by John Lutz
Still wet and cooled down from her first dive, the water didn’t feel so luxurious when she entered it after her second dive and cut toward the bottom. She’d attempted a swan dive, and she knew she hadn’t been nearly vertical on entry and would have scored low if anyone had been judging.
Again her palms found the smooth concrete and she turned in the cool silence and began her rise to the surface.
She was surprised when her progress was stopped.
Then she realized something-someone-was clutching both her ankles, keeping her from rising.
Worried but not panicked, she twisted her body to see downward. Through the blue murkiness she could actually see the hands, the long pale fingers, encircling her thin ankles, but she couldn’t make out the face of whoever was doing this to her.
She bent down lower, contorting her body so she could reach the strong fingers and try to pry them from her ankles. But her buoyancy prevented her from reaching the hands.
She’d assumed someone, probably a teenage boy, was playing a joke on her. But the grip of the fingers was so powerful, seemingly as unbreakable as steel bands. Maybe he didn’t realize how strong he was.
Enough is enough! she decided.
She tried kicking herself free, but the hands allowed all the lateral movement she wanted without permitting her to rise. She knew she was merely wearing herself out.
Sitting in the sun on the warm, damp towel, Michael stared at the pool and wondered why Bernice hadn’t come up yet. Then, as a skinny black girl in a green suit bounced twice on the edge of the board and dived, he turned his attention back to his boats.
Beneath the water, Bernice decided to change tactics and was paddling upward as hard as she could, trying futilely to provide lift for herself and whoever was keeping her from rising. She was aware of a slim girl in a green suit shattering the surface above her head and sliding past only a few feet away, her eyes clenched shut as she gracefully arched her body and began a smooth arc up toward bright sunlight and air. Bernice’s chest began to ache as she realized her increased efforts were only causing her to rise a few feet then sink back toward the bottom of the pool.
She understood then that this was no joke, and she panicked, flailing desperately with her arms and hands, writhing and trying to kick free as she strained every muscle and ounce of will toward the dim light above.
Still, she could not rise.
The white boat with the sunblocker collided with and sank the red plastic boat at the edge of the towel.
Michael looked around again for Bernice but didn’t see her.
He wasn’t alarmed. He picked up the white boat, now the sunblocker bottle again, and tried to remove its lid.
Bernice hung suspended beneath the water, her arms spread wide as if she were about to embrace a lover. The last of the air in her lungs had escaped through her slack mouth and was curving away in a graceful string of bubbles.
The cruel hands had finally released their grip on her ankles, and she slowly began to rise.
Deirdre gripped the tile lip of the pool and easily hoisted herself up and out of the water.
Someone screamed. Several people began to shout.
Deirdre snatched up her towel and started drying herself off.
Then she walked around the hot concrete apron to the other side of the pool to join the growing tide of people streaming around a confused Michael to see what had happened in the deep end.
22
Molly wished David would arrive.
She sat on the sofa hugging Michael to her. He’d stopped crying. At first she was relieved, then his silence began to bother her. She wondered if his young mind had finally grasped what had occurred. But that was impossible, she realized; most adults hadn’t grasped the immensity and banality of death. He lay inertly against her as she held him even tighter.
Molly had finally stopped crying too. The police had brought Michael to the apartment an hour ago, two uniformed officers with sad and respectful expressions. The taller of the two, who wore an inadequate mustache and looked barely out of his teens, told Molly they’d found Bernice’s purse and identification in one of the lockers at Koch Pool, and several people said they thought she’d been with Michael, whom someone noticed seemed to be unattended. When they brought him to this address, Mrs. Esslinger, downstairs, had informed them which apartment Michael lived in.
And the police had told Molly what happened to Bernice.
She cried on the phone when she called David at work to tell him. And she’d cried for a long time afterward. But now the shock, the merciful deadening of the senses, had set in, and her tears had dried as the hard fact of death was assimilated and the grief turned inward.
