Skinny Dipping

by Connie Brockway

  “You’re right, Granddad,” Mimi whispered. She crossed her arms over her chest, tipped her head face to the sky, and fell backward. She landed a lot harder at forty-one than she had at thirteen. A white puff of snow erupted around her and the wind was knocked out of her lungs. “Ouch.”

  For long minutes she lay there getting her breath back, staring up at the sky and listening to all the years, all the summers and falls, springs and winters, that had gone before.

  The beach had seen a thousand campfires and the careful construction of thousands of s’mores, many made by Mimi and even more eaten by her. Most nights, she and her cousins were serenaded to sleep by her aunts’ and uncles’ singing, not because they had fancied themselves some sort of Minnesota Von Trapp family, but because there was nothing else to do—no television, no radio signal; even the lighting was too poor to read by for long. She still remembered every note of “Autumn Leaves” and “Misty” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

  How many rainy days had she and her cousins spent in one of the tip-tilted porches playing dominos or Cooties or Candyland, while the leaf-choked gutters overflowed and the rain carved deeper ruts in the driveway? How many paper sailboats had she launched at the top of the drive?

  Somewhere near where she now lay, her father had taught her how to swim, bobbing along beside her on an inner tube, holding her long braid in one hand to keep her head above the water and a beer bottle in the other. Mimi twisted her head, squinting as she tried to make out the shape of the swimming raft that had floated here almost thirty years ago. There. There…

  Her father had brought her up to Chez Ducky for the summer. She’d been eleven. Her mom hadn’t been keen on the idea. There were so many better, more productive ways to spend a summer, but in the end she’d relented. It was going to be a wonderful summer, an endless summer, with all the Olsons and her dad and her and nothing to do but play. But her dad had only stayed the one night before taking off again, casually saying good-bye and warning her he didn’t know when he’d be back. In the meantime, she had to promise him to enjoy every day and let go of all her worries and cares for the summer. She hadn’t protested. Protesting never got her anywhere, not with her father, not with her mother.

  After he’d left, she’d tried to go with the flow. She really had. Yeah, the days were relaxed and the faces pleasant and the sounds comfortable, but she kept wondering when he’d come back. The days turned into weeks turned into months. September arrived and her father didn’t return. Then, one afternoon, her grandfather told her that Solange was coming to pick her up and take her back to the cities because school was going to start soon. And all of a sudden, just like that, she’d realized her dad wasn’t coming back. Maybe not ev—

  Just as she had when she’d been eleven, Mimi stopped the thought from fully forming, returning to her memory.

  Late that night, like dozens before, she’d heard her aunts and great-aunts splashing and laughing out on the lake. Her summer was almost over and she and her dad hadn’t spent more than a single day of it together. But out there, on that lake, the summer was still going on.

  She’d slipped from her cot and down to the beach to find the Olson women skinny-dipping in the moonlight. When they saw her they waved at her to join them. Eagerly, she’d stripped off her nightshirt and slipped into the water. She’d gasped, amazed at the sensation of every inch of her skin enveloped in cool, silky water, and thought she’d never truly been swimming before. She’d never wanted to leave the lake, or for that night to end.

  And in some ways, it hadn’t. That night she’d finally learned the art of letting go.

  Now Mimi closed her eyes, inhaling through her nostrils. She stretched out her arms and started sweeping them up and down by her sides. Her legs joined in the action, scissoring from side to side, her boot heels scraping the ice beneath. There. Now that would be a snow angel the wind would have a hard time erasing, she thought when she finally stopped.

  The only problem now was how to get up without ruining her creation. She couldn’t roll over, even to get to her knees. How had she and Granddad done this, anyway? She tried bending at the waist, but a few years and a lot of goose down made the whole sitting-up-without-using-your-hands thing nearly impossible. But if she’d done it when she was thirteen, she could do it now. She gathered her resolve and heaved upward, grunting. Almost…She fell back.

  She tried again with the same lack of success. Okay, how about if she bent her legs, grabbed her knees, and used the leverage to rock upright? She gave it a try. She almost made it, but like a Tommee Tippee Cup, at the last moment she listed sideways. She pitched herself in the other direction so as not to ruin the angel and ended up on her back again. This was ridiculous. All she had to do was stick her feet under her butt and—Her boots slipped out from under her.

