I brought my mittens to my face, his words washing over me. ‘No,’ I whispered. ‘It’s not.’
Last month, at the pool with Claire and Frannie, I followed them as they marched for the platform diving board. Frannie’s little legs scrambled up the stairs-it was so high, there was an industrial-looking staircase to get to the top instead of a ladder. After a while, Frannie appeared at the top and walked to the very edge. We watched her fall, her little arms crossed over her chest to make her body more aerodynamic. When she hit the water, she plummeted under, then resurfaced. She waved to her mother, just a tiny red speck among the lapping blue. The lifeguards leaned forward, poised to jump in and rescue her, but she paddled easily to the ladder. Then Claire climbed up to the platform, waved at me, and jumped off herself.
When it was my turn, I teetered at the top, the platform rough under my bare feet. The edge was solid, without any spring to it. I could see the old men in the sauna in the corner, the lap swimmers making flip-turns at the far end of the pool. I could even see the parking lot through the windows, and wished I were sitting in one of the parked cars instead of shivering here, practically on the ceiling. Even when I was younger, I shied away from jumping off diving boards or skiing down mountains. I didn’t like the idea of dropping from great distances.
‘Come on!’ Claire called from the deck.
I turned around. There was a girl of about fifteen waiting behind me, leaning her elbows on the stair railing. I am twenty-six years old, I said to myself. It’s about time.
I screamed the whole drop. When I hit the water, I was first relieved, then thrilled. Frannie applauded, messily slapping her little hands together, and Claire waited for me at the edge of the pool. ‘Did you like it?’ she asked.
I got out without saying anything, but I could feel I was smiling.
I only went off that once. But sitting with my dad by the Promenade, I suddenly wanted to do it again. I wanted to bring Philip, too. I wanted to jump off the diving board holding his hand, even if the lifeguard didn’t allow it. And when we hit the water, I wanted to open my eyes underwater, look at him, and wave. And when we got to the surface, I knew I would tell him, maybe for the second or third time, how I truly felt, something that I already knew would make him happy. The words wouldn’t come easily, stumbling out of me like clumsy, newborn animals-wormy little birds, maybe-but at least I’d give it an attempt, and that would be something.
I looked out at the debris floating down the river. More Coke cans, old, partly disintegrated shipping pallets, and then, all of a sudden, a beautiful, blue-green glass bottle. It was mostly obscured in the water, so I wasn’t able to tell what was inside, but there could have been all sorts of things. A potion, maybe. A tiny ship, like the ones that were trapped inside the bottles on my father’s shelves. Even a letter, explaining all the mysteries in the world we still hadn’t uncovered. But I knew, suddenly, that there was probably nothing inside the bottle except icy water from the East River. Realizing that made me a little sad, but also gave me a wise, stripped-down feeling, as if I’d really-finally-figured something out.
As I was watching the bottle float to us, it started to snow. The snow stuck to the bottle’s curved sides. The flakes were huge and dry, perfect sledding snow.
My father opened his palms to catch the falling snowflakes. ‘We might have to postpone the open house.’
‘Maybe not,’ I said. ‘People might come anyway. You know people will do anything for real estate.’
My father laughed. I tried to imagine where we’d all be, a day or so from now, when this blizzard really took hold. I saw Steven and Angie sitting in the airport, gazing wearily at the departures board, their flight indefinitely delayed. I saw Josephine at the airport, too, headed back to Colorado, calling her father, Mark, and telling him who she’d seen this weekend. I saw Mark sitting in a chair in a large, ski-chalet style of room, gazing at a photo of him and my father-the only one, perhaps, he’d saved. I saw Samantha soldiering on to another real-estate conference, her Mercedes windshield wipers churning. I saw Philip crunching through the snow to the corner market, stocking up on milk and bread and pancake syrup, pausing at the sporting goods store in town to buy a red plastic sled, the kind two people could fit on.
And I saw something else, too, farther in the future: I saw myself, sitting in a warm, quiet lab, flipping the switch of a microscope, turning the knobs on the side to focus. The image had a clean, sure feel to it, like a stone worked over by the ocean.
The bottle bobbed. The current shifted so that it floated close enough so that we could almost reach down and grab it. My dad pointed at it. ‘If only it were summertime and hot out. I’d see if I could reach into the water and get that bottle for you.’