Chapter 11 #2
“If it isn’t Anna Plummer!” Mimi said, as if they were old friends.
“I did not know that you were a member here!” She stood over Anna’s chair, shading her eyes with her right hand.
The effect of three women standing over her was like having the sun hide behind a storm cloud; for a moment, she felt dark and cold.
“New Life Timers!” Anna said, with faked enthusiasm.
“We did it for the water bottles.” All members were issued free insulated bottles, white and red, a sign of brand allegiance.
Around town, you could spot a Life Time member from a mile away by those water bottles.
A club that would have me as a member was what Anna was thinking.
Who even wanted to be in with this crowd in the first place?
“Well, the smoothies are just to die for,” Mimi said.
“That’s not a lie,” Karen said. “There’s this peanut butter one, and sometimes I drive all the way over here in the mornings just for the smoothie.”
Anna nodded. She believed this, actually, although, it did seem pretty unbelievable to drive twenty minutes for a smoothie.
“We haven’t seen you at any of the PTO events,” Mimi continued. “Right, ladies?”
Karen and Ellen nodded.
“I’ve just been so busy,” Anna said.
“I hope we’ve . . . resolved all of our differences from earlier this year.
” Mimi put her hand down. Now Anna could see nothing but the brutal ball of sunlight behind the three women.
They looked like photographic negatives, silhouettes in the sun, unclear and unfocused figures before her.
“I think it would be better for us all to go back into the school year with a fresh new start.”
“Of course,” Anna said.
“Anyway, good to see you, as always, Anna.” Mimi reached down and put a hand on Anna’s foot.
The gesture took her by surprise. The intimacy of it, the quickness.
Mimi was nimble, did things you wouldn’t expect.
Quick as lightning, she had turned on her heel and hopped off in the other direction, minions at her back, none of them—not even Ellen—bothering to say goodbye.
That could have been the end of it, and really, it would have been just another strange late-May day, a posse of uncomfortable Hamilton women at Life Time, if the next series of events had not unfolded, quick as a summertime thunderstorm.
Every hour on the hour, the guards blew the whistle and called all the kids out of the pool for ten minutes so that the adults could enjoy the luxury of the pool to themselves.
So at two o’clock the guards blew, and all the kids came swarming back to their parents, like ants on sugar.
Ben and Louisa and Di’s son Brian shook off in the sun and sent water spinning across the chaises while their parents went to swim by themselves.
Anna was on her back, staring up at the sky, two cumulus clouds that looked a lot like the kind of fake clouds you saw in video games.
That was how perfectly formed they were, with just a shade of gray on the lining.
A designer could not have invented a better set of clouds.
The guards blew the whistle again, and before Anna had a chance to flip from recumbent to standing, her own kids were running toward the pool, and that’s when she saw it, out of the corner of her eye, just a flicker, just a small thing.
Or did she? It looked, from her vantage point, like Mimi Mar had hip-checked Louisa, sending the bony girl tumbling forward to the edge of the pool.
All the kids had been rushing, and Mimi had appeared from nowhere, a specter in black, and there was Anna’s daughter, stumbling forward until her heel caught the concrete edge and over she fell into the clear blue water.
Anna quickly swam to where Louisa had fallen in, but by the time she reached the edge of the pool Mimi was gone and Louisa was up at the surface catching her breath.
“Are you okay?” she asked, breathless, grabbing Louisa by the wrist.
“Yeah, Mom, I just tripped,” she said. “So embarrassing!” She covered her eyes with both hands.
“You just . . . tripped?” Anna asked. She had seen it, though, clear as day, the image of the woman, black on black, grazing her daughter.
It was a taunt, a warning. And then she was gone.
But that couldn’t be real. It would be a deranged thing to do, after all, to hip-check a little girl into a pool, and Anna was starting to wonder if she had seen it or if she had imagined it.
There was the heat, the flurry of people, the chaos.
She couldn’t be sure. And yet, there was that moment, too, lingering in Anna’s memory—the smile at school pickup.
That was equally unhinged, if she thought about it.
“I caught my foot.” Louisa held it up as proof; a nick on her heel was bleeding.
“We should get you out.”
Di was oblivious, afloat on a haze of rosé. She hadn’t seen a thing, or, if she had, she wouldn’t remember it in the morning anyway.
Louisa was prattling on, concerned about whether other second graders had seen the mishap.
Humiliation loomed large in her elementary school life.
For a minute, Anna believed her daughter’s account.
It had been an accident, a stupid accident, and the vision—well, that was just her imagination, running wild as usual.
But then, just as Anna was climbing the ladder to leave the pool, with Louisa ahead of her, Anna saw, at the far end of the pool, two open doors. Mimi Mar waved and held a hand to her mouth, and then Anna was sure.
“It was good to see you, Anna Plummer,” Mimi called. “Don’t be a stranger now.”
Deranged. That was the word that flashed through her mind again. The woman was deranged.