No, Ben had thought then, but it seemed stupid not to; shit, the guys on the team spent half their lives walking around in Speedos. The whole team took yearbook pictures in their suits, busting out push-ups before the shots to look cut for the chicks who would later ask them to sign the page. Besides, Wakeland was the coach, and you did what your coach said; it was practically written into the Constitution.
Ben’s bare legs upset his imagination. He couldn’t conjure Rachel anymore. At first he stared at a framed picture hanging on the wall. It was a print of an oil painting of the Laguna Coast. A single tree clung to a rocky outcropping, while huge waves exploded onto the rocks. The whitewash slammed the exposed roots, and Ben tried to place his mind there, in the water, down below the rocks, where his father’s ashes floated in the salt. But he couldn’t ignore Wakeland’s hands, the man’s fingertips crawling up the side of his torso, and he shut his eyes to try to find Rachel again. She was there and then she was gone, and he felt sick for a moment before he found her again—her naked body as he imagined it would be, bird-boned and softly curved, smelling of soap. The hands were on the back of his thighs now, the fingers fanning toward the center of his teenage world, and he made those hands Rachel’s—her fingers small and delicate, warm across his skin. But Wakeland’s callused hands scratched Ben’s skin, and before he knew what was happening, before he could get back to Rachel, he was sticky wet, and a wave of confusion ran through him. He ran to the bathroom and cleaned himself up, throwing his soiled underwear in the trash, hiding them beneath the tissues and a cardboard toilet roll.
“It’s all right, Benjamin,” Wakeland said on the other side of the closed door. “That happens sometimes. It’s natural. Nothing to be ashamed of.”
Ben unlocked the door and came out into the light of the hallway, and Wakeland hugged him like a father, tousled his hair, and told him it was all right, everything was okay. He wouldn’t tell anyone.
“Just between you and me.”
The wave finally let Ben go and he lay there in the shallows, getting the feeling back in his body. His wrist ached, his neck and shoulder were kinked and bruised, yet he swam out again and let himself be punished by the waves. He wasn’t even trying to ride them anymore. He simply turned his body into the swells and let the crushers throw him onto the shore. He wanted to break his neck, wanted to be planted in the sand. He crashed onto his back, slammed headfirst, cracked his knee, but he kept coming up sucking air, kept swimming out to meet the waves, to get pummeled onto the shore, and his body kept rising to the surface, his lungs expanding with the salted air.
—
HE CALLED RACHEL from a pay phone in the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger on Balboa Boulevard in Newport Beach.
“I want to see you and Emma,” he said. “Before I’m on tonight.”
“You frightened her yesterday,” Rachel said.
“I know,” he said. “I overreacted.”
“You did,” she said. “You frightened me, too.”
“Oh, c’mon, Rach.”
“If you’d seen the look on your face, you’d understand why.”
“Rachel,” he said. “Let me come over. Please.”
The line was silent for a moment. Someone ordered Animal Style at the drive-up window. Please, Rach. Please. A seagull snatched a crushed French fry from the pavement.
“No, Ben,” she said. “Not yet. We need a couple days.”
—
SITTING IN HER Z in the parking lot, Natasha watched the boys stream out of the swim complex, their hair wet and slicked, their workout bags slung over their shoulders. They looked impossibly young to her, newly formed, their bodies a fragile miracle.
Practice was over, but between the slats of the metal fence Natasha could see Coach Wakeland still walking the edge of the pool, and the arms of a single swimmer slashing through the water.
Two minutes later, she walked into the boys’ locker room. The cement was still wet with footprints. The air stank of sweat and mildew, of body odor and cheap cologne. She was here on impulse, driven not by any rational search for evidence but simply by a need to see the man, to look him in the eye—to see if you could read such sickness in the face.
The office was empty, the door locked. On the wall across from the office was a line of framed photographs—a dozen or more pictures of boys with medals dangling from their necks. THE WALL OF FAME was stenciled in light blue above the photos. Ben’s photograph hung on the wall directly opposite the window to Wakeland’s office, his bare shoulders covered only by the ribbon of a county medal. Two down the line was Tucker, bare shouldered, too, holding up a gold trophy, much younger-looking than he looked now—no dark circles under the eyes, no worry lines crisscrossing his forehead. Then Lucero, in the last picture frame. The boy held a medal up to the camera so that the gold edge of it filled up the bottom corner of the shot. The picture couldn’t have been more than a few months old, maybe regional or state finals from last spring. He was a beautiful child—a shock of hair, a wide smile, and deep black eyes, all of him electric, alive, caught forever in gelatin and paper, pinned there behind the glass for Wakeland to enjoy from his office chair. All of them, a whole wall full of boys, smiling back at Wakeland as though they had given their blessings to be hung on a hook. Natasha had the sickening feeling that this wall was a different kind of trophy case.
She heard a whistle echo from the pool and then a man’s voice calling out a cadence: “One, two, three, breathe. One, two, three, breathe.”
She found Wakeland pacing the side of the pool, stopwatch in hand, a single boy freestyling down the line. She stood in the shadows of the cement diving platform and watched. He wasn’t a big man, but his body was wiry, and there was a vanity about his dress—the shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal his biceps, the shorts tight around his muscular thighs. The boy flipped at the wall and kicked it hard down the line.
“Push it,” Wakeland yelled. “Push through the pain. Pain is nothing. It doesn’t exist.”
The boy hit the wall and Wakeland clicked the watch.
“Fifty-nine point two,” Wakeland said. “Needs to be fifty-eight, at least. We’ll keep working at it.”
Wakeland helped the boy out of the pool and flipped him a towel. The boy started drying off, his muscles long and lean, as though they’d just been formed. He couldn’t have been older than fourteen.
“Is this the next one?” Natasha said, coming out of the shadows.
Wakeland spun around, caught off guard. “What?”
“You grooming him?” she said.
“This is a closed practice,” Wakeland said.
“What’s your name?” she said to the boy.
“Phillip.”
“Phillip,” she said. “Go home.”
The boy looked at Wakeland, confused. “Go ahead,” Wakeland said, and the boy flopped it across the pool top to the locker room.
“Let me guess,” she said. “His parents are divorced, he’s been having trouble in school, you’re turning his life around, going to make him a swimming star.”