Chapter 6 Mute Swan #6
“I was obsessed with this boy, Lucius McCool. So was another girl, Molly Boone, and he went back and forth between us, week
to week . . .”
“Asshole in training,” said Sam. “Reenie, I may be immature but I’m not immature enough to be jealous of your first love.”
“That’s not it! You might not love me anymore.”
“Kind of dramatic.”
“Okay, so Luke wasn’t bad, just skin-deep. Pretty good at most things, funny, he was a great dancer, and you know that any
woman would walk through fire for a guy who can dance . . .”
“So maybe my suffering at Blessed Sacrament wasn’t for nothing. We can do the cha-cha anytime you want.”
“We do that very nicely anyhow,” I replied. His effort to lighten the mood turned my heart. But I had to go on. I described
Molly, a living doll, five feet tall, ninety pounds, the cheerleader at the top of the pyramid, the good fairy in the school
musical. “Molly would walk up the stairs with Luke, just checking to make sure I could hear, and be like, ‘Oh, honey, tell
me what we’re going to do on Friday, and I mean, tell me everything we’re going to do. Because I wouldn’t do everything. A
little rub and grind, but not everything.’”
I was gone then, blown back light as a leaf down the corridor of time, through the angles and circles of the fusty library,
where, with just enough late-winter light from the stained-glass windows in the images of Hemingway and Hawthorne to see each
other’s eyes, we leaned against the yellow hardwood shelves and made out; the cushiony field of lavender behind the field
house, a leftover from some former farm, where we lay in the spring evening and made out; the black marble tables in the world-class
lab endowed by the estate of Sheboygan’s most famous scientist, where he lifted me in my tight jeans and stood between my
legs and we made out until my thighs were sore, a bruise my body still remembers; the spangled moonlight on the surface of
the reservoir where we huddled in his car; or the woodland park, heavy with the smell of pine, where he pressed me against
a tree and we made out. Impressed as he was by the limits I set on our passion, Luke wanted the all of it. He kept asking
me why I didn’t love him, why I didn’t trust him—as though he honestly didn’t understand why, although the former was true,
the latter never could be. If I gave that to him, would he give up on Molly? Would he be only mine?
“Where is he now?” Sam asked me. “Did you keep in touch with him?”
“He’s an orthopedic surgeon, of course, so he doesn’t have to ever be nice to anybody—he only sees patients when they’re asleep. But then he can enjoy how much they suffer when they wake up.”
“So, not a fond memory. You slept with him.”
“I never got the chance to.”
“I thought you said . . .”
“He undressed me, we were in the field, I was unbuckling . . . and that was when she made the video. Luke was the one to spot
her. He yelled at her. She ran. And within an hour . . .”
It was everywhere.
People burst out laughing when they saw me in the hall. They pretended to suck their middle fingers. I wanted to die. Luke
was blasé. He thought himself as a real stand-up guy for saying Molly was a bitch. By then, I didn’t care if he went back
to Molly.
I played sick and then I got sick. I missed two weeks of school, until only finals week was left. I went to Broadway Blooms
and begged for dead flowers, supposedly for an art project. I left these on Molly’s front steps in the middle of one dark
spring night, tied with a black ribbon, with a note that read, “This matches your heart.” Next morning, from behind a big
Chinese maple across the street, I watched Molly show the bouquet to her mother. They both laughed. Apple, tree, huh?
“We used to go to this granite quarry to swim. This huge place. We called it the reservoir, although it wasn’t really that.
It was clean, deep, pure water, cold enough to freeze your bones and yet not as cold as Lake Michigan. Kids still go there
to swim and make out. My parents even still go there to swim. We would go when the workers were gone, those nights when the
heat was like this giant hand pressing down on you,” I said. “It was crazy dangerous. No-trespassing signs all over the place,
and the police would make noise, but their own kids swam there.”
Kids would pull their cars up close to the edge of the quarry and turn on their headlights.
Everybody would rush in, the boldest ones naked, screaming when the water hit their vulnerable bellies.
It sounds hopelessly 1950s and it was, something out of a James Dean movie.
By then, it was late summer, the video of me and Luke still circulating, but he actually did go back to Molly, so much for “love” and “trust.” I went to a party where I knew she would be, not with him.
