Jonathon King - Midnight Guardians

There was no telling when she was going to stop. Sometimes she’d be at it for an hour, sometimes two. I told myself it didn’t bother me, and then moved down to the pool corner to sit on the steps. I sat on the edge, with my feet and calves submerged, and sipped the beer. I waited as I watched her head, her usual sunlight blonde hair darkened by the water.

I knew what she was doing; I’d done the same thing myself when I came to Florida to get away from the streets of Philadelphia. Descended from a long line of policemen, I thought of the job as a duty, a lifelong commitment. Then one night, while responding to a store’s silent alarm, I came face-to-face with an armed robber. He got off the first round, his bullet piercing my neck.

In reaction, I returned fire. But in my hesitation and piss-poor aim, I hit the second person coming out of the store, a thirteen-year-old accomplice who took my 9-mm slug in the back as he twisted away. The round severed his spinal cord, and he was dead before his body touched concrete. I left my career in the street, blood pooling under the body of a teenager.

After Billy set me up in the research shack on the river, nearly every night there I’d paddle my canoe upstream into the Glades, keeping that rhythm, punishing myself, looking for some kind of solace. I knew Sherry was doing the same thing now, and I knew the answer wasn’t there.

For several years, I’d kept up a habit of touching the spot on my neck where the robber had shot me. Unconsciously, my fingertips would go to the smooth, circular scar tissue and caress it. A while after I met Sherry, I quit the habit. Her love had helped me move on. I wanted to do the same for her.

Staring down at my feet in the water, I was about to stand when the flump-flump stopped. By the time I looked up, she’d dipped her head under the water and executed a powerful breaststroke to move out of the current and over to my side. When her face surfaced, she was smiling and breathing hard-happy to see me.

“Well, hello there,” she said in between deep gulps of breath. “How long have you been watching?”

She was still floating, her chin just above the surface, those malleable blue-green eyes of hers taking on the color of the water, with the azure tint that always seemed to assert itself when she was in a good mood.

I took a quick glance at my half-empty bottle and wagged it a bit.

“Long enough for a couple,” I said.

She took another stroke closer and half stood, putting her wet hands on my knees, and then pushed herself up with her arms, as if she were doing one of her impressive workout dips. Then she raised herself until her face was level with mine.

“So, were you assessing my stroke, or what?” she said, her breathing starting to subside.

“Pretty proficient,” I said, setting the bottle on the tile behind me without taking my eyes off hers.

She pushed herself higher and closer. I could feel the water dampening my pants legs and dripping onto my shirt. She moved her lips onto mine and slightly opened her mouth; her breath was warm.

When she broke off the kiss, we held eye contact. And I knew the question on her face was a reflection of the question on mine: Do you really want to do this?

She answered it first. “Come on in,” she said, backing away with a teasing smile. “The water’s fine.”

I undid the first button on my shirt and then gave up and pulled it over my head. My khakis came off with some effort, and I stepped down into the pool, the warm water sliding up my rib cage until I was nose-to-nose with Sherry. She kissed me again.

With a nervous flutter in my chest-Was I fifteen again?-I asked myself: What do I do? Where do I go? How careful? How much?

I touched her shoulders with my palms to shape the muscle there, and then let them slide to her back. She had a swimmer’s body, defined and hard. I pressed my fingertips into the muscle fibers and massaged them. She broke off the kiss with a shiver, hooked her thumbs under the shoulder straps of her suit, and slipped it down.

Only then did I pull her to me, chest to chest, my nose in her hair, which had not lost the smell of her perfume, despite the chlorine. She nuzzled the side of my neck, and I let my hands flow over the curve of her hips. I was on my toes, partially floating, my knees flexed to match her height, forming a natural lap. I started to draw her onto me, holding the backs of her thighs-in that aching zone of passion, hunger, past my tentative beginnings. As I used my strength to pull her onto me, and my hand slid down her left thigh, it lost purchase at the point where that limb ended.

I fumbled. She jerked at the touch of my palm across the flap of her amputation. I tried to recover, reaching again to hold her close, but she twisted and then pushed away like a young girl who’s realized she’s gone too far in her foreplay. I hesitated, and did not try to stop her from leaving.

After my hand touched the skin flap of Sherry’s amputation, she’d quickly pulled up her suit and stroked over to the steps. On one leg, she hopped up and out of the water and grabbed a nearby towel, slung it around her waist, and made her way inside. I stayed in the water, rested the back of my head on the gutter, and closed my eyes, listening to the sound of night insects, taking in the odor of night-blooming jasmine.

Later I sat at the kitchen counter, drinking beer in the dark, feeling sorry for myself. There were techniques I’d taught myself to control my anger when I worked on the streets of Philadelphia as a foot patrolman: when a punk-assed kid mouthed off when I asked him not to loiter in front of the bistro on South Street, or when some dealer was lucky enough not to be carrying when I finally thought I’d outsmarted him and he just smirked and turned out his empty pockets.

Grain of sand, I’d tell myself, let it go. Form that omega sign with your ring finger and thumb, a reminder not to let the anger rule you. Get the small rubber pinkie ball out of your pocket and squeeze it in your palm-a hundred times, no, two hundred. I’m not sure any of them worked then; I wasn’t sure they’d do tonight.

I’d made love to Sherry hundreds of times, many of them joyful moments in that very pool. But I’d never made love to one-legged Sherry. It had been nearly a year; no matter how understanding I tried to be, knowing my needs were no match for what she was enduring, I was still failing. You’re insensitive, Max. You’re thinking with your dick, Max. Don’t be a Neanderthal, Max. Finally, I poured half the beer out in the sink and rinsed it. The third bottle of the night wasn’t helping; a fourth or fifth wouldn’t, either.

When I went to her room, the lights were still on. She was sitting up in bed, dressed now in one of my big Temple Owls T-shirts and a pair of sweatpants. She was on her side of the bed, the same side she’d had since our relationship started. But a long rectangular mirror was propped lengthwise against her inside hip and extended to the foot of the bed. From my viewpoint, it was a four-foot, framed length of particle board. The mirrored side faced her.

“Hurting?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“Yeah, a little bit,” she said without looking up. Her head was cocked to the side so she could stare into the mirror.

Within the first couple of months of her amputation, Sherry had developed a pain in her leg, the missing one. She began complaining that the missing leg was in such pain she couldn’t stand it. This is a woman with a pain threshold higher than anyone I’ve ever met. When I dragged her through the Everglades with a compound fracture, she’d refused to cry out. So my layman’s logic asked: How could something that’s not there anymore hurt? But I also knew that she was suffering.