The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin

park. Celeste was not a delicate eater. Her nose moved together with her mouth in a grasping motion, and the food vanished quickly. I loved the quick motion of her eyes. I loved her long legs with their loping, circular movement like she was riding a bicycle. I loved her smell of musk and clean, fresh grass and even the dry, perfectly shaped pellets of dung that sat in tidy piles around her pen.

      Joe loved Celeste, too. For weeks we studied her. We determined what she liked best to eat, where she most enjoyed a scratch, when she was most amenable to a cuddle, and when she preferred to play. Joe liked to feed her long blades of grass, the ends disappearing smoothly into her mouth as though she slurped spaghetti.

      We doted on Celeste for one month, maybe two, and then she vanished. When I arrived one morning to feed her as I always did, her pen was empty. It was August, the days slow to start, humidity thick as fudge. Joe helped me search the bushes in the yard and took me down the street, calling “Celeste! Celeste!” until the dew burned off and we were both sweaty, pink-faced, still wearing our pajamas.

      I wept as Joe carried me home.

      “Fiona, listen,” Joe said. “Celeste had to go back to live with her rabbit brothers and sisters.” He set me down in the front yard. My tears had wet his pajama top. Stripes of snot glistened on his shoulder.

      “Really?” I said. I hadn’t considered this possibility.

      “Have you ever heard the term ‘reproduce like rabbits’?” said Joe. “All rabbits have so many brothers and sisters! The most of any species.” Joe was eight and wise in every single way.

      I stopped crying. I believed my brother. All at once I felt ashamed for keeping Celeste imprisoned for so many weeks. I was glad that now she had returned home. It would be a terrible thing, I thought, to be separated from your siblings.

      * * *

      MY GRIEF FOR Celeste lasted exactly five days. Then Joe brought me to the pond.

      It was another hot, sticky morning, and I lay on the couch reading War of the Worlds and imagining where I would hide from an alien invasion. I was a precocious and prolific reader, often stealing Renee’s books or ones from the cardboard boxes we had yet to unpack, generally preferring to exist within my own made-up world rather than the real one that surrounded me.

      “Come here,” Joe said, standing in the doorway. “I want to show you something.”

      I narrowed my eyes, examining his face, and then put the book down.

      He led me along the sidewalk, through a neighbor’s backyard, over a low fence, and down a steep, wooded hill. The going was rough—no real path, heavy vegetation, and fallen tree trunks. Shifting spots of sun played with my eyes, and I tripped and fell. Joe helped me up, then swung me onto his shoulders, and I rode like this down the hill, ducking sharp branches, holding tight with my legs around his shoulders, my arms around his neck.

      Finally the woods thinned, and Joe lifted me down. Before us was a shallow, sun-speckled brook that twisted through the trees.

      “Ta-da!” Joe said, as though he were a magician and this his finest trick. It was cool here, calm, the water talking quietly to itself, the fizz of dragonflies and the airy whine of mosquitoes.

      “Let’s stay,” I said.

      For the next few hours, we played on the rocks beside the brook. We did not speak. We threw stones. We crouched and watched the spindly-legged water bugs skitter across the surface. We fashioned fishing poles from sticks and bits of long grass tied to the ends, but we had no bait and the quick, darting minnows ignored our efforts, instead flashing silver as they poked and picked algae from the rocks like housewives choosing melons. We walked downstream, the brook widening as it went. The sound of rushing water grew louder, and then the woods cleared and before us shimmered a small green pond set like a jewel amid the trees and the long cattails. On the far side was a dam with water rushing beyond it in turbulent free fall.

      Duck grass and bunches of loosestrife grew along the perimeter, lily pads, too, with their hand-size leaves and stiff flowers like divination rods. There was a low grassy bank, perfect for sitting, and a small beach area of gray sand and pebbles. No one else was here, but I saw evidence of activity: a battered little rowboat overturned on the grass, a crushed soda can, a few orange cigarette butts, one marked with the dull red of lipstick. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever seen.

      “Joe!” I called. “Can we go in?”

      Joe didn’t answer, just pulled off his shirt and jumped from the bank into the water. I stripped off my sundress and tiptoed across the sand. My feet, ankles, knees, thighs entered the water, and the cold advanced with an excruciating certainty that was lovely and painful all at once. Beyond the narrow strip of sand, the bottom of the pond was thick with mud and slime. I felt it squirt between my toes, my feet sinking deeper with each step. The cold clutched at my hips, my stomach, my bare chest, and it was only then I remembered that I could not swim.

      My feet lost their grip on the slippery bottom. My head slid under smoothly, silently. My mind registered only surprise: at the cold, at the heavy silence, at the quality of the underwater light—green and glancing gold—and the fine algae that drifted like mossy snowflakes in the water. I waved my arms, and the algae spun crazily, an explosion of green particles unburdened by gravity. In the distance I made out the bulging eyes and long, spiked mustache of a catfish.

      I wanted to stay here. It was beautiful and strange in a way that the gray house and our new life were not. That life was only strange, only coarse and dirty. Underwater in the pond was the first time I felt wonder.

      And then Joe’s strong hand gripped my shoulder and he hauled me up out of the gold and out of the wonder. I inhaled, and the cold water invaded me. I thought I’d swallowed a minnow, a whole school of minnows, and their sharp silver bodies cut deeply into the interior spaces of my nose and chest.

      “Fiona!” Joe cried. I coughed and sputtered as Joe pulled me onto the grass. I lay on the bank heaving and then vomited in one satisfying, emptying gasp.

      The look on Joe’s face was terrible. “Fi, are you okay? I’m so sorry. This was so stupid. So stupid. Noni never taught you to swim, did she?” He hit his forehead with his hand.

      “I’m okay.” My voice was a rough croak. I cleared it and repeated, “Joe, I’m okay.” It felt odd, me reassuring Joe who so often reassured me. The pain in my chest expanded at the sight of my brother in such distress. “Joe, you saved me,” I said.

      Joe had already started to grow into himself. In one short season, he’d become a standout on his Little League team. His hands were huge, his feet huge, too, his shoulders skinny and boyish but broad, his waist narrow. He was shaped like a kite trailing streamers of pond water as he stood above me. He looked at me with his dark blue eyes and slicked-back hair, and his face transformed into a sort of relief.

      “Save you?” he said. “I guess I did.” And Joe smiled.

      * * *

      THAT SUMMER JOE taught me how to swim. Every day we walked to the pond with towels and swimsuits and sandwiches. We started slowly, Joe’s hands on the small of my back, my arms circling, legs kicking up a flurry of water as I struggled to suspend myself. It took one week, and then I was floating on my back without assistance, my arms outstretched like the points of a star, hair spread around me.

      “Next, dog-paddle,” Joe directed, and I knew that he was proud of me. I was not a quick study. I did not take easily to physical activity and was disposed to fall back on complaints of a sprained ankle, a shortness of breath.

      One of the many miracles of the pond was that here, in the water, my physical self disappeared. The feeling was delicious. As I tilted my head back atop the surface of the water, a cold rushing filled my ears and I became weightless. This was a sensation I would remember some twenty years later, when I at last would lose the weight that since childhood had circled my body like a sleeping python. Unencumbered is the word I would use in poems to describe it. And also: Untethered. Unrestricted. Expansive. Free. I felt it first in the