Chapter 9
GWEN
I got there at six-forty with my kit, and for the first time in three weeks it felt like mine again.
Ten days of July had been different. Benita in the mornings, the pharmacy calling Wade's phone, the PT van on Fridays, which Lita complained about in a way that told me she'd made a friend on it.
Three swims that week — three, actual, at the actual lake — and my body was in that phase where everything hurts and you're grateful, because at least the hurt is a receipt.
Wade came with me. He'd asked the night before, sort of sideways, do people watch that thing or is it a swimmers-only situation, and I'd said people watch, and he'd said okay.
Al had the seeding sheet out and was fussing with it, and then he did the thing he's done for two years now without either of us naming it — turned it around and slid it toward me.
"Order's wrong. Fix it."
"Deb should go in the second wave, not the third."
"She wants third."
"She wants third because she doesn't want to be passed. Third means she gets passed by fifteen people in the last four hundred." I moved her up. "Put Ruthie behind her. Ruthie'll sit on her feet and pull her through the flat part."
"Done."
Thirty seconds, that's all it was. But Wade was standing four feet away with a coffee, and I saw him watch a sixty-eight-year-old man hand his wife the clipboard. That's how he put it in the truck afterward.
Half our lane breathes on both sides now. There were nine of us at the buoy line in the first wave and I counted five bilateral breathers, four of whom learned it from me on Saturday mornings in this water and none of whom remember that anymore, which is exactly right.
The trial went well for me. Not spectacular. My middle kilometer was slow, and I knew it while I was in it. That's the June bill coming due, and there's no way around it except through it. But I came in strong, and Dot read me my splits with her mouth flat, which is Dot for decent.
Then Pearl. She was doing her first full loop, not the trial; she wasn't in the trial, she'd have drowned in the trial. Al had put her in after the waves cleared to swim the short course loop for the first time, the real one, out past the point where the bottom goes.
She got to the second marker and stopped.
You can see that stop from the shore. It isn't tired; tired looks different.
She'd put her feet down where there was no down to put them, which is a thing beginners' bodies do on their own.
She was treading and turning in a circle.
The third marker was maybe eighty meters further out, where the water goes from green to that other color.
I was up on the ramp with my cap in my hand, dripping, cold, done.
"Al."
"I see her."
"I've got it."
I pulled the cap back on wet, which is horrible, and walked into the lake at eight-forty in the morning with a time trial already in my legs, and came up beside her slow so I wouldn't startle her.
"Hey, Pearl."
"I can't do the deep part." Her voice had that shake, the one that isn't crying. "I'm sorry. I was fine, and then I looked down, and it's just — it goes down."
"It does go down."
"There's nothing there."
"There's about thirty-one feet there. Same water as the shallow part, the exact same water. It's just got more of itself underneath it."
She laughed at that, one breath of a laugh, still treading.
"Here's the deal. I'm going to swim on your right side, right at your hip, close enough that when you breathe you'll see my arm come over. You can breathe every stroke if you want. Every single stroke, that's allowed, that's not cheating, that's what the deep part is for."
"What if I stop?"
"Then I stop. I'm not going anywhere. I have nowhere to be for the rest of my life."
That's a lie I tell in water and nowhere else.
We swam it. Eighty meters to the marker, then the long side, which is four hundred, and the deep part is the middle two hundred of that.
She went at about half my slowest pace and I matched her stroke for stroke, one arm for one arm, so every time she turned her face out of the water there was a shoulder next to her.
Twice she stopped, and both times I stopped and floated on my back and said something about the weather, and both times she started again on her own.
At the far marker she got the taste of it — I heard her breathing change, it goes quieter, that's how you know — and by the shore markers she was actually swimming, actually pulling, her stroke ugly as a bag of hangers and completely functional.
She stood up in the shallows and put her hands over her face.
I went to get my towel, and I was maybe fifteen feet off, wringing out my cap, when I heard her start in on my husband, who'd come down to the water's edge with the coffee still in his hand.
"You're her husband." Her voice was up in that place people's voices go after they've done something. "You're Wade. She's mentioned you."
"That's me."
"I only got in that water because she said she'd swim next to me." Pearl was laughing, wiping her face. "I've been getting in the shallow end for eight months, and I've been fine in the shallow end. She said she'd swim on my right the whole way. She said if I stopped, she'd stop."
"Huh," Wade said.
"She did, too. Twice." Pearl pulled the towel up around her shoulders. "Just floated there on her back talking about the weather. And I said, what if I can't finish, and she said — " and here Pearl put on a voice that was not remotely my voice, "'I've got nowhere to be for the rest of my life.'"
My husband didn't say anything for a second.
