Swim Back to Me

by Ann Packer

  Trina came in, dumped her things on the kitchen floor, and shrugged her bomber jacket on top of them. “I’m starving,” she said as she opened the pantry door. Over her tiny, barely developed frame she was wearing an even tinier black T-shirt. She was fifteen, but in her tight top and heavy makeup she looked like a ten-year-old who wanted to pass for twenty-one. Hand in a bag of potato chips, she turned to Laura and said, “I need better eyeliner.”

  “Hello to you, too.”

  “Mom, I’m serious. You buy department store stuff for yourself and Walgreens crap for me. It’s like, do you want me to look like a ho?” Sometimes she waited for a response, but tonight she just headed off, calling, “Where’s Matt, anyway?” as she disappeared.

  “I don’t know,” Laura said. She was alone in the kitchen, neither child within hearing distance. She said, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  The room smelled of tomato and melted cheese. She turned off the oven and cracked the door. Maybe he’d gone for a drive (he wouldn’t do that) and his new Jeep had broken down (it was three months old) and he was out of cell phone range and couldn’t call.

  Had he mentioned an evening meeting? She knew he hadn’t. She’d spoken to him in the middle of the afternoon as she sat waiting in her car for Charlotte, nothing to do but call and bother him.

  “You’re not bothering me,” he said. “I’m glad you called, actually. I’ve been trying to remember, I know you’ll know this: Who was that guy in that movie, you know, the one about the people, who lived in the place—”

  “Stop,” she said with a laugh. “I’m not that bad.”

  And they said bye, see you at home, and now he was over an hour and a half late.

  I ran into an old friend and we got to talking. I lost track of time …

  He didn’t, ever. So, an accident: she pictured smashed front ends, engine fires, holes in the guardrail. She imagined a fire truck pulled over at the side of the road, firefighters walking up and down in their black coats, draping blankets over the dead.

  To stop herself she summoned the girls. At the table she talked so she wouldn’t seem worried, then fell into silence as they barely picked at their food.

  Trina laid down her fork with a clank. “These enchiladas are disgusting. They’re soupy.”

  “I think they’re good,” Charlotte said. “But I’m not really hungry.”

  “Why,” Trina said, “do we always have to have Mexican? I don’t even like it.”

  “You don’t?” Laura said.

  “No.”

  Charlotte put her napkin next to her plate. “You like fish tacos.”

  Trina made a face at Charlotte and carried her plate to the sink. Laura watched as she stood there, her back to the room, shoulder blades like little fins. She wheeled around and said, “I think it’s rude that he hasn’t called you.”

  “Maybe his phone died,” Laura said.

  “Then he should borrow one,” Trina said. “Duh.”

  Charlotte cleared her plate, and both girls went to do homework. Laura scraped their uneaten enchiladas into the garbage. Matt didn’t like it that she let them complain about her cooking, but what was she supposed to do, say they had to like everything? He was a stricter parent than she in just about every way. His kids had firm bedtimes, and so now hers did, too, fairness being the number one rule in every self-help book about stepfamilies and blending. “Blending?” Trina had said. “What are we, ingredients?” But it was an apt enough metaphor. And a tough enough task. Two adults, five children, and twenty-one relationships. A few days before the wedding—ten months ago now, they were coming up on their first anniversary—he had said out of the blue that of Laura’s two he thought the marriage and all it entailed would be harder on Charlotte. She’d adored him for that. Not because he was right—though she believed he was—but because he had thought about it. He was such a funny combination: orderly, precise, even a little controlling about certain things … but also remarkably intuitive.

  By nine-thirty dread had invaded her body. She went upstairs and waited while Charlotte brushed her teeth, then she turned off the light and sat on the edge of Charlotte’s bed.

  “Mom?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Do you think he went out for barbecue?”

  Charlotte was referring to a conversation they’d all had a week or so ago—Matt, Laura, and all five kids—when Matt said he’d been craving hickory-smoked ribs, pulled pork sandwiches, mashed yams.

  Laura kissed Charlotte’s forehead and pulled the blanket to her chin. “Maybe so.”

  In the master bedroom, heart pounding, she called his partners at Sierra Mountain and Gravel, but they were both so concerned that she ended up trying to reassure them. Next she tried the company secretary, who said he hadn’t mentioned anything out of the ordinary. His cousin Frank—his closest friend—didn’t answer.

  She went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. There were bits of dried spit at the corners of her mouth, and her pulse was wild. She turned on the shower and tried to cry, but she was too terrified.

  Early on, she’d told him in passing that it was scary dating him. Puzzled, he asked why, and she said: “Because I like you.” She had by then lost Adam, lost their family life, and she lost the girls every few days to the inexorable tides of joint custody. Matt was toned and fit, but he was well over fifty: behind the thick ropes of his triceps, over his sculpted pecs, his skin was soft and starting to droop. He took cholesterol-lowering drugs and would probably have knee surgery in the next few years. Now, standing in the bathroom, she imagined that tender body of his, that body she loved: bleeding by the side of the road somewhere. She wanted to fling herself on it, shield it from harm.

