Read Swimming at Night: A Novel for Free Online

always kept journals. Katie found it disconcerting that her sister preferred to share her feelings on paper rather than in person. As a teenager Katie had found the temptation to read one irresistible. She had twice searched Mia’s room hoping to uncover information that only her journal would reveal, but, for all Mia’s clutter and disorganization, she was fastidious about hiding them.
    Carefully, Katie slid the journal free. Glimmering sea-blue fabric was stretched across the cover and it felt heavy in her hands. She traced a finger down the spine and then opened it carefully, as if Mia’s words were butterflies that might flutter free into the air.
    She turned the pages slowly, admiring her sister’s elegant handwriting. In some things, Mia was lackadaisical and careless—her wallet was a brick of receipts, and her books were dog-eared with doodles filling the margins—yet the handwriting in her journal wasgraceful and refined. The entries were crafted around pencil sketches, handwritten notes, corners of maps, and fragments of memorabilia from places she’d visited. Each page was a work of art brimming with its own tale.
    “Everything okay?” Ed was standing in the doorway to Mia’s room.
    She nodded.
    He glanced at the backpack. “You’re going through her things?”
    “I’ve found her travel journal.”
    He straightened, surprised. “I didn’t realize she kept one.” He pushed his hands into his pockets. “Are you going to read it?”
    “I think so. Yes. There’s so much I don’t know about her trip.” And about her , she thought. They’d barely spoken while Mia was away. She wondered when this distance had grown between them. They used to be close once, but not lately. She sighed. “Why did she go, Ed?”
    “Traveling?”
    “Yes. She booked the trip so suddenly. Something must have happened to make her leave.”
    “She was just impulsive. Young. Bored. That’s all.”
    “I shouldn’t have let her go.”
    “Katie,” he said gently, “you’ve had a long day. Perhaps you shouldn’t be looking at her journal tonight. Wait till morning, at least. I was just about to make us a snack. Why don’t you come into the kitchen? Keep me company?”
    “Maybe in a minute.”
    When the door closed, she flicked through the pages and picked an entry at random. As she began to read, her gaze jumped from phrase to phrase— “cinder desert,” “Finn and me,” “deep violet sky,” “lunar landscape” —as if each word was too hot for her mind to settle on. She squeezed her eyes shut and then reopened them,trying to focus on a single sentence. But it was hopeless; her gaze roamed over the words, but her mind refused to digest them.
    Frustrated, she flipped on. She passed an entry where a sketched bird took flight from the bottom of a page, and another where Mia’s writing spiraled around an invisible coil as if being sucked downwards. Her heartbeat quickened when she realized she was traveling towards the back of the journal, her fingertips skimming the edges of each page as they drew her to Mia’s final entry.
    Reaching it, Katie paused. There would be things, she knew already, which she’d rather not learn, but like a passerby being drawn to the sight of a crash, she was unable to look away.
    Staring at the final entry, she saw that just one side of the double spread was filled. The adjoining page was missing; it had been ripped out, leaving behind a jagged edge near the spine of the journal. Her eyes fixed on the remaining page, which was filled with an intricate pencil drawing of the profile of a female face. Within the face a series of detailed doodles had been drawn: a roaring dark wave, a screaming mouth, falling stars, a hangman with six blank dashes, an empty phone dangling from a wire.
    Katie snapped the journal shut and stood.
    She shouldn’t have looked; it was too soon. Already new questions were swimming to the surface of her thoughts. What did the illustrations mean? Why had a