Part Five: Swimming Lessons

Fin's teacher, Mrs. Jones, had just taught the class the meaning of the word "irony" last Monday. But as she stood on the wide white porch of Thomas Chickering's house, Fin couldn't quite remember what it meant.
She stared at the door, but couldn't make herself move. They had a big brass knocker in the shape of a smiling sun. The longer she looked at its smiling face, the creepier it seemed. But she still didn't budge. Instead, she thought of her first meeting with Thomas. She remember the strange warmth of the February air, the powerful new watch on her wrist, the shock of blond hair dripping and heavy from river water. She remembered telling him he shouldn't play in the water unsupervised. She remembered him ignoring her advice. And now, as she lifted the heavy knocker and banged on the door three times, she remembered that if you ever found yourself smack in the middle of irony, it usually meant you'd feel pretty silly afterwards.

Thomas opened the door with a tennis racket in one hand and a bag of marshmallows in the other. They stared at each other without speaking. Fin felt the eyes of the smiling sun boring into her over Thomas' right shoulder. Finally, when she couldn't stand it any longer, she spoke.

"You've got to teach me how to swim." She said breaking her own advice. She wasn't sure what the protocol was for making up with a friend after a fight as she'd never had a fight with anyone other than her mother and she'd never had a friend at all. She didn't know if Thomas would yell at her or slam the door in her face and she wasn't really sure who should say they were sorry in the first place.

"Awesome." Thomas said and stepped back so she could move into a big hallway where white spiral stairs rose up and disappeared into the ceiling above.

She followed him past the stairs and into a huge kitchen at the back of the house. All the surfaces from the floors to the counter-tops to the silver ceiling lights shone. It was so clean that it took Fin a minute to realize that the entire back of the house was windows. She had thought it was missing a wall and would have walked straight into the glass if Thomas hadn't caught her by the back of the shirt. Fin walked very carefully after that.

The more and more Fin looked around, the more amazed she became. All the floors were wooden and covered in big soft rugs with crazy zigzag prints on them and all the walls were so white, Fin was afraid to touch them for fear of leaving a fingerprint. She couldn't believe people actually lived here. Her whole apartment would fit in the kitchen. It was the kind of house that made you feel you ought to tiptoe.

She followed Thomas up the winding stairs until she got dizzy. At the very top was a narrow door and through this door was Thomas' room. It was the only room that wasn't white. It was a brilliant blue like the summer sky. Fin recognized it at once. It was the same color as her room.

"Did my mom...?"

"Yeah." Thomas said.

Fin tried not to get jealous. It was strange seeing traces of Miss Maggie in somebody else's house.

Thomas dropped the tennis racket and marshmallows next to the bed. Fin noticed bits of sticky white marshmallow goo stuck to the strings and wondered what exactly he had been doing before she knocked.

Just at that moment, Fin heard what sounded like shouts from some other part of the house. As she listened more carefully, two voices rose and rose to a pitch that sounded almost like a scream. She was about to asked Thomas, but he had grabbed another bag from underneath the bed and was pulling her through the door and down the stairs so fast that she was afraid she might fall. The voices were so loud when they reached the main floor, that she was sure Thomas would stop to investigate, but he just marched back to the kitchen and through another door that Fin had not noticed before. This door led to a set of stone steps reaching down into a lower part of the house.

They slowed down once Thomas had shut the door behind them and the voices began to fade. Despite herself, Fin began to get scared. It was cooler as they traveled deeper underground and the light was dim. When they reached the bottom of the steps, Thomas flipped a switch on the wall and all at once the room began to glow. Light flickered off the ceiling and the walls and Fin smiled and gasped at the same time. She was standing at the edge of an emerald pool. She could see the lights under the water and bright blue tiles that formed a big "C" in the middle of the pool.

"You have a pool in your house?!" It wasn't really a question or a statement. Even when she said it, Fin couldn't believe that it was true. She marveled at the sound of her voice echoing off the walls and water. Thomas broke into a huge grin and began pulling goggles and floaties and flippers out of his bag. In all the excitement, Fin had actually forgotten that she was going to have swim. She felt a solid pit of ice in the center of her stomach as Thomas rolled up his jeans and walked down the first two steps into the water.