  Downstairs, she found Trina on the family room couch, binders and books open all around her. She’d gotten her hair cut very short just before the wedding, but it was growing out, and she’d pulled it into stubby pigtails.

  Laura stood there for a moment and then went to the kitchen for her purse. When she came back, Trina was on her feet, hands planted on her slender hips. “Have you called Kevin?”

  Kevin was Matt’s son, his oldest. Laura shook her head. “I don’t want to worry them.”

  “Yeah, but what if Matt called them?”

  “I’m going to drive around a little. Obviously if he calls or comes home, call my cell.”

  The night was freezing, the moon little more than a sliver in the blue-black sky. There were clouds in the east, in the direction of the mountains. She climbed into her car and started the engine, shivering a little as she waited for it to warm up. Sometimes, after work, he went running at the regional park, but never without telling her beforehand. Still, that’s where she went first, eyes scanning the parking area before she turned around and headed toward town, with a detour past the company on the off chance he was still there. The parking lot was empty, though, the office dark. Out back, great mounds of rock lay in the moonlight like giant, slumbering animals.

  She made her way to 49 and headed south, slowing as she passed the parking lots of shopping centers that were just closing for the night. She crossed the Interstate and drove around Old Town and downtown, then headed for the high school, where on spring nights he sometimes took Kevin to do sprints on the football field. At last she drove to his ex-wife’s house, aware she’d been saving it for last but still surprised by the relief she felt when she saw the two cars parked outside, Kevin’s and his mother’s, and no others. She hadn’t really thought he’d be there, had she?

  She turned around and headed home. Something was terribly, horribly wrong. Was he lying in a ditch somewhere? Trapped in such terrible wreckage that the Jaws of Life couldn’t get him out? She was so panicked that when she finally turned off the main road, she braked and rolled down the window and gulped at the cold air. Then she imagined arriving home and pulling up behind a police car, and she flew the last two miles, the picture insistent: the black-and-white parked in Matt’s parking place, its
blue light swirling, the front door of the house open as Trina faced the officers.

  It wasn’t until she reached the turnoff for the driveway that she got ahold of herself. Why a police car if she was going to make things up? Why not Matt’s car? She drove the quarter-mile of the driveway at a reasonable twenty-five miles per hour, convinced in some small part of her mind that her behavior during these seconds would determine what she would find, that only slow, moderate driving would give her Matt. At the very end of the driveway there was a sharp turn to the right, and she sucked in her breath, then sighed hard when she saw the empty parking area. She felt dizzy and rested her forehead in her hand before going into the house.

  Trina was in the kitchen, holding a jar of peanut butter and a spoon. She looked up as Laura came in, and her face fell. “It’s worse now!” she said. “Why is it worse now?”

  Laura was too tired to reassure her. “Because before, even though we told ourselves he wasn’t just hanging out somewhere nearby, we secretly believed he was. Hoped he was. And now it seems he wasn’t, and we have no idea what’s going on.”

  “Well, I watched the news,” Trina cried, “and it’s supposed to snow.” She tossed the spoon into the sink and left the room.

  Laura retrieved the spoon and put it in the dishwasher. If his car had broken down somewhere and it started to snow … She pictured him walking in a blizzard, snow pummeling his head and shoulders. He was resourceful, though: he had a collapsible shovel in the cargo area of his car, a package of flares, a down sleeping bag. Snow he could handle. Snow was such a familiar adversary that when Kevin turned sixteen and got his mom’s old Camry, Matt outfitted that trunk, too, even though Kevin wasn’t allowed to drive into the mountains alone yet. “He’s a kid,” Matt said. “Who loves skiing fresh powder. You do everything you can to keep them safe, and then you do a little more.”

  Her husband took a powder. Wasn’t that an expression? He took a powder, took off, disappeared.

  Laura picked up the phone and called the hospital. She called the highway patrol and waited while they typed Matt’s name into their database. She called the sheriff and was told they could send someone out to take a report, but she might want to give it a little more time.

  She went upstairs and lay on the bed. If he were at all sentient, he would have called her. And so clearly he wasn’t … or he couldn’t. Maybe it wasn’t a car accident. Maybe he’d been robbed and tied up somewhere. Robbed and shot. Someone coming up behind him at the ATM, pressing a gun into the center of his back. She ran into the bathroom, ready to vomit, but the feeling passed. This time she didn’t look in the mirror.

  Finally, near two, she changed into pajamas and took a sleeping pill. But what if he called, and she was out so deeply she didn’t hear the phone? She went downstairs, found both of the household’s cordless phones in case one wasn’t working, and brought them to bed with her, sliding Matt’s pillow out of the way and laying them, along with her cell phone, in its place.

  The first time she ever saw him was in a 7-Eleven, late on a weekday night. This was about a year after her separation. There was a guy in her way, a big guy wearing a tan windbreaker and pre-faded blue jeans that somehow accentuated his height. He was 6′4″, 6′5″—exceptionally tall, with a thick chest and close-trimmed snow white hair. He was standing right where she needed to be, and she couldn’t move or say excuse me—she just stood there. Why this paralysis? Love at first sight, he joked when they finally compared notes, but it was fear, not love—or fear-plus-its-opposite, fear plus an incongruous feeling of calm. His height, his posture, his competence: he was in command, he was going to terrorize her or save her, it didn’t matter what she did. This was an embarrassing reaction, piddly and womanish, and she didn’t tell him about it until they’d been sleeping together for months and there were ways in which she was in command of him.

