In Case of Emergency Read Online Free PDF

awake.
    Across the room, in the back of my closet, behind sliding doors thick with too many coats of white paint, a small cardboard box rests on the highest shelf. Each time I move I don’t bother to unpack it; the label just says STUFF in faded black marker. Somewhere in the stratified contents lives a postcard that arrived in the mail when I was twelve years old, Ryan fourteen.
    She’s wearing a Santa hat and khaki shorts, my mother. She has water shoes on. Behind her, looming, the black and red crests of Westwater Canyon, the expansive Colorado sky.
    The postcard arrived two years after she left. Back then, everything was separated into before and after, and Ryan and I still talk in this way sometimes.
    I memorized it a long time ago. Every detail. A matte-finish photograph, sort of a Christmas card, the postcard serves as an advertisement for the river rafting company my mother and her boyfriend, Sergio, operated for over a decade. They probably sent out a hundred of those things; I don’t know why I kept it. The gold cursive along the bottom edge reads: SEASON’S GREETINGS FROM WESTWATER’S DISCOVERY TRIPS ! My mother with her Santa hat, one arm wrapped around the waist of the gangly youthstanding next to her, the other hand holding an oar with a wreath hung on it. She offers it up to the camera like it’s a fish she’s proud to have caught. Sergio is fifteen years her junior and he looks it, standing by her side flashing a peace sign. I hate those fingers, their skyward-facing twin points. That one detail I have fixated on for years.
    At 0402, I decide to go swimming. I dig through drawers until I find my dark blue T-backed swimsuit. Not wanting to wake Marla in the next room, I’m conscious of every amplified sound. Stripping down, I pull over my reluctant body (sluggish legs first, uncoordinated arms next) what feels like a rubber band. But when it snaps into place it feels like home.
    Before Mom left, the thing I wanted most in life was to grow up to be her; I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. My mother’s wavy brown hair hung all the way down to her waist; she had a singsong laugh and always drank out of a bowl-shaped blue mug, whether it was coffee or tea or water or beer. She wore bright, flowing clothing, and I would play dress-up in her hand-me-downs, in skirts and blouses that didn’t move the way my clothes moved, that barely seemed to exist between my fingertips and settled gently on my skin. We read together almost every night, The Phantom Tollbooth, The Happy Prince , but there were also the stories she made up, like the one about the underwater castle a few miles west of Manhattan Beach, so perfectly camouflaged along the Pacific Ocean floor that sailors and scientists had never spotted it. I discovered later that some of the stuff she told me was true—how an octopus grows a new arm if it loses one, how an earthworm has five hearts.
    After she left, Dad could barely look at me and Ryan. He lost himself in long work hours, turned on the television as soon as he got home. Mom called us about every two weeks, then once a month, then once every several months. Her inability to know what to say was obvious in her too-cheerful tone and its shifting lightness. Like a tightrope walker who knew it would be suicide to look down.
    I shut the front door softly, click the deadbolt into place, and leave the key underneath a potted plant. I set off down the hall, passing the other apartments. Marla and I have lived here about eight months. She never uses the heated pool, but I go at least twice a week, either early mornings or late nights. Never this early.
    After Mom left, swimming was instinctual, a survival mechanism. Ten years old and I thought of my gear, that flower-print suit complete with cap and goggles, as a superhero’s outfit. I practiced stances in the mirror. The save-the-world stance was obvious enough: feet spread apart, hands on hips, a determined gaze looking up and past