“I’ll be right back.” He took the plastic bag out of the bin and headed out the back door. There was no way he was coming back.
Danny stood at the lip of the old empty swimming pool, upending the plastic bag of fruit rinds, rotini, and coffee grounds. The pool was a small oval of concrete, ten feet deep, lined with cracks and moss. On buying the house, their father had decided to try to fill it with brush and compost to eventually create a small garden. But over the last forty-four years, they had managed to only fill it halfway. While Danny didn’t appreciate Libby’s constant assignments, he did love coming out here. He liked to empty the compost bucket. To duck low branches and step over roots, to come out to this slight rise between the house and the boathouse beach, all hidden in woods.
He liked to imagine how this must have once looked. The mild elevation would have given a perfect view of the water, if some trees were cleared. He wondered if, beneath the fallen logs and ferns, there was a mosaic floor, some Gilded Age extravagance depicting seals and porpoises, where tanned feet once slapped out a spray of water before them as they walked around to the deep end for another dive. The sunset would have been beautiful then. The waters of the sea and the pool would’ve reflected back all those long waves of light, the reds and oranges. He could see the long dresses, the seersucker blazers, the rolling trolley with spirits and ice. He imagined his parents, lean and tall, like Grant and Hepburn, dressed in white, drinking cocktails in low glasses.
He had often begged his father to restore the pool. But the B.O.B. reared its head. This was the nickname they had given Bob Willoughby anytime he acted particularly lawyerly—stating the case, reviewing the facts, explaining the obvious and clear course of action. His father argued against Danny’s plea—the costs, the broken pumps used to bring the salt water up from the sea to the pool, the decadence of a pool with the ocean right in front of them.
Danny thought his father was calling him greedy. It was one of the few times Danny had ever felt belittled by him. Danny only wanted a place to actually swim, not just jumping in and out again because the water was so cold it burned. He wanted to do strokes. Sometimes Danny thought his father had been right. He was greedy. Greedy for time. Standing on the mosaic terrace that existed only in a world buried under a hundred years of pine needles and moss, he felt the vastness of time stretching out beneath him, and at the same time how quickly it got eaten up. He thought of his father, napping on the porch. No more. Now under the water, sleeping with seaweed. He thought of his mother, but then he didn’t. He wouldn’t.
After his father died, he could think of nothing else. Of all the moments that Danny had tried to catch his father’s attention, fixed always on his mother, like the sea always tending to the rocks, whispering, comforting, sometimes pleading, sometimes pounding. And she, like the rocks, seemed both to resist and absorb it. She would bathe in it, bask in it. There were moments of storm, too, of eruption of water, and the groan of rock shifting. Losing his father was almost worse, never having lost something before. It was losing something he’d never had, and again time felt both quick and slow. But it wasn’t worse. This was.
Danny shook the plastic bag, let long threads of carrot peels slide forth, falling on corncobs and watermelon rinds. Must be Libby’s from the week before.
“Hurry it up, Dan,” Libby called from the house. He ignored her.
He’d had Scarlet those last three years, when she was no longer submerged in her love for her husband, or in his love for her. Really he had her before too. She was never so lost as his father. She could look up from beneath waves of devotion and see Danny, make some joke about deep-sea diving or mermaids, about how sweet and silly it all was.
One night when Danny was twelve, she’d been standing at their kitchen table chopping tomatoes, pulverizing them, actually. His father stood behind her, one hand searching for the weather station on the radio, the other rubbing the back of her neck.
“If you’re not careful, I’m going to chop my fingers off,” she said to him.
“A delicacy I will devour with my supper,” he said, kissing her behind the ear. She looked at Danny sitting across the table from her, bugged out her eyes, and stuck out her tongue, as if to say, Oh my God, I married a cannibal.
But now, he couldn’t think of her. He couldn’t eat tomatoes or listen to the weather. He could think of his father, but not his mother; he could not let himself. He had to be vigilant, or he began to see her hands; thin with long fingers, the age spots beginning just below the knuckles; the rings, wedding, anniversary, something amethyst for the day he was born. He pressed a cut on his hand until it stung. It cleared his mind, and he stopped seeing her. He wanted his mind blank. He wanted to shut out all stimuli until his mind was just white noise.
Danny walked around the pool, stopping at one end. The edge of the pool curved in, rounded by moss. The toes of his sneakers stuck out over that edge as if he were about to dive in. He wondered how much it would hurt to dive into branches and leaves. Would there be enough of a cushion or would he hit the bottom? His mother was an excellent diver. She used to dive off the bow of the sloop when they went sailing. Just the three of them. He stepped back from the edge, picked up a pinecone.
In the woods toward the house he heard the crunching and cracking of footsteps. Libby. Man, she was really invested in this trench business.
“Seriously, we need to get started,” she called again, much closer this time, but still out of sight. Danny looked around, trying to figure out where to hide. There was only one place. He sat down on the edge. At this end, the pool held mostly dead leaves and brambles. A vine grew into, or out of, the tangle, crawling up over the side. He lowered himself down onto the pile of detritus, and squatted, his back pressed against the side of the pool, the pinecone still in his hand.
“Dan, where are you?” Now she was close enough that her footsteps sent an acorn skittering into the pool three feet from him.