The Swimming Pool

by Holly LeCraw

  He turned to her but there were other people near her now and the expression she gave him was genial, set, her eyes glancing away. He raised his hand in farewell; he wasn’t sure if she saw. It could be that he had imagined any connection. Perhaps that was better. Because otherwise he knew she was watching his failure with his wife, that she had seen it all along.

  VI

  She had told him not to knock, ever. Because I would always let you in, she said. Instead she left the door unlocked. He would call from the road to tell her he was coming—he could never keep himself from doing this because his anticipation was so great, as he drove, that he always thought he might burst, and hearing her voice helped him. So she was always ready when he arrived, freshly showered, her hair loosely twisted up, wearing one of her long silky skirts. She was lovely, but he regretted what he had missed—the dirt from her garden, the sand and salt from the beach. It was how he loved to see her, and he would, the next day, sweaty and summer-dirty, as rough as Marcella Atkinson ever got. She would stand at the sink in her sun hat and old shorts, scrubbing her hands. “Don’t wash,” he would say. “Don’t wash too much.”

  “I am a dirty woman,” she would say.

  “No. You’re not. You’re all I want.”

  It was easy, at the beginning, not to think. He swam, constantly, in desire. One weekend he left her house to go for a run, and as he ran, on the sand-edged roads near the beach, he felt he was more fully aware of his own body than he had ever been before. He could feel every strand of muscle flexing, every drop of blood rushing through his heart. This was what desire was like. He had had girlfriends before but never someone he had craved, like a drug.

  He had intended to run longer but suddenly he couldn’t stand being away—it was a ridiculous waste of time, not being with her—and he turned to go back. As he retraced his steps, panting, he was sure his father had not felt this way. He couldn’t have. His father—carnal, lustful? Distracted, so distracted that he could think of nothing else, wanting only to go to her?

  His father had felt differently, his father had not loved her in the same way. His father was not here. He, Jed, was.

  He slowed a block away from her house and made himself walk but when he got there he did not stop to stretch. He burst into the house; she was not there. He went to the bedroom and there she was, lying on the bed, naked under the sheet, as he had left her, reading. She looked up at him with a slow smile that grew more somber as she saw him standing there, breathing hard, in the doorway. He took off his shirt and wiped his face. “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing is wrong.” He stood there with the blood still surging through him and felt enormous. I will fill this room, he thought. I will be all she will ever think of, ever want. He was at the bed in one stride, standing over her. “Listen to me,” he said, “listen.”

  She was still smiling, like he was playing a role, but there was a question in her eyes. “I am listening,” she said softly, and although he knew she had not meant it as a rebuke it felt that way. He took a deep breath, tried to make his heart slow down. Carefully, he lowered himself to the bed, beside her. He did not know what he was going to say.

  It was an overcast Saturday afternoon, and in the flat light he could see each of the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the single straight worry line across her forehead. He touched the groove gently and thought of all that had gone into it, all the years she had lived, without him. Something in him broke open. “Listen. I love you,” he said. “Right now. I love you.”

  He didn’t see or even feel her face moving; weren’t his fingers touching her skin? And yet somehow sadness came and settled like a shadow. It was because of time, the impossibility of it, of them in it.

  Or maybe the shadow on her face was the same shadow that never left them, the shade in the corner of the room, the shifting will-o’-the-wisp of his father.

  He withdrew his hand, got up from the bed, and walked over to the open window. The overcast day made the colors outside more vivid and he looked out at Marcella’s garden, at the green grass and the perennial border with its drifts and heights and valleys of bloom, and thought how much time she had spent there without him, and would again, after he was gone. He was breaking a rule he had, of never speaking or even thinking of time, of any sort of progression. He had barely broken it now but he felt that, still, she knew. He felt her knowing, behind him, on the bed: it was her garden, not his, not theirs. He did not know what sort of fragile structure they were making, but he did not want it to crumble. He had said he loved her. He turned away from the window, back to her.

  She had thrown off the sheet and was lying uncovered, on her side, a leg drawn up and her arm over her breasts so she was almost modest, a nude in a painting. Her head lay on her other arm and she was looking straight ahead, far beyond him, not dreamily but intently, as if she had been instructed to train her eyes on the horizon. Then she drew her knees up halfway and Jed thought that maybe she was cold, or ashamed, or afraid, and that she would curl herself into the fetal position and they would be miserable and separate. But as he watched, she turned onto her back. Her arms fell to her sides, her palms up, open like shells. She looked at him with her sad green eyes and slowly he turned full to her, and she let her drawn-up knees fall open until she was completely exposed to him, her primitive secret folds of her opening to him, and then the glistening beneath. She lay there exposed and secretless and waiting.

  I am old enough, her eyes said, to have learned to ignore time.

  He knew she was wrong but he went to her anyway.

  I

  When Jed pulled into the driveway Sunday night, the house was dark except for a blue glow in the living room. He went in through the kitchen door and could hear, faintly, the meaty voice of the Red Sox announcer.

