Chapter 3
Chapter Three
The water looks calm, which somehow makes it worse.
The pool wants me to get in, but I stand at the edge of it and can't.
It's late morning, and the heat has become a physical thing, a hand pressing flat on the top of my head. The water lies in the deep end, blue and motionless. Not a ripple. In this heat the pool is the one cool promise, and every other person within thirty miles would already be in it.
Julia would do a clean racing dive off the far end without breaking conversation. David would float on his back with his eyes closed and call it the only medicine that works.
I put one foot on the top step, where the water goes warm and clear over the tile, but my body refuses to go any further.
It isn't a decision. That's the thing nobody understands who hasn't felt it. It isn't that I choose not to swim. Some older, deeper part of me has already made the choice and won't be argued with.
When I look at that blue surface for too long, the edges of it start to shiver. The blue goes dark. Brown. Cold.
And then I am not standing beside the pool anymore.
I am in the river.
Glass blooms green around me. The seat belt cuts across my chest. Water presses against my mouth, my nose, my eyes. Somewhere above me, rain drums against the roof.
I step back onto the hot dry stone so fast pain shoots up through my heel.
For a second I don't know where I am.
Then the heat comes back. The lawn. The maples. And the water is just a pool again.
“Fine,” I say out loud, to nobody, to Luna, who has followed me out and is watching me from the shade with her head on her paws. "You win."
I head over to the birds instead.
The aviary stands at the far end of the lawn, tucked among the maples. It’s a broad timber-framed enclosure, with fine wire mesh running from a low stone base to a sloping cedar roof.
From the kitchen, it almost disappears into the trees.
Inside, narrow branches cross between potted shrubs and nesting boxes. The birds have room to hop and dart through the filtered light. Yellow and blue and white flash behind the mesh.
Even from the house, the whole thing looks alive.
I carry a tin of seed down the path and work the outer gate open.
They stir before I'm through it, wings beating soft against the air as they gather along the nearest branches.
When I scatter the seed across the feeding shelf, they come down around me in a bright, chattering rush, close enough that I can feel the small wind of them on my hands.
Nothing in me argues. That's the thing about the birds. My body walks down here without a fight and stands in the middle of all that noise and lets it happen, and for ten minutes I'm not somebody who is managing anything.
It was Kane’s idea. He put it to me in the first year, in a way that made me think I’d thought of it.
Green space and birdsong lower anxiety, he said.
They use it in long-term care, in psychiatric units, because it works when almost nothing else will.
Get outside. Grow something. Keep something alive that isn't you.
He didn't say the last part. I added that myself, and I've never told him.
I stay until the tin is empty. Then I go inside and get on the treadmill, because moving is the only other thing that empties my head.
I run until the shirt sticks to me and the numbers on the console blur.
I don't think about water. I don't think about the envelope on the kitchen island.
Or the articles I read four times this morning, as if my eyes were trying to tell me something my mind wouldn't hear.
Afterward, in the shower, it happens again. The water is warm and I have my face turned up into it with my eyes shut, and for no reason at all there's rain instead. Cold rain on my cheeks. The smell of mud and grass, and a red light turning somewhere behind my eyelids. On, off, on.
I open my eyes to white tile and steam. My hand is against the wall, holding me up, and my heart is going like I'm still running.
Two years, and it still finds me in the shower.
It still finds me at the edge of a swimming pool on the hottest day.
I turn the water off and stand dripping in the quiet.
On my right side, the world has that faint underwater muffle it always has now.
That ear never fully came back. I turn my head to be sure the house is as empty as it feels.
I dry off and find my phone and do the thing I always do after, the thing Kane doesn't know about. I pull up the article. I've read it so many times the screen barely needs me anymore.
The Timberland Chronicle
Woman Killed in Heavy Rain Identified
Kelsi Taylor, 23, died Thursday evening after being struck by a vehicle near the river bridge during heavy rain, according to police.
Authorities cited poor visibility and extreme weather as the primary factors.
The woman behind the wheel was hospitalized and later released.
Following a preliminary investigation, no charges were filed and the collision was ruled accidental.
Taylor's family released a brief statement asking for privacy.
Her fiancé, who has since declined interviews, said the couple had argued earlier that evening and that she left before he could stop her. She never came home.
That's the part I read twice. The argument. The leaving. The never coming home.
I read it the way I’d press on a bruise, probing for something beneath the pain. A face. A road. A reason I was out there at all. It never helps. All I have is Kelsi, the weather, and a gap where I should be. Everything the article knows, I know. Everything it doesn't know, neither do I.
It's nearly noon, which means it's nearly time for therapy.
Dr. Giles Kane appears on my laptop the way he always does, a few seconds late, filling the frame with his study in Seattle. He has a salt-and-pepper beard and more hair than a man his age has any right to. He adjusts his glasses, then his camera, then his glasses again.