Fin knew most kids her age already knew how to swim, but somehow eight summers had passed and she had never gone to the YMCA with the other kids or even waded in the river with her mother on warm evenings when she met her after work. She didn't like the idea of not being able to reach the bottom or hold on to something solid. She had dreams of falling under and not being able to reach the top again.

Thomas held out a hand and suddenly she couldn't swallow. "Ellar said I have to choose to sink or swim. He said we can't go on adventures with him if I don't." Part of her wanted Thomas to say that it didn't matter--that there would be other talking animals with other adventures that didn't require such scary tactics. But she knew deep down that the only adventure worth taking is the scary kind. So she took off her t-shirt and jeans to reveal a bright yellow swimsuit with ladybugs and she took a deep breath, grabbed a floaty and stepped in the water.

It was warmer than she had imagined. And the green glow of the underwater light was soothing. She held Thomas' hand and moved down another step so that she was even with him and the water reached her knees.

"I don't think I can do this."

"Of course you can."

"I don't like water."

"I don't usually like girls, but you turned out alright." Thomas said. He laughed and moved down another step.

"Well, I don't usually like the people my mom works for, but your parents must be okay if they've got such a cool house." Fin said, stepping down so that the water was up to her shoulders and her arms rose to the top because of the plastic floaties around her wrists. This was the deepest she had ever been.

"Yeah, well houses aren't everything." Thomas said, releasing her hand so quickly that Fin lost her balance and slipped off the last step. Her head went under and everything was dark. Water went up her nose and down her throat and she couldn't feel anything but water all around her until a hand reached down and jerked her upwards. She crawled up the steps and lay coughing and spitting on the concrete edge of the pool.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry! I'd didn't mean to move so fast!" Thomas lay on his stomach next to her. His face just inches from hers. His brown eyes were so close that Fin could see little yellow flecks around the pupils. She didn't move. She didn't even blink. She could only think about the solid ground beneath her.

"Fin," Thomas said after a long while, "are you okay?"

She closed her eyes and nodded, her chin scraping the concrete. With her ear to the ground she could hear the water lapping against the edge of the pool. "I've got to remember to close me eyes and hold my nose next time." She said and smiled and opened her eyes. Thomas still looked worried.

"Sink or swim? Right?" She said and got slowly to her feet. Thomas followed.

"Sink or swim." He repeated.

Part Four: Sink or Swim?

When Miss Maggie arrived home that evening at 6:53 after cleaning her very last house, Fin pretended to be asleep. She didn't want tell her mother about Ellar anymore. She decided it was a secret that she would share with no one but herself. After all, only she knew the proper way to summon him. Thomas had been a gamble, like faking sick. Sometimes you landed a free day off school and sometimes you landed in the doctor's office.

The next afternoon found Fin with her knees in the muddy bank, whispering over and over again, "Ellar, Ellar please come back. This is Findley Swain inviting you for a visit." At 4:13 exactly, a silver fish somersaulted over Fin's head before making a neat jackknife back into the water.

"Good afternoon, Miss Swain." Ellar spoke with his mouth only partly above the water's surface so that little air bubbles accompanied his words.

"Good afternoon, Ellar the fish." Fin said, scrambling up to make a sort of bow. Fin remembered that Ellar was the kind of fish who required a certain degree of etiquette.

"Where is the other human? The boy?"

"He, uh, won't be coming back to the river." Fin studied her grimy hands.

"What do you mean he won't be coming back?" Something about the way Ellar asked this particular question made Fin pictured her first grade teacher, Mr. Winston. He was a stooped man with tufts of graying hair at his temples and no where else. He wore a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that were always slipping down his nose when he looked down at you.

"Thomas Chickering is no friend of mine." Said Fin a little too loudly. She didn't like the idea that a fish could bully her.

"My dear girl, I am the one that summoned the lad and I will be the one to decide if he returns. Really! I don't understand how..." The rest of the speech was lost in a myriad of bubbles. Ellar had gotten so worked up that he slipped completely below the surface. In fact, he was under for so long, that Fin began to walk away with the idea that he might be calmer tomorrow.

"No matter, no matter." She heard from behind her. "Can't all fit together just so at the beginning." Ellar was saying. "All journeys have their bends in the road."

At the word "journey," Fin scurried back to the water's edge. "What journey? Where'm I going?"

"You mean where are you AND Thomas going, my dear. And that will become clear when you can answer this simple question: sink or swim?"

