Swimming Lessons

by Mary Alice Monroe

  “I’ve got you a plane ticket.”

  She searched his face, strained and taut, and his eyes, dark with worry. “Tell me what’s wrong!” she cried. Then in a flash, she knew. Clutching his shirt she cried out.

  “Oh, God, is it Lovie?”

  26

  No sooner had Ethan’s truck come to a stop in the driveway of the beach house than Toy pushed open the door and ran up the stairs. The front door was locked and she hit it with the flat of her palm in wild frustration before digging in her purse, tossing its contents to the porch floor before she pulled out the key. Her hands shook violently as she tried to maneuver the key into the lock. Ethan, coming up behind her, took the keys from her hand and readily opened the front door.

  Toy exploded into the house. “Lovie!” she called out, turning her head from right to left. She raced from room to room like a madwoman, calling over and over, “Lovie! Lovie!”

  Ethan stood in the living room and watched, knowing she had to go through the motions, to see for herself that Lovie was gone. She hadn’t cried. Nor had she slept or eaten in the twenty-one hours it had taken them to wait in the airports, to fly to Charleston and to drive to Isle of Palms. He knew she’d dissolve soon and he planned on being there when she did.

  Toy came stumbling back into the living room, her eyes wild with despair as she glanced around the familiar room that had always felt so comforting and was now empty and cold without her daughter in it. She had a dazed look on her face, as though she’d been hit by a bullet, felt the sting, but had not fully absorbed the blow. Her gaze finally fell on Ethan.

  “Ethan,” she said in a hollow voice. “Where is she? Where is my Little Lovie?”

  Her voice broke on the last word, as did her balance. In three strides he was at her side, collecting her in his arms before she collapsed to the floor.

  Cara sat in a chair facing the window, staring out. Across the bedroom, Brett was on the phone with Ethan. He spoke in low, even tones that revealed the depth of his fatigue. She’d always thought that in times of crisis, she was the strong one, the clear thinker who could make quick decisions and act on them, efficiently and effectively. She sighed wearily. Not any more.

  She looked out at the sunny sky over the glistening marsh. The bucolic scene mocked the misery she felt inside. She sat riddled with self loathing, of no use to anyone—not to Toy, not to Little Lovie and least of all, not to her husband.

  Brett hung up the phone. She heard his heavy sigh and knew that he was also carrying the burden of worry for Toy.

  “How is she?”

  “They got back from the police station. Ethan’s hoping she’ll sleep some now. She’s pretty wired. He’s going to stay with her tonight.”

  “That’s good. She shouldn’t be alone.”

  “She’s going to the station again tomorrow morning. I hope she can think of something we’ve missed.”

  “I should go see her.”

  “I wouldn’t go just now,” he said in a hurry. “She’s probably exhausted.”

  “She doesn’t want to see me, does she?”

  “She doesn’t want to seeanyone right now. She needs to rest. She’ll want to see you tomorrow.”

  “No she won’t. She’s angry at me, I know she is. And I don’t blame her. I’d be angry, too.”

  Brett moved to her side and reached out to put his hand on her shoulder but Cara pushed it away. “She is not angry at you,” he said slowly and with deliberation. “She’s not angry at anyone. She’s only worried about Lovie.”

  “Of course she’s angry. I lost her child!” Cara put her hand to her head and shook it in disbelief. “How could I have lost her child? How could I have lost your child?”

  Then Brett was there and she was pounding his chest with her fists. “I lose children. My God, Brett, I lost two children!”

  He managed to get his arms around her and hold her still. “You didn’t lose any child, Cara!” he said close to her ear. “The children, both of them, were taken from you. You’re not to blame.”

  He held her tight until her sobs subsided and she felt limp in his arms. He loosened his arms, but still held her.

  “It’s a sign,” she said wearily. She turned her head to rest her cheek against his chest. The fabric of his shirt was damp with her tears.

  “A sign? Of what?”

  “That I’m just not cut out to be a mother,” she said, her voice cracking. “Maybe this was for the best.”