"Mallory. Good to see you. Can you hear me all right?"
"Turn yourself up a little. My left ear's the good one."
"How's that?"
"Better," I say.
He makes a note, or pretends to, and sits back. He has a way of starting gently, never pushing too hard at first. Mostly it works. I have never decided whether that's his training or his nature.
"How's the week been? You look flushed."
"I ran. It's eighty degrees out there and I still got on the treadmill. Hence the glow."
"You didn't swim."
It isn't a question. He knows I have a pool. He knows what the pool represents.
"I know what you're going to say. But I’m making progress. I did stand in it up to my ankles," I say. "That's a personal record. Write it down."
"I will." He doesn't smile, but the lines around his eyes do. "And the birds? Are you still going down to them?"
"Every day."
"Good." He means it. It's the only thing he ever prescribed to me that I took.
"And the sleep?"
“I’m getting some."
"With help, or without?"
I look at the little square of myself in the corner of the screen, the woman with wet hair and a careful expression. I think about lying, but I don't, because lying to Kane wastes both our afternoons. "With, twice this week. The nights David is away are worse. He left today for Portland."
Kane nods slowly. “Right. The nights alone. We've talked about how those go. Are you still checking the locks? Listening for things that aren’t there?”
I nod. “I'm aware I check the locks. It's a very boring problem to have."
“It isn’t boring and it isn’t a problem. It’s a response. Your body learned something two years ago and it’s still trying to keep you safe with the only tools it has.” He lets that sit. He’s good at letting things sit. “How’s the hearing? You said the right side’s been bothering you more.”
“I saw the audiologist again this morning. Nothing’s changed. Same loss, same frequencies. She reminded me the damage is permanent. The hair cells that were destroyed aren’t coming back.” I shrug. “And she’s still trying to talk me into a hearing aid.”
“Why won’t you?”
“Because then it’s real.” I hear how that sounds and push straight past it.
“Most of the time I manage. It’s worse in loud rooms. Everything on that side gets muffled, and sometimes I lose half of what someone says and nod like I heard them.
” I try to make it a joke and it lands somewhere short of one.
“I hate that the most, I think. More than the pool. More than the driving. Missing things. I used to hear everything. It was the whole job, hearing what people were trying not to say.”
There. I've walked us right up to it without meaning to, my mouth arriving before the rest of me can stop it. A small alertness comes into Kane's expression.
"The job," he says. "Say more."
"It's nothing. I'm just rambling.”
"Mallory."
I look past the laptop to the island, where the envelope is hidden beneath the catalog. In that half second, I decide to give him only part of the truth.
"Cassandra might call again,” I say. "My old editor. She checks in from time to time. It gets me thinking about work, that's all. Whether I could still do any of it."
"And how does that thought feel?"
"Like standing at the edge of the pool," I say before I can dress it up. "Wanting to get in but not being able to."
He's quiet. He takes his glasses off, which is what he does when he's about to say the thing he really means to say. I brace.
“I want you to be careful,” Kane says. “Because I know that woman. The working one. She isn’t gone.
She’s part of you, and she’s a gift. But the work you did before the accident, the cases, the crime material you buried yourself in, that world was hard on you even then.
After what you went through, going back into it could cost you more than you realize. ”
He pauses.
“There are things from that night you still can’t remember.
We don’t know why some memories come back and others don’t, and trying to force them isn’t something I’m willing to do.
When memories do return, they don’t always come back neatly.
They can come in pieces. Images. Sensations.
Sometimes enough to make you feel as though you’re right back there. ”
He watches me for a moment.
“You’ve already spent two years trying to get your footing. I don’t want you throwing yourself back into that world before you’re ready.”
"I'm not forcing anything."
"I'm asking you not to." He puts the glasses back on and looks straight into the camera.
He almost never does, and for a moment it feels like being watched through a window.
"Avoid obsessive digging into the past. Especially old cases, old articles, any of it.
You don't have anything to prove to Cassandra or to yourself.
If something from back then comes looking for you, we handle it together, slowly, in here.
But don't go looking for it. Can you promise me that? "
I glance toward the envelope under the catalog. From here, it’s only a catalog on a counter in a quiet house. But I know the exact weight of the paper inside it. I know that sometime tonight, when the house is dark, I’ll slide it back out and read every word.
"I promise," I tell him.
"Say it like you mean it."
I groan. "I promise, Giles. No digging."
Kane studies me across the miles, and I keep my face still. Whatever he sees, he decides to accept. Our time is nearly up and, I think, he wants to believe me almost as much as I want to be believed.
"Good," he says. "Same time next week. Call me before that if the nights get bad."
"I will."
The screen goes dark, leaving my reflection in the black glass, wet-haired and unreadable. Beyond the laptop, small and out of focus at the far end of the kitchen, the envelope sits exactly where I left it.
I get up and go to it.