  Damn. If only she could—

  “Mrs. Olson! Mrs. Olson!” a young man shouted frantically.

  She lifted her head off the snow and peered between her feet. Someone, a man—Prescott?—was lurching down the snow-covered steps of the lodge deck, his coat flapping open, hatless, gloveless, waving his arms wildly. “Stay there! Don’t try to move!”

  Huh? She lifted her head higher.

  “It’s all right! I’m coming!” he shouted. And now he had been joined by three dogs, who danced wildly around his legs as he stumbled off the last step.

  Sonofabitch. He better not tromp out here and ruin her angel. She heard a sound, faint but growing louder. It took her a minute to place it. It was an ambulance siren. What the hell?

  “You’re going to be all right!” Prescott was screaming while the dogs barked furiously. “Don’t try to move! The paramedics will be here any minute!”

  The para—He’d called an ambulance? For her? Her eyes grew round with horror. Her face burned with mortification. He had! He thought she was having some sort of attack!

  She rolled over and shot to her feet, snow angel be damned. Prescott was scrambling over heaps of snow piled under the deck, shouting, “Mrs. Olson, no! You should stay down!”

  “Prescott, you idiot—” She stopped. Blinked.

  Prescott had disappeared.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  As it turned out, Prescott hadn’t disappeared. He’d fallen into his half-finished swimming pool.

  Just as Mimi made it to the edge of the pool, two paramedics trotted around the corner of the house, the guy in the lead hailing her. “Where’s the lady with the heart attack?”

  “In the pool!” Mimi called.

  “Huh?”

  She pointed emphatically at the pool. The ambulance crew members came to her side and together the three of them peered over the edge. Prescott lay motionless on the bottom, sunk a foot deep into the snow, his army surplus coat flung open, exposing his flannel pajamas. One of his legs was twisted under his body. A boot lay next to him.

  “Is that the lady?” the guy next to her, a hefty young man with a pale, feathery mustache, asked.

  “There is no lady.” The sight of Prescott lying there scared the crap out of her. The stupid kid might have killed himself in his misguided effort to save her life. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

  “You bet. Claus, get the rope ladder and tell Artie to help with the gurney. Pronto!”

  “You got it, Bob!” The other ambulance attendant hurried off.

  “We got a call about ten minutes ago from someone at this address saying there was a middle-aged lady flopping around on the lake, having a heart attack,” Bob said, his hands on his thigh as he peered down at Prescott. “I musta misunderstood. You’re lucky we were heading back from a false alarm out this way and only a few miles away when we got the call.”

  Prescott moaned, and Mimi breathed a sigh of relief until he started to roll over and she saw the direction his right ankle was pointing, which was not the direction it should have been. Her vision swam. The paramedic caught her by the collar and steadied her.

  About this time the sherif
f, who’d been cruising the southern part of the county and monitoring calls, arrived. He, alongside the paramedics, clambered down into the pool and together they secured Prescott to the gurney, then attached it to the sheriff’s come-along and winched him slowly up the side of the pool. From there it was a straight shot into the ambulance.

  Inside the ambulance, Prescott rallied. “Where am I? What happened?”

  “You’ve had an accident, kid,” said Bob, the paramedic, as he stuck an IV into Prescott’s arm. “You’ve hurt your ankle and banged your head pretty good.”

  “I did? Last thing I ’member is—” Prescott lifted his head, looking around anxiously. “Where’s Mrs. Olson? Is she okay? Did you find her?”

  “Easy, Bud.” The paramedic pressed him back down. “Who’s Mrs. Olson?”

  “The lady on the lake!” Prescott said. “She must still be out there—”

  Mimi started to sidle away from the ambulance. Bob pinned her to the spot with a hard glance.

  “Calm down. She’s just fine. Aren’t you?” the paramedic prompted, waving her inside the ambulance.

  Shit. She climbed in and smiled weakly down at Prescott. Sweat glistened on his pale skin, and his eyes were glassy with pain.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. You just worry about you.”