  Brett’s sigh trembled as he squeezed her. “Oh, honey, what good is it to talk like that?”

  He was right. She knew he was, but it did not stop her pain. She looked over at his hand on her shoulder. It was a large hand, strong and firm. She rested her lips against his skin.

  “I am so sorry,” she said, a broken woman.

  The following day Toy rose with the sun to find Ethan slumped and asleep on the sofa. He was still dressed in the tan pants and long sleeved, white shirt he’d worn on the plane and dark stubble shadowed his jaw. He looked exhausted and she knew it was all for her.

  She tiptoed past him, so as not to awaken him, to slip out the back door. In October the morning air was cool and damp. She gulped deep mouthfuls of it as she followed the narrow, winding beach path to the ocean. The wildflowers were closed tight and dewy, not yet opened to the sun. Toy broke out from the high dunes on to the beach and walked at a heady pace from the dune to Breach Inlet and back. She had to get outside. She needed to feel the sand of her beach between her toes, to see the detritus rich waters of her Atlantic Ocean. She needed to feel grounded when her whole world was tilting out of orbit.

  When she returned to the beach house she found Ethan awake, pacing at the door.

  “Where’ve you been?” Worry made his tone sharp.

  “On the beach,” she replied. Her own voice sounded dead.

  “Please, let me know if you’re going out.”

  “Why?”

  His eyes pulsed with frustration and he turned to the counter. “Want some coffee?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  His went through the motions of making a pot of coffee and as it brewed, Ethan prepared breakfast with the same neatness and attention to detail that he had at the Aquarium. He chopped neat piles of mushrooms, green peppers and scallions, beat eggs in tight circles with a wire whisk and flipped the omelet with a professional turn of the wrist. Pulling out a chair at the table, he set the beautifully prepared plate before her.

  Toy sat woodenly and stared at the omelet congealing on her plate. She felt her stomach turn at the rich scents. “Where did you get the food?”

  “Flo and Emmi stopped by last night and brought food. Cara was here, too. You were asleep and no one wanted to disturb you.”

  “Cara was here?” She pounced on this. “Was there any news?”

  “No, nothing.”

  The light that had momentarily sparked in her heart was snuffed out. She felt cold—in her body, her heart, even in her soul.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t eat this,” she said, pushing the plate away.

  “You’ve got to eat something to keep up your strength.”

  “Maybe later.”

  “You haven’t eaten in…”

  “I’ll be sick. My stomach…” She waved it away, shaking her head. Instead she sipped some water, feeling the cool liquid moisten her lips. “Should I call the police again?

  He shook his head. “They said they’d call you if they learned anything at all.”

  Her fingers tapped the counter restlessly “They wanted a recent picture of Lovie.”

  Seizing on this, she stood and walked to the bookshelf to retrieve a gray cardboard box. Bringing it back to the table she emptied the contents. Dozens of photographs spilled to a pile on the table. She began to sort through them, one by one. Ethan came near to look, leaning over her shoulder.

  “These are the pictures I took this summer,” she told him.

  She’d taken photographs all summer of the turtle nesting season.
Some of the photos were taken with her cheap instamatic camera. Some were sharper and had better color. Those were taken with the camera that Ethan had given to her for her birthday.

  Using her index finger, she pulled out a photograph of the remarkable turtle tracks that had gone around Lovie’s sand castle and another of Lovie sitting beside the turtle nest, curious. Lovie proudly carrying the orange nesting sign up the dune. Lovie packing turtle team supplies into the backpack. Lovie bending over to inspect a sea shell. Lovie following a hatchling crawling to the surf. Hers and Lovie’s footprints, side by side, in the sand.

  “They’re good,” he told her.

  She picked up a close-up photograph of Lovie in her favorite turtle team T-shirt. Lovie was smiling ear to ear, revealing a missing front tooth.

  “She was so proud to be a turtle lady,” Toy said in a soft voice, remembering each incident in the photographs as though it were yesterday.