The door opened and David entered. He carried his suit coat slung twisted almost inside out over his shoulder, and the wind had mussed his hair. His eyes appeared puffy, as if he’d been crying too. Maybe he had, Molly thought. She’d never seen him cry.
He dropped his coat on the chair and came to her, then touched the side of her neck gently.
“You okay now, Mol? You sure Michael’s okay?”
She met his eyes and nodded, then looked away from him. She guessed she was okay. Her eyes were so dry now they burned, and her throat felt constricted.
“Nobody seems to know what happened,” she heard herself say. “Someone said they saw her go off the diving board, and she just never came up.”
David leaned down to kiss Michael, who smiled slightly but didn’t move. “Maybe she hit her head on the bottom of the pool,” he said, straightening.
“No. The police said there wasn’t any sign of that. They think maybe she blacked out and drowned. Or maybe got disoriented underwater.” Molly sighed. “Hell, David, she was a good swimmer. She went to some lake in New Jersey last summer with her mother and an aunt, showed us photos of her diving off a dock. She bragged to us that she’d won a bet by swimming across the lake, remember?”
“I remember,” David said. “How did Michael get home?”
Molly told him.
“Has someone notified Bernice’s mother?”
She nodded. “I told the police that her mother lived in Teaneck, and they said somebody there would talk to her.” She could feel moisture soaking through her blouse from Michael’s tears or saliva. He’d loved Bernice and he’d miss her in whatever way three-year-olds grieved. She’d miss Bernice too. How many friends had Bernice had, with her small family and her temporary jobs? It seemed she had never sunk the kind of roots that would sustain her into middle and old age, as if her life had been predicated on a premature death. There were people like that; you could see early death on them in their childhood photographs, something in their eyes, their stances, their uneasy look of impermanence. As if a part of them knew they were only travelers passing through, their stays briefer than most. It was all so unfair and sad.
Her grief expanded in her, almost choking her, and she began to cry softly. “Goddamn it, David!”
She felt the cushion shift as he sat down beside her. He rested a hand on her thigh. Michael moved against her, and she saw his bare feet dig into David’s stomach down near his crotch. David didn’t seem bothered by the small feet. He raised his hand from her thigh and cupped it around her shoulder, hugging her.
“It happens,” he said. “Stuff like this just happens. It’s shitty, but that’s how the world works.”
A sad laugh that surprised her broke through her sobs. “You sure are a comfort.”
“I guess I’m not much help. This kind of thing throws me. I’m sorry, Mol.”
She reached up and squeezed his hand gripping her shoulder. “It’s okay, David. I’m just all…I don’t know. Things are so screwed up lately.”
Then she began sobbing harder. It made her furious that she couldn’t stop. Within a few minutes she’d set off Michael, who began to wail.
Molly wiped at her eyes and saw David lean back against the sofa. His body slumped and he clenched his eyes shut. He looked haunted and years
older.
She tried to get some work done the next day but couldn’t. David had gone to work as usual, but he still looked strained and tired. She doubted if he was getting much accomplished either.
She’d kept Michael home. He slept most of the day. Slept so much, in fact, that she’d become worried and phoned the doctor, who’d told her it was probably Michael’s way of dealing with Bernice’s death. Molly wasn’t to worry about him unless signs of physical illness or prolonged depression appeared. It was difficult to notice signs of depression in someone when they were asleep, she thought. But she didn’t mention that to Michael’s pediatrician.
Molly had sat at her desk, her work spread before her, waiting, but she’d barely touched it. She’d spent most of the day gazing out the window-rather, at the window. At nothing. Not even at the bluebottle fly that buzzed against the pane and crawled along the window frame. Her focus was inward. On grief and mortality.
Julia had agreed to come to the apartment and baby-sit Michael that night, while Molly and David were at the mortuary. This was the only night for visitation. Bernice’s funeral was scheduled for the next morning.
