The Swimming Pool

by Holly LeCraw

  That night in the motel suite they turned on the radio and poured wine into the glasses Marcella had brought. She tried to bustle, to let her usual kitchen rhythms take over. Cecil said he wanted to help and so she set him to chopping an onion, but when she glanced over at him a minute or two later he was still trying to peel it with the tip of his knife. “Go,” she said, laughing, taking it from him. “Go sit, you silly man.” Cecil, his hands up in surrender, retreated.

  “All I really want to do is watch you,” he said.

  “That is all you are good for,” she retorted, smiling, and then turned her back and quickly finished the onion. She felt his eyes on her and all at once wished he would look away, that she could hide, just for a moment, and gather herself together. She couldn’t care less that he could not cook—neither could Anthony—but she had handed him a knife and told him to do something he never did, and thus had exposed all the things he normally did do, without her. As she had watched him struggle with the onion, a look of earnest concentration on his face, she had seen him with Betsy, in a kitchen that had been theirs for years and years. She had seen Betsy, in her unassailably competent way, taking care of him. She felt the weight of their routines, the life to which he would soon return. She would not be in it and the weight pressed down, making it hard to breathe.

  His hand was on her shoulder. She turned to him and his eyes were so blue and she thought with an unfamiliar ferocity, They are mine. The only eyes that truly see me. “Why, Chella,” Cecil said. “Chella, what’s wrong?”

  “It’s only the onion.” She brushed at her eyes with her free hand. “I am too sensitive.” She made herself smile at him and he smiled back and in her head she heard an old voice, her mother’s: Ungrateful girl. Of course. She told herself, See, this is what I want. This, here. Enjoy it now. What I wanted is here, I have it, I cannot believe it!

  She cooked the dinner and carefully arranged the plates and they sat down to eat with music playing in the background, but she could not keep hold of the dutiful happiness. The mauve tapestry motel furniture clashed with the bright yellow Provençal placemats and napkins she had brought. They were new, so silly, she had spent too much money in a little gift shop in Mashantum Village. She had wanted something unfamiliar. A false trousseau. In the store, as she was paying for them, she had felt a moment of dizzy joy, but that was now gone. In front of her, the food she had cooked, hot and good, was nevertheless unreal. It did not match the reality of the room, of the synthetic sofa cushions where so many other people had sat, the bed where so many others had slept.

  She heard Cecil say, “This is delicious.”

  She knew there was appreciation, even love, in his voice but she could think only of the things he would never say—what Betsy cooked for him, what they talked about at dinner. How this was simply a duplicate of something he already had. “We are just playing house,” she said.

  “Please don’t cry.” He reached out and took her hand.

  “It wasn’t the onion,” she said.

  “I know.”

  She sat with her fork poised foolishly in the air and fought, fought, as hard as she wanted to—but not as hard as she could. She gave in and whimpered, “I want this.”

  There was a pause. She never forgot that pause. She was terrified, she had broken a rule, she had spoken of the future and of the ultimate breaking of rules. She wasn’t terrified of what Cecil would say—he wouldn’t rise from the table, displeased, punitive. He wasn’t Anthony. She thought instead that leaden silence would descend, that their connection would be broken, which would be the worst thing of all. She had been ungrateful. She had asked for too much.

  Instead Cecil said softly, “I do too.” She looked up at him. “I want this too.”

  She didn’t answer and the moment lengthened. She took in the still life of their half-eaten dinner and half-drunk wine. She looked at Cecil’s blue eyes full of desire. At, not into. She thought of that later. Not into. Still, he nodded, and she felt the smile rise on her face. She would let herself believe it. This moment was the pivot. The world had changed, everything was different. She would keep breaking rules. She would break all of them.

  II

  On Tuesday morning, sitting at the kitchen table, Callie said, “It’s August.”

