Sounding the Waters

by James Glickman

  “I hear you’re thinking about moving up here,” I say.

  “Ye Gods,” she says. “I’m here almost every week as it is. If I lived here, we’d be getting all tangled up in each other’s feet. Isn’t that right, Jeannie?”

  “Absolutely. We need to wait until one of us gets sicker.”

  Alice frowns and shakes her head. “Not for a long time for you, and it please God.” She gestures at one of Brendan’s nearby sculptures and starts to walk toward it. She asks me to come join her. I say I will be there in a minute.

  Jeannie mutters something to Annie, whose eyes flash with something like pain. I lean down and Annie whispers, “Jeannie says watch out. God takes long lunch breaks.” She then goes off to stand with her grandmother.

  “About breaks,” I say. “Shouldn’t you go a little easier on your mom?”

  “I suppose. It’s just that she hovers around with those wet eyes and that worried face and feels helpless, and that makes me crazy. Right now, I prefer to maintain the illusion I’m not. Helpless.” She looks toward Alice. “She ought to take a leaf from Brendan’s strategy. Denial.” She pulls her cane out from under the bench. “Let’s change the subject, shall we?”

  “Have you talked to Bobby yet?”

  Jeannie looks over by the reflecting pond where he is in conversation with half a dozen others. “Have to wait until the crowds part. But I had a chat with Laura.” She opens her mouth to tell me about it, but stops. I follow her gaze. “Gail’s here,” she says. I excuse myself to her and Alice and Annie.

  Before I go, Jeannie says, “I need to talk to you later. It’s important.”

  The other shoe, I wonder, remembering the look on her face when she asked me for a favor.

  I have not seen Gail in over two years. When our marriage ended, she opened her own environmental consulting firm in the capital. There is too much tension between us to kiss and far too much familiarity to shake hands. We say hello.

  “What am I supposed to sign?” I ask.

  “I’m selling the cabin.” From her, the words “the cabin” make my stomach clench. I had given her the cabin outright in our settlement. Gail’s love of nature was apparently deep enough to accommodate what had so unnaturally occurred there. As for me, I could not set foot in the place afterward without a kind of nausea. “The title search people want some sort of waiver of claim.”

  “I have no standing to make a claim.”

  “They seem to want it anyway. So if you don’t mind?”

  “No, I don’t mind,” I say, though to my surprise something in me does mind. It takes me a moment to identify it. After she sells the cabin, it will not only be that our daughter, Becky, is gone, but she will be consigned a bit further in the impersonal past. As absurd as the thought is, I am somehow surprised that the world simply does not freeze in place. This August 22 will make five years. In two more years, Becky will have been in the earth longer than she walked upon it. They say it gets easier with time, but they don’t tell you that you never get over it. And I am stunned sometimes, including right now, at how very little easier it is.

  “I also wanted to talk to you about a couple of other things,” Gail says. “Can we go someplace? Get a bite to eat or something?”

  The papery feel in my mouth and throat returns. It is like thirst, but deeper than thirst. I am not a little taken aback by her request. “What’s wrong with talking here? And if you’re really hungry…” I point to a table of hors d’oeuvres.

  She blushes faintly. “Actually, I am. But I was hoping to sit down. In a few minutes, you understand. I want to say hello to the Parrishes and see the sculptures.”

  I look at my watch. I have already been here half an hour. “You’re already an hour past the opening time.”

  “Ben. Dammit. This is not easy for me. There are just a couple of things I want to tell you. And then I promise not to intrude again. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I go over to say goodbye to Bobby and Jeannie, who are talking together at the far perimeter of the exhibition. They each see me coming, give me a nod, and continue their conversation.

  Bobby is saying, “First you tell me I shouldn’t run, and now you tell me I should.”

  “I’m telling you you shouldn’t withdraw. That’s different. You pulled off a long shot to win. Withdraw and you can forget winning dog officer. Who’d risk wasting another vote on you? Hell, I’m not sure I would.”

