John Lutz - The Ex

“One more dive, Michael!” she yelled over to him.

He glanced her way, smiled, then pretended the sunblocker bottle was another boat, steaming toward the red toy one at the edge of the towel. Bernice hurried to the diving board.

Still wet and cooled down from her first dive, the water didn’t feel so luxurious when she entered it after her second dive and cut toward the bottom. She’d attempted a swan dive, and she knew she hadn’t been nearly vertical on entry and would have scored low if anyone had been judging.

Again her palms found the smooth concrete and she turned in the cool silence and began her rise to the surface.

She was surprised when her progress was stopped.

Then she realized something-someone-was clutching both her ankles, keeping her from rising.

Worried but not panicked, she twisted her body to see downward. Through the blue murkiness she could actually see the hands, the long pale fingers, encircling her thin ankles, but she couldn’t make out the face of whoever was doing this to her.

She bent down lower, contorting her body so she could reach the strong fingers and try to pry them from her ankles. But her buoyancy prevented her from reaching the hands.

She’d assumed someone, probably a teenage boy, was playing a joke on her. But the grip of the fingers was so powerful, seemingly as unbreakable as steel bands. Maybe he didn’t realize how strong he was.

Enough is enough! she decided.

She tried kicking herself free, but the hands allowed all the lateral movement she wanted without permitting her to rise. She knew she was merely wearing herself out.

Sitting in the sun on the warm, damp towel, Michael stared at the pool and wondered why Bernice hadn’t come up yet. Then, as a skinny black girl in a green suit bounced twice on the edge of the board and dived, he turned his attention back to his boats.

Beneath the water, Bernice decided to change tactics and was paddling upward as hard as she could, trying futilely to provide lift for herself and whoever was keeping her from rising. She was aware of a slim girl in a green suit shattering the surface above her head and sliding past only a few feet away, her eyes clenched shut as she gracefully arched her body and began a smooth arc up toward bright sunlight and air. Bernice’s chest began to ache as she realized her increased efforts were only causing her to rise a few feet then sink back toward the bottom of the pool.

She understood then that this was no joke, and she panicked, flailing desperately with her arms and hands, writhing and trying to kick free as she strained every muscle and ounce of will toward the dim light above.

Still, she could not rise.

The white boat with the sunblocker collided with and sank the red plastic boat at the edge of the towel.

Michael looked around again for Bernice but didn’t see her.

He wasn’t alarmed. He picked up the white boat, now the sunblocker bottle again, and tried to remove its lid.

Bernice hung suspended beneath the water, her arms spread wide as if she were about to embrace a lover. The last of the air in her lungs had escaped through her slack mouth and was curving away in a graceful string of bubbles.

The cruel hands had finally released their grip on her ankles, and she slowly began to rise.

Deirdre gripped the tile lip of the pool and easily hoisted herself up and out of the water.

Someone screamed. Several people began to shout.

Deirdre snatched up her towel and started drying herself off.

Then she walked around the hot concrete apron to the other side of the pool to join the growing tide of people streaming around a confused Michael to see what had happened in the deep end.

Molly wished David would arrive.

She sat on the sofa hugging Michael to her. He’d stopped crying. At first she was relieved, then his silence began to bother her. She wondered if his young mind had finally grasped what had occurred. But that was impossible, she realized; most adults hadn’t grasped the immensity and banality of death. He lay inertly against her as she held him even tighter.

Molly had finally stopped crying too. The police had brought Michael to the apartment an hour ago, two uniformed officers with sad and respectful expressions. The taller of the two, who wore an inadequate mustache and looked barely out of his teens, told Molly they’d found Bernice’s purse and identification in one of the lockers at Koch Pool, and several people said they thought she’d been with Michael, whom someone noticed seemed to be unattended. When they brought him to this address, Mrs. Esslinger, downstairs, had informed them which apartment Michael lived in.

And the police had told Molly what happened to Bernice.

She cried on the phone when she called David at work to tell him. And she’d cried for a long time afterward. But now the shock, the merciful deadening of the senses, had set in, and her tears had dried as the hard fact of death was assimilated and the grief turned inward.

The door opened and David entered. He carried his suit coat slung twisted almost inside out over his shoulder, and the wind had mussed his hair. His eyes appeared puffy, as if he’d been crying too. Maybe he had, Molly thought. She’d never seen him cry.

He dropped his coat on the chair and came to her, then touched the side of her neck gently.

“You okay now, Mol? You sure Michael’s okay?”

She met his eyes and nodded, then looked away from him. She guessed she was okay. Her eyes were so dry now they burned, and her throat felt constricted.

“Nobody seems to know what happened,” she heard herself say. “Someone said they saw her go off the diving board, and she just never came up.”

David leaned down to kiss Michael, who smiled slightly but didn’t move. “Maybe she hit her head on the bottom of the pool,” he said, straightening.

“No. The police said there wasn’t any sign of that. They think maybe she blacked out and drowned. Or maybe got disoriented underwater.” Molly sighed. “Hell, David, she was a good swimmer. She went to some lake in New Jersey last summer with her mother and an aunt, showed us photos of her diving off a dock. She bragged to us that she’d won a bet by swimming across the lake, remember?”

“I remember,” David said. “How did Michael get home?”

Molly told him.

“Has someone notified Bernice’s mother?”

She nodded. “I told the police that her mother lived in Teaneck, and they said somebody there would talk to her.” She could feel moisture soaking through her blouse from Michael’s tears or saliva. He’d loved Bernice and he’d miss her in whatever way three-year-olds grieved. She’d miss Bernice too. How many friends had Bernice had, with her small family and her temporary jobs? It seemed she had never sunk the kind of roots that would sustain her into middle and old age, as if her life had been predicated on a premature death. There were people like that; you could see early death on them in their childhood photographs, something in their eyes, their stances, their uneasy look of impermanence. As if a part of them knew they were only travelers passing through, their stays briefer than most. It was all so unfair and sad.

Her grief expanded in her, almost choking her, and she began to cry softly. “Goddamn it, David!”

She felt the cushion shift as he sat down beside her. He rested a hand on her thigh. Michael moved against her, and she saw his bare feet dig into David’s stomach down near his crotch. David didn’t seem bothered by the small feet. He raised his hand from her thigh and cupped it around her shoulder, hugging her.

“It happens,” he said. “Stuff like this just happens. It’s shitty, but that’s how the world works.”