Fin paused for a long while. She was afraid of the answer. "You asked Thomas that one before." She said, stalling for time. Ellar merely nodded, the low sun throwing a glint of rainbow colors from his scales. "Well nobody wants to sink," Fin said finally, shuddering at the image of dark and swirling waters, "so if I had to choose between the two, I'd say 'swim.'"

"Right you are. Knew I'd picked you for a reason." Ellar nodded his approval. "So tomorrow at 4:13 you will bring Thomas and we three shall swim towards the beginning of our adventure." He spoke these last words with the same tone that the preacher used during the benediction at church and then began to disappear below the water once more.

"Wait!" Fin shouted in a panic. Ellar stopped his descent but did not re-emerge. Fin knew before she spoke that her next words would cause the loss of a second friend in two days. "I--I can't swim."

Ellar only paused for a beat before replying, "Can't and shan't are two very different animals, my dear." Then she watched as he disappeared completely. She was fairly certain that the sea of bubbles dissolving in his wake was laughter.

Fin stood and began rubbing the muck off her corduroy pants with a handful of leaves. A shudder passed over her as she pictured the dark depths of the winding river, teeming with all things slimy and slick. On her walk home she wondered to herself: why can't you learn life lessons without getting wet?

Part Three: Miss Maggie's Maid Service

Fin spent the entire next day searching the halls for Thomas. In fact she spent so much time looking for him instead of where she was going that she ran into a door on her way to P.E. She wasn't particularly surprised when she found herself flat on her back in the hallway. She'd run into doors, trashcans, even the side of a car once. She was always too busy looking at funny-shaped clouds and passersby to think about her own two feet.

The great thing about running into things at school is that the nurse sends you home early. On this particular day at 1:17 in the afternoon, Fin found herself walking past her own apartment and following the river towards Glenwood Downs, the ritzy neighborhood where her mother cleaned on Tuesdays. Fin had wanted to tell her mother, Miss Maggie, all about Ellar last night, but wasn't sure she was supposed to. She'd never had a friend before, and thus never someone to share a secret with, and she had wanted to check with Thomas first. But now, as she steered herself through the rod-iron gates and made a left onto Willowbrook Road, she decided she couldn't wait any longer.

She had never actually been to one of the houses her where her mother worked. She was always too afraid she'd run into one of her classmates. But today she walked towards house number 503 with confidence because everyone she knew was still in school.

Despite her bravery, she still had to stop and catch her breath when she came upon the house. "House" was actually the wrong term. Words like "mansion" and "castle" floated through her brain. It towered over nearby houses like a great old oak among saplings. It was blindingly white with a wrap-around porch AND a wrap-around balcony. Fin felt like she'd stepped back in time to the real old south where people had iced tea brought to them on silver trays by servants. As she walked down the cobbled driveway towards her mother's rusting Honda, she realize her mother would have been the one serving that iced tea. Suddenly, she wanted to go home to the little apartment that was really the second floor of a house owned by two spinster sisters who played cards and gossiped about their church friends on the front stoop.

"Findley! What are you doing here?" Miss Maggie said as she walked towards the car with a bucket and mop.

"I-I ran into a door at school and the nurse sent me home."

"Oh, not again. Remember, 'eyes on the road at all times'." Miss Maggie said, smiling. "Are you okay?"

"Yes. I just-just came to tell you something." Fin wanted more than anything to get out of the shadow of the house. She couldn't explain it, but she felt like she was being watched...like the windows were giant eyes.

"What is it dear?"

Fin was having second thoughts. Maybe this WAS a secret and she SHOULD wait for Thomas. And then the unimaginable happened. A wooden gate in the hedge that bordered the gardens in the back opened and a blond curly head emerged.

"My mom wanted me to give you this before you left." Thomas said, handing Miss Maggie a check, discretely folded in half. It was at this moment that he turned and saw Fin. She watched through slitted eyes as he dropped his head.

"Thomas, this is my daughter, Findley. Findley, say hello to Thomas Chickering."

"Hello."

"Hello."

He had not looked up. If he had, Fin might have punched him. She didn't even care that her mother was there.

"Oh, I forgot the Pledge. I'll be right back, dear, and then we'll go home." Miss Maggie said as she walked briskly towards the gate that Thomas had just come through.

"You knew."

