He docked the boat next to his small chest and smiled up at her, squinting into the sun. “Promise.”
She gave him a hug, feeling him trying to pull away from her. “What a good boy!”
Making sure he had a grip on his boat, she picked him up and carried him from the pool to where their towels lay on the concrete, along with her blue rubber thongs and the bottle of sunblocker. She slipped her feet into the thongs, carefully hooking the strands of rubber between first and second toes, then picked up everything and went with Michael to the deep end of the pool.
That end of the pool was only slightly less crowded. The only place there was room to spread out a towel was well away from the water, which was fine with Bernice. It kept Michael all the farther from danger and allowed her plenty of time to dive, surface, and get to him even if he did decide to wander toward the pool.
She spread out the large Miami souvenir towel with the sunset-and-flamingo design, then made sure Michael was happy seated on it, pouring a thin stream of water from his toy boat.
“Promise me again to stay here until I come back?” she asked.
He was watching the water from the boat making dark patterns on the pale concrete. “’Course,” he said, without looking up at her.
Confident he was busy with the boat and would obey her, she slipped her feet from the thongs and hurried over the sun-heated concrete to the diving board.
After waiting for one other diver, she got up on the damp rubber matting of the board and glanced over at Michael.
He was still on the towel, watching her now. She waved to him and he waved back. A few men and teenage boys looked her way, but the frail, almost bustless woman in the yellow-flowered two-piece suit didn’t hold their interest.
With a final glance at Michael, she walked to the end of the board, sprang twice for height, then did a fairly neat jackknife, entering the water clean and not making much of a splash.
After the heat of the sun, the cool envelopment of the water felt wonderful. She reached the slightly angled bottom of the pool, pushed away with her hands, and quickly surfaced, stroking to the side of the pool and checking on Michael even before she climbed up the aluminum ladder onto the concrete. He was still safely on the towel, as he’d promised.
Bernice smoothed her wet hair back where it had worked from beneath the rubberband behind her head and started to walk over to Michael. Then she noticed there was another lull around the diving board. And he was preoccupied playing now with the plastic bottle of sunblocker.
“One more dive, Michael!” she yelled over to him.
He glanced her way, smiled, then pretended the sunblocker bottle was another boat, steaming toward the red toy one at the edge of the towel. Bernice hurried to the diving board.
Still wet and cooled down from her first dive, the water didn’t feel so luxurious when she entered it after her second dive and cut toward the bottom. She’d attempted a swan dive, and she knew she hadn’t been nearly vertical on entry and would have scored low if anyone had been judging.
Again her palms found the smooth concrete and she turned in the cool silence and began her rise to the surface.
She was surprised when her progress was stopped.
Then she realized something-someone-was clutching both her ankles, keeping her from rising.
Worried but not panicked, she twisted her body to see downward. Through the blue murkiness she could actually see the hands, the long pale fingers, encircling her thin ankles, but she couldn’t make out the face of whoever was doing this to her.
She bent down lower, contorting her body so she could reach the strong fingers and try to pry them from her ankles. But her buoyancy prevented her from reaching the hands.
She’d assumed someone, probably a teenage boy, was playing a joke on her. But the grip of the fingers was so powerful, seemingly as unbreakable as steel bands. Maybe he didn’t realize how strong he was.
She tried kicking herself free, but the hands allowed all the lateral movement she wanted without permitting her to rise. She knew she was merely wearing herself out.
Sitting in the sun on the warm, damp towel, Michael stared at the pool and wondered why Bernice hadn’t come up yet. Then, as a skinny black girl in a green suit bounced twice on the edge of the board and dived, he turned his attention back to his boats.
Beneath the water, Bernice decided to change tactics and was paddling upward as hard as she could, trying futilely to provide lift for herself and whoever was keeping her from rising. She was aware of a slim girl in a green suit shattering the surface above her head and sliding past only a few feet away, her eyes clenched shut as she gracefully arched her body and began a smooth arc up toward bright sunlight and air. Bernice’s chest began to ache as she realized her increased efforts were only causing her to rise a few feet then sink back toward the bottom of the pool.
She understood then that this was no joke, and she panicked, flailing desperately with her arms and hands, writhing and trying to kick free as she strained every muscle and ounce of will toward the dim light above.
Still, she could not rise.
The white boat with the sunblocker collided with and sank the red plastic boat at the edge of the towel.
Michael looked around again for Bernice but didn’t see her.
He wasn’t alarmed. He picked up the white boat, now the sunblocker bottle again, and tried to remove its lid.
Bernice hung suspended beneath the water, her arms spread wide as if she were about to embrace a lover. The last of the air in her lungs had escaped through her slack mouth and was curving away in a graceful string of bubbles.
The cruel hands had finally released their grip on her ankles, and she slowly began to rise.
Deirdre gripped the tile lip of the pool and easily hoisted herself up and out of the water.
Someone screamed. Several people began to shout.
Deirdre snatched up her towel and started drying herself off.
Then she walked around the hot concrete apron to the other side of the pool to join the growing tide of people streaming around a confused Michael to see what had happened in the deep end.
22
Molly wished David would arrive.
She sat on the sofa hugging Michael to her. He’d stopped crying. At first she was relieved, then his silence began to bother her. She wondered if his young mind had finally grasped what had occurred. But that was impossible, she realized; most adults hadn’t grasped the immensity and banality of death. He lay inertly against her as she held him even tighter.
Molly had finally stopped crying too. The police had brought Michael to the apartment an hour ago, two uniformed officers with sad and respectful expressions. The taller of the two, who wore an inadequate mustache and looked barely out of his teens, told Molly they’d found Bernice’s purse and identification in one of the lockers at Koch Pool, and several people said they thought she’d been with Michael, whom someone noticed seemed to be unattended. When they brought him to this address, Mrs. Esslinger, downstairs, had informed them which apartment Michael lived in.
And the police had told Molly what happened to Bernice.
She cried on the phone when she called David at work to tell him. And she’d cried for a long time afterward. But now the shock, the merciful deadening of the senses, had set in, and her tears had dried as the hard fact of death was assimilated and the grief turned inward.
The door opened and David entered. He carried his suit coat slung twisted almost inside out over his shoulder, and the wind had mussed his hair. His eyes appeared puffy, as if he’d been crying too. Maybe he had, Molly thought. She’d never seen him cry.
He dropped his coat on the chair and came to her, then touched the side of her neck gently.