  When he was growing up there had been no TV in the Cape house, but the first time Billy visited, before he and Callie were married, he said, What’s the deal? No baseball, even? And Jed and Callie, who were both eager for Billy’s cheer and health, looked at each other and said, Why not? At the time Jed had felt inordinately grateful: hardly ever was his parents’ absence a cause for celebration. He and Callie had begged for TV for years, and when they bought a set and installed it, on their own, they felt almost nothing but glee. But since then Jed never had been able to get used to it. It was mainly Billy who turned it on.

  Jed opened the refrigerator. “Hey, man,” he called, “you’re still here!” From the living room, Billy waved at him but didn’t answer, and Jed knew that Callie must be asleep. He held up his beer and Billy nodded, so he took out another one and closed the fridge.

  Billy was slouched in the middle of the sagging old sofa. “Thanks,” he said in a low voice. Jed plopped into the chair next to him. “Thought I’d go back tomorrow,” Billy continued. “Hang out in the morning for a while. Callie’s a little low.” He gave a shrug.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. Won’t talk. Just low. She misses her baby brother. Who’s busy off gettin’ some poon—”

  “Oh, shut up.” Jed took a long drink.

  “So how’s the Jersey girl?”

  “Fine. Good.”

  Billy straightened a little. “Is she fine and good?”

  Jed matched Billy’s new tone. “Yeah, man.” For the first time in what seemed like weeks, he felt himself grinning. “Yeah.”

  “When you going to bring her home, meet the folks?”

  “We’re working on that. Patience.” In the comfort of the familiar living room, the wholesome sounds of baseball in the air, Callie gone, Jed felt he had temporary immunity from his usual caution.

  “Mmm. Well, we miss you around here,” Billy said. “Not the same without you, brother. You know—this is nice.” He gestured with his bottle to the couch, the TV, the two of them watching it. Jed nodded. It was what he had thought his summer would be; it wouldn’t have been bad. He felt a pang of what seemed like nostalgia—ex
cept, of course, that wasn’t possible. For a moment time felt utterly confusing—what had already happened, what was happening now, what had he expected or imagined? “Jamie misses you too,” Billy continued. “I’m telling you, I’m chopped liver. It’s Uncle Jed this, Uncle Jed that.”

  “I love that kid,” Jed said, with a force he had not intended. “I love both of them.”

  “I know.”

  “So Callie’s okay, right?”

  Billy didn’t seem to hear the edge of challenge. “Yeah. Just the blues. Thinks about your parents. I’m telling you, it’s worse when she’s here, but she wants to be here.” Billy was quiet a moment, then continued, his tone elaborately offhand, “Hey, my mom sent me this article from the AJC. She’s always sending me random stuff, you know? Well, it was this thing about unsolved murders.” He stopped and shifted in his seat, and Jed saw he was already wishing he hadn’t said anything. “Cold cases,” Billy continued, reluctantly. “It just—I didn’t like seeing it in print again.” He glanced at Jed. “She’s clueless. Mom.”

  “You didn’t show it to Callie.”

  “No. It’s just been on my mind.” Billy paused. “Sorry. Shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “S’all right.” Jed watched the Rays’ fat but agile shortstop fire to third and the Boston runner get tagged. “So,” he said, not looking away from the TV, “they solve it?”

  “No.”

  “Damn.” His head was light, he watched the little men in white running on the manicured green field; funny how there was hardly any movement at all and then the sudden soaring, the energy spilling out and rounding movements like a dance, and then all at once the ball shot across the diamond and now the runner was out at first. He thought of facing Anthony across the net, waiting for him to serve. “I might give that detective a call,” Jed said.

  “Really?”

  “I mean, obviously the file’s open. Did it mention my dad? The article?”

  There was a pause. “Yeah.”

  “What a load of horseshit.” Jed felt weightless, giddy. He really did feel angry at the detective but it was an anger as clean as cold water. “I wish they would do their fucking jobs and clear his name!”

  “Shh.” Billy took a pull from his beer and then said in a lower voice, “Damn straight.”

  Jed turned on him. “You don’t think he did it, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Somebody’s out there, some animal, and they haven’t caught him yet because they’re sitting around on their asses blaming my father.”

  Billy stood. “You want another one?”

  “Sure.”

  While he waited Jed stared at the TV, at the expressionless concentration on the pitcher’s face. That was it. Purity. Jed’s mind was racing, his thoughts felt as unclouded and hard as the pitcher’s eyes. The pitcher threw another strike.

  He heard the refrigerator door close and then Billy’s returning steps. “Here,” Billy said, handing him a bottle and plopping back on the sofa. “Look. Are you really going to call the guy?”

  “Don’t see why not.”

  “They’ll let you know if anything turns up.” The pitch was high and outside.

  “Yeah, but I could still light a fire under their asses.” I could tell them something, he thought, and it was not until that moment that he realized he could.

  Billy sat up all the way, held his own bottle in front of him with both hands, like an earnest offering. “I don’t know if you need to stir it up. It’s been seven years, man—”

  “Almost eight.” I could tell them something. He wasn’t there, he really wasn’t, I know it for a fact.

  They would say, How do you know that, son?

  And then? he thought. Then what?

