This is the Water (19 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

W
hen you and the girls get to the facility for evening practice, Paul is waiting for you. “Hi, Annie. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Your girls go on ahead of you into the locker room and change into their practice suits made of polyester. The practice suits, after a few swims, start to hang and bag and balloon. The practice suits lose thread at the seams from the stitching starting to unravel. The practice suits fade and the chlorine from the pool deteriorates the material in a line at the sternum and in a line up through the rear, so that the practice suits become sheer after time. After the practice suits start to fall apart, the swimmers wear them over other swimsuits they have that are also falling apart, to give them that drag. This is how you feel, at the moment, like you are wearing two practice suits instead of one, as you walk over to Paul. You wish you did not have to talk to him, because you know that once you start a conversation, it will be that much harder to walk away from him.

“Let's go for a walk,” he says. Not far from the facility is a reservoir with trails connecting all around it. The roots of trees cross over the trails, filling the walk with stumbles now and then. Paul grabs your arm to hold you up when you falter over a slick root hidden by the first few fallen leaves of autumn. The day is cloud-covered, and a light mist seems to cover you both like a spray from a perfume bottle you've walked yourselves into. No one else is on the trails, only the occasional chipmunk rustling the leaves. “I've missed you,” Paul says, on a part of the trail where you cannot see the sky through the thick canopy formed by the dense tops of pine trees. He turns to you and starts to kiss you. You feel as if the trail just came out from under your feet, and you're falling through an airshaft, only you're not alone. Paul is falling with you. He's bolder with you than he's ever been before. He reaches up under your fleece pullover and your tee shirt. He slides his thumb up under your bra, touching your nipple, just slightly, while he kisses you. Between your legs you're aware of how quickly you're becoming wet, so quickly you're almost embarrassed and hope his wandering hands don't find themselves down there.

It was Dinah's promise to herself to lose weight and at the same time exercise. She didn't want to be one of those women who has lost a lot of weight and looks as though she has wings of skin hanging from her arms. She tried, at the facility, to do the weights, but she didn't like the grunting the men beside her made when they lifted the barbells. She tried doing the treadmill, but she didn't like how she was constantly staring at the same scenery out the window while she jogged. She considered doing the stationary bicycle, but was annoyed by seeing women on the bicycles able to pedal and flip through pages of a magazine at the same time. It made Dinah think that the bicycling wasn't going to tone her muscles in the least if it looked that easy to do. For these reasons, she started walking the trails by the reservoir. She liked how she hardly saw anyone else on the trails, except for the occasional lone person walking a dog. She liked how, when the wind was right, she couldn't even tell there was a major four-lane highway nearby, and she could only hear the sound her feet made stepping on the newly fallen leaves. She even liked looking into the reservoir, where in places it was choked with some kind of underwater menace of a weed. It was almost a frightening scene to look at, reminding her how dark and twisted things in real life could be, a good reminder, she thought, of how the mind could be dark and twisted as well. Not all things were as nice and paved over and smooth and predictable as our civilized world made them out to be. There weren't going to be fast-food restaurants at every exit with molded plastic seating and bright lights. There weren't going to be predictable people either. Some were just plain evil, like the man who killed Kim. Dinah felt lucky she could recognize this. She didn't think many people could. There were some people out there who thought everyone had a grain of goodness within them, when it just wasn't true. Dinah knew better than that.

Dinah would usually take the trail that first looped around the reservoir, and then went up to the top of a steep hill and came down again. By the time she was done, she was sweating, and slightly out of breath. It was a much more satisfying workout than she could get at the facility.