  He nods. “But what about Laura and Annie? Family comes first.”

  “Annie will be fine if you and Laura get your act together. And if family really comes first, you better also walk the walk because that sure isn’t how your wife sees it right now.”

  “And you,” he says softly. “What about you?”

  “I’ll be fine. What’s going to happen with me will happen regardless of what anybody does. I just won’t get to be in your face every day.”

  “I don’t know,” Bobby says, and looks at his shoes.

  “And while you’re musing this over,” Jeannie says, “just remember one other thing. If you withdraw, you’re virtually handing the seat over to Wheatley for six long years.”

  Bobby looks up and his eyes narrow, taking on a familiar competitive glitter. This argument has his attention in a way that his personal career concerns did not.

  I start to say goodbye.

  “What do you think?” Bobby asks.

  “I think you’ll make an excellent decision, whatever it is.”

  “You’re an asshole,” he says.

  I find myself nodding absently.

  As I am about to have a few words with Jeannie about whatever it is she wants to tell me, Manfred McMasters, Bobby’s old law partner, arrives. Bobby shakes his head, slowly. “I’ll have to hand it to him. I’m surprised he came.”

  “What happened with Freddie?” I ask.

  Jeannie rolls her eyes. “That’s a sad story. Basically, when Governor Roberts asked Bobby to run with him again last time, he promised him the say in the next state supreme court appointment. Bobby told Freddie he was his choice. But when Bobby decided to run for the Senate…”

  “Roberts decided he would make the appointment himself.”

  “Which he did,” she says. “And Freddie’s mad because he wasn’t it.”

  “And he blames Bobby?”

  “Who else is he going to blame?”

  “Governor Roberts.”

  “Much too reasonable.”

  “Freddie’s reasonable, isn’t he?”

  Bobby shrugs. “He used to be. And maybe someday he will be again.”

  Gail comes up to say hello and farewell.

  Looking around anxiously, Jeannie excuses herself to Gail and pulls me aside.

  She takes a big, nervous breath and says, “I need your help on something.”

  “What?”

  “I stepped into some shit.”

  “What kind of shit?”

  “The legal kind. And I was threatening to track it all over Bobby’s campaign. He doesn’t know about it. And for his own good, he can’t know about it.”

  “You? How did you get into legal trouble?”

  “The usual reason. Money. I don’t want to go into it now. But if it comes up—and I’ve got a source who tells me it’s going to—will you talk to Erickson Bruce for me?”

  Erickson Bruce is the state’s special prosecutor. “Represent you?”

  “Yes.”

  I grow instantly nervous at the thought. “I’m not good at that kind of stuff, Jeannie. You know that.”

  “Look. I just need someone I can trust. You’re it. No fancy footwork required.” I sigh. “Please,” she says. “Please.”

  “Let’s go over the problem together. If I’m capable of handling it, I’ll try. That’s all I can say.”

  “Thanks, Ben.
I really appreciate it.”

  “I said if.”

  “I know.”

  Gail and I leave together. As I follow her car to a restaurant she has suggested, I try to brace myself for whatever conversation lies ahead.

  ✳

  It was my day to watch Becky. Gail had a land-use evaluation to do, and on that hot and humid August Sunday she was on the other side of town taking soil samples. Becky was going through one of her weeks where Dad was great and Mom was a pain—she also often went through the reverse—so it worked out well for me to be looking after her. After an ectopic pregnancy and the scarred Fallopian tubes they found afterward, we were told we would be unable to conceive a second child. So we pretty much shared the duties and satisfactions of caring for Becky.

