How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer

anymore,” I say. “All that good pain medicine.”
    “Too bad about the cast. I really mean it. They itch something awful.”
    Great.
    “Now, can I ask you one question, Aïda?” I say.
    “One.” She lifts her cup and grins at her sneakers.
    “What was all that malarkey about your mother? I mean, for God’s sake.”
    There’s a long silence. Her lips move slightly as if she’s about to answer, but no words come. She sets the cup down and begins to twist her hands, thin bags of bones, against each other. The knuckles crack. “I don’t know,” she says finally. “It was just something to say.”
    “It wasn’t just something to say. You broke into the house. And you made Joseph go with you.”
    “I didn’t make him do anything.” She frowns. “He could have stayed behind with you.”
    “You sorcered him, Aïda. You knew you were doing it.”
    Aïda picks up her tiny spoon and stirs the espresso, her eyes becoming serious and downcast. “I did look up my actual mother once,” she says.
    The admission startles me. I sit up in the iron chair. “When?”
    “Last year. After the accident. I imagined dying without ever knowing her, and that was too scary. I didn’t tell my dad about it because, you know, he wants me to see him as
both
parents.”
    “But how did you find her?”
    “There was a government agency. France has tons of them, they’re so socialized. A man helped me locate a file, and there she was—I mean, her name and information about her. Her parents’ address in Rouen. My grandparents, can you believe it?”
    I imagine a white-haired lady somewhere on an apple farm, wondering to whom the high, clear voice on the phone could belong. It sounds like the voice of a ghost, a child she had who died when she was twelve. She answers the girl’s questions with fear in her chest. Does a phone call from a spirit mean that one is close to death?
    “They gave me her phone number and address. She was living in Aix-en-Provence. I took a bus there and stood outside her apartment building for hours, and when it rained I stood in someone’s vestibule. I didn’t even know which window was hers. It’s just as well, I guess. She wouldn’t have wanted to see me anyhow.”
    I don’t want to believe this story. It seems designed to make me pity her. Yet there’s an embarrassment in her face that suddenly makes her look very young, like a child who has admitted to a misdeed. “Are you going to try again?” I ask.
    “Maybe sometime. Maybe after my career.”
    “That might be a long time.”
    “Probably not,” she says, her eyes set on something in the distance. “I’ll have a few good years, and I’d better make enough money to retire on. I don’t know what other job I could do.”
    I consider this. “So what will you do with yourself afterward?”
    “I don’t know. Go to Morocco with my father. Have kids. Whatever people do.”
    I think of those pictures of my uncle in couture evening gowns, his skin milky, his waist slender as a girl’s. His graceful fingers hold roses or railings or billets-doux; his hair hangs long and thick, a shiny mass down his back. He now wears turtlenecks and horn-rimmed glasses; there are veins on the backs of his hands, and his beautiful hair is gone. I wonder if such a thing can happen to Aïda. She seems eternal, the exception to a rule. Can she really be mortal? Even when she fell off the bridge and chanted fever songs I knew she would survive to see international fame. In the glossy pages of Signora Cellini’s magazines and those of women all over the world, she will never, never change.
    But here on the sidewalk at the café she bites a hangnail and looks again at my foot. “We should get you home,” she says. “You need some rest.” I wonder if she will survive what will happen to her. I wonder if she will live to meet her mother. There are many things I would ask her if only we liked each other better.
    One afternoon, perhaps a month after Aïda’s