Omar grabs the pool net, uses the handle end to hold Thalia’s body a few inches below the surface. She doesn’t struggle. This is what he said in his confession, a detail that always destroyed me: the idea that someone who’d been so alive could be killed—so gently, so slowly—by a pool net.
Omar racks his brain to think who’s seen them together, who might know. He can’t deny being here in the gym; he’s been making calls all evening from his office phone. He’ll have to say he saw nothing, heard nothing. (So why, then, when they first questioned him, did he volunteer that his door was open?)
He waits ten minutes, longer than anyone could possibly survive without air. To his surprise, she sinks a little. Her feet lower than her head, but both below the water’s surface. He folds Thalia’s clothes, puts them on the bench. He knows where the maintenance guy keeps the bleach, industrial strength, and he goes to the cabinet, uses his shirt cuff to lift the bottle, to pour it onto the bloody pool deck. He watches it fizz white. He scrubs with a forgotten towel, and it’s a long time before he can step back and not see a pinkish blur. He turns on the lights for a second, to check. He uses the same bleach and the same towel on the drops that dot the tiled hallway. He’s lucky: In his office, there’s blood visible only on the CPR poster. Still, even after he peels it off, folds it, stuffs it in his backpack, he scrubs the wall. He returns the bleach to the maintenance closet. To do this, he has to reenter the pool, has to see Thalia bobbing below the surface.
He’s sobered a bit, and it’s harder now to look. The smell of chlorine starts to sicken him, and the last thing he needs is his own vomit at the scene. The water keeps moving her. Her arms don’t stay by her sides, her head hits the lane line. She’s close enough to his end of the pool that he can reach one lock of her hair to pull her closer. He rubs the hair in his fingers, because oh God, what has he done, such a beautiful girl—he ruins everything. He breaks things. He broke his own marriage. This is who he is, and he hates who he is, hates that he’s the same boy who once broke his grandmother’s crystal hummingbird. Look at him. Look at her. He wraps her hair around the lane line, getting his sleeve wet. He wraps it around five, six, seven times, to anchor her in place, to keep her from—what? He doesn’t even know.
He locks the pool door behind him; maybe it will buy him time, delay the moment her body is found. He takes the towel, to burn with the poster.
All that night, all the next day, his hands smell of chlorine.
(Was I satisfied with my story that morning? I told myself that despite the missing pieces, I ought to be. Perhaps the dull nausea I felt had something to do with last night’s dining hall lo mein. In any case: I was able to get out of bed. I was able to start my day.)
16
Before class, Britt asked if she could interview me later. I told her I’d talk, but that mine shouldn’t be the first interview she played on the podcast. “It might seem sloppy,” I said, “using your teacher as your first source.”
I said it partly out of an instinct to disavow responsibility. If the podcast somehow got out into the world, I didn’t want it to look like I was steering the ship. I wasn’t someone who’d decided that despite being utterly peripheral to this story twenty-three years ago, I was the one to tell it now. (Everyone shut up and listen to me, a girl who wasn’t even friends with those people!)
I warned Britt that I didn’t have a lot to say, that all I could do was describe Thalia as a person. And that I might not even be free that night; I was trying to meet up with a friend from Boston. But by class break, I hadn’t heard from Yahav. I texted him—because if I didn’t, I’d wait around like an idiot. Sthg came up for tonight, but lemme know if you have time in next few days!
I don’t need you to care about Yahav. It would be odd if you did. But he’s part of the story, and he was a big part of my mental state those two weeks. Lest I sound clueless and desperate: This was someone I’d been seeing for two years, someone who would, when things were working, text me just to say good morning. When we got together he, too, was separated and starting the divorce process. We were already friends—both teaching at UCLA, both enjoying rapid-fire conversation and politics and tapas bars. I don’t believe in soul mates, and that’s made life easier; we were simply good together.
I’d met him at a potluck thrown by a psychology professor friend, in a house full of spider plants—a remarkably unsexy party if only because the place smelled of cat litter. Yahav had piled his plate with so much food that I found myself scoping his physique to see if he was all muscle or just an ectomorph. The answer turned out to be both, I confirmed two years later when we finally slept together, when I ran my hand down his ribs and his long, ropy quadriceps. But in the moment, I apologized for staring at his plate, the mountains of orzo and chicken and veggie lasagna. I said, “You have literally everything, so tell me what ends up being best.” He took the request seriously, and kept reporting back throughout the night, advising that the brownies on the far end of the table were the superior ones. “The key is salt,” he sotto-voced into my hair. “The others lack sufficient salt.”
Still married to Jerome, I considered my coffee dates with Yahav simply, if thrillingly, social. We shared an interest in Israeli cinema, and he wanted help finding some early Uri Zohar movies, which led to us watching A Hole in the Moon in his office. I was more taken with the books on his shelves than the film, doubly so because he was a law professor and I hadn’t expected to find David Mitchell and Audre Lorde in lieu of anything leatherbound. I understood that because we were becoming friends, we would never sleep together. Specifically: Because I’d opened myself up to him in unflattering ways, because I’d worn glasses and no makeup on our walks, griped about Jerome’s anxiety, even moaned to him about the stretch marks my kids had gifted me, I’d taken sex off the table.
And then, at a wine bar late one night after we discussed our foundering marriages and the panic attacks Yahav was getting in traffic, he looked at me with such imploring eyes that the future rolled out in front of us, soft and green.
We’d only been seeing each other six months when his wife was diagnosed with severe chronic fatigue syndrome and he realized he needed to stay with her, take care of their daughter, live in the house. Her illness put us on hold, turning a legitimate relationship into an illegitimate one. I found myself in an affair by default, not because I chose to transgress but because I was unwilling to cut off a full-throttle romance just because circumstances had changed. We saw each other, we didn’t see each other, we were together, we were undefined, he emailed, we texted, he begged me to send nudes, he said he needed me, he went silent, we met in hotels, we met at my place, he felt guilty, he felt relief, she was getting better, it was back, she had heart issues, I was the only thing keeping him together, I was the reason he was falling apart. He took the BU post that fall—a yearlong sabbatical from UCLA, but he’d be teaching a couple of classes in addition to writing his new book—and his family came with him. His wife was doing better, somewhat. They were still talking divorce, but I was in no position to rock the boat. I couldn’t fault him for any dismissive action, because he was doing the Right Thing when he ignored me. And I couldn’t advocate for myself without being wrong.
So: Here I was, giving him the easy out. Reduced to the girl I’d always refused to be, happy with crumbs.
After the break we were supposed to talk about editing, but the other kids had grown interested in Thalia’s case, had started googling things, developing their own theories, and wanted to talk about it.