The Sea of Light by Jenifer Levin Read Free Book Online Page A

not the thing to turn the tide? Isn’t it true that she began to eat again shortly afterward? So maybe we have that mad old witch to thank, Tia Corazón with her candles, her powders, her incantations and her spirits—because, yes, my child began to eat again. And lived.
    Sacrifice. Felipe, how much do you want her life, and how much the treasure she wins? Pick up this card and look. Crown of the heart or of world kings, muy señor mio, you’ll have to choose. Sacrifice. Your house disappears like wind. Bastante. Excess of the body. She’s trying to turn into air now. For sacrifice. Take the egg in your hand, my child, it’s enough struggle. Eat. Eat. Drive out the death in your heart, and eat.
    She lit candles, eyes rolled up into her head, the feathers spread across my daughter’s chest sprayed with warm red droplets. Calling on the Seven Powers.
    That mad old witch.
    I stared into candle flames and saw them: the hearts for sacrifice, raw, soaked with life. Smoke singed tears from my eyes. They ran down onto my fingers, and when I held the fingers up against flame and shadow the drops were thick crimson, staining my face and hands. Then the thick dark stain turned to gold in front of me, burned pure and clear by the shimmering, flickering light.
    *
    It’s what I’ve waited to hear: hum of a car, methodical crunch of a garage door closing. Rubber soles on cement. Then the sure scrape of keys against a doorknob, driveway lights switched off, and I am already down the stairs.
    She sits on the living room sofa with a single lamp on. Ankle on knee, arms stretched wide, easily, she looks relaxed and then sees me and starts a little, flashing a tense smile.
    “Hi.”
    “Went for a drive today?”
    “I had some things to do.” In the lamplight her face looks colorless, bloated.
    Beneath this pale puffiness the face is young, big tired eyes and a child’s lips. When I sit opposite her the eyes shift anxiously. I wiggle bare toes against my carpet. Look down and for a second find them very ugly, misshapen and unfamiliar, as if they’re monstrous digits belonging to someone else. My words sound lame.
    “Rough day?”
    “I don’t know. I drove up to see this coach at State.”
    Calmate. Not too many questions. They said it at the hospital, Let her lead the way, do not force anything, express your interest but above all do not pry, and I wanted to ask how would it be possible to achieve all these attitudes simultaneously? but in the end was embarrassed to say it.
    Now I say instead, very cautiously, “I didn’t know you were in touch with anyone—I mean, anyone like that.”
    “I applied late. A little while ago. I had to get some records and stuff—and I had to have some things sent. There was this mess with papers, sort of, because I still have more than two years of eligibility left.”
    Postage, application fees, letters requesting recommendations and records—I’d have been glad to help her. But she has done it herself without asking anybody else and now, though afraid in some way I expected to be, resentful in another way I did not think I could be, I am also proud.
    “You know,” I breathe, “you don’t have to—”
    “Brenna Allen—she’s got a pretty good program there. It’s Division Two. But she said they’d get some money—”
    “You know you don’t have to worry about the money. You know it doesn’t matter to me—I can take care of it all.”
    “Yeah, but you don’t have to.”
    I watch her eyes in the dim light, a kind of sorrow grips them until they meet mine, large, dark, hurting.
    “I mean that you don’t have to compete if you don’t want to. Or even swim any more. That’s not important to me.”
    “I know, Dad.” She leans forward, natural and calm for a moment. “Look, let’s just see. I don’t have any idea how things will be with me, really. I don’t even know what I want these days, to tell you the truth. But I liked her—the coach up there—I liked her a lot.