The Swimming Pool

by Holly LeCraw

  “You are making her leave! Does—does she want to go?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Things change,” he said, and she thought she saw the usual unspoken blame and judgment on his face but then she wasn’t sure. If only he would scream at her, if only he would grind her down and say it was all her fault, it would be better than him just sitting there—

  And then for one strange moment she thought, Now. If I reach over to him now. If I tell him I want it to be different, now. Beyond apology—if I look at him, if I see him. The father of my child. The man I loved.

  But she leaned weakly against the counter and stared at the floor instead and let him decide. She really did not think there was any other way. Of course Anthony did not say it, but she believed she had gotten what she deserved.

  THEY WENT SHOPPING IN CHATHAM and out to lunch, and then meandered back to Mashantum. Toni wanted to stop at the market. “They have these brownies there,” she said. “From some bakery in Brewster. I’m obsessed. I go there practically every day.”

  Marcella felt more composed than she had the night before. They had seen two different people from the tennis club while they had been walking around Chatham, and it had been all right. Toni of course didn’t know that Marcella felt odd, and standing beside her Marcella had found she could better pretend she was at ease. She had hoped to avoid the market, though. It was where you bumped into people.

  “They’re really good, Mom,” Toni said, misinterpreting her silence.

  “I’m sure they are,” Marcella said. She glanced at Toni, who had one bare foot up on the dashboard, as if they drove around together like this all the time. Her heart gave a glad little flip. “Of course we’ll stop,” she said. “Why should I resist chocolate?”

  The market was almost as weirdly familiar as Anthony’s house. The few things that were different stood out to Marcella like neon. “Is that the bakery counter?” she said. “That’s new. Molto alla moda. In my time you could not find a baguette on the Cape to save your—”

  “Oh, my God,” Toni muttered. She clutched Marcella’s hand.

  “What?”

  “Jed is over there.”

  Marcella felt her heart drop like a stone, down, down through her feet, it had left her altogether, she was empty and weightless, no longer attached to the floor. She had known this might happen. She—had wanted it? She should act like an adult. They couldn’t run out of the store. “Should we speak to him?” she said.

  “No!” Toni whispered frantically.

  Of course. No. Unthinkingly Marcella pulled Toni closer to her. “Where is he?”

  Toni gestured with her head, and then let go of Marcella’s hand and slid backward into the aisle they had just left.

  The market was not a big place at all and Jed was twelve feet away. He was standing in the crowd at the deli counter, next to the tank of lobsters with their rubber-banded claws. A little blond boy stood beside him. There was an odd dark X on Jed’s back and then Marcella realized he was wearing a baby carrier. The baby’s head wasn’t visible, but she could see the bare legs dangling, mottled with the chill of the store, pink socks on the tiny feet, the most helpless things she had ever seen. If Jed turned just ninety degrees, he would see her.

  Toni plucked at her sleeve. “Mom.”

  But Marcella stood mesmerized. The little boy. Jed was holding his hand. As she watched, Jamie tilted his head up, up to look at his uncle, and for a second the fluorescent light shone blindingly on his hair, not blond or white but a brightness beyond color. She was watching what might have been. A little boy with a hand to hold. Jed stood with his other hand curved under the baby carrier. The little legs straightened, and one kicked, and as she watched Jed rolled back the cloth hiding the baby’s face and bent his own head down to check on her. Marcella had never seen that look on his face before, whole and relaxed, smile lines at the corners of his eyes like an older man’s—the man he would become. What she had never had and what she would not have.

  “Mom,” Toni hissed again, and yanked at her hand, throwing Marcella off balance. The sudden movement she made as she righted herself caught Jed’s eye. He turned to her, and the heart she had felt drop away from her was suddenly inside her again, blooming. She wanted to hold it out to him: Here it is! She was losing all caution, not caring, she felt a smile beginning on her face and didn’t stop it. Here is my heart! But as Jed looked back at her his face never went beyond wooden, except his piercing, burning eyes. Then Jamie said something, looking at her, and Jed bent down to him, and Toni said, “What is with you?” and Marcella followed her down the aisle to the register. She glanced behind her once. She knew Jed wouldn’t follow them.

  “I’ve never seen the children,” she managed to say. “The little boy. He looks like Callie?”

