Page 62 of Breathing Under Water

How could I have made such a mess of everything? My eyes fill, and I don’t bother wiping the tear that spills over. I’ve been crying so much recently, it’s hardly even noteworthy. I just feel so utterly and completely alone. I was supposed to be an overachiever, one of the best swimmers of my generation, making my way through college with perfect grades and equally impressive friends. And somehow now I have nobody left and not so much as a roof over my head. It has taken every last ounce of my effort to keep my grades in a place I’m comfortable with, which is nowhere near the top-tier GPA I was pulling off before.I can’t stop thinking about everything I’ve lost, and it hurts so much, I feel as though I would hardly even notice if my limbs fell off. I try to pull myself back from the abyss that has been dragging me deeper with each passing day, to bring my attention back to something in the present, something concrete. I look back at the messages on my phone, taking a deep breath, reminding myself that I’ve already made it through three months. I just need to keep taking it one day at a time.

I start to feel just a little calmer, as if the phone is tethering me to something, even though all I’m looking at are promotional messages from ALO, SwimOutlet, and the poke bowl place I used to love, back before it became one more commercial establishment that didn’t fit into my budget.

But beneath those, I find one more unread message. When I see who it’s from, my breath catches.

30

Berry

October 2023

Hollis is at the house for dinner. It’s taking some time for me to get past the way he and Phil were in cahoots behind my back, angling to fix Phil’s company without ever telling me anything about it. I’m trying to move forward, and with each evening that Phil spends telling me about his day, how he’s handling the bankruptcy, sharing both his successes and fears with me, I feel our relationship healing.

It also helps that Hollis has been more of a mensch than ever with Leo. He arrived twenty minutes before I got home from work and will be spending the night. He announced a few weeks ago that he’d like to spend one night with us a month to help out, but I’m pretty sure the opposite is true—he’s lonely. Maybe the recent work he did with Phil knocked something loose inside him, reminded him how nice it is to feel needed. Either way, he’s always been a much better grandfather than he ever was a father.

I’m unpacking a grocery delivery when Stella calls.

“I just got off the phone with Greer,” she says. Greer Franklin is a second-grade teacher, and she and Stella have gotten very friendlyover the past couple of years. “She said the nonfiction text unit is a disaster. Whatever Neil Rumson gave them links to last year’s anthology, which we no longer have. Then it asks the students to circle glossary entries, but they haven’t even introduced glossaries yet. She had a whole litany of issues. I wrote it all down and just emailed it over.”

I stop pulling items from the grocery bag as I take a steadying breath. What Stella just relayed is eerily similar to what I heard from Lorrie Cyrus on the fourth-grade team about the new math assignments from Neil and how the materials jumped right to the standard algorithm before students had learned area models or partial products. And two days before I spoke with her, the entire kindergarten team came to see me because the tubs of manipulatives Neil ordered for the counting and sorting unit didn’t have any of the sets they were supposed to, just random numbers, many of which were stuck together with dried glue.

All the new strategies Neil Rumson outlined at our meeting back in June are turning out to cause one hiccup after another. This lack of alignment with school standards ultimately reflects on me. With each mistake being made, I can feel the promotion to permanent principal slipping further and further from my grasp. More important than my own self-pity is the fact that we can’t let our students suffer for my mistakes.

“Let’s organize an urgent review of the curriculum,” I tell Stella. “Tomorrow. We gather teachers, department chairs. We have to fix this.”

“I’m on it,” Stella tells me. “I’ll start sending calendar invites. I knew you’d know what to do.”

As I hang up, I hear Leo come in the front door. He’ll behappy to find Hollis waiting in the living room. They’ve always gotten on like gangbusters. Hollis has a knack for tech, so he and Leo like to debate the merits of the newest gadgets from places like Brookstone and Sharper Image.

“I got a ninety on my history essay,” Leo says to Hollis by way of greeting.

Hollis grunts, and I assume it’s the sound effect that accompanies my father-in-law rising from the couch. He’s never been a hugger, and he knows better than to invade Leo’s personal space anyway, but he’s got old-fashioned values and still rises to greet people.

“Come, let’s go tell your mom the good news,” he says.

“It’s not good news,” Leo answers. “Last time I got a ninety-two. A ninety is worse than a ninety-two, so this is bad news. Sad news, bad news. Bad news bears. More bad news.”

My heart stutters at his words. The past few months have been so hard for Leo, but I thought he’d finally begun perking back up. When we talked to his psychiatrist in August to see if we should switch his medication, the therapist said Leo’s moodiness was normal and, in fact, a good, appropriate response to being separated from someone he’d grown fond of. While Phil and I agreed that it had been lovely to see Leo develop the friendship with McKenna, telling him he had to stay away from her hurt all of us so much. I’m still not sure it was worth it.

But then, a couple of weeks ago, Leo suddenly came back to himself. He stopped moping around and even started asking about studying education in college to pursue a teaching career.

“I have to get into college, Grandpa,” Leo says, and I can breathe again. I love seeing him focused on his future.

Phil and I are still working out the finances of it all, but at least we’re working together again instead of working against each other, as we did for all those months.

“A ninety on an essay isn’t going to keep you out of college, kid,” Hollis says with a smile in his voice. “Especially not with all those hundreds you get in your multi-quadruple-quadrilateral-dimensional-whatever-it-is math classes.”

“There’s no class called that. I take dimensional analysis,” Leo says as they appear at the entry to the kitchen.

“Right,” Hollis says. “I should have mentioned I was joking.”

“It’s not a good joke because it doesn’t make sense. Multi-quadruple means multiple sets of quadruples, which are configurations of charges or magnetic poles, and quadrilaterals are shapes with four sides, but we’re talking about dimensions, not shapes, because it’s not geometry.”

“I brought you something,” Hollis says, heading over to the computer desk in the kitchen and picking up a catalog.

Leo looks down at the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, with its picture of some high-tech charging station on the cover, and nods vehemently as if Hollis did just the right thing. Soon they’ll be busy debating what they think of each new gizmo for sale.

“Great, thanks,” Leo says, reaching out for the magazine. “I’ll look at it upstairs.”