She was falling-down drunk. I was sober, the “gin and tonic” sparkling in my glass all tonic.
I went up to Molly and hugged her. She jumped.
I said, Can we talk it over? I didn’t leave things bad between us.
She knew that I had every right to hate her guts, and why would I give a shit if she hated me too? But she agreed to come with me.
Was she so conceited she thought people would like her no matter what she did? Did some sliver of her being repent the hell
she had put me through, especially since she got the boy?
I slipped a couple of nip bottles of gin into my pocket, along with a lime wedge wrapped in a napkin.
“Let’s go,” I said. “I’ll drive. You’re too wasted.”
She followed me, stumbling a little on her book-thick platforms as she did. She was so clueless. It was like agreeing to go
on a midnight ride with an assassin.
And what about me? Did I tell myself I was only going to off and leave her at the reservoir to call somebody else to bring
her home? Maybe to call Luke? It seemed that my choices that night were fated, as though I was steered by a force much bigger
than I was, that there was no retreat.
“What happened then?” Sam asked, in a voice so low I could barely hear it.
“Someday I’ll show you the reservoir. We could go night swimming maybe.” I tried to describe the quarry for him, a strange,
still kettle, deep but with no tide, and glittering dark sand all around.
“I have to say, Reenie, not making it sound super attractive. I am not even a little tempted to go swimming in a place where there are probably dead bodies on the bottom.”
“That’s true of every single body of water except a swimming pool.”
“Then thank heaven for swimming pools. I also wouldn’t go swimming in my underwear in front of a bunch of buff college guys
and girls for a thousand bucks. I’m neither old enough nor young enough for that.”
“It was always so dark. Without the cars around the fence and the headlights, it would have been pitch black, impossible to
see anything.”
Once she was good and drunk, I convinced Molly that I would drive her home in her car and somebody would pick me up. How grateful
she was almost stopped me, but only almost. She got into the back seat and promptly passed out. I drove to the reservoir,
which, because of the party and because it was still early, before eleven, was deserted. There was one person, apparently
scavenging stuff that washed up or was dropped, easily two football fields away. All I could see was a headlamp bobbing along,
then that disappeared, a car engine rumbled, and there was the sound of tires popping along the gravel. I piloted the front
end of the car into the water, opened the driver’s-side door, and began my descent. Water romped into the front seat and finally
I could tell that if I got out now, the car would roll on without me, until it sank, until it plunged to the bottom where
no light could penetrate.
Then suddenly, Felicity was there, driving my car. She stopped and scrambled over the front seat of Molly’s car, somehow managing
to shove the back door open, hauling Molly, limp as the corpse she would soon have been. When she huffed at me to help her,
I did, tugging on Molly’s feet.
She coughed a little but didn’t even wake up.
Without a word, we lugged and shoved Molly into the back seat of my car and drove her home. Finally, she moaned, and her eyes
fluttered open as we draped one of her arms over each of our shoulders and half carried her up the curved rustic stone front
walk, ringing the bell to the right of the huge carved red door, until her mother answered, in pajamas and a robe, her hair
flat, her cheeks creased, clearly prepared to be outraged but then abruptly rueful, mortified, and relieved, choking out the
words “thank you” as she pulled her daughter inside.
Felicity and I went back to the reservoir, where we tied ropes from my trunk onto the bumper of Molly’s car and began to haul
it out. We hadn’t gotten too far when Felicity stopped. “Let’s leave it this way. It looks like she was so drunk she drove
too close. And we just got here in time. That’s sort of lying by omission, I guess. But I can’t figure out anything else.”
She went on, “I want you to promise that we will never speak of this again.”
I began to cry, hard. You didn’t hug Felicity, but I grabbed her then, and she allowed it, gently patting my back a little.
“I don’t blame you if you don’t care about me anymore,” I said.
“I care about you just as much as I ever did. I didn’t do this for Molly, I did it for you. I’m just glad I followed you.
I’m just glad you left your keys.”
“Why did you follow me?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Something was strange. It was like when something wakes you up at night and it’s not a sound? Like
the quietness is the sound? Or like a storm is coming and it’s just holding its breath?” I was crying so hard that I couldn’t
speak. “You’re not that person, Reenie.”
“I almost was.”
“Thinking about it isn’t the same as doing it,” she said.
We got into my car and went home.