Bodies of Water (12 page)

Later, when the air grew chilly and the children were ready to collapse, we tucked them all into their respective, makeshift beds and returned outside to the yard. The picnic table was still littered with dirty plates and crumpled napkins and empty soda bottles. Rose’s toys lay scattered across the lawn, and the children’s bikes lay like hulking metal skeletons on the grass. We each had three empty bottles of beer next to our seats.

Eva stood up and went to the picnic table. It was dark, but the moon was nearly full. It reflected brightly in the still surface of the water. Her silhouette was familiar but new in this backdrop. She was wearing a pair of red Capri slacks and a white sleeveless blouse, but she’d kicked off her shoes earlier. It was hard to believe that it had been less than a year since she’d had Rose. Her waist had returned to its tiny circumference, though her breasts remained large. Her body was everything mine was not: soft, curvy, inviting.

She started to clear the dirty plates, and I shook my head. “You don’t have to do that,” I said.

“Oh, I don’t mind.”

“No,” I said, my heart swelling with something I barely recognized: a sense of defiance, of freedom. “I mean, we don’t have to do any of that. Cleaning up. Washing dishes. We’re on vacation. We can make up our own rules.”

She looked at me suspiciously, but I nodded, feeling suddenly bold. “Rule number one: No cleaning the dinner table until morning.”

She stood back and put her hands on her hips. “Okay then, rule number two: Bikes and toys should only be put away in the event of rain.”

“Rule number three,” I declared, my heart pounding hard, my throat thick. “Every evening must end with a swim.” I was thinking about the night at the Rippling River Campground, wishing I’d joined her in that freezing water. Here was my second chance. I also wanted to remain in this place, in this twilit aching place, for just a little longer.

“I like that rule,” she said, smiling at me warmly.

And so we swam.

This is what I remember about that night: the warm surface of the lake, the freezing, murky water below, the way it took my breath away, the way my heart stopped beating when I felt the cold shock of it on my legs, my hips, my waist. I remember the sharp rocks at the bottom and the way they hurt my feet, the minnows that tickled my skin. And I remember Eva. Eva like some sort of mermaid, dipping and diving and surfacing. Her hair, relieved of its chignon, running down her back like dark water. I remember the sound of our voices echoing even though we were trying so hard to be quiet. I remember feeling my body grow in strength in the water, as it always did when I was swimming; water made me feel powerful. Invincible. Sure of myself. If not for the water, if not for the welcoming embrace of the lake, I might not have done what I did.

Eva swam to me, under water, teasing. She didn’t think I could see her, as her body moved stealthily beneath the dark surface. I knew she intended to surprise me, to startle me. And I couldn’t see her, but strangely, I
felt
her. I knew exactly where she was. I could sense her body the way I could always sense where my girls were in the house. It was instinctual, animal.

And so when she broke the surface of the water, just inches from me, I had to feign surprise. To pretend that I hadn’t known she was coming. That all of this was coming.

“Boo!” she whispered loudly. Water dripped down her face, her eyelashes were stuck together with it. Her lips were wet, parted slightly, coyly mocking me as I pretended to catch my breath.

If it hadn’t been for the water, for the darkness that concealed us, for the safety I always felt when submerged, I wouldn’t have dared. But we were swimming, our bodies no different from the lake. We were somehow a part of it, and so my hands reached out and grasped her waist, that tiny little waist. I could feel the small bones of her hips just beneath my grasp. She was weightless, so when I pulled, her body floated toward me without resistance.

And then her body was pressing against mine. I could feel her breasts, so much larger than my own, unfamiliar, soft and yielding, pressing against me, my arms holding on as though she might just slip through and be carried away by the water. And so I held on, and she held on, and then I was burying my face in that soft place. (I remember the smell of the lake, after all this time; I can still smell the incredible scent of the lake on her skin.) And our lips, finally, finally were touching. I was so hungry. Like a prisoner given only gruel for years and years suddenly being presented with filet mignon. And she returned my kisses with her own fierce hunger. I was crying, I think, though it could have only been the lake. And she was crying too. I could feel the shudder and tremble in her chest. Later, inside the covers of our shared bed, I dreamed we were still swimming, the soft sheets lighter than water. And the entire night I held on, like someone afraid of drowning.

The following two weeks with Eva at Lake Gormlaith passed somehow both slowly and in an instant. Normal time was suspended without the usual obligations and concerns: without men, without lunches to pack and meals to make and arguments to be had. We were breaking every single rule that usually prevailed at home in Hollyville. We were living in an upside-down world, a world of our own making. I even told my mother we wouldn’t be able to visit, that we had company. I didn’t want anything, or any
one,
to steal even a moment of this fleeting, floating time.

Our days were sun-dipped, Kodachrome days. When I recollect that summer now, I see only the dazzling constellations of light on the water, Eva holding her face to the sun, her body patterned by the shadow of leaves. I see the children running one by one down the old wooden dock, leaping into the water. Carefree. I see my own heart swelling inside my chest, like a buoy, holding me up.

We clung to each other in the mornings, quietly, as the children stirred in the other room. We were both afraid, though we didn’t ever say it, that one of the children would hear us. We were so careful. Vigilant. And somehow, this only heightened our longing. It was like a game, how quietly we could kiss. How silently we could make love. And instead of getting up and making breakfast for the children, we gave Chessy and Donna domain in the kitchen, where they concocted children’s ideas of breakfast: French toast every day, peaches gritty with sugar, giant glasses of chocolate milk. We told them that we were on vacation and wanted to sleep in. Under covers, we moved so slowly, the bed barely creaked. And we listened to their laughter, relied on their laughter, to mask the sounds that sometimes escaped us.