"Yeah," he said. "She'd say that."
He was looking out at the water. I could only see the side of his face, and whatever was going on in it had nothing to do with Pearl, who kept talking, happily, about the third marker and her arms. I stood there with a wet cap in my hand and didn't go over.
Later, Dot's tailgate. She drives a green pickup older than my daughter. After Saturdays she puts the tailgate down and eats a hard-boiled egg out of a paper towel, and if you sit on that tailgate she will not ask you anything. She just sits there being seventy-one until you talk.
Wade had gone for gas. Quarter to ten, the lot emptying.
"He's hired an aide," I said. "And he's taking Tuesdays and Thursdays himself. Banked leave. It's costing him nine thousand dollars and his standing with every man he works with."
"Mm."
"He washes her hair. I found out sideways."
"Mm."
"So everyone gets to say he's a good man now."
"Is he?"
"Yes. That's the problem."
Dot ate her egg.
"I found out in June that he'd turned down a paid aide in May and told his brother and sister I'd be hurt by the help." I picked at the tailgate rust. "So I've been very clear about my column. Twice, in writing."
"Good."
"There's another column, Dot."
She didn't say anything.
"I never once said no." My voice came out fine, which was somehow the worst part of it. "Not one time in twenty-nine years. Every call, every crisis, every Thanksgiving. I answered every one of them like a subpoena. Like there was a penalty."
"There was."
"No, there wasn't. There was never any penalty, because nobody ever had to threaten me with one.
" I looked out at the water. "Being needed was the only medal I let myself wear, and I got very good at earning it.
My mother's dying taught me I could carry anything — five months, mostly by myself, and I found out I could do it, and I've never once put the lesson down. "
Dot put the eggshell in the paper towel and folded it up.
"And some years," I said, "some years I wrote my name into their blank spaces before anybody even asked me to.
I did that. Charmaine didn't do that, Wade didn't do that.
I'd see a gap in a family's schedule and fill it with myself, and then I'd be so tired, and I never understood why nobody noticed how tired I was. "
"You want the swim version or the kitchen version?"
"Swim."
"You've been swimming with drag. Not ballast. There's a difference and you know it, because you're the one who taught Deb the difference.
Ballast holds you level. Drag just makes everything cost more, and if you've been dragging something long enough you'll swear up and down it's part of your stroke.
" She looked over. "That whiteboard, the sister, the he'd be hurt business — that's theirs.
All of it, and don't let anybody hand it back to you.
But the writing-your-own-name-in part. That's yours. "
"Yeah."
"So drop it and see what your real pace is." She shut the tailgate. "I'd like to see it. I've been swimming next to you four years and I've never once seen you swim without something tied to you."
I drove home and did two things.
First I got the calendar off the nail and wrote the whole training block in ink.
Not race day, that was already there — all the rest of it.
Dawn swims Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Long Saturdays with the distances, four thousand, five, six, back to four.
Taper week starting the fourteenth. Race day already sitting there in the twenty-first. Ink, every square. If you cross out ink it shows.
Second, I opened the family thread. I have never sent a message to that thread that wasn't logistics or a smoothing-over.
Twenty-nine years and I have never once transmitted a thing about myself into it — Charmaine's birthday, the PT change, tell Russ I said hi, a thumbs up on a photo of a lake in Arizona.
I typed it out and sat with my thumb over the button for probably ninety seconds, and my heart was going harder than it had gone in the water that morning.
Hi all — logistics from me, which is new. I'm unavailable weekday dawns, 5:00 to 8:00 a.m., through the summer. I'm also unavailable August 14–21. I have an open water race on the 21st, the state 5K at Kettle Point, 7 a.m. start. You're all welcome at the shore.
Send. Then I put the phone face down on the counter and went and started dinner, and I did not pick it up.
Not when it buzzed, not the second time.
I browned the meat, did the potatoes, set the table, and the phone lay over there face down like something I'd decided not to feed.
It buzzed a third time while I was draining the potatoes. I let it.
Monday morning the alarm went at five. I came down in the dark in my suit with sweats over it, and the kitchen was empty, and the kit was where the kit lives — cap, goggles, towel rolled the way I roll it.
The thermos was next to it. I picked it up and it was warm.
Full, screwed shut, the coffee made the way I make it, which is not the way he makes it. Nobody in the room, no note, no mug in the sink because he'd washed the mug. Upstairs a man was lying in bed pretending to be asleep who'd gotten up sometime before five to boil water in the dark.
I stood there in my own mudroom at five-fifteen holding a warm thermos in both hands, waiting to find out what it was going to cost. Nothing came. Nobody came down. I put it in the bag and went and swam four thousand meters.