"Yeah."

"You knew my mom was your cleaning lady and you never said anything."

"Yeah." He still hadn't looked up from his sneakers.

"So is that why I couldn't find you at school today? Were you hiding?" Fin said, spitting out the last words. Her hands were tight fists.

"Ummm, no. I go to St. Andrews Academy and we're out today for teacher meetings."

"You go to private school." Fin said, more to herself than him. She was quickly re-assembling the picture of Thomas in her brain. She couldn't believe she had loaned him her watch. He probably had millions of watches in his palace.

In the long silence, Thomas had finally looked up at her. "I was going to tell you yesterday, but I got mad about the fish and forgot."

"You forgot?!" Fin said, already turning and marching down the driveway. "Well I was going to tell you what Ellar the fish told me yesterday, but now I forget." She looked back to see Thomas' mouth fall open. She yelled, "Tell my mom I'll meet her at home!"

And with that she broke into a run and didn't slow down until she hit the dirt path by the river. She stopped only long enough to shout into the sapphire waters, "Ellar, if you can hear me, I can't meet you today. I'm sick and have to go home now!" She didn't really care if he heard her or not, but she knew he liked politeness and would get mad if she missed their appointment without telling him first. It wasn't his fault Thomas was a traitor.

Now that she had stopped running, she began to shiver. She remembered she had left her jacket at school. As she mounted the steps on the side of the house that led to their second floor apartment, Fin decided that if there was a lesson to be learned from today's events, she didn't want the hear it.

Part Two: Gone Fishing

The next afternoon at exactly 4:13 Fin sat down on the bank of the Harpeth with a peanut butter and banana sandwich. It was one of those cheery days when the sun is out and the sounds of crickets and birds and wind in the trees make it feel like summer instead of February. Fin wasn't sure but she felt there might be magic in the air.

It wasn't until Fin sat chewing her last bite of sandwich that she began to worry that Thomas would not come. She had never made plans with a friend before and did not know that her promptness was unusual. However, her worries soon ended when she heard a whistling tune and turned to see Thomas' shock of blond curly hair covered in a straw hat. He was carrying an armful of wire hangers and a brown paper grocery bag. Fin ran to help him.

"What's all this?" Fin asked.

"If we're going to catch a fish, we have to have poles. That's what the hangers are for. And if we're going to use fishing poles, we have to have bait and that's what's in the bag." Thomas said. Fin watched as he unpacked items one by one.

- a ball of string
- worms in a jar
- a handful of jelly beans
- a bag of Cheetos


"Why're you wearing that silly looking hat?" Fin asked rather grumpily. All this time she had been looking for a sign of her watch and began to wonder if he had lost it. If a friend was someone who was going to be late and lose your stuff, Fin wasn't sure she wanted one.

Thomas was now busy straitening the wire hangers and didn't notice that Fin was angry. "Hasn't your mom ever read the Tom Sawyer book to you? He always wore a straw hat when he fished."

Fin's mother always made up her own stories at bedtime and until this moment, Fin had not found it strange. She sat down with her back to him and felt like crying.

"Here, I brought one for you too," he said, tossing both a hat and her watch into her lap. This was the first present Fin had ever received and so she put it on solemnly and forgot every bad thing she had just thought about Thomas Chickering.

They tied one end of the string to the unbent hangers and then tied worms to the other end. Once they had plopped them into the river, they sat on the bank with their arms on their knees.

After a good long while of watching the worms bob along in the current, Thomas turned to Fin and said, "Maybe we should try the jelly beans. A talking fish might want something sweeter."

Fin who had been listening to the birds and the crickets and the wind again, had actually forgotten about the fish altogether. But she quickly pulled in her string and helped him tie the slippery beans to the end.

They settled down once more with the bag of Cheetos between them and waited and waited and waited...

As the setting sun began to turn the sky the same orange-y color as their fingertips, Fin said, "Maybe he was just passing through?" She felt bad for Thomas who looked very sad that he hadn't caught his fish and was bending his hanger into a mean-looking knot.

"Maybe we could try again tomorrow?" She said, hopefully. But Thomas did not answer. He was jamming everything back in the bag, even his straw hat.

"I can't tomorrow." And without another word, Thomas marched into the fading sun, leaving Fin alone with her new hat and wet hanger.

