The Twilight Swimmer (21 page)

Conrad slid out of his chair and stood up, unsteady on his feet. He gripped the back of his chair for balance.

“She was a strong swimmer, Brandi. Just like you. But she died. She
died
.” His voice cracked. No longer gravelly. No longer full of anger. “It was no accident.”

“You don’t know that!” Brandi cried out, surprised by the intensity of her own voice but unable to control it. “You’re just drunk!”

Conrad wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and lowered his eyes, suddenly ashamed. “I want you to think what it would do to your mother, and to me, if we lost another child. Even if you have no desire to protect your own life, even if you trust this strange man… Please, Brandi. Think of us. And be careful.”

CHAPTER NINE

The season was clinging to the last vestiges of summer the night Brandi and Spider saved the Swimmer’s life.

But that very night, the changing of the seasons seemed to begin in earnest. Cool air blew in from the restless Atlantic, chilling the air and crisping the leaves on every tree branch until they crinkled and twisted at their stems in a final burst of multi-colored expression. Manicured lawns that had stood proudly through September were beginning to lie down each evening, the blades retiring like tired soldiers after a long march. Cats gave up their summer hunts in favor of spectator sports from paint-peeled windowsills, and dogs naively adopted their owners’ desire to hurry back from sundown walks through quiet streets. All the vehicles in town seemed to get worse gas mileage, their fuel lines tightening instinctively to keep out the cold and their tires subtly deflating.

Another autumn in Edgewater. Brandi’s favorite time of year.

Jenny’s too.

When they were girls, Brandi and her sister took advantage of the brisk autumn air to go on long hikes through the woods west of town. They wrapped themselves in sweaters and scarves, more for the fun of arming themselves for a task than for actual utility. The temperatures were cool enough to chill them if they stayed still for long, but the girls kept their peg legs pumping and their ropy arms swinging, a dampness forming at the base of their matching headbands. While holed up in their shared bedroom or ensconced in any one of the house’s over-decorated rooms, the girls never ceased their rapid fire babbling for more than a minute or two. But once they were outside, bundled needlessly, their hikes were spent mostly in silence. They never discussed their silence, before they left the house or after they returned. There was no need. Both girls knew that the forest was full of wonders that could not be seen nor heard nor understood without deep concentration and a mind unburdened of pointless chatter. Their father had taught them as much by example, on their earliest family hikes
.
Only their mother had failed to heed his unspoken lesson. By the time they had grown enough to recreate those hikes without their parents, they preserved the ritual. They forged new trails without their father, but they remained beholden to his influence.

On one such hike, the girls had been in the forest for hours and were on their way home when Jenny stopped in her tracks. She inclined her ear to better listen then ran off the trail without a word of explanation. Brandi followed. Her sister was moving quickly, and the ground was uneven, but she managed to keep up. And she found Jenny squatting at the bank of a fast-moving creek. Jenny’s hands were busy, but Brandi could not see what they handled until she walked around her sister. It was a juvenile fox. Eyes opened to the world and the bare skin of its birth now giving way to a thin layer of velveteen fur. But it was much too young to be on its own, and had chirped its distress loudly enough for Jenny to pick out the noise from the layered forest sounds. She held the fox against her body, in her lap, and its chirping lost its distressed character. It was not quite happy to have been found by the unusual creature now stroking its tiny head, but neither was it struggling to be released.

“It will die out here,” said Jenny, breaking their code of silence.

“Where is its mother?” asked Brandi with a nervous tremor in her voice.

Jenny shrugged and wrapped the fox in her scarf, privately vindicated that she had found a use for it. The fox fluttered its eyes and chirped one last time as Jenny softly folded the material over its head.

Brandi instinctively accepted the task of distracting their parents so Jenny could sneak the animal inside the house. They entered together, but Brandi immediately acted out a limp her mother was sure to notice. She allowed Sherri to lead her by the hand into the front room where Conrad was watching television. They propped up her falsely injured foot and Sherri loomed, arms folded, while Conrad examined his daughter. He poked and prodded, asking her to let him know where it hurt and how severely. She answered with winces to secure an appropriate level of sympathy. Meanwhile, Jenny was already upstairs. She emptied out the bottom drawer of her bureau, refilled it with shredded magazine pages, and deposited her scarf and its sleeping passenger.

That night, the girls sat on Brandi’s bed and discussed the welfare of the fox. Could it survive indoors? What would it eat? How long before its chirping was too loud to keep the animal concealed? The more questions they raised, the more they realized there was no hope at all of raising the animal within the confines of their bedroom. Not without one of their parents taking up the cause. Not without their father.

They stayed up all night so they could catch him at dawn, before he went to the station. Ignoring his claim that they were making him late for work, they dragged him down the hall and into their room. The fox was scratching around under Jenny’s bed, gnawing on an apple core the girls had provided for its breakfast. Conrad dropped to his hands and knees to watch the fox, and the animal looked up from its meal to chirp at him. “Winter is coming soon,” said Conrad. “It won’t survive the winter alone.” “Then we’ll keep him until spring,” Jenny announced with defiance in her tone. Conrad nodded as he rose to his feet, kissed each girl on the cheek, and stepped out of their room. There was an understanding, between the three of them, that he would persuade their mother of the plan. Exhausted and exhilarated, the girls lay down on the floor to watch the fox, wrapping their arms around each other in celebration of their charity and cunning.

