Chapter 13
The apartment was over a dry cleaner’s, two blocks from the aquatic center.
It had two rooms and a tiny kitchen and a balcony just wide enough for one chair.
The balcony looked out over a scrubby little park with a basketball court and a big old ficus tree, and in the mornings Scarlett could hear kids yelling and the thump of a ball on concrete.
The whole place smelled faintly of steam and starch from downstairs.
She loved it immediately.
She paid the deposit herself. She bought a used couch from a woman on the fourth floor for eighty dollars, and a mattress, and two plates and two cups and a frying pan.
She did not buy anything that matched. Jess came over with a housewarming plant and looked around and said, “It’s the size of your old closet. ”
“I know,” Scarlett said happily.
The first night, she lay on the new mattress on the floor with the window open and the city noise coming in. No landing. No locked door. No FBI. Nobody downstairs. The black water came at three, the way it always did, and she woke up gasping, and there was nobody on the other side of the door.
She turned on the lamp. She sat on the mattress with her knees pulled up. She breathed.
After a while she got up and made tea in her one frying pan, because she’d forgotten to buy a kettle, and sat on the balcony in the dark and watched the ficus tree move in the breeze until the sky got light.
She did it by herself. It turned out she could.
* * *
She took SwimSafe back on a Thursday.
She walked into the Walsh Foundation board room in a plain black dress with a folder under her arm, and she sat down at the long table across from Sheila Gaines and six other people who had voted to put her on leave for her wellbeing, and she laid it out.
SwimSafe would leave the foundation. It would become its own nonprofit, with its own board, and she would run it. Not as a name on the letterhead. As the director. In the water. The foundation could keep funding it if it wanted to, as one donor among many. Or it could stop. That was up to them.
“We can’t just give you the program,” one of the board members said.
“You’re not giving it to me,” Scarlett said. “I’m taking it back. I brought it here. I’m taking it home.”
There was a long silence.
Then Barb Hughes, at the end of the table, cleared her throat.
“I’d like to be the first donor,” Barb said.
Her tan face was red. “To the new one. Personally. And I’d like to say, in front of everyone, that I’m very sorry about what I said to you at the kickoff.
I didn’t know. I should have known. I’m sorry. ”
Scarlett looked at her for a moment.
“Thank you, Barb,” she said. And she meant it.
The vote was unanimous. By the end of July, SwimSafe had its own bank account, its own board, and a cramped two-room office in the back of the aquatic center with a hand-lettered sign on the door.
The sign said SWIMSAFE — MISS SCARLETT, because one of the kids had made it, and Scarlett would not let anyone replace it.
* * *
She texted Ryan on the first of August.
It was the first time she’d contacted him since she drove away from the house. She sat on her balcony with the cheap phone and wrote it four times before she sent it.
Saturdays. 6 a.m. The aquatic center. You can swim in the lane next to mine. One conversation afterward. I say when it’s over.
She sent it. She put the phone face down on the balcony rail.
It buzzed thirty seconds later.
I’ll be there.
That was all. No thank you. No I love you. No paragraph. She looked at those three words, and she didn’t know if she was disappointed or relieved.
* * *
When she pulled into the aquatic center parking lot at five-forty on Saturday morning, his car was already there.
He was sitting in it with the engine off. When she parked, he got out. He was wearing old gym shorts and a faded T-shirt and flip-flops. He had a towel over his shoulder and a pair of goggles in his hand that still had the price tag on them.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
“Since five-thirty.”
“It’s five-forty.”
“I didn’t want to be late,” Ryan said.
She unlocked the side door with her key. The building was dark and echoing and cool, and it smelled like chlorine, and she turned on one row of lights over the lap lanes, and the water went from black to blue.
She heard him breathe in behind her.
He had never seen her here. She realized that, standing at the edge of the pool in the half-light. In nine years, he had come to galas and kickoffs and ribbon cuttings. He had never once come to watch her swim.
* * *
He was terrible.
She had known he wasn’t a real swimmer. He swam like a lot of rich men swam, a big, splashy, head-up freestyle meant for getting from a boat to a beach. But she hadn’t understood how bad it was until she watched him try to swim one length of the long pool.
