Little Children (12 page)

Sarah and Todd and the kids were sitting maybe a third of the way up the hill on that sweltering Wednesday afternoon, much closer to the center of the pool than if they’d been able to claim their usual spot under the spreading oak tree. They had an unobstructed fifty-yard-line view of the water, from the toddlers sitting in the shallow end to their left, to the junior high kids batting around a beach ball in the middle, to the teenage daredevils doing backflips off the deep end diving board to their right.

But like most of the people around her, Sarah wasn’t looking at the water just then. Her gaze was drawn—irresistibly, it seemed—to the nearside walkway, to the man standing near the lifeguard chair and glancing around with a worried expression, apparently searching for a clear patch of grass on which to spread the rolled-up pink towel that was draped around his neck.

At first she thought she was looking at him because he was holding a bright orange scuba flipper in each hand and had a diving mask of the same color perched high on his forehead. People didn’t often wear that sort of gear to the Town Pool, and even if they did, this guy wouldn’t have seemed the type. He was a pasty, overweight man who had made one mistake by going shirtless and another by wearing a ridiculously loud pair of swim trunks, lurid tropical flowers throbbing against a flat gray background, a combination of errors that somehow made him seem overdressed and underdressed at the same time. But then Sarah took a second look at his oddly familiar face and realized that she was staring at him for an entirely different reason.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s him.” She lowered her voice and pointed. “You know who.”

Todd squinted. “Oh, Jesus. He shouldn’t be here. I don’t care how hot it is.”

As if by reflex, Sarah turned to check on the kids, who were engrossed in a game of Car Doctor. Lucy was the doctor. After Aaron staged one of his crashes, she examined the injured vehicles, listening to them with a toy stethoscope and then kissing them to make them feel better, at which point they were eligible to participate in another collision. Sarah reached out, in a rush of tenderness, and pressed her hand against her daughter’s sweat-sticky cheek. Lucy brushed it away, annoyed by the interruption.

When Sarah turned back around, Ronald James McGorvey was sitting on the edge of the pool, tugging his flippers onto his feet, the towel resting in a heap beside him. Then he lowered the mask over his eyes and nose and wiggled it into position. He slid feetfirst into the pool, breaking the surface with only the barest hint of a splash.

No one minded at first. The beach ball kept popping into the air as McGorvey cut through the game with the heavy grace of a seal, the flippers beating a frothy trail in his wake. The divers kept cannonballing and somersaulting and bellyflopping off the springboard as he moved into the deeper water. But then a woman’s panicky voice cried out from the base of the hill.

“Jimmy! Jimmy Mancino! Get out of the pool this instant!”

A skinny kid, maybe ten years old, started paddling uncertainly toward the voice.

“Jimmy, now!”

Another voice rang out.

“Randall, Juliette. You too!”

“Sheila!”

“Pablo!”

“Mark! Mark Stepanek!”

Once the exodus began, it happened quickly. The shallow end emptied first, anxious mothers wading out with frightened-looking toddlers in their arms. The older kids were slower to leave, but before long they were climbing out, too, standing in sullen confusion on the walkway, water streaming off their bodies, puddling at their feet. All over the hillside, adults were whipping out cell phones, dialing 911.

For maybe five minutes, McGorvey had the whole gigantic pool to himself. He dove to the bottom of the deep end, then rose slowly, breaking the surface just long enough to catch his breath before heading back down. When he got tired of that he floated on his back for a while, his gaudy shorts billowing around his waist, the pale mound of his belly rising out of the water like a deserted island. He kept his mask over his face the whole time, so Sarah couldn’t tell if he was defiant or embarrassed or simply oblivious of the fact that he’d cleared the pool as effectively as if he’d been a shark.

By the time the police cruiser pulled into the parking lot—it was located near the deep end, behind a tall chain-link fence—Aaron and Lucy had caught on to the fact that something momentous was going on. They suspended Car Doctor and wriggled into the laps of their respective parents.

“Kids not swimming,” said Lucy.

“Why police?” Aaron wondered.

Sarah checked with Todd, uncertain how to explain the situation. But before she could begin to answer, a busybody with pink cheeks sitting directly in front of them turned around.

“There’s a bad man in the pool,” she said. “The police are coming to get him.”

“Why he bad?” Lucy asked.

“He’s not nice to children,” said Sarah. “But you don’t have to worry about it.”

