I was happy being separated, and was indeed sleeping with other people, or at least with Yahav, or at least I had been—and I had little issue with Jerome seeing other women. But when he talked like that, it made me sad in a way I couldn’t articulate.
I had time before dinner for the fitness room, which I found newly renovated and only half full of teenage weight lifters. I’d brought my swimsuit and goggles just in case, and was hot enough after twenty minutes on the elliptical that what I remembered as frigid water began to seem appealing.
If you can believe me: I told myself this was why I wanted to go to the pool. To cool off. That I’d packed my swimsuit because I liked to swim.
I changed in the locker room and jumped in the shallow end, making a noise I wasn’t proud of. I wondered if my legs’ sudden blue tint was a reflection of the pale blue pool walls, or if I’d gone hypothermic. I hadn’t bothered turning the lights on; I liked how things looked in the half dark, the late sun shining through high horizontal windows in soft, heavy beams. I’d forgotten about the light at Granby. It was different there, older, passing through centuries before it reached you. Outside in winter, it came down in needles; inside, it fell like soup.
Little about the pool had changed. There were records on the board from the early ’90s, a couple from one kid in the ’70s, additions for Stephanie Pasha, class of ’16, who’d shattered nearly every girls’ record. Two big equipment lockers still stood in the corner, kickboards spilling out. The lane lines still alternated bands of Granby green and gold. The same colored league banners from Holderness, Brewster, Proctor adorned the wall.
Fortunately, swim season was over when Thalia died, with only an away meet left. Could you imagine swimmers getting back in the pool, even with the water replaced?
I’d meant to think through lesson plans as I swam, but (shocker) it wasn’t where my mind went. It didn’t help that the space was vast and empty, or that my goggles messed with my peripheral vision and made me imagine movement beside me in the water.
The day I looked at the campus maps online, I’d found obsessively detailed calculations: The observation deck is twenty feet up and eight feet back from the lip of the pool, and the deck railing is three feet high, which means someone traveling from the top of the railing would have to travel twenty-three feet down and over eight feet out to reach the water. People had applied complicated geometry involving the arc of a jumping body. There were diagrams.
The reasoning went: If Thalia jumped, she might have come up short, twisted, grazed her head on the pool’s lip—or she might have gone long and landed neck first on a lane line. She couldn’t have done both at once, was the problem. The damage to her carotid artery suggested choking; and the injuries to the right side of her face, in addition to the damage to her brain stem and the back of her skull, were inconsistent with a single fall onto the pool deck or a lane line. Plus there had been no sign of impact at the pool edge.
My only experience in the pool as a student was the swim tests we had to pass before each fall and spring crew season. The first time, I’d barely gotten to know my teammates over a few days of erg training. It was a particular humiliation to stand there with my chubby, pale legs, the borrowed Granby swimsuit noosing my thighs.
Thalia wore one of those same green school-issued suits when she drowned, suggesting she’d either found it at the pool or borrowed it from someone on the team. It was size Large, and Thalia was a small person. No swim cap, no goggles. Trace DNA from Omar Evans was found inside the suit crotch—one of the main pieces of evidence against him. Although: One of the articles Fran sent me the next year had mentioned the instability of DNA in water. While water couldn’t put Omar’s DNA there, it could have washed someone else’s away.
Then there was the piece of his hair in her mouth. Well, there were actually two hairs in her mouth. A two-millimeter piece consistent with Omar’s DNA, and a three-centimeter strand from someone else, someone unidentified. A swimmer, the police had posited, another student who’d recently used the pool. I imagined what Britt would argue: Either hair might have been in the water already, inhaled as Thalia drowned.
I was out of breath. I didn’t swim often, and although my limbs were in shape, my lungs were not. I draped my arms over the lane line, hung there by the armpits. How many pieces of lint, fiber, hair speckled the pool’s surface? If I lowered my sight line exactly so, the water seemed covered in dust.
Those Reddit detectives would have had a field day in here. They’d have whipped out their measuring tapes, their calculators.
For years, I’d assumed Thalia was found in the deep end (isn’t that where one drowns?), but then I learned from Dateline that it was the shallow end, her hair so tangled around the lane line that a Campus Security officer, called by the teacher who discovered Thalia, had to jump in the pool and cut her free while the EMTs were on their way. I’d also assumed she was floating, but when my son was in his gory-and-disturbing-facts phase I learned that bodies don’t float for a few days. If Thalia’s head was near the surface, it was only because she was held there from above, her hair turned to puppet strings.
It wasn’t obvious that the cause of death was drowning. There was water in her lungs, but all that meant was either she took several breaths in the water, or water—maybe water already in her mouth—entered her lungs during the EMTs’ attempts to revive her.
They weren’t able to perform the autopsy until the day after Thalia was found, almost two days postmortem—a lapse that would erode many positive signs of drowning, such as (I was horrified to learn) froth in the upper airways. The medical examiner ended up having to look at tissues on a microscopic level, where the results were solid if not iron-clad. The official cause of death was “drowning precipitated by injury.”
Britt had pointed out in class that the crime scene—which wasn’t considered a crime scene for days—was a mess. Water everywhere, mud tracked in, Thalia’s arm scraped as they pulled her out. The traces of blood they found later on the concrete by the shallow end, even the blood on the emergency exit doorframe—those were likely enough to have been smeared there by uncareful paramedics that no one could draw conclusions. Plus, who knew what had been washed away by the chlorine. No one came in with a luminol test for days.
There are two doors to the pool. In other words, two ways in and out—both down by the shallow end, directly opposite each other. One opens to the hallway full of trophies—the shiny new ones and the desiccated 1890s footballs—which in turn leads to the gym, the locker rooms, the lobby, the front entrance. Omar’s office was off that hallway—twenty-six feet from the pool door, according to the internet. The other door is the emergency exit, with its giant Alarm Will Sound sign, not meant to open from the outside.
Omar had a key not only to the gym’s front door (the same master key that opened most doors on campus) but one for the pool itself (a unique lock). So did the athletic director, Mr. Cheval. So did poor Mr. Wysockis, the assistant athletic director, who first found Thalia on Saturday afternoon, heading in for his swim. The swim coaches—Fran’s mother, Mrs. Hoffnung, among them—had keys, as did the custodians. There were a lot of spare master keys floating illicitly among the students—but not pool keys. Why risk it all for a pool key?