“What did you do?” Maribeth asked.
“Mostly paperwork.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” Maribeth wasn’t sure why she should feel guilty, but she did.
“No, don’t be. I roasted a turkey breast, which is the best part anyhow, and I even have leftovers for sandwiches.”
They’d arrived at the pool. Maribeth had assumed lunchtime would be off-peak, but all five lanes were full of swimmers. “It’s so busy.”
Janice snapped her bathing cap low over her ears and adjusted her goggles. “This is nothing.” Maribeth expected Janice to get into the slow lane, which was where the older people were swimming, but she set out toward the faster lanes. “Have a good swim,” she called over her shoulder.
Maribeth stood above the slow lane. The three people circling in there seemed to be going terribly fast. Maribeth spent a good few minutes trying to figure out the etiquette of inserting herself into the flow. It reminded her of being fifteen, in driver’s training, trying to work up the nerve to merge into freeway traffic for the first time.
When there was a break in the swimmers, she got in and tried a sort of breast stroke but soon found that her still-healing underarm muscles restricted her range of motion so greatly that she was hardly moving. A swimmer swooped up suddenly behind her.
“Sorry,” she called.
She switched to a doggy paddle and made it to the end of the pool, where she held on to the side while she caught her breath. Another swimmer came up behind her. “Are you swimming?” she asked. Maribeth wasn’t sure if what she was doing could rightly be called swimming. It felt more like not-drowning, but before she could think of an answer, the swimmer did one of those neat little underwater turn-kicks and took off (not remotely slowly, Maribeth couldn’t help but notice) in the other direction.
Once she’d caught her breath and once there was a decent gap between her and the other swimmers, she pushed off again. This time she tried the crawl, crawl being the optimal word in describing her painfully slow stroke. Two swimmers passed her before she reached the other end of the lane. In the time it took her to complete the next length—having to stop and stand halfway through—all the other swimmers in her lane had passed her. She could feel their impatience radiating through the water. Slow lane or not, she understood, she shouldn’t be here. She was the old lady doing thirty-five on the freeway.
By the time she reached the other end—she had done four lengths at this point—her breath was raggedy, perilously close to hyperventilation. She felt panicked and must’ve looked it, too, because the lifeguard jumped down from his perch and in a voice that carried across the pool deck asked, “Ma’am, are you in crisis?”
She was forty-four years old and had suffered a heart attack and undergone bypass surgery. She’d run away from home and neither her husband nor her best friend had tried to contact her. And she couldn’t swim. Yes, she was in motherfucking crisis!
“I’m fine,” she gasped.
She managed to heave herself out of the pool and get herself back upstairs without collapsing. Up in the locker room she realized that all her things were stowed in Janice’s locker. And she had forgotten to bring a towel.
She was on the bench, shivering, when she felt a towel being draped over her shoulders. “There you are.”
Maribeth couldn’t answer. It wasn’t just that she was still breathless and shaking, it was that she had been caught out again. She could float, she could tread water, she could paddle, she could even approximate the strokes, but she couldn’t actually swim. How had she not known this?
“Let’s get you warmed up,” Janice said, guiding her toward the communal showers. She stood under the water a long time, letting the heat soak the cold and sorrow and emptiness out of her. When she finally dried off, she felt as wrung out as if she’d been swimming hard laps for days.
Janice was already dressed and packed up. Maribeth apologized.
“What are you sorry for?” Janice asked.
When Maribeth didn’t answer, Janice asked, “How long since your surgery?”
She was briefly surprised. But of course, she was now naked, her medical history was etched in relief all over her skin. “Seven weeks.”
“Why, that’s no time at all.”
Even if she could swim, it was a certain kind of hubris, perhaps the same sort that made her think she could run away with no repercussions, to think she could simply get into the pool and go.
She handed Janice back her towel. It was white, like a flag of surrender.
42
Later that afternoon, Maribeth logged on to her e-mail to search for her parents’ social security numbers. She really had given up on hearing from Jason. When she saw his message, for a brief second she wondered if he’d done that on purpose, waited the exact number of days that it would take her to go through the stages of grief and then just when she was starting to feel, if not okay, then resigned, drop an e-mail.
But that was paranoid.
Also that was way too much effort for Jason.
There was no subject line, but there was a little paper clip icon in the attachments field. Had he written her a letter begging her to come home? Had he sent divorce papers?
Okay. Take ten calming breaths. One, two—
Her hands flew to the keyboard, opening the message, downloading the attachment. She began to read. The first line was sickeningly familiar.
She felt vomit rise in her throat. She pushed herself away from the table. She did not want to puke on a library computer.
After five weeks away and nearly a week since she’d e-mailed him, Jason’s response was to send back the note that she had written to him the day she’d left home. Just like that. Return to sender.