  “A little turtle lady,” Ethan said, reading the words on the T-shirt.

  Toy was struck by a thought and bolted down the hall to Lovie’s bedroom. She went straight to the white wicker laundry hamper, and opening it, tore through the clothing in it, dumping them on the floor. At last she found it and pulled out Lovie’s pale green turtle team shirt. Her breath hitched at seeing it and she buried her face in the soft cotton. She could still smell Lovie’s sweet scent in the fabric.

  “Lovie, where are you?” she cried and dissolved in tears. She felt as lost and frightened as the child she had once been. Then she suddenly stopped and wiped her eyes with determined strokes. Clutching the shirt, she rose and walked to the kitchen counter to fetch her pocketbook.

  “I need to see my mother.”

  She found her keys, and closing her purse, walked quickly to the door. Ethan followed her and grabbed her arm.

  “Wait, I’ll come with you.”

  She stopped at the front door and turned to face him. He was tall and strong and his eyes shone with determination to help her. She thought for a moment that it would be comforting to have him with her then shook her head.

  “This is something I have to do alone.” She held her breath then said, “In fact, Ethan, I need for you to go home.”

  He looked hurt, his eyes bruised with fatigue. “You’re asking me to stay away again?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  Toy turned off busy Rivers Avenue in North Charleston onto a narrow street of box-like houses with squared off, scraggly lawns, gangly oleanders, unclipped hedges, and older cars parked in the street. She had to go slow to navigate around potholes so big she’d lose a wheel if she drove through one. She passed a few kids riding bicycles and an old woman in her bathrobe rocking on her front porch. She continued on to where a twisted fence partitioned off a trailer park. A jungle of weeds and vines writhed through the rusted chain link and partially obscured the sign: Charleston View.

  Toy shivered as she drove through the gate. Memories dappled her homecoming like the light that struggled to pierce through the leaves of the ancient oaks that grew between the trailers. The road here was little more than a graveled rut but the day was dry and her car reached what looked like the oldest trailer home in the park.

  She closed the car door and faced the house she grew up in. The rickety trellis that she’d painted forest green still bordered the bottom of the trailer, covering the cinderblocks it sat on. She’d painted it over ten years ago. There were big gaps in the fencing where it had rotted or just fallen off. She followed the gravel path and climbed the wood stairs. Rust ate at the hinges of the front door like cancer.

  She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, trying to calm her nerves. She’d not stood at this threshold since she was kicked out six years earlier. Her mother had shouted unspeakable things to her, words that could not be recalled without sharp stabs of shame. She’d sworn she would never return and remembering, she had second thoughts. Then she thought of Lovie and raising her fist, she knocked on the door.

  A moment later she heard footfalls approaching and steeled herself. The door swung open and a heavyset woman in a pink cotton floral bathrobe stood before her. She had thin, mousy blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, revealing gray at the crown and temples. It was a rough face with smoker’s skin. Pale blue eyes very much like her own stared out from under a greasy shock of bangs.

  Mother and daughter looked at each other a moment as they marked the changes that six years wrought.

  “You’re the last person I expected to see today,” her mother said without a smile.

  “Hello Mama.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I’d like to talk to you.” She peered over her mother’s shoulder. “Are you alone?”

  Her mother’s eyes hardened. “He’s gone. Come on in.”

  Toy released a quick sigh of relief that her step-father wasn’t in. She’d hoped that he still had his job at the foundry that meant he’d be at work by six.

  She stepped inside the closed, dimly lit room and was assailed by the scents of mold and the stale sweetness of spray starch that had always lingered in the air for as long as she could remember. She shuddered at the memories the smells triggered, even though the trailer was stifling hot.

  Nothing much had changed. The same dingy brown furniture sat in the same places in the room. Several cloth laundry bags lay on the floor beside an ironing board in front of the television. Her mother must still be taking in ironing, she thought. A rotating fan whirred in front of the ironing board, stirring the stale air. Across from it, the television had been muted, but on the screen a tele-evangelist in a long black robe was pacing a stage, raising his hands and preaching.