  “I guess so.” Toni’s voice was sullen.

  “The baby is so tiny still.”

  “But she smiles now,” Toni said. “She smiled the other day.” Her chin wrinkled, her lip began to tremble. The line moved and Toni dropped the container of brownies on the counter. Marcella put her hand gingerly on Toni’s back and Toni bit her lip, struggling not to cry.

  The checker was a girl about Toni’s age, but from a different world, wearing a nose ring, and with deep dark roots at the base of her yellow hair. She looked sidelong at Toni but said nothing as she punched buttons on the register. Marcella tried to catch her attention, wanting suddenly to establish a separate, fleeting connection, something to distract her from thinking of Jed still under the same roof and miserable Toni who might figure things out at any time. But the girl refused to meet her eye, and when Toni did not reach out for the offered bag Marcella finally took it and gently nudged her daughter to the door.

  HE HAD SEEN HER, he had seen her, just as he had been expecting, hoping, dreading he would, but it had shocked him still. Marcella had been down one of the narrow familiar aisles with the checkerboard linoleum at her feet, the shallow wooden shelves around her holding—as he had thought as a child—one of everything in the world. She had looked at him, her eyes wide, as if she could feel the heat coming from his gaze. And he had felt guiltier than ever. Trusting Jamie was holding his hand, the weight of Grace’s little body was pulling ever so slightly—she was so light!—on his back, tempting him to curve, to clutch and shield her. From himself, he supposed. Because, right then, he gladly would have chucked the baby aside, pushed Jamie out of the way, and gone straight to Marcella and carried her off, a black knight on a black horse. He wanted her so badly he felt himself shaking.

  He was able to push the desire far down inside himself until there was nothing but a black, sick feeling in his gut. The butcher had handed him the steaks then, blood-red hidden inside the clean white paper. They’ll be a treat, he’d told Jamie earlier, when he’d been feeling jaunty. We’re going to grill, just us men. Now he only nodded at the man behind the counter, turned silently away.

  At the checkout there was a line, but Marcella and Toni were not in it.

  He had walked to the store with the kids in the double stroller, defiant because rain was predicted, but Callie had objected only halfheartedly before he left. It had been raining off and on for days, it seemed—strange how once the weather changed it was hard to remember that anything else had come before. Outside the market, the air was clammy and the sky was a shifting, luminous gray. Jed put the grocery bag in the basket under the stroller and helped Jamie in, then detached Grace from himself and strapped her in too, the little ball of her, you still had to watch her neck but he could feel her getting stronger—she looked up at him with her newly clear blue eyes and smiled, showing her toothless gums. “Sweetheart,” Jed said. “Sweetie, how would you like to go the beach?” He looked at Jamie. “Whaddaya think, pardner?” he said, hoping Jamie would not protest. He badly needed the wide sky, the open sand. He needed the wind and the water stretching out empty, erasing his thoughts. Jamie looked back at him unblinking. “Just for a little while,” Jed said. “Then we’ll go home
and have lunch.”

  “Will Grace cry?” Jamie said gravely.

  Jed had begun noticing moments like this, when Jamie was acting far too old, too responsible. “Nope,” he said. “I brought a bottle. But good for you for thinking of Gracie.”

  When he had left, he’d told Callie he was taking the bottle. Usually she would have refused; she would have said she needed to feed Grace herself. And Jed would have said that she needed a break, and she would have said, her voice rising a little, No, it’s my job, Jed, you don’t get it. Today, though, she had just nodded at him, her eyes tired.

  “Here we go, bud. We’re going to run. Uncle Jed is turning into a fat slob, he needs some exercise.” He slapped his stomach, which was, if anything, too thin.

  He thought of Marcella’s fingers stroking him, and for the first time felt no sense of comfort.

  He kept up a stream of patter, as much as his breath would allow, all the way to the beach, more than a mile. He heard his own voice and felt it was a cloak he had thrown over himself, felt his feet pounding as though they were not part of him. The rage was still lurking. He didn’t want to let it out.

