Bats or Swallows by Teri Vlassopoulos Page B

time I caught her was in the kitchen at breakfast, and I had no idea what to say, so I asked her what was wrong, even though I knew.
“Zoe,” she said. “Do you know that your name means life?” I shook my head. “Your father picked it. Your grandmother was so mad when he didn’t name you after her. He’d promised he was going to.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said. But I did. My father loved this story, and would tell it to me often. Normally I’d cut him off, bored by my familiarity with the anecdote, but this time, my mother telling me the story and looking so sad, I pretended I didn’t know, that it was the first time I’d ever heard it.
In the pool, I closed my eyes and wondered if I could fall asleep like this, in the water, on my back. I probably could. Maybe I could spend the night here, my mother asleep upstairs in her hotel room, Hugo in his apartment, Susie with the dorm room to herself for the hundredth night in a row. The water was warm. At that moment, it seemed inconceivable that anyone could die like this. Bodies float. You don’t even have to try too hard; your body fat does it for you. I imagined my father floating in the sea on his back and looking up at the sky. Maybe in his last moments he didn’t struggle or choke; maybe he was just carried away.
Eventually I got cold and annoyed in the pool, so I got out of the water and shimmied back into my clothes, wringing out my wet bra and underwear and stuffing them at the bottom of my bag. I took the bus to Hugo’s, let myself in and hoped that he wouldn’t be home either. But there he was, working on a painting, and he didn’t apologize for not coming.
Hugo and I didn’t break up until weeks later, but after the weekend my mother visited, things weren’t the same. I was still staying at his place, but not as often, and sometimes he would outright ask me to leave. Finally, one afternoon as I sat on his couch watching him paint, he stopped, sat down next to me and told me that he thought it would be better for us if we didn’t stay together.
“What?” I asked. When Marie was struck by the horse, she didn’t die right away. She was still breathing when the ambulance arrived and kept breathing for a few hours more. The doctors couldn’t control the swelling of her brain and one by one her organs started shutting down. When Hugo broke up with me, I thought first of little Marie lying in the hospital, her life slowly extinguishing. We’d talked so much about her and I wanted to keep talking about her.
“I’m sorry, Zoe,” he said and gently patted the top of my head. “I think we need time apart. Things happened so quickly.”
I understood what he was saying. I had become aware of it while I waited for him with my mother, but the problem was that I felt like I had too much love for him, that it had somehow exploded into a poofy atomic bomb mushroom cloud when I wasn’t looking.
    When I made it back to my dorm room, I was sheepish and heartbroken. Susie was there and I saw a fleeting look of irritation when she saw me slink in, but when I started crying she softened. I’d almost forgotten the way people treat you when something bad has happened. Tentatively. She took me out and we drank slightly better beer and for a few hours we played the role of girlfriends, laughing and close. She hugged me when I cried again when we walked home.
“What are you going to do now?” Susie asked softly from her bed after we’d returned, as if it wasn’t an option to return permanently to our shared room anymore. She didn’t mean it as if she were kicking me out, but she’d also gotten used to me being away so much.
“Maybe or a few days,” I said.
I had classes in the morning, but the thought of leaving was suddenly appealing, so I simply left. I left a note for Susie on her bed. I’d misread the bus schedule and arrived at the station three hours early. Hugo’s was the only number I had memorized, so I called him while I waited. We hadn’t