Swimming Across the Hudson by Joshua Henkin Page A

silly,” my mother said.
    â€œI’m protecting the family.” I stood on a stool, holding the candle high above me, and when the alarm began to blare, I told Jonathan that we were safe for another week, that God would protect us until the next sabbath.
    â€œGod doesn’t protect us,” my mother said. “The smoke alarm does.”
    â€œYou don’t know anything,” I told her.
    I kept my door open when I went to sleep at night, hoping to hear the smoke alarm. I’d be like my father in World War II, guarding the battalion from death and Hitler, reciting poetry.
    â€œI hate poetry,” Jonathan said after school one day.
    â€œPoetry kept Dad sane during the war.”
    â€œSo what?”
    â€œSo it’s important.” I thought about this when I went to bed that night. Lying beneath the blanket my father had captured, I couldn’t fall asleep. I didn’t want to fight in a war; I lacked my father’s courage.
    â€œI don’t want to die,” I told Jonathan the next day. “I don’t want to get flown back in a body bag.”
    â€œThey’ve got nuclear weapons now. If you die in a war, you’ll get blown to pieces. There won’t be a body to fly back.”
    I imagined my parents during World War II. What was my mother thinking while my father was in combat? How could she have known the danger he faced, this girl who wasn’t yet a teenager, who lay in bed at night listening to the radio for news from the battlefront, who saved her allowance to buy provisions for the soldiers? Maybe those provisions reached my father. I saw him crouched in his foxhole, eating a can of beans my mother had sent him, grateful for her kindness.
    For a while I thought he’d been injured in the war—and that was why my parents couldn’t have children.
    â€œMaybe Dad got his balls blown off,” I told Jonathan.
    â€œHe didn’t get his balls blown off.”
    â€œMaybe he has some kind of disease.” I read about diseases I’d never heard of, and convinced myself I had them. “I have Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
    â€œNo you don’t,” Jonathan said. “Only Lou Gehrig had that disease. That’s why they named it after him.”
    â€œLots of people have Lou Gehrig’s disease. Thousands of people in the United States.”
    People with Lou Gehrig’s disease had trouble swallowing, so in fifth grade I started eating my food without chewing it, in the hope that with practice I could improve my swallowing.
    â€œYou’re a healthy boy,” my mother said. “People with Lou Gehrig’s disease are much older than you.”
    I didn’t believe her. I read about rare neurological conditions, about bacteria-carrying insects, and viruses that existed only in the jungle. And I continued to eat without chewing.
    â€œYou’ll choke,” Jonathan said. “That’s what you’ll die of—asphyxiation.”
    He wasn’t worried about disease, but he was happy to pretend he wasn’t well, if only so we could be a team.
    â€œI have whooping cough,” I said. I stood before my mother and whooped as I coughed.
    â€œI have the mumps,” said Jonathan.
    We knew about the mumps from The Columbia Medical Encyclopedia . People who had the mumps sometimes lost their hearing, so Jonathan pretended he was deaf. “I have to go to special mumps school,” he said.
    â€œI have cervical cancer,” I said. Then I felt bad, because my grandmother had died of cervical cancer; now she was in heaven, looking down at us.
    â€œOnly girls get cervical cancer,” Jonathan said.
    For months after that he pretended I was a girl. “You have breast cancer,” he said.
    â€œNo I don’t.”
    â€œYou need to go to a gynecologist.”
    Mostly we pretended we were sick so my parents would let us stay home from school. They rarely believed us, though. As a boy, my