  At the beach, the sand was pitted from the most recent rain. There were hardly any footprints. It was almost creepy how empty it was, although space was what Jed had wanted; but Jamie, bless him, climbed out of the stroller and ran down the sand as though it were 85 degrees and the gulls overhead were wheeling through a bright blue sky, instead of this strange dank that seemed to belong to no season. Jed followed with the stroller, its big spoked wheels slicing through the sand. Jamie stopped at the remains of someone else’s castle. There was a large hole beside it, now dry because the tide was out. “We need to dig for water,” he said authoritatively.

  Jed got out the sand toys. “You do that,” he said. “How about I dig a road? If you don’t hit water, then that can be a quarry. You never know if there’s going to be water.”

  “Okay.”

  The sand was usually therapeutic, even for Jed. The task at hand became all-important, the shoring up of walls and smoothing of streets, the vital organization of castles and bridges. It was an old instinct, a serious play, this urge to build, to complete. But today it was not calming him and he thought how what he had felt in the market was another instinct, an older one: the urge to possess, to declare that Marcella was his, where everyone could see. And then, tensing around Grace, another drive, just as old: to protect. He thought how his father would have been whipsawed by these same desires, and would have known, in the end, how utterly he had failed.

  “Uncle Jed, dig.”

  “Sorry, bud. Slacking off here.” He picked up a red plastic hoe and began marking out a wide road. “See, this is my grader. Rnnnnn, rnnnn. Now it’s backing up—beep, beep, beep.” He felt like an automaton, but when he looked up Jamie nodded, satisfied.

  He fell to his work and tried to get the road as smooth as he could, tried to see every grain of sand. The strangely intense light and the absence of shadows made it easier. He could be an ant, he thought, bending close, every speck a boulder. Jamie had edged right over next to him. Jed glanced at him and saw that just as he could see individual grains of sand he could also see each one of Jamie’s long eyelashes, even where they emerged from his eyelids, could see the minuscule unevenness where the pink of his lips met his pale face. His skin was poreless, incredibly smooth, still so new. This must be how Callie sees them, he thought suddenly. And Billy. What a parent does. More instincts. Sees every grain of sand. How my father saw me.

  He stared at Jamie’s skin, imagining it rougher. Someday he’d have pimples, someday he’d shave. He looked at the corners of Jamie’s eyes and saw that there were the faintest beginnings of smile lines; someday they would be deep grooves—and now Jamie seemed not like his own nephew but a stranger, a specimen who would live to have wrinkles, gray hair. Whose flawless baby skin would someday be grizzled and marked by dozens of inconsequential scars, the dings and blemishes of life. That would be a miracle in itself. Jed hoped for it now like a prayer.

  “Dig!”

  “I’m just looking at you,” Jed said. “You look like your granddaddy.”

  “One of my granddaddies is in heaven.”

  “That’s the one I’m talking about.”

  Of course it was just a lie. It was just something to say. Not that Jed knew for certain that Jamie’s features were so different; it could be that he looked just like Jed’s father had as a child. Who knew? There was no one who could tell him.

  Kneeling there in the sand, Jed could not have even described the father he had known, beyond the generic—balding, blue eyes. Could not have described his face. Couldn’t have drawn a picture. Not anymore. All he remembered now was that his vanished, vanquished father was the opposite of Jamie, so new, so full of possibility.

  And yet, he had not even been old. He had seemed old to Jed at the time, but now Jed knew that he had died still a young man.

  Jed imagined Marcella old. Callie. Jamie and even Grace. His mother—she would have been sturdy and vigorous, her hair silver, still thick. No, older. He saw her: frail, her hands backed with thick blue veins. His father. White hair and stooped back. Belly hanging in front and the rest of him gone thin, bones long and brittle, the flesh loose. Old. All of them—his parents, Callie, himself—their skin growing thin as paper, and then all of them just fading away, no death, no hysteria, just a gradual disintegration. It was the craziest kind of fantasy. No endings, no pain. That was an instinct too, to avoid death, pretend it could be conquered. To fear it.

  “Well, well,” said a voice. “It looks like we’re the only brave souls out here.”

  Jed looked up into the face of Anthony Atkinson.

  He seemed grayer and more heavily lined in the overcast light, and Jed thought for a moment that he was still in his daydream. Anthony’s brow furrowed. “Are you all right?” he said.

  Jed cleared his throat. “Fine. Nice to see you.”