  Jed got up from the table and poured himself a second cup of coffee from the pot near the sink. “Since when are we paying attention to the calendar?” he said. He had gotten home from Marcella’s late the night before. The very strangeness of these mornings was becoming familiar, how he felt yanked out of Marcella’s house by some alien force, how he was sleep-deprived, still swimming in the feeling of her body, of the timelessness in her bed. He turned around, his back now to the window, and watched the sun slant in onto the worn linoleum floor.

  “I don’t want to go back,” Callie said.

  “No, me neither.”

  “What do you mean?” Callie said, more alert.

  He shrugged. “I mean, I don’t want to go back. Maybe we could just stay here.” There was silence. “Why not?” he continued, and glanced up at Callie. She was looking at him intently, and he paused, and thought of the sensation that he had with Marcella: all the world falling away, all other people shades, the two of them the only living, dimensional beings. He had spoken without really considering his words, but now the idea was carrying him along by itself. “I mean it, Cal,” he said, his voice gathering force. “I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll move to Connecticut. I’ll stay here with you. Say the word.” Here is the answer! he thought. So simple! It will keep going, it doesn’t have to stop. It doesn’t ever have to stop—

  She looked at him hard for another moment, and then her eyes seemed to cloud over and she looked away. She waved her hand vaguely. “All right,” she said. “Sure. We’ll just stay.”

  “Callie?” Jed said. “You hear me?” Now he was the one suddenly alert. And that was his father’s voice—You hear me? Meaning, if you listen, all will be well; if you don’t, there will be trouble. It was a voice from a long time ago. “Callie?” But she was looking out the window; she seemed to know he was not really paying attention. Hear. Here. Not here.

  … and when you swing for godsakes don’t aim at the house. You hear me? The humor in his father’s voice. No, he was not in trouble. Jed was out in the yard, here in Mashantum, right where Callie was looking, the sun in his eyes like now, the yellow August sun—only they were looking the other way, toward the house, it was close to sunset. His father’s arms were around him, showing him how to swing a bat. The two of them stood together, his father’s body behind his to demonstrate the straightening of the elbows, the twist of the hips. On the bat there were four hands. Jed was safe—no, he was engulfed—but had he felt that then? or was it only now? In his mind the scene played forward. He wrested the bat away and turned on his father—but before he could do what he craved and dreaded his father was gone, a hologram extinguished. And he realized that murderous anger had lessened too, and rearing up new and strong instead was guilt he did not want to feel. His father’s warm happy voice. The big hands over his. How long Jed had wanted not to remember those things. “Cal? You hear me,” he said. It was no longer a question. “Anything,” he said. “We’ll stay here. Bar the door. You and me.”

  He needed her to answer. She needed to say, What are you talking about? What are you afraid of? He didn’t know what he would tell her. He would surprise himself. She would ask and the truth he didn’t yet know would simply fall from his lips—and also the truths he did know: This is whom I go to see. This is what I know now. This is why I keep escaping. Why I keep leaving you.

  But she didn’t say anything, and he realized she wasn’t really looking at him anymore. She didn’t see his stricken face, the mouth that was declaring his loyalty too loudly. He wouldn’t, couldn’t, tell her where he went. She had burrowed back down deep within herself, and he would not say You hear me? again.

  HE CALLED MARCELLA that night. Grace was asleep, and
while Callie was putting Jamie down Jed took the cordless phone outside. He didn’t think Callie would listen, but he still wanted to be well away. He sat in an Adirondack chair facing the house. Behind him was the pool and the screen of trees between their house and the neighbors’. In the darkening twilight, he could pretend that he was backed by wilderness all around. That he was completely alone.

  On the other end of the line Marcella’s voice murmured on and he felt desire as always, but somehow it was not blocking out his other thoughts. He wanted to interrupt and say, Something is wrong with Callie, and I cannot figure it out, and I don’t want to. He wanted to say, I sit by the pool with your sexy daughter and she isn’t you, and I hate her for it—but of course he couldn’t say that. Or what about: Make the summer stop. I will never get enough of you. Make it stay early August forever, almost over but not quite. Do it!