  I sat shirtless in a beach chair sweating and reviewing the files on a manslaughter case I was taking to trial first thing Monday morning. I also wanted to finish up a few notes on some campaign consulting I was doing for a friend of Bobby’s who was running for the state legislature. And then I needed to get a one o’clock lunch ready for Gail and Becky and me. When that was done, I planned to go over some new budget figures on orders from my boss, the county prosecutor, to see if we could cut some expenses this year without having to fire people in the process. And somewhere in there I also had some weeding to get done in our vegetable patch and a swimming lesson I had promised Becky. For me, actually, it was a fairly typical Sunday. Busy. I liked being busy. What else was life for? I was healthy, still pretty young, felt good, and had a lot of interests. I had also been—as I would even reflect from time to time—quite lucky in my life. My parents were still alive, my sister was flourishing with a family of her own, and I had an interesting job, a kind and attractive wife, and a splendid daughter.

  Perhaps, in the end, I was too lucky. There may be other words for it, too. Gail, in anger, used some of them. Arrogant. Smug. Heedless. Selfish.

  When I was growing up, no one in our town locked their cars, and even locking doors to the house was only for when people went away overnight. Now, when thefts and break-ins are common, and getting more common all the time, I still manage to remember to lock my car only sporadically, and sometimes I will lock my front door but forget the side or the back. It is habit, one that is a result of my having experienced the world a certain way in childhood. Perhaps I had the habit of being, let us call it, lucky, too. If something bad had happened to me or to my family, I might have been more watchful, more anxious, more scrupulously careful. As it was, without ever really reflecting upon it, I relied on luck, and it ran out on me that afternoon. Worse, and unforgivably, it ran out on Becky.

  Becky was running in and out of the water in her pink and white striped bathing suit, an inner tube lodged securely at her middle. She loved the water, but, a bit anxious generally, she was especially nervous about it that day. Two days before, she had been practicing swimming and accidentally ducked her head under the water and came up sputtering and coughing. From that point on, she decided she should keep the inner tube with her at all times, including all morning, even when she clambered onto shore to dig some more in the sand with her yellow pail and green shovel.

  I had become very practiced at reading and listening at the same time. Whenever Becky grew quiet for more than a few seconds, I would automatically look up. When I heard an unfamiliar noise, I would look up. Twice she came running out of the water, her face screwed up into violent distaste about what she called the yucky bottom. And it was yucky. Across the lake from us was an old dairy farm. Waste from the cows leached into the lake with the rain, creating a fertilizer so effective that the lake had bloomed with fish-choking vegetation. The state’s Department of Environmental Management required the farmer to set up a water-break to prevent the leakage—something Gail helped the old farmer design a low-cost solution for. But she explained to us it would be at least another year before the vegetation would begin to die back. We went out and pulled the weeds around our dock and made a compost pile for our garden, but the weeds grew back fast—and it occurred to me that was another task I needed to get to before the day was out. Still, as I had noticed all summer with regret, the vegetation had eased up enough for powerboats to be able to buzz around again without getting their engine screws fouled. For the last hour whenever I looked up to check on Becky, several times I saw a skier being towed on a long surfboard-shaped plank. He and the boat towing him were zooming along the far shore, a place far enough away for the chainsaw buzz of the engine to sound toy-like.

  I looked at my watch and gathered my papers. It was already a quarter to one. “Time to check on our banana bread, Beck. C’mon.” She and I had decided to surprise her mother with a treat. At her suggestion, we had even been careful to clean up most of the mess we made in the process.

  She looked up from the sand mound she was smoothing into a dome. At its bottom, her encircling crenelated wall kept crumbling.

  “Just a minute,” she said, dropping to her knees to repair the wall. Becky was quiet, round-eyed, and usually so compliant Gail and I sometimes worried about it. I was pleased when, as now, she resisted us a little.

  “Rebecca…”

  “Please?” she said.

  The powerboat was in the middle of the lake. Some of the waves from its wake had begun to creep up toward Becky’s sand building.