  Anthony looked down at Jamie. “Hello, young man. Do you remember me? I’m Toni’s dad.”

  Jamie looked up. “Toni left,” he said.

  “Yes, she did.” Anthony nodded gravely.

  “I overreacted to that,” Jed said, without thinking.

  “No, you didn’t. There are consequences for one’s actions. Or inactions,” Anthony Atkinson said. “She has to learn.”

  “Yes. Well.” Jed was fighting the sudden strange urge to apologize further. He felt a lump of transgression in his throat that could come up at any moment; he wondered what he might say—anything? Everything? It would be a relief, maybe—he wondered suddenly if Anthony could read his mind. Marcella, Marcella, he thought, experimentally.

  Behind him, in the stroller, Grace began to fuss. He felt a wave of unfamiliar impatience. Of course it had to be now. “Excuse me,” he said, and turned and lifted the baby out of her seat, balancing her on one arm while he felt in the stroller’s pocket for the bottle.

  “She seems healthy. Doing well? After a rough start?” Anthony said.

  “Yes, sir.” Jed took the cap off the bottle with his teeth.

  “Doesn’t look like you need help, anyway. You seem to be a natural,” Anthony said.

  “Thanks,” Jed said out of the side of his mouth. Grace was already sucking away. Awkwardly, he reached up with his non-bottle hand, squeezing the baby to him, and took away the cap. “If that’s meant as a compliment.”

  “Of course it is.” Their eyes met. Anthony’s were unreadable. “Toni’s mother is in town this weekend,” he said.

  Jed didn’t look away. “Really?”

  “Yes. So”—Anthony laughed and finally glanced away, down the beach—“I am keeping my distance.”

  “Sounds like a good policy.”

  “Is it?” Anthony answered, but his eyes did not meet Jed’s again. In the emptiness of the beach Jed felt he could hear his own heart, hear it began to accelerate. What if he took Anthony’s arm—no, grabbed it—and told him, no, sh
outed, about Marcella? The fury he had felt in the market began to rise again, redirected. Now he hated Anthony. Or wanted to. Or wanted Anthony to hate him—but his hands were full of Grace and her bottle and Anthony had done nothing to him, he had to calm down. And really he had done nothing to Anthony. No doubt he would not like to hear what his ex-wife had been doing, but the morality of the thing was no longer his concern—

  “You’re usually away weekends, aren’t you?” Anthony said.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Uncle Jed comes back,” Jamie said.

  Anthony looked down at him with his eyebrows raised in comical surprise, as if a bug down on the ground had started to talk. “Yes, indeed.”

  “I’m seeing someone,” Jed said. His breath was coming too fast.

  “Yes,” Anthony said. “Toni mentioned it.”

  Jed remembered Toni leaning over him, over the ankle that had not been sprained, and Anthony watching, watching. “She’s all right?” Jed said.

  “Doing fine,” Anthony said, in a voice of finality.

  “Look!” Jamie cried, pointing, and they both turned. To the south, over the dunes, the overcast sky had lowered and turned almost black, the clouds hurtling toward them like ships in a high wind; it looked unreal, like a time-lapse photograph.

  As they watched, Jed felt a large drop hit his arm, then another. “We’ll have to beat this thing home, won’t we, bud?” he said, hearing his own voice going light with relief. He set Grace in the stroller, the bottle beside her, and turned back to find Anthony on his knees in the sand, helping Jamie pick up the toys and put them in the big mesh bag.

  In moments the rain was falling steadily and Jed was busy stowing the gear and strapping Jamie in. “Callie will kill me, having the kids out in this,” he said.

  “Oh, I doubt that.”

  Jed expected Anthony to follow him up the dunes, but instead he said, over the rising wind, “All right, young James, your Uncle Jed will take care of you,” and then he turned and headed back down to the water. Jed ducked his head and ran in the opposite direction, but at the top of the path, panting already from the effort of pushing the stroller uphill, he stopped and turned around. The rain lashed him in the face but he could see Anthony walking down the beach, hunched against the wet, looking like a dark bird blown off course. The fury rose in him again, but now he wasn’t sure if it was anger or fear or pure suicidal recklessness. He raised a hand to his mouth, made a path for his voice, and shouted, “There’s something you don’t know!”