Chapter 12
Two spots above the blank line, Benjamin had signed in as a guest of Rita.
I scrawled my name, thinking of other pools and fitness centers I’ve visited, with their membership card scanners and their fancy entryways, complete with couches, electronic message boards, and flat-panel television sets.
This reception vestibule looked like it hadn’t been freshened up since the Kennedy era.
Benjamin had no reference point for categories like uppermiddle class and new rich versus old money.
I’d told him that lots of people try to look wealthy.
But the people who have had money forever try to look poor.
Rich kids and their parents in our town wore scuffed-up shoes, weird golf pants, and polo shirts with worn collars.
It was a preppy cliché, but I hadn’t grown up preppy, and Benj probably didn’t even know the word.
“Am I good to go?” I asked the desk clerk, who was still talking on the phone, head in a cabinet, rustling through some stacks of paper.
“Okay!” said the desk clerk, hanging up the phone. “Do you need anything?”
I absentmindedly massaged my cheek with my fingers. “A lock,” I said when it came to me. “Do you sell them?”
“No, sorry.”
“Do you have any extras to loan out?”
She smiled. “We used to. Let me see. I’ll check the back office.”
She was gone less than a minute. When she came back, I swallowed down a trace of bile and shifted my tote bag, wincing when I heard it crinkle. I was just buying time, until. Until what? Until I understood.
“Here you go,” she said, placing the lock in my hand. “Just drop it back when you’re done. Enjoy!”
I mirrored her expression, keeping the smile pasted on as I made my way into the women’s locker room, smelling that old familiar brew of chlorine, coconut-scented sunscreen, and fancy hair conditioner.
Then I saw the row of old lockers. Two of them, side by side, were decorated with black bows.
Each one had a combination lock affixed, a swimming team Speedo hanging outside.
The deaths were so recent. I supposed no one wanted to be the person to cut the locks off or remind family members they needed to retrieve the girls’ suits. It was too heartbreaking.
Looking around to confirm no one else had followed me into the changing room, I reached for the nearest neon-green swimsuit, and then for the one next to it.
On first touch, the second one still felt damp.
My stomach did a sickening drop again. As if a recent death was more horrible to imagine than one farther back in time.
But it felt that way, as if the past was close enough to reach back and grab, before anything bad happened or before the next thing did.
My fingers lingered, touching the fabric, which wasn’t actually wet, just shiny. I thought of that moment at home—the wisp of satin, clenched in my fist. I got that old feeling, like it was my job to contain this, even ahead of understanding it.
She gave them to me. But also: She was using me.
When I shook my head clear, I automatically reached for the clonidine tablets I usually carried, but then I stopped, remembering I’d taken the last one from the small pill case I kept in my purse.
The regular prescription bottle was back home, somewhere.
The last time I’d seen it was during the move, and I hadn’t spotted it since, because I hadn’t had time to properly organize the recently unpacked toiletries, medicines, and first aid stuff.
Some of it was in bathroom drawers, some in lidded plastic tubs in the hallway closet.
In place of a clonidine tablet, I tried some box breathing. In for four counts. Hold for four. Out for four. My only problem with box breathing is that I always wanted to stop in the middle. To hold for not just four, but longer than four. To make everything stop.
I allowed myself to picture the girls for a minute, the way I’d last seen each of them.
Sidney, with her long blond hair and effortless, retro ’80s supermodel tan; she’d probably been born with highlights.
Izzy with her black hair, sleepy eyes, and devilish smirk; more Aubrey Plaza than Sophia Loren, come to think of it.
Even when they weren’t in school uniform, they dressed the same, in a fashionably disheveled style: a men’s buttondown shirt slipped off one shoulder and tied at the waist, over a crop top.
High-waisted jeans with shredded cuffs. An enormous set of neon hoop earrings that seemed to bounce from one girl to the other.
The girls traded entire outfits. Lord knows they didn’t have to, given their wealth. What else did they share?
I hurried to the pool deck in my old bathing suit with a beach towel wrapped around my waist, spotting Benjamin just as he finished a lap. His hand went up, waving.
“Mom,” he shouted across all six roped-off lanes. “Over here!”
In the shallow end, two young women who were probably nannies played with two toddlers. In a lane next to Benjamin’s, an ancient, liver-spotted bald man performed the slowest and steadiest crawl stroke I’d ever seen.