  “Callie’s come to terms with it,” Billy was saying. “She knows they’ll never find the guy. She knows he’ll rot in hell, whoever he is. She’s not sitting up nights.”

  “Neither am I.” And then what? His father guilty in a whole new way. If Callie had answered her questions, there was no point in forcing her to ask new ones, making her wonder if their father had even loved their mother—right?

  “I’m just saying.” Billy sighed.

  “Callie talks about it?” Whoever he is.

  “Not really. Not anymore. She’s tough.” Billy drained his bottle and set it down on the coffee table, finally sat back. “All right. Full count. And—damn. Look at that.”

  The ball was sailing, out and away, above the expanse of green. As the crowd at Fenway roared, the TV camera closed in on the pitcher, his eyes following the course of the home run, his face still expressionless, and yet somehow the intensity turned to resignation.

  “That’s the way you play it,” Billy said, slapping his leg. “That’s the way you play that game. See? You never know what’s gonna happen.”

  “No,” Jed said. “I guess you never do.”

  WHEN BILLY D’AMBROSIO HAD MET JED MCCLATCHEY, and then his sister, during his and Jed’s first year of law school, he’d been dazzled. He hadn’t wanted to admit it, but it was true. They had been in the papers constantly, and yet here they were, leading their lives, getting A’s. Callie was beautiful, she looked him straight in the eye, she didn’t seem grief stricken at all except in the most understandable of ways. When she talked about her father she would often cry, pretty tears that didn’t frighten him.

  They quickly formed a tight threesome, they were all practically roommates except that Billy and Callie, in those days, had lots of rollicking sex. He and Callie got married and then they had Jamie and everything was proceeding nicely and Jed came over all the time, and Billy couldn’t quite say what it was that made him start to quietly jobhunt up north, except that when he held his baby son, James Duncan D’Ambrosio—named after Jed, not him—he wanted him to never know grief. Even then he was starting to feel adjunct to Jed and Callie, that their history with the parents he had never met was like another person in the room, filling all the space and draining it of air and life. He was afraid of them, these dead parents. If it had been only one—but it was both, Callie and Jed were too unmoored, what had been impressive now seemed unnatural.

  Billy had his little family and he loved them and he had not wanted Callie to leave this summer. He had managed to convince himself, though, that it was simply old-fashioned, an argument Callie had used herself—that women used to do this all the time, the men out, away, hunting and gathering in their city offices, the women and children safe in their summer idyll. That Callie had never before argued for old-fashionedness, or idylls, or madonnas tending hearth, he ignored. He had long ago become used to Callie being right, he wouldn’t argue now; besides, he could come home late and get up early and impress his firm, and become more and more convinced that he had done the right thing, moving them here, and that this summer’s separation was temporary.

  He was glad his brother-in-law was off doing something normal, getting laid or falling in love or both. He was glad he had something to rag him about and felt old crude humor rising to his lips, things he hadn’t said since college. It was a little weird, this whole scenario with the girl—he couldn’t say why exactly, he just felt it—but he didn’t blame Jed if he wanted to escape every now and then. That was something he could understand.

  JED HATED TO ADMIT IT, but when Billy left Monday morning he felt himself relax. He’d gotten used to being the man of the house, and to not being watched. It was not that Billy was looking for signs of trouble—rather, Jed felt that Billy was always trying to figure out where he himself fit, where he could insinuate himself. This was new. He might ask Callie about it, one of these days.

  After waving good-bye in the driveway, everyone else went back into the house and Jed got out a ladder and shears to clip the wisteria arbor by the patio. It was in full sun and Jed was up on the ladder sweating already when he heard the sounds of agonized protest coming from the house. He could make out Jamie hollering Mommy and no, and as this was not so unusual he kept cli
pping. Besides, Toni was there too; wasn’t she supposed to be useful? After a few minutes the yelling escalated, then stopped, and soon after he saw Callie sprinting down the driveway, pushing the double stroller. He watched her until the overarching oaks on Whig Street blocked his view.

  He balanced the clippers on top of the greenery, took off his shirt and wiped his forehead with it. Callie often went for a run in the morning, but alone, or only with Grace. Now she was pushing that stroller in this heat. He threw his shirt down to the ground and picked up the shears. It felt like 90 degrees already. And humid. He thought of Marcella in the heat, sweat at her hairline. Thought of them moving together slowly through the thick air as though they were swimming—

  He was standing immobile on the ladder, the long blades poised in the air. Stop. Ridiculous that he was pruning the wisteria now in the heat. But good. Good to punish himself, sweat to death in straight sun.

  “What are you doing?”

  He looked down, startled. Toni was at the foot of the ladder. He resisted the impulse to give a snippy sixth-grader sort of reply—Playing football, what does it look like I’m doing?—and took a deep breath. “Did Callie take both the kids?” he said, trying to keep accusation out of his voice.

  “I was going to keep Jamie,” Toni said. She sounded defensive anyway. “He totally pitched a fit, though. He hates me.”

  “No, he doesn’t.” She was looking up at him with her eyes shaded against the sun, her weight on one leg, chest thrown out. It really seemed to be unconscious. He tried to will himself into a fond sort of amusement. “Really,” he said, and started snipping again.