  But instead he said, “I was thinking I might call the detective. In Atlanta. It’s still an open case.”

  There was a pause and he wondered if this idea frightened her. Finally she said, “Caro, what would you say to them?”

  “I—I would just see. If they had anything else in there besides Dad. I wouldn’t have to say anything about you.”

  “You could, darling, though,” she said. Her voice was stronger now. “It will not hurt me. Darling, I don’t see how you could not.”

  “I don’t have to tell them anything. I would just check in. I have the right to do that.”

  “Oh, caro,” she said, and he didn’t like her voice, tender and reproachful at once, like she was speaking to a child. “It has been so long,” she said. “And what if they find who did it? You would just have a face to hate.”

  He was stunned with how little she understood. “I want a face,” he said. “Just one. Don’t you see? There’s a person out there. Some—animal—”

  “I know.”

  “Well, then,” he began, but he stopped, overwhelmed by possibility, by how much things could change. If he told the police what he now knew, if it became public, if Marcella was the one in the paper—although surely no one cared anymore. No one but him. He said, “He still could have done it. My father.”

  “What?”

  “He could have hired someone. Or something.”

  Her voice came like ice. “No.”

  He had never heard it like that before. There, she had done what he wanted her to do, told him what he already knew in his gut. “But someone did it,” he said, like a child.

  “Yes.”

  He was tired, he was not sure if he wanted to keep moving on this path that was beginning to seem more like a circle: you knew nothing, then something, then nothing again, but a new nothing. “I just want you,” he said. “I just want to see you.”

  Marcella said, “Then I will try to make you see me.” She knew him, she would do what he wanted. She told him about her garden and the beach that day, and the translation she was working on, and the cold soup she had made for her supper; in her words were pictures, her straight back standing at her counter, her hands chopping vegetables she had picked, the sharp knife flashing. She knew that her house was both a dream and a home to him; he heard her trying to weave the spell. But he was not soothed. Instead of seeing her, he watched his own house. His father’s house. As the sky darkened, the light in the windows grew yellow and warm. He saw Callie moving in front of Jamie’s window upstairs, pulling the shade, and then the light went off. It should have been homey, comforting, but instead the sight struck him as troubling and false, something prematurely extinguished. A few moments later he saw Callie downstairs, framed in the window above the sink. She stood there turning on the water, picking up dishes, but then stopped and was still for a long time. “Darling?” Marcella said.

  “I’m here.” He wanted to tell her how the yard around him was going from deep green to blue to black. He wanted to tell her that he could feel the presence of the pool behind him, the undisturbed surface looking almost solid. He wanted to tell her that sometimes he thought of her there, still, at that party by the pool, years before, that the image of her now still had not quite erased the dream of her then; that he did not know what the dream had been, what it still was, even though now he had her. What the yearning was. He felt anger rising. “I want to tell you about this house,” he said. “Where I am.”

  “Do, caro.”

  “But I won’t,” he said. “Because you know it already. Don’t you.”

  He heard her hesitate. “A little,” she said.

  “Do you know it well?”

  “No.”

  “Because you didn’t come here. You and Dad.”

  “Jed.”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “We didn’t go there.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I am not going to say, darling.”

  “Why not?”

  “It will not do anyone any good.”

  He wanted to unleash the rage now, but he couldn’t. He loved her soft voice. The same voice his father had loved. “Goddamnit!” he cried.

  “What? What is it?”

  “It’s no good,” he said. “It’s no good.” He stood up. What if his father had sat in that very chair? What if he had talked to Marcella on the phone while watching the light in his own son’s bedroom window? Why could he not get used to these thoughts—and what would happen if he did? “I want to see you,” he said. “I want to see you now.” He wanted her essence, wanted her wrapped around him like air.

  “I’ll come,” she said. “I’ll leave in five minutes.”

  “No.”

  “I will!”

  “You can’t. You can’t come here.”

  “I will stay somewhere else.”