Molly began dressing for the visitation early, before David got home from the agency. She’d taken a long, cool shower, then chosen her simple navy blue dress to wear, with matching shoes. Her only jewelry would be her wedding ring.
David came home and kissed her hello. He acted very subdued and put on his charcoal suit, a white shirt, and gray and maroon tie.
Dressed for mourning, they sat on the sofa in the living room, waiting for Julia. Michael was asleep again. The TV was on CNN, but the sound was little more than a murmur. Neither Molly nor David moved to increase the volume. In near silence they watched a tearful woman interviewed in the rain, then tape of a military plane crash that had occurred last year and been caught with a bystander’s video camera. Molly watched the sleek jet fighter skim low over what looked like a runway, then dip a wing that caught the ground. The plane pinwheeled and disappeared in an orange fireball. The backs of spectators’ heads could be seen as they moved toward the crash site, then the tape went black.
The phone rang.
David sprang to answer it before it woke Michael.
Molly watched his brow knit and his expression darken as he listened to whoever was on the other end of the connection.
“All right,” he said. She recognized that tone of voice, the one he used when he was trying not to show irritation. “Sure, that’s the breaks. And you’re positive she’s okay? All right, yes. No, really, we can work something out. Sure. Okay, good luck.”
She waited while he hung up the phone.
“Damn!” he said. “This is just what we need!”
“Who was it?” Molly asked.
David glanced at the phone with loathing, as if it were a snake that had just sunk fangs into him. “It was Julia. She said she can’t baby-sit Michael tonight. She just got a call that there was a fire a few hours ago at her mother’s house in Brooklyn.”
Molly tried to feel something. She knew that under ordinary circumstances she would, but tonight she felt nothing. Her emotions had been frayed and numbed by Bernice’s death. Now more tragedy for Julia. Julia’s mother.
Then a rush of shame almost made her blush. She wasn’t the only one in the world with grief.
“Is her mother okay?”
“Yeah,” David said. “Nobody was hurt, thank God. But this leaves us without a baby-sitter, and we’ve got to get to the funeral parlor within an hour.”
Molly felt a twinge of guilt at being secretly relieved that she wouldn’t have to view Bernice’s body. Or maybe the body wouldn’t be on display, a custom Molly despised. She realized she didn’t even know Bernice’s religion. Either way, Molly had had enough of death and didn’t want to visit with it this evening. “There’s nothing we can do about the situation, David.”
“Of course there isn’t!” he said angrily.
Her grief and the way her life had been knocked off center the last few weeks welled up in Molly. Tears were hot in her eyes. She damned herself for her weakness, but she began to cry.
David approached her cautiously and laid a hand on her shoulder. The hand felt like a bird that had lighted there and might any second fly away He was unsure of her reactions these days. Well, so was she.
“I’m sorry, Mol.” he said gently. “I get frustrated, angry, and I say things I don’t mean.”
Molly didn’t trust herself to try to speak, so she nodded. She managed to stop crying and wiped her eyes with her fingertips. Hell on the makeup. “That’s not why I was crying,” she said, only half lying. “I just thought about Bernice being gone. It doesn’t seem real. I should have remembered, death is something people learn to look away from.”
Even me, she thought.
“I don’t like to admit she’s gone, either,” David said. He removed his hand from her shoulder and glanced at his wristwatch. “Maybe we could take Michael with us.”
Molly was horrified. “No, David! We’re not taking a three-year-old child to a funeral home where someone he loves is laid out.”
“People do, Mol.” he said with a gentleness that surprised her.
She refused to be anything other than adamant. “People, maybe. Not us. Not our child!”
David couldn’t quite throw off his irritation. “We don’t have a lot of choice. The funeral’s tomorrow. This is the only night for visitation.”
“Michael’s sleeping,” Molly said. “Dreaming God knows what, but at least he might have some relief from his grief. I’m not going to wake him up and take him to see Bernice’s-I’m not going to do it!”