By then, the cops—there were two of them, an older white guy and a younger black guy—had entered the pool area through a padlocked gate that had been opened by one of the lifeguards. Looking hot and miserable in their uniforms, they trudged down the walkway, stopping near McGorvey’s pink towel and gazing at the lonely swimmer with what seemed more like envy than professional interest. Sarah didn’t hear them say anything, but McGorvey swam toward them as if they had. He had a little trouble hoisting himself out of the pool, so the black cop reached down and gave him a hand. The white cop handed him his towel.

“What’s those?” Aaron asked. “On the feet.”

“Flippers,” said Todd. “They help you swim better.”

The cops talked, and McGorvey nodded as he toweled off, the mask still concealing most of his face. The white cop shrugged. The black cop touched McGorvey, almost gently, on the shoulder. They didn’t seem to be arresting him. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought they were all friends. The cops stood motionless as McGorvey turned on his heels and began trudging toward the exit, his flippers slapping wetly against the concrete of the walkway. After just a few steps, though, he stopped to pull them off, balancing unsteadily on one leg, then the other. He did the same with the mask. Then he turned toward the hillside, spreading his arms wide, like an actor addressing his public. His voice was loud and plaintive, as if he wanted everybody to hear.

“I was only trying to cool off!”

After McGorvey left, the swimmers returned with a vengeance. It was a massive invasion of the Town Pool, the decent people of Bellington reclaiming it for their own. Grabbing their children by the wrists, Sarah and Todd joined the stampede, stumbling downhill with their fellow citizens, then waiting in an orderly line for their turn to walk down the safety ramp into what felt just then like the world’s largest bathtub.

Despite the overcrowding and disconcerting warmth of the water, there was a giddiness in the air, as if the collective funk of the past few days had finally broken. Adults got into giggly splashing fights. They bumped into one another and smiled. A beach ball appeared, and everyone understood that the point was to keep it aloft for as long as possible. When it finally touched the water, what sounded like a hundred voices said
Oooh
in unison.

The fun was only a few minutes old when the clouds abruptly darkened. A breeze stirred for the first time in recent memory, and faces turned skyward in surprised gratitude as fat, widely spaced raindrops began plummeting into the pool with the force of small pebbles. Kids staggered around with their tongues out, the way they did during the first snow of the year. Then it thundered. Nothing too scary, a sustained bass rumble off to the right.

“Clear the pool, please,” said a voice over the PA. “Everybody out! No swimming during an electrical storm.”

The swimmers groaned but obeyed. Once again Sarah and Todd were part of the herd, this time tugging their children uphill. As soon as they reached their towels they began gathering up their stuff with a sense of urgency that was intensified by another boom of thunder, this one considerably louder than the first, and followed seconds later by a crackling spike of lightning. Lucy whimpered and latched on to her mother’s leg.

“It’s okay, honey.” Sarah squatted to lift her daughter. “We better get going.”

“You’re gonna carry her?” Todd asked.

“It’ll be faster this way. She’s scared of the you-know-what.”

“That’s crazy,” he said. “Put her in the stroller. We’ll walk you home.”

The next thunderclap made Lucy squirm in her mother’s arms, her grip tightening uncomfortably around Sarah’s neck. Lightning flashed right on top of it, a yellow exclamation mark in the greenish sky.

“But that’s out of your way.”

“We don’t mind, do we, Aaron?”

Aaron looked skeptically at the stroller.

“What about Big Bear?”

“He won’t mind a little rain.”

To Sarah’s surprise, Lucy agreed to ride in the stroller, her usual disdain for that childish mode of transportation trumped by a desire to get home as quickly as possible, not to mention the novelty of riding with a friend. She switched places with the stuffed animal, whose synthetic fur felt no better against Sarah’s body than her daughter’s clammy skin.

The rain remained light during their journey across town, Todd pushing the stroller at a brisk clip, Sarah lagging a few feet behind, trying to figure out a good way to hold the unwieldy bear that didn’t require her to look at his creepy, disapproving face.

“Here we are,” she said, amazed to be standing in front of her house after only a ten-minute walk. It usually took her a half hour to cover the same distance with Lucy.

She handed Big Bear to Todd with a sense of relief and walked around to the front of the stroller. Kneeling to unbuckle her daughter, she suddenly understood why the kids had been so quiet on the way home.

“This is amazing,” Sarah whispered. “She never naps.”

It was a sweet sight, Aaron’s hand resting on Lucy’s thigh, her head leaning against his shoulder. She was sucking her thumb, making happy smacking noises with her lips.

“Aaron’ll be out for the next two hours.”

The wind rushed through the treetops, spinning the leaves upside down, signaling the true arrival of the storm. A faucet opened in the sky, releasing a sudden deluge.