  Coffee filters—they were both buying coffee filters. “Not only did I let myself run out,” he said a little later, the two of them finished paying and standing in the dark parking lot, each holding a flimsy plastic bag—“Not only did I let myself run out, I let it happen twice.” He explained that in order never to wake up in the morning and discover he had no coffee filters, he habitually maintained two boxes at a time, a main one and a backup one. “My rule for myself is, when I move the backup filters into the main filter position, I’m supposed to buy a new box to take over the backup function. What am I going to do now, add a backup for the backup?” He grinned, and she was charmed. She liked how crowded his teeth were. His hair was so short she could see the skin above his ears.

  She hadn’t been on a date since the separation. Just a week or two earlier, Trina had surprised her as she was clicking through Match.com. “Mom,” Trina cried, all priggish preteen though she was already in seventh grade. “Gross.”

  Of course it was for coffee that they first got together. At Dwell Time, a café he suggested, a tiny, dark-walled place with the bitter-rich smell of freshly ground beans. “I admit it,” he said, pulling out her chair for her, “I’m a coffee geek.” He told her about a trip he’d taken, the first summer after his separation—a coffee safari in Kenya. Wildebeest by day, espresso by night. The tour group went to three small-harvest farms, and now he was a convert to single-source coffee and a fair trade buyer whenever possible. Laura couldn’t get her mind around a man who looked like a marine but would fit in perfectly in Berkeley.

  She’d met Adam in Berkeley—at Berkeley, where they were both students—and she told Matt about this as the sun moved higher in the café window. It was 1985, Reagan had just been reelected, and she and Adam spent their first few evenings together talking about what a bubble the Bay Area was. They fell in love and got married and stayed on, happy in the bubble, until Laura finished her PhD in education and was encouraged to apply for a newly created position with the Auburn Union School District. “Why not?” Adam had said. “Let’s give the real world a try.” Now the poor guy was stuck in the boonies at least until Charlotte was grown, all because his ex-wife had gotten a good job offer once upon a time.

  “Wait a sec,” Matt said in response to this, and she remembered, too late, that he was a Sierra Foothills native, born in Grass Valley and an Auburn resident since high school. The “boonies” comment wasn’t why he stopped her, though. He said, “It sounds like you feel guilty,” and she sat back in her chair and studied him more closely: this man who looked like a marine and understood feelings.

  They talked on, and the friendly feeling at the battered café table turned into curiosity, excitement. They were from similar families (both with the distant father, the passive/hysterical mother). They’d had similar marriages (instead of tenderness, resentment; instead of passion, apathy; it was better to be alone, they agreed, than to live like that). And as far as their kids went—nothing was more important. Dating, they said, eyes averted, would always come second.

  This was a Saturday in late spring; out the window of the café, forsythia was in flashy yellow bloom, and flocks of birds flew north again. His shirtsleeves were rolled to just below his elbows, and his forearms were covered with white or maybe blond hair. She longed to put her hand on his arm, to feel the fine, silky fur over the sinewy muscle.

  In the morning it was thirty-five degrees out. The sky was the color of concrete. She left a note for him on the front door, just in case, then took the girls to school and drove to the police station. Her heart rate, her skin, her stomach—everything was off. She was sick.

  A uniformed young man asked her a series of questions and then handed her a form to fill out.

  “So now what happens?” she said when she was finished.

  “We’ll enter your information into the national database.”

  “And?”

  He hesitated, putting the form on the counter and smoothing it out. “We can’t really go looking for an adult, ma’am.” He blushed and brought his finger to his mouth, holding it sideways over his upper lip for a long moment. He looked
her in the eye. “Was everything OK at home?”

  “He didn’t run away,” she said. “He’s either hurt or in trouble. Or dead.”

  “In trouble.”

  “I don’t know! I was hoping the police might help me figure it out!”

  She went to work and somehow made it through the morning. The parents she saw were themselves so worried—Laura did educational testing, evaluating kids with possible learning issues—that she kept a grip on herself, which meant feeling stricken but keeping the bloody highway movie at bay, though she could feel it there, waiting.

  At lunchtime she had half an hour free. She called the highway patrol again and then every hospital within a hundred miles. With her twelve-thirty already in the waiting room, she tried his ex-wife’s cell phone, leaving a message requesting a call back “at your earliest convenience.” Such an awkward phrase. It made her think of a line from Dickinson: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” Also during. She’d been vague enough that it might be late afternoon before Sandi called back, but that would just have to be OK. Laura was one of the people who might call Sandi if a child of hers were hurt, and she didn’t want Sandi to worry about that for a single minute.

  Two more hours, and she was finished for the day. She locked up and started across the parking lot. Something brushed her head, and a snowflake hit the bridge of her nose. She looked up, and the sky had gone yellow. In a moment the flakes fell fast.