the end of the day, I can’t wait to tell Glory about the first-year mentee I’m getting on the team. According to Coach Cat, this girl chose Meadowbrook over one of the Ivies because she heard our team had better camaraderie. But when I come bounding into the kitchen, I’m surprised to find it empty.

“Glory?” I call, moving toward her bedroom. The shades are drawn, making the room weirdly dark for this time of day. Still, enough light is coming in under the curtains for me to tell no one’s there.

“Glory?” I call again, moving through the bedroom and pushing open the bathroom door. Empty. My heart starts to race. I don’t know where she could have gone without her car. She’s never been the type to take a random evening walk around the neighborhood.

I race to the back door, and that’s when I see her. She’s in our small patch of backyard, dressed in her pink bathrobe and slippers, surrounded by veritable carcasses of her beloved butterfly bushes. They’ve all been uprooted and are lying scatteredaround the yard in a mess of haphazard twigs and wayward petals. It looks like she’s been pulling the plants out of the soil one by one. She’s now bent over a patch of lavender, yanking the sprigs from the ground, tossing her spoils behind her.

“Glory!” I shout, hurrying through the door and down the two concrete steps to the grass. “Glory! Stop!”

She doesn’t even look my way—just keeps at her task. She’s muttering something as she continues pulling out her plants as if she’s on some kind of mission.

“Glory! What on earth are you doing?” At last I’m close enough to grab her arm.

She startles at the contact, finally pausing and looking up at me.

“What happened?” I ask. “Why are you destroying the garden?”

She stares at me for a long, hard moment, and the dread I was feeling inside grows even stronger.

“I...” she starts, looking back down to the ransacked flower bed. She turns again, taking in the chaos of the dismembered weigela shrubs littering the ground around us. “No, I didn’t mean...” She kneels to the grass, lifting a small branch with its pink flowers still attached, and runs her thumb and forefinger over the petals.

I don’t speak as I watch obvious regret take hold of her.

“Oh, dear.” She looks suddenly stricken. “They had only just reached full bloom.”

She gathers the nearby branches into a neater pile and then looks back up at me.

“Oh, McKenna.”

Her eyes are wet.

“Glory, what happened?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have the foggiest notion. I don’t even remember coming out here.” Her eyes scan the scene around us again. “But now I’ve ruined them all.” She stands and begins moving around the yard, collecting more scattered pieces of her beloved bushes.

“I’ll get a trash bag,” I say, hurrying back inside to the cabinet under the sink.

Once we’ve finished cleaning the yard, I convince Glory to wait until morning to tidy up the ravaged patch of dirt that was the flower bed. Instead, she follows me back into the house and asks me to wait for her at the kitchen table.