“You better come in,” Sarah said, tugging Todd toward the house. “I can’t let you walk home in this.”

Dripping wet, they carried their sleeping children upstairs and laid them down on Sarah’s bed, which she was glad she’d made before leaving the house. Still sucking her thumb, Lucy rolled onto her stomach, sticking her plump little butt in the air. She was wearing an orange-and-yellow bathing suit with a little ruffled skirt that had flipped up, exposing the dimpled baby fat at the top of her thighs. Aaron was sprawled out on his back, the pink-and-purple tentacles of his jester’s hat spreading wide along with his arms and legs. He had delicate features, and those miraculously long eyelashes you only saw on little boys, never on grown men.

Sarah and Todd stood at the edge of the bed for what felt like a long time, watching their children sleep, and listening to the rain drumming against the house, afraid to even look at one another. Sarah’s mouth was dry, her bathing suit unpleasantly tight around the waist. When Todd finally spoke, there was an audible tremor in his voice.

“We’re not gonna do anything crazy, are we?”

Sarah thought it over for a moment. She felt light-headed, almost weightless, as if she were about to rise off the floor.

“I don’t know,” she whispered, reaching for his hand, threading her fingers through his. “You’ll have to define crazy.”

TODD WAS A NERVOUS WRECK ON THE DAY OF THE GUARDIANS’
season opener against the Auditors, a team of CPAs who were the reigning champs of the Midnight Touch Football League. Even though the kickoff wasn’t scheduled to take place until the ungodly hour of 10
P.M.
, he woke at six in the morning with a full-blown case of game-day jitters, and couldn’t manage more than two bites of the frozen waffle Kathy slid in front of him at the breakfast table.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m not really hungry.”

She looked at him a little more closely.

“Are you sick?”

“I’m fine. Just a little keyed up about the game tonight.”

Kathy’s eyes went dead, the way they always did when he tried to tell her about the Guardians. He didn’t blame her, exactly; he understood that she saw his return to organized football as pure self-indulgence, some kind of premature midlife crisis, and even a potential threat to their family, at least to the extent he allowed it to interfere with his preparation for the bar exam (she had no way of knowing that his preparation had diminished to the point where it could no longer be interfered with). Even so, he would have appreciated a smile or a word of encouragement, some miniscule signal of support. When he was in high school, the cheerleaders used to visit his house while he slept, festooning the trees with toilet paper and writing inspirational messages on his driveway in colored chalk—
Go, Todd! We Love #12! Let’s Get Rowdy!
During his senior year, Amanda Morrissey, a wispy little junior with bleached hair and a sexy overbite—she was always the pinnacle of the human pyramid—snuck into his bedroom on the night before the big Thanksgiving Day game and woke him up with what she called “a good luck blowjob.” Back then, the whole world noticed when Todd had a game.

“I’m running low on underwear,” Kathy reported. “Think you could do some laundry today?”

Todd said he would. He smiled at her across the table, glad to be able to resent her a little for a change. In some very small way, it helped counteract the massive amount of guilt he’d been feeling for the past couple of weeks.

“What about dinner?” she said. “Any ideas?”

“I can’t even get my mind around breakfast.”

“Anything but pasta,” she told him. “We eat way too much pasta around here.”

“I thought you liked pasta.”

“I do,” she said, gathering up the breakfast dishes and carrying them to the sink. “That’s the problem. Pretty soon I’ll be able to sell advertising space on my ass.”

Todd studied her back as she rinsed the cups and plates and stuck them in the dishwasher. She was dressed for work, summer casual in a blue tank top and a silvery gray skirt that fit snugly enough that you could see what a great body she had, but not so snugly that you thought she was showing off. Her legs were lean and athletic, the graceful bulge of her calf muscles somehow accentuated by the flatness and practicality of her sandals. It would have been nice to notice that she’d put on some weight—as if that would have supplied him with some sort of excuse for fucking another woman—but no one was going to be using Kathy’s ass for a billboard anytime soon.

Am I angry with her?
Todd wondered. If he was, that would help to explain his otherwise inexplicable behavior. But he didn’t really have a lot to be angry about. She loved him and treated him well. He couldn’t have asked for a better mother for his child or a more patient and considerate life partner. He had disappointed her, of course—he had disappointed himself, for that matter—but most of the time she kept it to herself. Their sex life wasn’t what it used to be, but that was only because they had so little time to themselves. If they’d been able to sneak off for a weekend, he had no doubt that they’d be going at it like they had the summer after graduation, when they lived together for the first time and sometimes didn’t stagger out of the apartment until four or five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. Kathy shut the dishwasher and turned around.