“This is awesome,” Benj said when I reached the far side of the pool. Pointing to the big swimmer’s clock hanging over five lounge chairs, only one of them occupied, he said, “Here, time me.”
So that’s why he was glad to see me. No contacts. No way to see the clock.
“How many laps are you doing?”
“Three hundred meters.”
“That means nothing to me.”
“There and back, six times.”
I waited for the second hand of the big swim clock to sweep up to the “60” position, a new minute about to start. “Ready, set, go!”
Swimming had built up his back, bulked out his shoulders, and tapered his waist. He gobbled protein bars between classes, then skipped lunch period in the cafeteria, going instead to the school’s weight room—an alternative Summit allowed.
I knew why he and other kids like him did it: to avoid the terror of the cafeteria—the stares, the cliques, that moment of wondering where you should sit or if you should just turn around, dump your tray, and flee.
I was a kid, too, of course. The difference was I wanted friends, enough for me to overcome my shyness.
When I told Benjamin that story, he corrected me.
He wasn’t shy, he said. He just didn’t like most people.
In any case, the weight training had paid off. I couldn’t believe that more girls hadn’t noticed his good looks or the way he was shooting up. Already, there was too much ankle showing below the cuffs of his latest thrift-store jeans. He wouldn’t be the shortest boy in his class forever.
Benjamin was coming in for the first of six completed laps when I noticed a man occupying a lounge chair in the shade.
He caught me looking and shifted his gaze downward, to a yellow pad not unlike the ones I’d just packed up from my office.
Lawyer, I thought, or architect. The latter guess only because he had an Architectural Digest at the top of a pile of reading materials next to his chair.
He was older than me by a decade. Slim, tan, and fit. Eyes hidden behind nothing-special sunglasses. Good-looking. Intellectual, if all that reading material was an indication. But not someone I knew from Summit, which was the important thing.
After his last lap, Benjamin hit the wall and yanked off his goggles. “Time?”
“Five minutes, forty seconds.”
He slapped the water with his palm, face unreadable.
“Is that a victory slap?”
He ran a wet hand over his face then stared up at me, eyes bloodshot, brow furrowed. So, not a victory lap.
I asked, “Is it good enough for the lifeguard test?”
He dipped under the water again, then emerged, smoothing back his otter-dark hair. “There’s no maximum time for the three hundred meters. You just have to swim it with a confident stroke and even breathing.”
“Well, no problem there!”
But his expression had flattened.
“You probably need a snack by now,” I said.
“No. What I need is to learn how to flip turn. Which will make me ten percent faster.”
“But you don’t need to go any faster.”
“All real swimmers do flip turns.”
“Are you sure?”
“Mom.”
Since he’d started visiting the pool this month, he’d had to swim laps alongside the real swimmers—private swim team swimmers. I got it. I lowered myself into the water and started doing the breaststroke, allowing him time to swim off his frustration, although I still didn’t fully understand it.
For the next twenty minutes, we remained in our own worlds, our parallel lanes. When complicated questions or images began to form in my mind, encouraged by the mindlessness of my slow and steady breaststroke, I pushed them away. But I could not push away the silent words, surfacing like bubbles.
He barely knew Izzy. He’s got nothing to do with any of this.
Another length, a tap on the wall, a slow turn, and back again.
He’s not like Ewan.
But that wasn’t a name I wanted to think about.
I mentally sidestepped, trying to think instead of my late mother. I could see her wistful, patient smile. I could remember tagging along with her to grown-up places—art galleries where she browsed but never bought; bookstores where she took her time in the fiction section.
Once, from a phone booth near a movie theater, she placed a call to let my father know that we wouldn’t be home until late, and he mentioned a visit from a neighbor alleging something, graffiti or a suspiciously injured cat—and she should come quickly.
Still, we went to the movie. It was La Cage aux Folles, in French, playing at the Fine Arts in Chicago—a little over my head, but I enjoyed it in the end because she did. The last movie we ever saw together.
My mother had done an admirable job of seeming evenkeeled no matter what was going on around her. She didn’t let her kids’ moods or misbehaviors drag her down. Until the day she died of a stroke, one never would have known she was stressed or suffering.
If I were sentimental, I’d wish that she could have lived just a few years more.
But I wasn’t, and I didn’t. It would have broken her already-weak heart to see how Ewan turned out.
Unless I was misunderstanding everything and she always knew.
Perhaps she was only waiting, full of dread, for the rest of the world to find out.