After breakfast, while the children played outside, we tidied up whatever mess was left from the day before and then retired to our respective chairs on the front lawn in our bathing suits. But while Eva quickly turned the golden color of a ripe peach, I simply watched as a thousand more freckles appeared like scattered constellations on my skin. At night, Eva played connect the dots with her tongue.

We watched the sun move across the sky, in and out of clouds. On the rainy days, we sent the children to the tree house and hunkered down inside.

We read. Alone and to each other. She whispered lines of E. E. Cummings and Pablo Neruda into my hair. We drank beer in the middle of the day and took naps whenever we felt sleepy. Once, we left Chessy and Donna to watch the little ones and took the boat out to the little island at the center of the lake and made love on the rocky shore beneath an enormous willow tree. It was a dangerous and breathless afternoon. But in the safety of the trees, I felt both safe and emboldened.

“Tell me about San Francisco,” I said, as Eva slipped back into her dress and sat on the shore with her knees tucked under her chin, staring out at the still water. I reached out and touched an exposed part of her thigh with my finger, let it linger there. “I want to know who you were before you met Ted.”

I still had such a hard time envisioning Eva without Ted, without the children.
That
Eva was like an apparition: a ghostly Eva, a shadow Eva. But I wanted to know her, everything about her. Sometimes, with Eva, I felt unsated. Even after we had made love for hours, or held each other through an entire night. It was as though I had an itch I couldn’t reach to scratch; I couldn’t ever seem to get enough of her. I sometimes dreamed of a terrible thirst, of drinking glass after glass of water and still feeling as though I might die, my tongue and lips and throat parched. I had a thousand questions I wanted to ask, so many things to learn.

She sighed and looked away from the water, studying my face. She twisted her loose hair into a ponytail, securing it with a band she slipped from her slender wrist. “I left Oregon when I was seventeen. I met Liam at school. I got pregnant. He had a wife. I met Ted. The end.”

She didn’t like to talk about Ted. Here, Ted and Frankie were no different than the characters in the novels we read. But from the fragments of information I gathered, it seemed that Ted had fallen madly and instantly in love with Eva (how could he not?), so much so that when he learned she was pregnant, and that the father had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared, he agreed to raise Eva’s baby as his own if she agreed to marry him. He loved her, and promised he would take care of her and her child. He swooped in like a giant pelican to a fish and carried her away.

“What was it,” I asked, “about him?” I knew it would pain me, to hear what had attracted her to him, but I still wanted to know. Needed to know.

“Ted?” She laughed. “I don’t know. I guess he was just so
charming
. Always the salesman. He could sell a cage to a lion.” And I thought about how Ted had cajoled her, tamed her, caged her. I promised myself I would never do that.

“We should get back to the kids,” she said, shaking her head and pulling her dress down over that soft beautiful expanse of flesh.

There were other questions I wanted to ask, but now as she reached for my hand and stood up, I knew the opportunity was gone.

Eva didn’t like to talk about San Francisco, but she did like to talk about her childhood in Oregon. She’d grown up in a small coastal town; her father was a fisherman, and her mother died in a car accident when she was just a little girl. She didn’t have any siblings. She spent her days collecting debris she found on the beach and assembling it into sculptures. She built fairy houses out of seaweed and pebbles and twigs.

“What happened to the mobiles?” I asked.

“Oh, they’re long gone now. I left most of them on the beach.”

“No, I mean the ones from art school. Do you have them still?”

She shook her head.

We were sitting on the grass watching the children play in the lake. Chessy and Donna were doing handstands, their pink feet sticking up out of the water.

I wanted to see the things she had made. I thought maybe they might help me to understand her better. “Do you have any photos of them?”

“No,”
she said, shaking her head.

“Mommy, Mommy, look!” Sally said. She was learning how to float on her back. In the water, she bounced and bobbed like a doll.

“I see you!” Eva hollered. “Good job!”

“Can you tell me about them?” I asked softly.

“Billie,”
she reprimanded. The way she said my name stung. She sighed. “Ted destroyed them. All of them. An entire year’s worth of work was ruined in the matter of one night. He hated Liam. He was so jealous. My artwork was just a reminder to him of my life before he met me.”

I pictured Ted with his hulking body smashing her artwork to pieces, destroying all that beauty with his stupid rage. And then I started thinking about Ted’s anger, his bullishness. What Eva and I had was so pure, so good. It too was something beautiful, crafted meticulously with our hands. I tried not to think about what he would do to us if he were ever to find out, the destruction he was capable of. I had to will him away from my thoughts. He didn’t belong here. Not between us on the soft grass as our children played together in the lake.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

And then a shadow came across Eva’s face, as though she were remembering something. Her brow knit and she blinked hard, shaking her head as though she could shake the memory away.

“Eva,” I said softly, remembering what she had said when we were camping, about him not being a good man. “He wouldn’t ever hurt
you,
would he?”

“Mommy! Mommy!” Donna yelled. “Look what Chessy and I can do.” Francesca was riding high on Donna’s shoulders. Johnny was chucking rocks at the shore.

“Johnny, don’t throw rocks while the girls are swimming!” Eva said. She looked at me then, and said, “No more silly questions. Okay? Rule number four.”

 

The day that Frankie was due to arrive for his visit and then to take Eva and her kids back to Hollyville, I could barely drag myself out of bed. It was as though someone had pulled my heart out of my chest and shoved it back in. It no longer fit. It felt swollen, constricted.