Page 127 of Curvy Girl Summer

We didn’t say anything for most of the trip. I didn’t even turn on the radio. In the quiet that filled the car, I couldn’t help but wonder how he was really feeling. I wanted to ask, but I also knew how it felt to not want to or know how to process when you’re in the midst of it.

“It was hard for me to go swimming after my sister died,” I told him, interrupting the silence that had settled around us. “My sister loved the water. We were out on the boat every other weekend growing up. After she got too pregnant to feel like making the drive to the beach, she got her water fix at home. My sister and her husband had a house with a heated pool in the backyard. She swam every day, twice a day, to keep in shape. And one day… she overdid it.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss, Aaliyah,” he responded quietly.

“Yeah, thank you. This happened five years ago, so…”

“But still.”

I glanced over at him and nodded. “Yeah.”

We were both quiet for a moment.

“She drowned?” he uttered.

I shook my head. “She got out of the pool a little earlier thanusual because she didn’t feel well. She had sent her husband a text message to let him know. When he got home, he found her collapsed on the floor in the hallway.”

I felt his eyes boring into the side of my face as I drove. Keeping my eyes on the road, I pushed myself to continue.

“Apparently, she had a fatal arrhythmia,” I continued.

“Oh, wow.”

“Yeah. She had an underlying heart condition, and with the pregnancy and the exercise regimen, it was too much, I guess. Every time she exerted too much energy or did too much, she was at risk. She was a ticking time bomb, and she never even knew it. None of us did.” I paused, staring straight ahead. “And even though I knew what it was, and I understood what happened, I still couldn’t go swimming. I just…” My sentence trailed off as I remembered the dreadful feeling that overcame me when I thought about swimming.

“You couldn’t get past it,” Ahmad said softly.

Biting my lip, I nodded. “I just couldn’t do it. I was so focused on what happened to her that I wasn’t able to focus on what was happening in the moment. It kept me stuck there. And then two years after she’d died, I went to a pool party, and someone thought it would be funny to push me in the pool. Now, he didn’t know what had happened; I don’t really talk to people about it. But I remember panicking as I went under, and I almost drowned.”

“Oh, shit.”

“I knew how to swim, but I froze. I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t ready to be in a pool. I wasn’t ready to swim. I wasn’t ready to deal with Aniyah’s death. Someone pulled me from the pool, and the party went on without missing a beat, but I went home. It took another year and a half before I was ready to swim.”

“What made you ready?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Therapy. Time. Trip to Tulum. But I knew when I was ready. I knew I was ready before I was willing to test the theory of me being ready. And I recognized how much time I wasted because I was scared to deal with what really needed to be dealt with.” I stopped at the light next to Onyx. “Trauma.”

He didn’t say anything, but he nodded.

“Being in someone’s shadow is always hard. But when the person is no longer alive, it makes it worse somehow. Because I can never live up to the perfection of a memory. So even after dealing with my issues with water, there’s still some trauma that remains…”

I let my sentence trail off.

I hadn’t meant to say so much. The words just kept tumbling out of my mouth. I hadn’t realized how much I was sharing until it was already out in the open. I hadn’t really shared that with anyone. Nina and Jazz knew, but I never had to say it. Outside of the sessions with my therapist, it was the first time I’d verbalized it.

I cleared my throat. “So, I can understand how whatever happened today could retraumatize you,” I whispered, hoping I wasn’t overstepping with him.

Silence surrounded us again.

“How old was your sister?” he asked, breaking the silence.

I stared straight ahead. The sound of my turn signal clicked as I waited to turn onto our street. “She was thirty.”

“Thirty?” he repeated in disbelief. “That’s… young.”

“Yeah.” I cleared my throat. “It is.”

I could feel him staring at my profile. His eyes on me made more of my truth tumble from my mouth than I anticipated.

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