It was the second time today that she felt like crying. Now that it was getting darker, the noises of the crickets and the birds and the breeze was starting to sound scary. As Fin slowly got to her feet, she heard a splash....then another like a hand slapping water.

Ker-splash, ker-splash, ker-splash.

Fin tip-toed to the edge of the bank and peered into the darkening river.

At first the water was as flat and still as a lake, and then...ker-splash! A shimmering silver fish jumped out of the water in a beautiful arch before diving beneath the smooth surface.

"Wait!" Fin shouted, afraid that the magical fish would leave again. A silver head appeared down stream.

"Ellar the fish, at your service, madam."

"Y...you do talk." Fin stuttered and then fell into silence.

"The polite response would be to introduce yourself, young lady." Ellar replied.

"Oh, sorry. My name's Findley Swain. Nice to meet you."

"Likewise." She couldn't be sure but she thought she saw a tiny fin wave in her direction. "Unfortunately, darkness has caught us and I must go. Shall we say tomorrow, 4:13?"

"Wait! But why didn't you come earlier? We've been waiting all afternoon." Fin said, wishing Thomas could see this.

"Young lady, when you want to catch a fish for dinner, use a pole. When you want to catch a fish for conversation, use your manners. We like an invitation, you know." And with that he turned tail and swam off, mumbling something that sounded like, "No manners...no manners at all."

And so as Fin walked home that night at 5:47, she thought about her first lesson in dealing with talking animals: treat them like your friends, not your food.

Part One: The Right Timing

It wasn't long ago that Findley Swain learned how to read a clock. Her mother, Miss Maggie to the people whose houses she cleaned, had taught her one cold January night when she was sick with a fever. She remembered that the long hand was the minutes and the short hand was the hours. She liked the idea of a clock. That it would always tell you what was supposed to be going on in the world at any time of the day. For instance, if both hands pointed straight up, it was time for lunch or if both hands pointed straight down it was time for dinner.

Fin loved her new talent and began to search for clocks around town. She found one above the sliding doors at the grocery store and above the stove in her own apartment and to her surprise there was one in EVERY SINGLE classroom at her elementary school.

Because of the new wristwatch her mother gave her for her birthday, Fin knew it was exactly 4:13 in the afternoon when she saw Thomas Chickering lying on his stomach on the bank of the Harpeth with his head underwater.

She ran and dragged him out by grabbing hold of the straps of his Crocs and pulling as hard as she could. She was small for an eight-year old, but managed to pull the curly-headed boy a good three feet.

"What do you think you're doing?" Thomas asked with a face dripping with water.

"Saving your life." Fin said.

"Well don't." Thomas said, without looking at Fin.

"You don't have to be so mean. Don't you know you're not supposed to be playing in water without a grownup?"

Thomas did not answer. He just got up and started walking back toward the playground behind the school. Fin was about to turn back and follow the path next to the river that led her home, but Thomas had turned around again.

"Did you hear it?" He asked.

"Hear what?" Fin said, glad he was talking to her again. She didn't have many friends because her mom cleaned most of the other kids' houses.

"The, uh, well...the fish."

Fin paused to think about it. "I don't know. What does a fish sound like?"

"I don't know what most fish sound like, but this one definitely talked." Neither Fin nor Thomas thought this was strange.

"What did it say?"

"I think it's a he and he said: 'sink or swim'."

"What the heck does that mean?"

"I dunno."

Fin and Thomas stood there for a long time without talking and thinking of all the possible answers to this mystery, but both were too shy to share their guesses.

Finally, Fin cleared her throat and said, "It's 4:47 and I have to be home by 5 or my mom starts to worry."

"Okay." Thomas said, but still neither one moved.

"I think we should meet back here tomorrow at the exact same time to see if we can hear it...him...again." Fin said, hoping Thomas would agree so she could talk to him again. She didn't really care so much about the fish.

"How am I supposed to know what time it is so I know what time to meet you?" Thomas said.

After a very very very very long pause, Fin undid the Velcro strap of her new watch and handed it to Thomas. "Here, we can trade off."

And with that they made a plan to find the fish the very next day so they could have a good long chat with him.

As Fin walked home, she thought a little about solving the mystery of "sink or swim", but mostly she thought about her new friend and about how giving time away was really the best way to spend it.

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(coming tomorrow) Part Two: "Gone Fishing"