  “C’mon,” I said. “Mom will be here soon.” I was about to say the bread was going to burn when the smoke alarm in the cabin went off. Becky hated loud noises and, though we were at a great enough distance for the beeping not to be painful, she put her hands over her ears and shook her head. The alarm would be set off sometimes by a dirty oven, and I assumed we had spilled some batter, or perhaps the bread was burning.

  I could have insisted she come in. I could have let it go on beeping. Instead I said, “Don’t go back in the water.”

  “All right,” she said without looking up.

  “Did you hear me?”

  She nodded. I jogged toward the house, secure in the warm sunshine and cloudless sky and my own luck. And in my watchful and compliant daughter.

  It was the oven. I took out the bread and fanned the alarm with a dishtowel a few times until it stopped.

  I looked out the window at Becky. She was still working on her wall. Behind her, I could see a small wave carry off her pail and shovel. I opened the window and called to her to watch her toys. Ever since she was small, she hated to lose track of her possessions, and now she was inclined to be neat by habit, as if by keeping the world orderly she could better trust it. She quickly grabbed the pail, her feet going ankle-deep in the water. Then she headed back for shore. Another, larger wave washed away the southern flank of her wall. She busied herself with building a trench. I told her it was time to come in. “No more loud noises!” I called.

  The phone in the kitchen rang. It could be Gail. Or, I thought, it could be my boss. Or the woman I was trying to help win a seat in the state legislature. Or Bobby and Laura. Or my friends on the police force with some last-minute information about tomorrow’s trial. Whoever it was, the phone was right next to me and I decided it should not go unanswered. Our cabin phone number was unlisted. Only people close in friendship or work could get in touch with us.

  It was Gail’s parents in Baltimore. They had made their plane reservations for their long-planned visit in October. I glanced out the window at Becky, called her again, grabbed a piece of paper, and wrote down her grandparents’ flight information.

  Within the time it took for me to write down the flight numbers, times, dates, and name of the airline, it happened. She must have noticed while trying to dig a trench that her shovel was missing and then seen its green plastic form floating off just past the end of our dock. Anxious not to lose something, she went in the water to get it, floated a few feet farther than she meant to, perhaps because of the wake. And then they hit her.

  The driver, a seven
teen-year-old, said he never heard or saw anything. Judging by the number of empty Miller cans the police found in the back of the boat, I can believe that. It was the skier behind who saw it all. He tried to holler and to signal, but the two boys ahead of him on the boat couldn’t hear him.

  I did not see it either, though since then I have seen it unwillingly in my imagination a thousand times. Furious at their coming so close, I ran outside to yell at the boys, and then I saw Becky was not onshore. My heart hammering in my chest, I looked around in disbelief. “Becky!” I called. And called. And then I saw the torn plastic of the inner tube and, nearby, just beneath the water, a bit of pink and white striped suit.

  I dove in the water, pounding frantically to where she lay floating a few inches below the surface. I hugged her to me, said her name, and pulled her to shore, telling her over and over in a soft voice not to worry, she was all right now, she was going to be fine. Her forehead had a small cut at the hairline and her eyes were closed. Otherwise there was not a mark on her. The boys from the boat stood on the sand nearby, their faces white. The one who had been skiing behind and seen it all happen kept saying, “Oh God…God,” and running his hands through his hair.

  The neighbors called an ambulance and came running out with a blanket. I listened to Becky’s chest, saw her rapid shallow breathing, took the blanket and covered her. Then I lay down next to her on the sand and whispered soothing things. After a while everything inside me grew still. Her eyes stayed closed and her lips were bluish. Suddenly I had the conviction this was very bad. My legs began to tremble and my teeth to chatter.

  I was still shaking when Gail arrived. She had been looking forward to lunch as on any other day, but then she saw the rescue vehicle at the house. We had just boarded when she drove up, and she ran to climb in the back with us. As she panted with fear and anxiety, I told her what had happened. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.

  Then she asked in a low, trembling voice, “You left her alone at the water?”

  “The smoke alarm went off.”