Today, just for variety's sake, she decides to go up the hill first, and then do the loop around the reservoir. There is a lot on her mind, of course. Now that she has told her husband she wants a divorce, she wants it right away. She doesn't want to spend another night in the same house with him. She and her daughter will be the ones to move out, she has already decided that. She even looks forward to finding another house in another town. Of course, there is the question of which school district her . . . Is that Paul and Annie? Dinah almost says out loud, interrupting her thoughts. She stops in her tracks as she spies on them through a stand of thin maples on a connecting path that is a few hundred feet below the path she is on. Paul has his hands up Annie's shirt and they are kissing. What Dinah first notices is how much thinner Annie is than her. She can see the vague outline of Annie's stomach muscles as the shirt is lifted off her skin. Will I ever look like that? Dinah thinks to herself. And then she thinks of taking a picture with her cell phone. A picture, after all, is proof. She will show it to Thomas the next time she sees him. He will have to see for himself what he is up against. Her mind races. If need be, when the time comes, she can help Thomas file for divorce. She has a lawyer who is decent. She can help Thomas look for property in the area, because, of course, if a swim-team parent has to relocate, they will relocate closer to the facility. Everyone is tired of the long commute. Wouldn't it be nice just to be within fifteen minutes of the place, get home at a decent hour, cook dinner, and have time for your child to get their homework done, instead of driving almost an hour in the car each way, having your child do homework on the road, and quizzing your child for tests while you hold one hand on the wheel and the other on their textbook? She will mention to Thomas how the area near the facility isn't bad. The town nearby has a lovely coffee shop, neighbors are in walking distance, and there is a movie theater for the occasional night out. Dinah tries to think of women she knows whom she could fix Thomas up with. There is Marianne from the office, who is fit, runs triathlons, and reads books. She wears pretty lace camisoles under her blazers. Dinah bets that Thomas would find Marianne attractive, or maybe, if she loses enough weight, she will consider going with Thomas to the movies herself. After she takes the photo, and puts the phone back in her pocket, she feels that the cell phone, a pricey one already, is now even more valuable. She is worried she'll lose it, so she holds her hand against her pocket as she walks back to the facility.

If Dinah had stayed a few minutes longer at the scene, she might have taken a photo of you pushing Paul away, and saying to him, “Let's just walk for now,” despite the fact that your whole body seems to be leaning in toward Paul's and wanting you both to keep kissing and touching. On the walk up to the top of the hill, Paul tells you that he has finally contacted a lawyer. He hasn't hired him yet, but has run the facts by him. “The lawyer wants me to convince Chris to convince Bobby Chantal's daughter to stop the exhumation. But what if Pam Chantal won't do it?”

All around, you can see how fall is on its way. Orange and gold maple and oak leaves are covering up the blades of green grass that were on the ground only a week ago. Every once in a while, a bright leaf from a tree falls slowly beside you, sometimes softly touching you, landing on your shoulder for a moment before falling to the ground. They fall slowly enough for you to even reach out and catch them. Now that the leaves are thinning on the trees, the sun is weaker than it was where it shines through the larger spaces between branches. In the distance you can hear what sounds like tour buses traveling on the highway. The leaf peepers are on the roads now, stopping at country stores to take pictures of pumpkins piled on porches and Indian corn hanging from the eaves. You want to tell Paul how you don't want to hear any of it anymore. You don't want to know how crazy Chris has become.

 

Y
ou wish you were at the facility now. If only you hadn't listened to Paul and gone on a walk with him. If you hadn't you'd be in the water now, maybe working on improving your scapular plane of motion in the free by making sure you rotate a little on each side before lifting out your arm, and making sure your elbow is pointed high into the air before you dive your fingertips back into the water to start your reentry.

Paul moves closer to you now and takes you in his arms and starts kissing you again. The sun's gone lower in the sky, and you think that because it's darker now, maybe you're letting Paul kiss you harder, his fingertips more than just brushing your breasts, his body pressing into yours so that you can feel the concentration of the warmth of the blood that's making him hard. It's the sound of crying that pulls you apart. Not a child's cry, but a woman's. She's calling for help. When you and Paul get to Dinah, she's on the ground, grabbing on to her ankle. “I can't stand up,” she says.

