They emerged, Ivor in navy trunks and Billy in black, their swimwear a similar style that fell to above their bumpy knees. They had both draped white gym towels over their meaty shoulders, their pudgy hands cinching the towel at their chests. They would enjoy the scrap of coverage the towel lent them until the last possible second before they entered the water. With their free hand, they both pulled on the end of their towels, trying and failing to make the short flaps cover their stomachs.
Billy plodded across the damp floor toward the weighing scale. He stepped on, telling himself not to get his hopes up. There was likely no change from yesterday’s reading. The numbers jumped, and stopped. Three hundred and fifty-one pounds. He had dropped another pound overnight, bringing his total weight loss to the beautiful round number of fifty. Ecstatic, he turned to step off the scale. His delight fell away.
Ivor stood staring at him, that now-familiar rage back in the boy’s face. He looked down at himself and then at Billy, his eyes filling. Billy reached for him, but Ivor turned around and toddled toward the pool.
Billy followed Ivor into the brilliant blue water, the chill giving him that unfailing rush despite his concern for the boy. “What’s going on? What happened back there?”
“I don’t want you to talk,” Ivor said.
“Come on, something’s bothering you—”
“Stop talking. I don’t want you to say anything,” Ivor said, almost wailing.
“Okay, okay,” Billy said, anything to get the boy to calm down. “I won’t say another word.”
Ivor again allowed Billy to support his back and legs while he stretched out on the water. After several minutes of floating, Ivor flipped onto his front and Billy again put the boy through the paces of pretend-swimming. Next, Billy coaxed Ivor into trying to float on his back all alone.
After several failed attempts, during which Ivor panicked and refused to let Billy remove his hands, the boy finally managed to float solo. He made snuffling sounds, arrhythmic breathing that signaled both his delight and still the trace of fear. Billy clapped and cheered, making Ivor’s face light up. Billy took a picture in his head. He never wanted to forget this moment. The pool teemed with people, and sounded too loud, but it was as if he and Ivor were the only two there.
*
Back in the changing room, as Billy and Ivor dressed, Ivor’s words turned Billy’s stomach cold. “Being fat is bad, isn’t it?” His face was crimson.
Billy tried to think what to say, and then hoped to sound matter-of-fact. “Fat isn’t bad, but it can be very unhealthy.”
Ivor pushed past Billy and moved to the exit. “Ivor,” Billy said.
“No!” Ivor said. “I said I don’t want you to say anything.”
Billy hurried after Ivor, feeling like that’s all he did now, chase his children.
Eighteen
July 21. The evening of Billy’s big march. Six months ago today, shortly before eight o’clock in the morning—right about when Billy and Tricia had learned that Michael hadn’t shown up to milk the cows—Sergeant Deveney had arrived with his cap in his hands and the news that would shatter their world. Six months, and a part of Billy still couldn’t believe, still expected to turn around and find Michael standing right there, smiling, waiting.
So much had happened in such a short time. In what sometimes felt like forever. He’d lost Michael, his firstborn, and it had prompted his goal to shed half of himself, and to try to stop suicide. Already, he’d dropped over fifty pounds. He saw a flash of himself sitting at a potter’s wheel and sculpting those fifty-some pounds of fat into a boy. He squeezed his eyes closed, as if that could black out the strange-awful picture. Oh, to be a Dr. Frankenstein. To bring Michael back.
His resolve hardened. At least he could bring about change. He could do good. And all in Michael’s name. He’d never known he’d so much fight in him. Never known he could be capable of so much. His was no ordinary weight loss, no ordinary march, no ordinary documentary. He was going to change the world. A shiver passed over him, cooling the surge of bravado. He wished he’d more of an army around him. Wished he could believe that at the very least his wife and children would stand with him through it all. He swallowed hard. In a short while he would go downstairs and put his family to the test. It would wring out his heart if they failed him.
*
In the bathroom, Billy’s face stared out of the mirror above the sink, his head and stomach in a spin. These past couple of weeks it had proven harder and harder to drop the weight and he’d hovered at a loss of fifty-three pounds for what felt like forever. To shift the scale again, he’d cut down to just the performance shakes and had increased his visits to the pool, swimming twenty laps every morning and twenty more in the evenings. But he couldn’t keep that intensity up. It would kill him. Now that the scale was moving again—a total of fifty-seven pounds—he would revert to a more realistic diet and exercise routine, and hopefully rid himself of these awful, poorly sensations. His head and stomach were sick, too, from pure nerves.