  Geez. Here this damn kid lay, stretched out with a busted ankle and a concussion, and he was worried about her, a stranger whose only interaction with him had been when she’d foisted a mangy dog off on him in order to keep from having to deal with it herself. She could almost forgive him for calling her middle-aged.

  He blinked up at her. “You’re sure? I thought you were having a heart attack. I saw you flailing around on the snow and—”

  “I’m fine,” she repeated, and then said primly, “By the way, I’m only thirty—thirty-five.”

  “Really?” Even through his obvious pain, he looked surprised. Behind her, Bob snickered.

  “Really.”

  “But you were, like, having a seizure, though,” Prescott insisted.

  “I was making a snow angel.”

  At this, both paramedics, the driver, and the sheriff, a good-looking man with all the charm of a cabbage, stopped what they’d been doing. The sheriff’s gaze shifted toward the Breathalyzer in the front seat of his car.

  “You guys have a problem with that?” she demanded.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Not me, ma’am.”

  “Stop calling me ‘ma’am.’”

  Prescott’s eyeballs rolled back in his head.

  “Okay,” Bob announced to his driver, “that’s it. We’re ready to roll. You want to come to the hospital with us, ma’am?”

  “No. I’m just the neighbor.” The little pissant paramedic couldn’t be that much younger than she was. She started to back out of the ambulance.

  “Wait.” Prescott’s hand shot out, grabbing her wrist. His eyes were lucid once more.

  “What?”

  “You’ve gotta get the dogs into the house. They’re out here somewhere.” He stared up at her imploringly. “It’s cold. They’re small.” He reconsidered. “Smallish. Please.”

  “Dogs?”

  “Three. Bill, Merry, and Sam. You remember Bill. I adopted the other two to keep Bill company.”

  “Look, we gotta get this guy to the hospital,” Bob said, his gaze on a monitor attached to Prescott via little cables. “Get his dogs rounded up, will ya?”

  “And stay with them in my house until I can find someone else to.”

  “What? Why don’t I just take them down to Chez—”

  “No. Please,” Prescott pleaded. “They’re pound dogs. They have abandonment issues. They hate change. They get nervous in new places. It makes them act out. There is no one else. Please.”

  “Come on, lady,” the paramedic piped up. “It’s not like spending a few days in a mansion would be doing hard time.”

  It wasn’t the house she objected to; it was the dogs. She hadn’t planned on spending her last few winter days at Chez Ducky playing nursemaid to a pack of mutts.

  “I’ll look in on them,” she promised, backing out of the ambulance and dropping to the ground.

  “No! I told you, they have abandonment issues. They hate being alone for more than a few hours! They’ll howl!”

  “So?”

  Prescott emitted a strangled sound of despair.

  “Geez. Nice payback,” she heard someone mutter.

  Mimi looked around. The other paramedic and the sheriff stood behind her, regarding her with profound disappointment. The sheriff had crossed his arms over his chest and was shaking his head. Normally, disapproval held little sway with Mimi, and it didn’t now, but Prescott did. He really had thought he’d been racing to her rescue.

  “Okay. Fine, I’ll stay with the dogs at your house. But only until you can make other arrangements,” she grumbled gracelessly.

  “Thank you!” Prescott breathed. “Their food is in the freezer. There’s lots of it. And there’s stuff in the refrigerator-freezer for you, too.”

  “Let’s move!” The other paramedic elbowed her aside as he got in, and Bob pulled the ambulance’s doors shut. They took off, the siren blaring.

  The sheriff stuffed a piece of gum into his mouth, chewing as he eyed her thoughtfully. “You’d think a woman your age who makes snow angels would be more…”

  “More what?” Mimi asked, putting her hands on her hips.

  He shrugged. “Tenderhearted, I guess.”

  “You want tender? Buy veal,” she snapped. “Are you going to help me find these dogs or not?”

  He backed toward the open door of his car. “Not. Got a call about suspicious activity on the other side of the county.”

  “You’re lying,” she accused him.

  “Maybe. But you’d never be able to prove it.” He slid in behind the wheel. “Besides, seems to me you were enjoying playing in the snow. Now you got an excuse. Have fun!”