He made it about halfway before he flipped onto his back, gasping.
He finished the length on his back, kicking like a paddleboat. Then he hung onto the wall at the far end with both arms, and his face was bright red, and he was breathing like he’d run up the stairs of his tower.
Scarlett, in the next lane, had already done four lengths.
She stopped at the wall beside him and pushed up her goggles.
“That,” she said, “was the worst thing I have ever seen in this building.”
“I’m aware,” he gasped.
“And I’ve seen six-year-olds throw up in the shallow end.”
“I’m aware.”
She put her goggles back on and pushed off before he could see her face.
* * *
She swam three thousand yards that morning. He swam, in total, maybe six hundred, with long stops at the wall. But he didn’t quit. Every time she came back to the wall at his end, he was pushing off again, splashing and flailing, red-faced and determined.
And every time she came back to the wall, she saw him.
That was the problem she hadn’t planned for.
She had seen her husband in a swimming pool a hundred times.
On vacations. At hotels. On the swim platform of the Halcyon.
But she hadn’t looked at him in a long time.
And now here he was in the lane next to hers, in the blue light, in a pair of old black swim shorts, with water running down his chest and his shoulders, and his dark wet hair pushed back off his face.
He had lost weight since the spring. He’d lost it in his face and his waist. What was left was all shoulders and arms and the hard, broad chest she’d had her hands on in the kitchen.
She watched the water bead on his skin. She watched a drop run down the center of his back and disappear into the waistband of his shorts.
She thought about the summer they started dating. A crowded public beach on a Sunday. Him, thirty years old and sunburned, chasing her into the waves and catching her around the waist and pulling her under, and coming up laughing, with his mouth on hers and the salt in both their mouths.
Her face went hot. She pushed off the wall hard and swam a fast two hundred.
* * *
The conversation afterward lasted nine minutes.
They sat on the bleachers wrapped in towels, three feet apart, dripping. The sun was starting to come through the high windows.
He asked how SwimSafe was. She told him. He asked about the new office. She told him about the sign. He laughed. He asked how she was sleeping. She said fine, which wasn’t true, and he looked at her like he knew it wasn’t true, and didn’t push.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s it.”
He stood up right away. “Same time next week?”
“If you want.”
“I want.” He picked up his towel and his goggles with the price tag still on. At the door, he turned around. “Scarlett. You were—in the water. You were beautiful. I don’t think I ever told you that. Watching you swim is like—” He stopped. “I’ll see you Saturday.”
He left.
She sat on the bleachers alone and was furious with him for ten minutes, and she could not have said why.
* * *
He came the next Saturday. And the next. And the next.
He was there at five-thirty every time. His car was always the only one in the lot.
By the third week, he had cut the price tag off the goggles.
By the fourth week, he could swim a whole length of freestyle without flipping onto his back, though he still breathed every single stroke like a drowning dog.
By the fifth week, she noticed that he was getting better much faster than anyone who only swam once a week had a right to.
“You’re taking lessons,” she said at the wall.
He went red. It wasn’t from the swimming. “No.”
“Your turns are different. Somebody taught you to tuck your chin. You’re taking lessons.”
“Wednesday nights,” he admitted. “From Tony. The instructor. The big guy with the beard. I pay him. It’s not through SwimSafe. It’s private. I didn’t want you to—” He stopped. “I didn’t want you to think it was a gesture.”
She stared at him.
“I just wanted to be able to keep up with you,” Ryan said. “For one length. Even once.”
* * *
In the sixth week he tried a flip turn.
He’d obviously been practicing it with Tony. He came into the wall fast and proud, and tucked, and rolled, and got the whole turn backward. He came up spluttering, with pool water pouring out of his nose, coughing so hard he had to hang on the lane rope.
Scarlett, at the wall, laughed.
It burst out of her before she could stop it. A real laugh. A loud, helpless, echoing laugh that bounced off the high ceiling and the empty bleachers. She laughed until she had to put her forehead down on the edge of the pool.
When she looked up, he was hanging on the lane rope with water running out of his nose, and he was looking at her like she had just handed him the moon.
She stopped laughing.
“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Sorry,” he said. And he didn’t stop.
* * *
The conversations got longer.