Someone knocked three times loudly on the door. It occurred later to Molly that it was almost on cue. As if it were the result of eavesdropping.
She and David exchanged glances, then David crossed the room and opened the door.
Deirdre was standing in the hall.
David stepped back and she moved in.
“I heard about your baby-sitter,” she said. “I just came down to tell you I’m sorry. I feel for you. I know how awful it must be-”
She stopped talking and regarded them more carefully.
“Did I come at a bad time?”
Molly looked off to the side. “Christ!”
David bowed his head and looked embarrassed. Molly could have kicked him.
“We were about to leave for the funeral home,” he said, “when the woman who was going to watch Michael for us called and canceled.”
Deirdre glanced around. “Where is Michael?”
“He’s asleep.”
“Well heck,” Deirdre said, “I’ll watch him for you. How much trouble can he be if he’s asleep. He won’t even know you’re gone.”
It made sense, but Molly didn’t want it to happen. She felt almost panicky. “David, I-”
“It’ll be okay, Mol.” He glanced again at his watch, frowning. “He’s sleeping, like Deirdre said.”
Deirdre smiled and flipped her hair back off her shoulders. “I’ll just curl up on the sofa and watch television.”
Molly shook her head. “No, really-”
“Don’t you worry,” Deirdre said. “He’ll be snug as a slug in a rug.”
David shifted his weight nervously. “We’re gonna be late, hon.”
Molly was beaten, resigned. “All right,” she heard herself say in a defeated voice. “All right…”
David nudged her toward the door, and Deirdre followed.
“Anything I need to know about how the TV works?” she asked.
“No, it’s easy,” David said. “The remote’s right there on the table.”
When they were in the hall, Deirdre leaned against the doorjamb, smiling at them. “Don’t you worry, you two. Everything’s gonna be just fine here.”
“We won’t be gone long,” Molly said. She realized it had sounded almost like a warning.
“Be gone as long as it takes,” Deirdre said. “And please, don’t
worry.”
She closed and locked the door, still smiling as she thought back on this evening.
After a moment, Deirdre went to the window and watched Michael and Molly climb into the back of a taxi. As the cab pulled away, she could see Molly’s pale face as she craned her neck to glance worriedly out the rear window. Like a ghost watching her life recede.
Deirdre tiptoed into the bedroom and stood gazing for a long time at the sleeping Michael. He was frowning in his sleep, his closed eyelids pulsating as he dreamed. He looked so much like David when he frowned. She closed the door softly and went back to the living room.
This might be my apartment, she thought. My life. David might be my husband, Michael my child. Destiny had decided otherwise, but destiny could be manipulated. Fate could be tricked.
Sitting down on the sofa, she aimed the remote at the TV and pressed the power button.
My favorite button, she thought with a grin.
After tuning to a Roseanne rerun, she sniffed at the sleeve of her blouse. Then she walked into Molly and David’s bedroom and chose a perfume from the array of bottles on Molly’s dresser. She dabbed some on her wrists. You never could tell who might show up at the door unexpectedly-maybe even Molly and David, returning home with changed minds about attending Bernice’s visitation.
Deirdre touched her fingertip to the bottle again and pressed it here and there to her blouse. She bent her left elbow and held the material of the blouse’s cuff to her nose.
Better, she thought, smiling at herself in the mirror as she replaced the cap on the bottle. Hardly detectable. Though she was sure neither Molly nor David had noticed. It was something only she’d be aware of, because she knew and they didn’t.
She’d returned from Brooklyn only an hour ago, and she still smelled like smoke.
23
The next morning, a cab pulled to a halt at the curb where the taxi had picked up Molly and David the previous night. The sun hadn’t yet burned away the clouds and it was a softly lighted, hazy morning, not yet oppressively warm. Passersby on West Eighty-fifth stepped along with energy and enthusiasm; their posture and expressions were unlike the heat-intensified weariness they would display at the end of the workday.
