Tristan watched someone swim off the island. It was a girl swimming in her clothes. It could only be her.
Marie watched in admiration. She could never master the front crawl. It was something about the breathing. She couldn’t breathe sideways. Where Marie breathed, she went, and so she could never keep her body straight like this swimmer. She wondered if she would ever be able to swim with such ease and so beautifully. If her desire to achieve it could be held back by doubt, was it truly desire she felt, or something less? If she desired it, then she would have been able to do it. Desire overcomes inhibition, this swimmer, going into the deepest water, was telling her.
From his table, Emiel watched from the beginning. He thought she was trying to make a scene, to turn people’s attention, particularly his. He was wrong about her then and would be wrong about her in his memory.
Stella had come to think of the girl as timid, a disappointment.
The cold water and her warm tears met on her cheek and cancelled each other out, so there were no tears and there was no water. She would know when to turn around, but not yet. She was gaining strength, not losing it. She would laugh with them all about swimming in her clothes. She would ask them to come in too. Tristan would want to punish her but he would fail and smile and show open affection, because he loved to watch her swim. She would forgive in general. No need to be specific. She would forgive them all, and this way could forgive herself.
But the strength she was gaining was not in her body. It was something else. No one was more surprised than she was. Here I am, she thought, looking at her hands – at the beautiful way skin illumines under water. Skin stays bright, even deep. It was the last thing she would do with her hands, just look. She looked for what seemed like a long time, her eyes full but not with water or tears. Her eyes were full of light. Here I am, she kept thinking, wanting to see her own face for some reason, even a quick reflection, but there were only these hands, which were hers. She felt the longer and more she looked, that she was falling in love with them, these beautiful hands, and would follow them anywhere.
When she went under, Tristan thought he understood. She was trying to prove something. He waited for her to surface in a different place, waiting a long time. She was good at holding her breath. But when she didn’t surface after too long, he ran and dove off the dock in all his clothes and boots. A wave hit the back of his throat like a fist. He tried to swim forward but his boots weighed his legs down so that his hips bent sharply and he started to slip back. The dock was right there because he had not moved, only tread. Reaching up and holding a dock ring with one hand, he tore off his boots without untying the laces and stripped down to his bare arms and chest. She was always trying to get him to swim into the deep water. It was not something he could do. Why didn’t she listen? He never told her why he couldn’t do it, but she might have known. She knew, he thought. His clothes floated and the water churned white and grey around him as he tried again to swim, wrecking himself against the water and air, all the same to him, and as a wreckage he swam, pushing and punching ahead, when he might have pulled. But that wasn’t him, that was her. Tomasin pulled through.
‘You can’t follow.’ He heard her saying that. You never could.
Born in Guelph and based in New York, Jesse Ruddock first left Canada on a hockey scholarship to Harvard. Her writing and photography have appeared in the NewYorker.com, n+1, BOMB, Music & Literature and Vice. Shot-Blue is her first novel.
Typeset in Whitman and Brown
Printed at Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acidfree, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1973 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover design: Office of Paul Sahre
Cover photo: Joshua Strang, USAF
Author photo: Drea Scotland
Coach House Books
80 bpNichol Lane
Toronto ON M5S 3J4
Canada
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800 367 6360
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Shot-Blue Page 20