Skylight Confessions

by Alice Hoffman

  “God, I’m sorry,” Meredith said when she returned. She’d brought out a bottle of whiskey. She hadn’t bothered with glasses. “I figure we need this. Sam’s not what you think,” she said after she took a swig. “He’s a good boy, really. He’s talented. He just got sidetracked by drugs.”

  “You sound like his mother,” Daniel said.

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “He needs rehab.”

  “He needs a lot of things,” Meredith said tiredly. “He’s been in rehab.”

  “Look.” Daniel pointed above them. Ashes were falling from above in a thin, fine line. They looked like snowflakes, only they were black. Maybe it was chimney soot or debris from a passing plane; maybe it was an odd weather disturbance, black sand picked up from some foreign shore now deposited on the lawn.

  “What happened when he was six?” Daniel asked. “Sam mentioned something about that age.”

  Meredith took a drink and passed the bottle over. “His mother died.”

  “So that’s how you came up with your theory. People get trapped in time, so spirits must get trapped, too?”

  “No,” Meredith said. “I came up with it when I realized I couldn’t get past being sixteen.”

  At that moment Daniel didn’t care if he ever went back to New Haven or if he ever finished his dissertation. This was the purest instant he had ever experienced; the way he felt inside right then. If he had to be trapped in a forever he would choose this very moment. The black night, the few yellow leaves still clinging to the bare trees, the beautiful dark-eyed woman drinking whiskey, the way she gazed at him, the way she made him feel.

  “And that’s a bad thing?”

  “It is for me. I ruined someone’s life.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “You don’t know me. I used to be a swimmer, now I’m terrified of pools. I can’t get past the bad thing that happened.”

  “So you’re stuck in time. Like your ghost.”

  “She’s not mine.” Meredith took the bottle of whiskey and drank deeply. “But we’re alike. Unable to move on.”

  Daniel Finch thought it over. He felt pierced by desire. He was utterly lost and he simply didn’t care.

  “Break down the time you’re stuck in.” Matter destroyed re-forms in a different guise. Her terrible past could re-form into the present, for instance; it could become this moment with him.

  “How?” Meredith’s face was tilted toward him. She was utterly concentrated, her brow furrowed.

  “Do the thing you’re most afraid of.”

  “Just like that?”

  “Don’t think. Thinking is overrated.”

  “How can an academic say that? Anyway, I always assumed it was feeling that was overrated.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong.”

  Meredith looked at him.

  “Just like that?” she said.

  He nodded. “Don’t think.”

  Meredith got up and went over to the pool. She felt breathless and stupid and terrified. She stood on the edge. There were a few yellow leaves floating in the dark water. Daniel could barely make out her form in the dark. Meredith took off her coat first, then her shoes. She slipped out of her jeans and her underpants, her sweater and her bra. She refused to think. Her mind was static, electric, filled with the present, filled with yellow leaves, this moment, this water, this time.

  Daniel watched her move toward the pool, stunned and thrilled. He would never be free of this, not that he’d ever want to be. He could see the outlines of Meredith’s body now. Her long, creamy back. She was gone before he could look as carefully as he would have liked to; he would have liked to gaze at her forever, but one splash and she had disappeared into the black water. He had no idea whether he was supposed to follow her or, like some specter himself, merely slink away through the soot and the boxwoods to another time and place.

  It was cold enough for Daniel to see his breath in the air. He wasn’t much of a swimmer, but he didn’t think about that. He took off his clothes. He crossed the patio, slacks and shirt and underwear left behind in a pile along with his briefcase and coat. He stepped onto the edge of the pool. Meredith was already treading water. She watched him lower himself into the deep end like a large, shy fish. He was clumsy and he made her laugh. He paddled over.

  “You’re a terrible swimmer,” Meredith said.

  “I am. But I play Ping-Pong. And I can ice-skate.” He was shaking. How embarrassing. The cold, the whiskey, the strangeness of the night.

  “Someone killed himself because of me once,” Meredith said.