Paul pulls off her shoe to get a closer look. Her ankle, with her skin so white, looks like a large puffball mushroom, the kind that have been cropping up every morning on your front field because the weather's been damp. “What happened? Did you just trip?” you ask her.

“Yes, stupid me. This never would have happened if I hadn't been walking with my hands in my pockets. Oh, my phone. Is my phone all right?” Dinah moves her body so she can reach into her pocket, but when she does, her ankle moves, and she sucks in her breath.

“I'll get it for you,” you say.

“No!” Dinah says. But you have already reached into Dinah's pocket for her, and slid the phone out. When you turn it on for her, to see if it's still working, the photo of you and Paul kissing is on the screen.

“The picture doesn't matter,” Dinah says. “Even if you erase it. I'll just tell Thomas and Chris I saw the two of you together.”

“What? Let me see that,” Paul says, and grabs Dinah's phone.

“You're spying on us?” you say.

“You always think everything's about you, don't you Annie? Well, wrap your brain around this. I didn't come out here to spy on you. I came out here to get some exercise, and then I saw the two of you swapping saliva like some teenagers.”

Paul deletes the photo.

“Come on, Annie, let's go,” he says, grabbing your hand.

“We can't just leave her here,” you say. Paul tosses Dinah's phone next to her hand on the ground.

“She's got her phone,” Paul says. “She can call whomever she wants to come help her.”

Walking back to the facility, you can't even answer Paul's question when he asks you if you're all right. You're feeling the familiar feeling all over again. The glistening road, wet from the misty weather, threatening to crack open and suck you down into an abyss you'd never be able to crawl your way out of. But you're with Paul, and thinking about your brother isn't supposed to happen when you're with Paul or thinking about Paul. How is this happening?

Thomas, you think, would not listen to Dinah even if she did approach him with the news. You even think how at first he would probably tell you that Dinah started babbling away at him about you and Paul, and that he didn't believe her, thought the pressures of being a swim-team mom were becoming too much for her, especially now that her daughter is not winning any more of her races. Thomas would tell you that he felt sorry for Dinah, having to make up such low stories about you and Paul. Thomas, if you don't say anything to ruin it, might never even believe Dinah, and you could carry on as usual, no matter what absurd stories she may tell him. Because that's what it is, absurd—a grown married woman kissing her friend's husband in the woods.

This is the facility, the light coming in from the tall windows above the entrance now a little darker, the sun close to setting. This is you going up to the front desk, telling them there's a woman on the upper trail at the reservoir who probably sprained her ankle so seriously she will need medical treatment, a clinic, a doctor, some X-rays to make sure nothing's broken. These are your daughters coming out of the showers after practice. Their hair dripping wet at the ends, creating water stains on their shirts above their small breasts. These are the girls saying almost immediately when they see you, “We're hungry, what's for dinner?” This is Sofia saying, “Sounds god-awful,” when you tell her falafel with tahini dressing. This is you not feeling up to driving home just yet and seeing Thomas. “I've changed my mind. Let's order pizza,” you say. These are the girls, cheering in the parking lot as they're walking to the car. “Saved by pizza!” Alex yells.

 

T
his is you pulling into a nearby pizzeria you have seen many times before but have never gone to. These are the girls fighting over pepperoni or sausage. This is you, with a window-seat view of the hillside you and Paul were just standing on. This is you looking at the hillside, scanning it for signs of Dinah, even though you know you wouldn't be able to see Dinah from so far away and through the gold and red leaves. This is you wishing your girls wouldn't eat the pizza so quickly. You don't want to have to go home any time soon and face Thomas. Maybe Dinah has already called him and told him the news about you and Paul. This is the pizza, mostly eaten, mostly, Alex says, because your daughter has just seen the movie
Aliens
and likes to repeat the line about the aliens that goes, “They mostly come out at night, mostly.” Now your daughter expresses everything this way. She says, “I mostly feel sick, mostly,” and she says, “I mostly feel like not doing my homework, mostly.” And you think to yourself, I mostly feel like not going home, mostly.