“I’m dreading work today,” she informed him.

Todd was tempted to ignore her, to mirror the indifference with which she’d greeted his mention of the game, but he didn’t want to stoop to that petty level of payback.

“Why’s that?”

“I’m interviewing this vet at the hospital.” She glanced at Aaron before continuing. He was sitting on the floor in front of the refrigerator, staging a battle between magnets. Just then, a strawberry was inflicting serious damage on a local realtor. “He lost both legs at Iwo Jima.”

“Jesus.”

“But that’s not the worst of it.” She smiled, the way people sometimes do when every expression seems equally inappropriate. “He’s in this state of like permanent denial. He still believes it’s 1944, and that he’s the same person he was back then. Basically, he’s a seventy-five-year-old man with no legs who thinks he’s a healthy teenager.”

“Maybe that’s not so bad,” Todd speculated.

“I know what you mean,” she said. “But it doesn’t really work like that. He can’t understand why his parents don’t visit, and he’s furious with his girlfriend for not answering his letters.”

Todd sipped his coffee, marveling as he did almost every day at the way he’d underestimated his wife. When they met in college, he’d mistaken her for a bit of a phony, a pretty girl dabbling in poetry and painting, trying to look more artsy than she actually was. Even when she got accepted into film school, he figured that she was just killing time until they could begin a conventional upper-middle-class life in the suburbs: i.e., he’d work his ass off every day for a big law firm, while she went to the gym and Starbucks before picking up the kids at day care. And now here she was, ten years down the road, spending her summer with shell-shocked amputees at the VA Hospital while he lounged at the pool all afternoon, fine-tuning his tan and getting into trouble.

“You know what else? He keeps asking me out. He wants to take me dancing.”

“You’re joking, right?”

“It’s breaking my heart.” Kathy glanced at Aaron again, and then back at Todd. She kept her voice soft, so only he could hear. “And we think we have problems.”

No matter what time Todd and Aaron arrived at the Town Pool, Sarah and Lucy always managed to show up a good ten or fifteen minutes later. He wasn’t sure how she made it work out that way, but it happened too consistently for him to imagine it was an accident. It must have been a point of pride for her not to be first, not to look too eager.

Every day Todd waited for her in the shade and tried to convince himself that the spell was broken, that he’d finally come to his senses and realized that it just wasn’t worth it, risking his marriage for a woman he barely knew and who wasn’t even his type, and what was worse, implicating his own child in the deception. Sometimes he practiced break-up speeches in his head, a series of disconnected utterances—song and movie clichés, mostly—strung together in a momentarily plausible chain:
We must be out of our minds, Sarah, let’s put a stop to this before someone gets hurt, maybe if there weren’t kids involved, this is really hard for me, Sarah, I still want us to be friends
…

But then he’d see her, bopping down the concrete walkway with Lucy, a big smile on her face, straw bag swinging jauntily at her side, and all these shopworn phrases popped like soap bubbles in the air around his head.
She’s here! Right on time!
He’d watch with indiscreet pleasure as she spread her towel out next to him and untied her navy blue beach robe—she’d gotten the robe a few days after they’d begun their affair—to reveal the red bikini underneath, and all he could do was shake his head and sheepishly admit that he’d been kidding himself again, that the spell was nowhere near being broken, that he was just as startled by the force of his desire for her today as he had been yesterday.

Startled, because at any other time in his life, he wouldn’t have even looked twice at her, wouldn’t have had the imagination to see past her sharp-featured, not-quite-pretty face, her less-than-stunning body. Why would he? He’d always been the kind of guy who could get the obvious girls, the pretty ones with haughty expressions and legs-up-to-here, the short sexy ones with the big brown eyes and the improbably large breasts, the would-be models, the willowy Asians, the hotties who caused a stir walking down the beach or past a row of lockers, the ones who’d never been without a boyfriend since the day they turned eleven, the girls most other guys knew better than to even make a play for. He’d never had to make the adjustments and compromises other people accepted early in their romantic careers, never had a chance to learn the lesson that Sarah taught him every day: that beauty was only part of it, and not even the most important part, that there were transactions between people that occurred on some mysterious level beneath the skin, or maybe even beyond the body. He was proud of himself for wanting her so badly. It made him feel like he’d grown up a little, expanded his vision, like he’d traveled to a faraway place or learned to appreciate an exotic food.

