Swimming Lessons

My wife and I knew that Ellie was hooked the second we put her in swimming lessons. We were nervous. We started her late; some of our friends did the thing where they throw their infant into a pool and see how well they do. It’s supposed to be so similar to the womb that the baby figures out immediately how to swim. Or so I’ve heard. But we started her ten years ago, when she was four. My friend Evan said something about how that’s practically the same at starting her at age twenty, but Evan doesn’t even have kids. He’s in a band and has had long hair for twenty-five years. He wanted us to name her Ocean, after his band, Ocean Angel. But we stuck with Eleanor. Ellie. Both Kate’s and my grandmother’s name. We discovered the coincidence during the first conversation she and I ever had, actually, at a bar one night seeing Evan’s band play. Which is why Evan thought he had a vote in naming the baby. I said, Evan, we’re not having a child to promote your music. That hurt his feelings and I was shocked. I mean, it’s my kid.

Sure enough, when I told Evan that Ellie did great in her first swimming lesson, he said beginner’s luck. I said, she’s four, do four year-olds even have luck. He said yeah, it’s called not dying of SIDS. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I said, Evan, she’s not an infant, she’s a toddler. He said same difference, I said no, it’s really not. He said I’d changed so much since becoming a dad. I said no, I haven’t, I’m just telling you my daughter did well in swimming lessons and can hold her fucking head above water, can’t you just say that’s great. He took a sip of his beer and said “that’s great”.

Kate’s never been a huge Evan fan. She once accidentally texted him instead of me at one of his concerts. The text said “can we please get out of here, I feel like I’m going to get hepatitis just listening to this”. She was mortified when she realized. She quickly followed it up with a “kidding! you guys rock!” but the damage had been done. Evan doesn’t do well with those sorts of things. When I asked him if he’d consider cutting his hair for my wedding photos, not only did he not speak to me for an entire week, he now also takes every opportunity to remind me that my hairline is receding. Just yesterday he sent me an Instagram reel featuring Ten Things to Know If You’re Starting to Lose Your Hair. It was from this account he follows and I think he’s sent me every single one of this guy’s videos. Last week the one he sent me was called “The Quiet Horror of the Body Snatchers”. The week before it was “How to Know If You’re Being Gangstalked”.

Evan’s gotten into that stuff a lot in the last decade. I think I started to get my first whiffs of it after he and Meg broke up. Meg is Kate’s sister, which is how I met Kate. Evan never fails to remind me that if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be a father to Ellie. And if it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t even be able to brag about her swimming. Which is what Evan thinks it is, me bragging. I mean, even if it is, aren’t people allowed to brag about their kids?

Meg and Kate are incredibly different. Meg’s a white woman with dreadlocks, and Kate’s a white woman without them. That’s basically all you need to know. But they’re close. Close enough that Meg told Kate basically all the reasons she left Evan, the last straw of which being he sold their camper van to buy bitcoin when it came out. Then he sold the bitcoin a month later and used the profit to buy a new drum set and synth for Ocean Angel. And Meg was like, you literally don’t have anyone in the band who plays the keyboard. And Evan told her she didn’t believe in him, or in Ocean Angel. This was before she found out that he’d sold the van for the money. She found out about the van the week after, when she went to its parking spot down by the water and found it gone. Kate said she’d never heard Meg so mad in all her life. But all Evan can remember of that story is how he got in on bitcoin when it was hot, and then, like an idiot (his words, not mine), sold it before he had the chance to make millions. I guess that’s what he means when he tells people that, in addition to being a musician, he’s a private investor.

And to be honest, things haven’t changed much with Evan in the last ten years. He’s got a room somewhere downtown — I’ve never been — and though Ocean Angel has long broken up, he’s kept the instruments. His room is crammed with them, and he lives out of a suitcase he’s got shoved in the corner. I’ve told him he’s welcome to stay in our guest bedroom — he’s complained many times about the owners of his house, an elderly couple from Korea who he’s convinced are spying on him through a small camera in the air conditioning — but he turns down our offer every time. I think it’s because he knows Kate can’t stand him. She once said to me that she doesn’t want him around “our fourteen year-old daughter”. I was like, Kate, he’s not that kind of weird. Just a little lost. She said I’d been saying that forever, and do I even really know him anymore. I said I guess I didn’t really.

That brings us to this last weekend. Ellie’s provincial swimming championships. I hadn’t heard from Evan in months. He’d told me he was moving to Bahamas for a business venture he was starting with a friend. And with Evan, either this stuff is true, or it’s not. Either way, it’s always ridiculous. Once, he actually did move when he said he was moving, and sent me pictures of him from a hostel in Florida where he worked as a "Safety Operations Officer” in exchange for room and board. He explained to me that the owners hired him to rid their business of hidden cameras and government-spy stuff they thought it had. He was there for three months, taking apart the light fixtures and thermostats and whatnot. Why he came home, he never said. Another time, he said he was in Barcelona, and then showed up at our house the next morning. So you never really know with him.

But I’d assumed Evan actually had moved to Bahamas because he’d stopped sending me stuff on Instagram. I assumed he was staying in a place down there where the wifi was scant. And, to be honest, I wasn’t horribly worried about him. I guess I’d been feeling a little burdened by our friendship. I mean, he’d been my friend for practically my whole life. He was the first kid to be my friend in kindergarten and all that stuff. But since our early twenties we’d had almost nothing to talk about. And it really didn’t help that Kate couldn’t stand him. To be honest, I can’t entirely blame her. The remnants of the Evan I was once extremely close with had long evaporated, left behind somewhere in the stacks of our college library, where he’d spend long nights buzzed on Adderall trying to finish his philosophy degree. He never did. His brain sort of collapsed in on itself during the final year. I think it was the combination of the stimulants and the thinking about thinking about thinking. I always told him that’s what a philosophy degree gets you: mentally ill. Anyway, he dropped out, stayed on the stimulants, and instead used the energy he had to write lyrics for Ocean Angel and work at the student bar.