  “No. You can’t come here. You know that,” he snarled. “You know that perfectly well.”

  He listened to her crying. “Chella,” he said, and waited, not for her but for himself. Let her name hang there, let it be his. Let himself pretend. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I had to do that. I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Marcella.” And she was a miracle again, the long-limbed creature in the chair by the pool, and he felt utterly lost, so far from her.

  He watched Callie at the window. Finally she moved away and he could no longer see her. But he imagined he could feel her impatience, her need, emanating from the house. “I have to go,” he said.

  “Jed—”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I have to go.” His whispering voice shook. He was furious, again, that he could not stop wanting her. I will never get enough of you. He heard now what he had really said: never.

  CALLIE MADE HER WAY through her days with a growing sense of dread that sometimes felt, sickeningly, like anticipation. It was as though she were a citizen of a country that was about to be invaded; she felt hazy denial, yet knew also that escape was futile, that the normalcy of the days as they ticked by was surreal. It was all about to collapse, even though she did not know who the invading forces would be, or even what the battle was. She knew only that even on the most beautiful, the most perfect days—days of blue sky and soft breezes and long naps taken by her children—she felt that the perfection was an evanescent gift she was not entitled to accept.

  It was a cloudy day, however, when Grace first smiled.

  The air was oppressively muggy and the sky looked like it would break open and pour any minute, only it never did. Every so often there were five-minute sprinklings that barely wet the earth, and when they stopped the air was more humid than ever.

  “God,” Jed said, sitting at the kitchen table, “this day is constipated. Someone needs to get the mail moving.” This was something their grandmother used to say and Callie knew she was supposed to laugh, but she didn’t.

  Nevertheless, the saying seemed to please Jed. He heaved himself up to begin unloading the dishwasher, and as he rattled plates and stacked cups he began to riff: “Give the weatherman an Ex-Lax brownie,” he said. “Give that man a bran muffin.”

  Toni, who re
mained wilted at the kitchen table, drinking Diet Coke, said, “Oh, shut up. Jamie will just get going about pooping.”

  “He doesn’t know what a bran muffin does,” Jed said. But from the family room piped a voice: “Who pooped?”

  Jed sighed. “No one, buddy,” he called.

  Jamie appeared at the door. “But Toni said—”

  “She didn’t mean to say that.”

  “She said ‘shut up.’”

  Jed was silent. Toni’s eyes flicked to him and then she said to Jamie, “I shouldn’t have said that, sweetie. Those are very bad words.”

  Jed had turned back to the dishwasher. Callie could see his back, rigid; the hostility was there as plain as day, and she shrank from it. “Stop it, you two,” she said. There was a catch in her voice that she had not intended. Jed and Toni both glanced at her, surprised, and words failed her—“Oh, you two,” she repeated, knowing that what she said made no sense, wondering why she was linking them, knowing it would bother Jed but only vaguely wondering why. Then Grace gurgled in her swing, so serious, always serious, the battery-powered ticking of the swing like a clock, Grace the pendulum, and Callie thought, Why are three of us here and a machine is holding my child? and she went over and plucked Grace out of the seat and left.

  She went straight to her bedroom and closed the door but she immediately regretted it—it was even more stuffy than the wide-open kitchen and she felt that on the other side of the closed door Jed and Toni would be exchanging accusing looks and Jamie would be about to come after her with his automatic jealousy. But she was not alone, she reminded herself. She laid Grace down on her back on the bed and propped herself up on her elbow beside her. “Oh, Gracie,” she said, looking down into her baby’s face, expecting nothing in return.

  Grace was looking at her very intently, with her dark blue infant eyes that were starting to lighten. Will she be blue-eyed? Callie thought. Is it possible that this baby will end up a lighthearted blue-eyed child? And she was beginning to feel the oddest piercing dread when the corner of the baby’s mouth began to go up and her cheek tightened, a lopsided leer for a moment, and then the sun rose, the most lovely smile, her child there as she had never been before, beaming at her.