  He slammed the door shut, raised a finger off the top of the steering wheel in farewell, and drove away.

  They weren’t big dogs, true, but Mimi wouldn’t have called them “smallish,” either. One, a plush-coated blond girl dog with dangling ears and a long plumed tail, had to be fifty pounds. The other was the color of dirty snow, a slack-flanked and long-legged male with upright ears and a long narrow snout that had a bump in it, giving him an uncanny resemblance to the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote.

  Mimi made her initial mistake by diving after the fluffy blonde as she scooted past her. She landed on her hands and knees. Blondie thought this was a game and darted in to tug at her boots, then jumped back when Mimi grabbed for her collar. She compounded her mistake by batting ineffectually at Wiley when he joined in, thus providing further evidence to their collective canine mind that the monkey wanted to play. (Mimi assumed all animals thought of humans as particularly mean-spirited monkeys.)

  It took her some time before she managed to stagger back to her feet and convince them she didn’t. She faced them panting as they stood splay-legged in front of her, tongues lolling happily as they wondered what she was planning next for their amusement. Somewhere in the past she’d seen an episode of the Dog Whisperer and remembered the guy saying that dogs needed a strong leader.

  “Come!” she commanded and began marching toward Prescott’s house. She looked back. The dogs were chasing each other in circles. She’d already been forgotten.

  “Come now!”

  They didn’t. She dug her hands into her pockets, pondering her next move. Her fingers closed on a PowerBar she’d stuck there sometime in October. Were PowerBars good for dogs? Did she care? She broke open the wrapper and waved the bar in the air.

  “Hey, doggies! Look! Num-nums!” Incredibly, at the word “num-nums,” the dogs stopped chasing each other. They looked at her questioningly. “It’s no lie, guys. Come with me and the PowerBar is yours.”

  She headed for the lodge, and this time the dogs dashed after her. True t
o her word, as soon as she got the pair inside she split the bar in half and tossed it to them. Then she looked around.

  Impressive. True, impressive mostly because the house wasn’t decked out like the Bat Cave she would have expected Prescott’s house to be, but impressive nonetheless. There wasn’t a lot of furniture, but what she saw was colorful and modern and looked surprisingly comfortable. Particularly the red S-shaped sofa and a pair of big, squat modern club chairs upholstered in nubby electric blue. But for all its visual appeal, it still had that ineffable interior designer vibe about it, like someone else was trying to figure out what would suit you. No stacks of years-old Smithsonian magazines, no moth-eaten dish towels draped over the spotless trough sink sunk in the granite kitchen countertop, no chrysalis suspended inside a peanut butter jar with holes punched in its lid, no empty painted turtle shells or unusually shaped rocks, no paperback novels, no agonizingly produced Play-Doh ashtrays painted in garish colors. In other words, it was as unlike Cottage Six as she imagined two lake places could be.

  The only things that indicated the interests or history of the person living here were dog related. Books about dogs and dog psychology lay in neat little stacks on the surface of a hammered-copper coffee table. Most had their corners gnawed off. The most notable feature of the room, however, were all the dog toys: balls, bones, stuffed toys, squeakers, pull-bars, chews, and some things Mimi couldn’t even identify. She glanced at her charges.

  “Spoiled mutts,” she grumbled.

  The pair, evidently tired from their little escapade, had hopped up onto the cushioned club chairs and curled up for a snooze. Good. If she was really lucky the two wouldn’t move until—Two. Pair. Prescott had said there were three dogs.

  Damn it, she thought, realizing which one was missing: Bill. Bill, the dog she’d foisted on Prescott, the foundation of this menagerie; Bill, the opportunist who’d masqueraded as an Olson dog all summer and grown fat on the impersonation; Bill, of whom Prescott had sent all those pictures that had led Joe to the conclusion that she was planning to con his son—and yes, she knew it wasn’t the dog’s fault, but she really didn’t care about being fair right now. She was tired, her toes were cold, and now that she was finally warming up, her butt was damp from where the snow was melting into her pants. Being fair wasn’t on the radar. Going out after the little bugger wasn’t on the radar, either. It wasn’t her fault Bill had run away.