Two weeks later, the fox was gone. Escaped through their closed bedroom door? Through a closed bedroom window? There was no solution to the riddle, and never would be. But the girls suspected their mother. While they were at school and their father at work, their mother had every opportunity to pull out the drawer, carry it downstairs, and overturn it in the backyard. It took very little imagination for the girls to see their mother doing exactly that, then shooing their fox away from the back porch with a broom or, more likely, a heeled foot. She would have muttered under her breath that she was doing her daughters a favor, protecting them from the fleas and rabies and plague the wild animal no doubt carried. She would have been certain that she had no choice, as a mother, but to overrule her husband for the sake of her children. Sherri never confessed what she had done, not even to Conrad. But the girls spent months accusing her with narrow eyes, with ignored questions and with conspiracies whispered in plain view.

They could not forgive her. They swore they never would.

Years later, months after the rescue of the Swimmer, the thought of Jenny and the fox was suddenly very pressing to Brandi. She dwelled on the memory for hours, retracing their steps through the forest. She could almost smell the damp leaves under their feet. She could almost hear the plaintive noises the fox made as Jenny wrapped it in her scarf. Those sensations brought her back in time, and she wanted desperately for them to be real again. She wanted it so much that she dropped to the floor of her bedroom and looked under her bed. She knew the fox wouldn’t be there. She had known for years that there was no hope of seeing the animal again. But she indulged her childish hope
.
And felt genuine loss, genuine pain, when she saw only dust.

Since her daring rescue of the Swimmer, Brandi had been on house arrest. Her father had not explained the circumstances of her punishment to Brandi’s mother in full, but Sherri accepted without question that Conrad’s decision was both necessary and just. Brandi was allowed to go to school, picked up and dropped off by one of her parents every morning and afternoon, but she was not permitted to leave the house for any other reason. She felt victimized by the punishment, felt that it was far too harsh. Arguing with her father was pointless. So Brandi rebelled in the only way she knew how. She made her punishment worse. If she wasn’t allowed to leave the house, she would confine herself further, never leaving her bedroom. She refused to sit with Cody while he played his interminable videogames. She refused to help her mother prepare inedible meals or to watch television with her father. She refused, even, to go downstairs to join her family for meals. Her already pale skin had gone ghostly white and her already thin frame carried less weight than ever. She saw Conrad register these changes in her appearance. She felt sure that any day now her father would regret the harshness of the punishment he had handed down, made harsher still by Brandi’s stubbornness. She felt sure he would knock on her door, beg him to forgive her for the wasted weeks of her teenage life and encourage her to get out and do
something
. But the day never came. There was no knock on her door. And so she continued to live out her sentence with quiet resolve.

Quiet resolve, and an active mind. She thought tirelessly, endlessly, of the Swimmer.

She had two images of him in her mind. She preferred the first, from the night she first saw him. His pale body lean and muscular under a strong moon as he carried Kelly out of the burning warehouse. He was the picture of health, of vitality. The image came to her mind again and again, like frames from a movie she’d watched many times. Always the same angle, always the same movements. She could even remove Kelly from the image and imagine the Swimmer alone, at the edge of the water, looking back over his powerful shoulder one final time before diving beneath the surface. She tried to think only of this image but, invariably, her mind wandered.

She saw him much more clearly as he was the night of the rescue. Bandaged from head to foot, his skin savagely burned and torn open. His eyes clouded and confused. His posture hunched and his limbs unsteady as they forced him into the back of Spider’s wagon, as they hustled him to the rocky beach, as he fell to his knees with a mighty splash. He had looked over his shoulder one last time that night, but his expression was impossible for Brandi to interpret. Had he thanked her with those mysterious gray eyes? Had he accused her, somehow, of enticing him from the water and driving him toward the suffering he so obviously endured? She wanted to believe that he understood the regret she felt, the awful regret that he had sacrificed his body so recklessly to come when she called. But if he did understand, if he did forgive her selfish schoolgirl’s curiosity, then why hadn’t he returned? Surely his wounds had healed. Surely his skin had regained its mythic paleness. But the Swimmer had not emerged from the water at the sound of her voice, no matter how often she sat at her window and softly invited his presence.

She wished Jenny were there. Jenny would know what to say, what to do, what to feel.

That moment, there was a light knock on Brandi’s bedroom door.

“Leave the plate on the floor, Mom,” said Brandi with a roll of her eyes. Her mother made a show of delivering her dinner every evening. Some nights she had put Brandi’s meal on a decorated tray, mimicking hostess techniques she had picked up from daytime talk shows. She had even tried, more than once, to push her way inside the bedroom with two plates of food – one for each of them – so two generations of Vine women could enjoy their meal together, as a sort of domestic adventure. Brandi would not allow her mother to step beyond the doorframe, however. If she was being confined to the house by her father, and confined to her room by her self, she certainly would not destroy the dark allure of that confinement by admitting visitors.

No answer from her mother. Another knock, slightly louder this time.

“I’ll eat more tonight, okay? Just leave it.”

Brandi wandered over to the door and swung it open a crack. She expected to find her mother standing in the hall, in a housedress and apron, holding out a steaming plate of unappealing edibles. Instead, she found her brother Cody staring at his feet, kicking one with the toe of the other, his narrow shoulders rolled forward. When the door swung open, he cautiously looked up.

“Mom said to come upstairs,” said Cody.

“Where, the attic? The roof? I already am upstairs,” she answered

“For me to come upstairs.
Go
upstairs, I mean. And get you. Dad said.”

“You said it was Mom. Get your story straight.”

“It was Dad,” said Cody with a shrug. “My story’s straight.”

“And why has the warden summoned the prisoner?”

Cody furrowed his brow, stumped by the question. He looked down at his feet again, hoping to find the answer tucked between his toes.

“Why does Dad want me to come down,” Brandi asked again. “Is it an order?”

“The guy is here for dinner.”

“What guy?”

“The policeman.”

“You mean Dad? Dad is here for dinner? Dad’s always here for dinner.”