  Her mother stood in the middle of the room. She didn’t ask Toy to sit down or offer her so much as a glass of water.

  “I seen you on TV,” she said. “With them turtles.”

  “Oh, really? That must’ve been the release of Kiawah. A television crew came out to film it.”

  “So you work at the Aquarium now?” When Toy nodded, her mother said, “I hear you went to college?”

  “I graduated last year.”

  Her mother made a face of surprise. “What do you know? You must be the first one in the family to graduate from college.”

  Toy felt a blossoming of pride before her mother added with a snort, “Who’da thought it would be you?”

  Toy was surprised that her mother still had the power to hurt her. She bent her head to open her purse and pull out the photograph of Little Lovie. “Mama, have you seen Darryl?”

  She looked surprised by the question. “Darryl? Hell, no. Why would I see him? He knows better than to show his face around here.”

  “He came back from California. He was playing music out there for the past five years. Anyway, he came by my place saying he wanted to get to know Lovie better.” She took a breath, realizing the magnitude of the moment. She held out the photograph for her mother. “That’s her,” she said “That’s my daughter. Your granddaughter. Her name is Olivia Sooner, but we call her Lovie.”

  Her mother took the photograph and drew it close to her eyes, studying it. Toy braced herself for a torrent of accusations that she’d not brought her daughter to meet them, not once in all these years. So when her mother’s face softened, Toy was caught off guard.

  “She’s the spittin’ image of you at that age.”

  Toy was deeply moved. No one in the new life she’d carved for herself had known her when she was young. It was the kind of observation a young mother hoped to hear from her own mother. Toy brought her hand to her mouth. “Really?”

  “She’s a pretty thing.” She handed the picture back to Toy. “You ought to bring her by.”

  “Mama, Darryl took her!”

  Her mother’s face screwed up in puzzlement. “What do you mean, he took her?”

  “I was out of town and he took Lovie for the day. It was all arranged. But he never brought her back! He’s been gone for three days and we don’t know where he went. That’
s why I’m here. I was hoping you might’ve seen him, or heard something about him. Maybe his mother called you or…I don’t know. Something. I thought maybe even he’d dropped Lovie off with you.”

  “No, I haven’t seen hide or hair of either of them. He wouldn’t likely come by here anyhow, knowing how we feel about him. Who was taking care of the child when you was out of town?”

  “Cara, my friend.”

  Her expression hardened again, so fast that Toy wasn’t sure she’d seen the softening in the first place. When she saw the flash of anger in her mother’s eyes, she felt herself reverting to the insecure teenager again.

  “What business do you have leaving your child with friends when you’ve got family who’d take care of her? You should’ve left her with me.”

  “No,” Toy blurted out, finding her strength. “I’d never leave my daughter with him.”

  Her mother swiped her hand in the air with her lip curled in disgust. “You’re not going to start in on that again? He didn’t do nothin’. He swore on the bible he never touched you funny. You were just imagining it. Or lying. You never cared for Roy.”

  The image of Roy’s hands on her breasts rose up in her mind and she shuddered, bringing up her palms and backing away. “No. I’m not going to get into this. It’s not why I’m here.”

  “Your father is a God-fearing man and he’d never do anything to hurt you or that child.”

  “He’s not my father,” she screamed back.

  Her mother appeared stunned by her outburst and, to Toy’s surprise, backed down a bit. “He’s the only father you have. And I’m your mother. You should’ve left that baby here with me, not some stranger. I never would’ve let anything bad happen to her.”

  “Like you did with me?”

  “You have no call to come here and say those things,” she said, very angry now. “I didn’t ask you to come.”

  “Mama, I didn’t come to fight. I only came to see if you heard about my baby.”

  “You came home because you’re in trouble again,” she said with a sneer. She waved her arm at her, shooing her away. “Go on, get out of here. You haven’t changed. You’re still in trouble. You’re always in trouble. Your kind always is.”