Todd had always been disturbed by the idea of elderly people making love, their droopy, liver-spotted bodies, the hair sprouting from where it shouldn’t, the wayward odors, the unpleasant proximity to death. Sometimes Kathy joked about it, asking if he’d still find her attractive when her gums receded and her tits were hanging halfway to the floor. Of course he said yes; what else was he supposed to say? But the truth was, he couldn’t even imagine Kathy as an old woman, or himself as an old man hoisting himself aboard her creaky bones. Kathy not beautiful wasn’t really Kathy. But sometimes, when he was making love with Sarah, a weird sense of exhilaration would wash over him, and he’d believe for a moment or two that he could happily fuck her when they were both eighty-five and toothless, that the way their bodies looked was somehow beside the point. But he kept this thought to himself, suspecting that she wouldn’t take it as a compliment.

No matter how often he reassured her, she remained insecure about her appearance, nervous that she didn’t measure up. She talked all the time about how handsome he was—square jaw, broad shoulders, etc.—and complained in the next breath about her own shortcomings: damaged hair, stubborn little potbelly, the surprising darkness of her nipples.
I love your mouth,
she’d say.
I hate my ear-lobes
. She praised the blondish down on his forearms and his crooked bottom teeth, then lamented a tiny mole on her lower back.
You have such slender fingers. Mine look like sausages.

She did her best to make herself pretty for him, and he was touched by her efforts. Lipstick one day, earrings the next. She tweezed her eyebrows, got an expensive haircut. The robe. Platform sandals. On the afternoon of Todd’s football game she showed up with a pedicure. She didn’t announce it, just stretched her legs out in front of her and wiggled her squat little toes, the startling drops of fresh metallic blue lacquer turning them into a series of oddly shaped, upside-down exclamation points.

Just the day before, she’d reacted badly when he tried to suck her toes. “No,” she snapped, yanking her foot away from his mouth. It was the first time the word had been uttered between them in two weeks of fairly comprehensive sexual exploration, all of which transpired during Aaron and Lucy’s now-habitual late-afternoon nap.

“What’s wrong?”

“My feet are disgusting. You don’t want them in your mouth.”

“I don’t mind,” he insisted.

“Well, I do.”

It was true that Sarah’s feet were not her finest feature. They were short and broad, almost primitive-looking. She was especially ashamed of her toenails, several of which had been thickened and discolored by fungus. Even now, after they’d been professionally clipped and polished, they still didn’t look quite right.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he told her.

“I wanted to,” she said. “Do you like it?”

He checked quickly on the kids. Aaron was showing Lucy his plastic dinosaur collection, letting her hold the less important ones. Todd slid his own foot across the grass and caressed Sarah’s instep with his big toe.

“I love it,” he whispered. “Ten little lollipops.”

That afternoon, for the first time, Todd had trouble maintaining his erection. It was nothing personal; the voice of his high school football coach just kept echoing in his head, reminding him that it was a bad idea to have sex before a game.

“Men,” Coach Breeden would say at the conclusion of Friday practice, “from now until this time tomorrow, you need to keep Little Willy under wraps. Those lucky few of you who have good-hearted girlfriends, please instruct them that a strict no-touchie policy is in effect. Those of you who are going steady with Sally Palm and her Five Sisters, I’d advise you to give those hardworking ladies the night off. God knows they deserve it. I want mean, hungry warriors out there on the field tomorrow, not a bunch of dreamy, weak-kneed lover-boys in velvet smoking jackets.” Coach would grin his cockeyed, unsavory grin. “To express my own solidarity with your ordeal, I hereby pledge to avoid any and all physical contact with Mrs. Breeden during the next twenty-four hours. Of course, those of you who have had the misfortune of laying eyes on Mrs. Breeden will understand that this does not technically qualify as a sacrifice.”

Coach Breeden was hardly a reliable source. He was a taskmaster from the old school, a short, thick-necked man who had a way with words and a host of dubious ideas about the human body—stretching causes injury, never swallow water during a game, pain is good—that were later debunked by younger, better-informed coaches. On some level, Todd understood that the prohibition against pre-game sex was pure superstition, like not walking under ladders or not swimming for an hour after a meal, but he didn’t do those things either, at least not if he could avoid them.

“What’s the matter?” Sarah asked. She was on her hands and knees, addressing him over her shoulder. “Am I doing something wrong?”

“No, it’s not you. I’m just a little distracted.”

She tried to help him out, coaxing him onto his back, telling him to just close his eyes and relax. She began licking his chest, moving slowly downward, past his rib cage to his navel, and then even lower. It felt good, until Todd remembered how badly he’d played on Thanksgiving Day of his senior year—a miserable five for sixteen passing, with three interceptions—after Amanda Morrissey’s surprise blowjob. He opened his eyes in alarm.