  “People kill themselves because of what’s inside them, not because of other people.”

  Daniel felt absolutely hypnotized. He wasn’t treading water, only floating.

  “Is that a principle of physics? Suicide can only be caused by one person?” Meredith asked.

  “Sui means oneself,” Daniel said.

  “You think you’re so smart.”

  Daniel floated closer. He put his hands on her waist. He felt charged. His mentor Dr. Rosen would have a good laugh; human beings could indeed be reduced to currents and impulses. Wasn’t that what desire was made of?

  “I haven’t done this for so many years,” Meredith said. The wet ends of her hair streamed over her shoulders.

  “Gone swimming?”

  Meredith laughed, a little.

  He moved closer, arms around her, so that their faces touched. The black water swished around them. A few leaves fell from the maples without a splash.

  “I haven’t made love to anyone. Loved anyone.”

  Daniel kissed her and didn’t stop. Not until she pulled away.

  “We’ll drown like this,” Meredith said.

  “Good. Let’s.”

  Daniel kissed her again and the rest was easy. Easier than it had been all those years ago when she’d been too afraid and too young, when everything that shouldn’t have happened did, and she couldn’t stop it or even understand it.

  SHE WAS A LIFEGUARD THAT SUMMER, FORCED TO WEAR THE official red bathing suit of the town pool when she would have preferred a black two-piece. She was the captain of the high-school swim team, her event the two-hundred-meter butterfly; she felt strong, invincible, ready to jump in and rescue someone. All day she sat on the high, white wooden chair, a whistle around her neck; she smelled like coconut oil. She had no idea how many little boys dreamed about her in her red bathing suit. All through the year she’d been involved with Josh Prentiss, the captain of the boys’ swim team, but now this summer she wanted to be free. She was only sixteen, not ready to be tied down.

  “Be honest,” her friends told her. “Tell him you just want to be friends.”

  She told him, but he wouldn’t listen. Late at night the phone would ring and Merrie would lie in bed, frozen. She vowed to her parents it was someone making crank calls, but they all knew who it was. Josh had begun to lurk around the house, peering in the windows, scaring the hell out of her mother when Mrs. Weiss found him in the backyard. How had love come to this? This twisted dark place. The phone calls, the fear, the look on his face when he drove by the house.

  Her friends told her he’d get over it, but they didn’t know Josh; they had no idea he watched Meredith at the pool from his parked car every day. They didn’t know she couldn’t sleep at night, that her dreams were filled with dark water, ringing phones, brutal fear. He left strange things for her by the girls’ locker room at the pool: a photo with her face cut out, a black sock torn to pieces, a dead field mouse completely wound in tape.

  And then the bad, unstoppable thing happened, one day in August, a hot, clear, perfect morning. When Merrie arrived at the pool there were several squad cars parked outside and an ambulance was up on the sidewalk. She heard the EMTs talking: Josh had climbed the fence in the middle of the night, and Meredith knew why. He’d wanted to somehow hurt her the way she’d hurt him. He’d watched her, knew her schedule. He did it in the pool for Meredith’s benefit; standi
ng outside the gate, she could see something immersed in the deep end. It looked like a bag of laundry or a sack of rocks until she realized it was a body. Before the officers forced Meredith back, insisting she had no clearance to be there, she saw a line of red in the water, a twisted, dark thread.

  Meredith dropped to her knees so hard and fast the concrete tore at her skin and left scars. She put her head on the ground. People all around her thought she was praying, but really she was begging for time to rewind. One day, that’s all. A few hours. Time enough for her to talk him out of it, or go back with him if that’s what it took.

  Everything smelled bitter, a mix of chlorine and blood. One of the officers helped her to her feet and took her into the snack bar. He found her ID in her gym bag and phoned her mother. The officer on the phone told Mrs. Weiss there had been an accident; the pool was closing for the rest of the season and she needed to pick Meredith up right away.

  Mrs. Weiss parked by the gate while the officer brought Meredith to the car. Meredith seemed in shock; silent and shaking under her skin.

  “Don’t think this is your fault,” Meredith’s mother said. “I won’t have that, Merrie.”

  But Meredith didn’t have to think it over. She knew the truth. She never went back to the pool. She saw his body every time she closed her eyes. She wanted to go to the funeral, but she was afraid of his family. On that night, after everyone else had grieved and gone home, Meredith took her mother’s car even though she didn’t yet have her license. She knew enough; she had taken driver’s ed. She drove to the cemetery and climbed over the wall. In the dark the headstones were either black or white; she didn’t stop searching until she spied the freshly dug grave. The air smelled like pine and earth. Children in town swore that if you entered this cemetery after dark and called out a dead person’s name, his ghost would come to you. Meredith called out Josh’s name. She sounded like the wind; she called for a long time, but no one came to her. No one answered. This wasn’t what was supposed to have happened. They were both supposed to go on with their lives.

  Meredith felt herself click off. A key into a lock. A body sinking. He had wanted to teach her a lesson, and he did. The rest of high school was a dream; she didn’t even bother to go to graduation. Meredith applied for early decision to Brown; she did her work, got good grades, and never once went on a date. She barely spoke to anyone at college, except for her freshman-year roommate, Ellen Dooley, who was an extrovert and wouldn’t let Meredith sleep all day on the weekends.

  Things happened in her family: her parents stopped talking to each other, then separated, each moving out of state. There was no reason for Meredith to ever go home again, except that she did. She’d been going back every year. It was her secret; one she held close. She visited the cemetery, not on the anniversary of Josh’s death or on his birthday — she might have run into his family on those dates — but on the anniversary of the day they met. Every time she went, she called out his name. They said a ghost couldn’t refuse your call, but this one did. All she wanted was forgiveness; all she got was silence. She stayed so long that on several occasions she’d found the cemetery gates locked when she went to leave, and she’d had to climb over the wall.

  This year she asked the Moodys if she could have time off in April. By now she had been seeing Daniel Finch every weekend for several months. She had started to swim regularly at the Yale pool, and swimming made her feel again. She was almost done with the past, but not quite.

  Daniel called one Friday night only to have Cynthia inform him that Meredith had gone home. “She never mentioned a trip to me,” he said. “She never even said where she grew up.”

  “Annapolis, Maryland. She’s staying at a hotel at the Baltimore airport. She’ll be back tomorrow.”

  Usually Meredith headed straight to the cemetery after checking in to the hotel, but this trip was different. Meredith turned off the highway one exit earlier than usual. She was thinking about Daniel as she drove, imagining the way he looked when he slept. He slept deeply; in the morning when he woke and she asked what he’d been dreaming about, he always said, You.

  She went to the police station in town. It took a while before they understood what she wanted — someone who could talk to her about the incident at the town pool all those years ago. Someone who’d been there. They directed her to the sergeant, who’d been at the scene; he was the senior officer now, but back then he’d been one of the young policemen who had watched her sink to her knees on the concrete and pray.

  “I wasn’t really praying. I just wanted time to go backward.”

  “That’s a prayer.” The sergeant got out the file; it was all public information now. “You want to tell me what you’re looking for in all this? Because there’s nothing in the files that will help you. Just the bare facts. He didn’t even leave a note. But off the record, it wasn’t the first time the police were involved.”

  “No, I never phoned the police.”

  “I mean the first time he tried. We’d been called to the house twice the year before.” Before he and Meredith were a couple.

  “You’re making this up,” Meredith said.

  “Why would I?”

  She looked at the sergeant. He was a perfectly ordinary man. “Because you’ve seen too many people in pain. Because you’re a nice man.”

  “Because it’s true.”

  She’d been too distraught to notice this officer all those years ago when he helped her into her mother’s car, but she looked at him carefully now.

  “I wouldn’t lie to you,” he told her.

  “No, I don’t think you would.”

  Meredith didn’t go to the cemetery. Daniel had been right. Josh had been alone in his decision; his pain had been his alone, a burden she couldn’t share.

  Meredith drove around, and when it was getting dark, she went back to the hotel. Her phone was blinking when she got to her room. Daniel had left a message. He’d be waiting for her at Bradley Airport when she flew back in the morning, unless she phoned and told him not to come. She took a long shower and got into bed, and for once she slept well. It wasn’t a wasted trip, it was just over. She woke before the alarm began to ring, and the truth was she was ready to leave before dawn.

  IT WAS JOHN AND CYNTHIA’S TENTH ANNIVERSARY AND IT was time to celebrate. They were celebrating not just the marriage itself, but, more important, the fact that against all odds, after ten years of trying, Cynthia was pregnant. Cynthia herself was blissed out; she looked like another person, the angles and anger gone. She had been planning the party for months. Tents on the lawn, a jazz band, dinner catered by the Eagle Inn, buckets of iced champagne set out at every table, although Cynthia herself had stopped drinking. She had read everything she could get her hands on regarding prenatal nutrition and had surprised herself with the passion she had for her pregnancy. She took walks twice a day with Dusty and did prenatal yoga every afternoon. Even John, usually so dour, seemed overjoyed about the baby. A second chance to do something right.

  Cynthia and John asked Meredith to stay on, but she had already moved to New Haven and was living with Daniel Finch. She continued to help out part-time. She hated leaving Sam and Blanca behind, but Sam was nearing his eighteenth birthday, and Blanca was twelve, very grown-up and capable, perfectly able to get to and from ballet lessons and art class all by herself on her bike.

  Meredith was handling the place cards for the party, writing each name in calligraphy while sitting at the table overlooking the pool. She would miss swimming here. Daniel vowed that when they moved to Virginia, where he’d gotten an appointment at UVA, he would make sure that wherever they lived had a pool. It didn’t matter how much it cost. Rent or buy. Condo or house. He didn’t care if he had to pay off the pool for the rest of his life.

  Daniel had asked Meredith to marry him, but she’d told him she needed time.

  “Our relationship began because of time,” Daniel said. “You believed a person could be tied to a time so strongly that even dea
th couldn’t sever the connection. Do you sincerely think more time will give you your answer if you don’t know now?”

  “It might. And it might not.”

  Daniel gave her a diamond ring that had belonged to his mother. It was antique, set in platinum.

  “I’ll wear it,” Meredith told him. “But I’m not committing to anything.”

  All the same, as she helped with the Moodys’ party, Meredith wondered how she would feel if it were her own wedding she was organizing rather than Cynthia and John’s anniversary party. For starters, she would want it small. No people she didn’t really care about. No crowds of drunken partygoers dancing all night.

  “Do you realize you’ve invited everyone in town?” Meredith said when Cynthia came out to join her.

  It had been a gorgeous spring. Not too much rain. Not too many mosquitoes. The basset hound followed at Cynthia’s heels, stepping on its own ears. The dog was devoted to Cynthia. He howled whenever she went out without him and nothing John Moody did could dissuade the dog from sleeping in their bedroom, although thankfully Dusty’s legs were too short for him to leap onto the bed.

  “Dear Dusty.” Cynthia scooped him up. “I promise I won’t neglect you when the baby arrives. I’ll still feed you hamburger.” She checked through the responses. “Actually, I haven’t invited everyone. George Snow, for instance.”

  Meredith looked up from her place cards.

  “John may be blind. I’m not. George was here night and day when Arlyn was dying. You and I both know the truth. Just look at Blanca. She has nothing of John in her.”

  “She’s smart and talented. She resembles him in that way. Did you invite Helen and Art Jeffries?” The owners of the Eagle Inn, who expected to be invited to every event they catered.

  “Thank you for remembering. I’ll phone them this afternoon. What will I do when you’re gone?” They had never really liked each other, but they’d worked well together.

  “You’ll hire someone else. You’ll be fine.”

  “I want you here early on D-day in case I need you,” Cynthia said. “Especially if Sam acts up.”