“I think it’s a different sort of night,” said Dulcy. “Try not to worry.”
When they crossed the lawn to the covered plunge—an ungainly white barn, nothing like the beautiful stone palaces she remembered from Budapest or Prague or Vienna—they could hear Hubie: Help me help me help me. And sometimes a higher note: Jesus . Dulcy tried to remember the soothing waters at Walton’s spas, the wonderful way she’d slept afterward. Maybe swimming would allow her to sleep through Hubie Fenoways’ wanting to die. When they entered and hit a wall of moist air and echoing laughter, she nearly turned around and ran, but she could hear the men behind them. It was time to disappear. She looked down at her grubby white feet, let go of the towel, walked to the cracked tile rim, and dropped off the side like an ungainly ladybug.
When she opened her eyes, Lewis was sitting on the edge. “I admit to being surprised.”
“I do, too,” said Dulcy.
In the beginning, the men put on a show: cannonballs from the deep end, back flops at the middle. A war broke out, then became male-female, ungainly water birds at an elaborate dance, a ritual of splashing approach and pretty retreat, arm-waving and ducking, the woman finally seized and tossed through the air, passed around like a ball or towed along behind like a dingy. Dulcy’s brothers had done this with her when she was little, but she hadn’t gotten water up her nose since then, or paid attention to her brothers’ skin and what was underneath the woolen bathing suits. Now she felt hunted, and she panicked. “Stop !” she yelled.
Lewis did, momentarily abashed by the whole transparent nature of the game. They caught their breath but watched each other. No one was nearby; no one paid attention. The dozen people in the pool had broken into distinct groups: Samuel and Grover had stopped quarreling to race, and Durr explained the sidestroke to Margaret.
“Would you like to get out?”
“No,” she snapped, holding the edge.
He went under and headed straight toward her like a seal, twice as fast below the surface as he would have been above. He came up along her body, arms around her legs, and he lifted her. Dulcy started to scissor. “Lie back,” he said. “I’ll spin you. Just give it a try.”
He kept a flat palm under her back, and twirled. She made herself relax and looked up at the rafters, the blurred moon through the dirty glass of the roof.
Someone whooped. Grover and Samuel were swinging from the rope twenty yards away while Audrey and Beryl oohed, and Rex had found his way into the water, though he had his arms on the tile edge and his head down. “I’m afraid he’ll drown himself,” said Dulcy.
“He won’t,” said Lewis. “He’s too worried. He just wired Gerry.”
“I’ve heard the pain of a burn usually improves after a day,” she said.
“Only if it doesn’t kill you,” he said. “The doctor thinks it’s already infected. He’s talking about gangrene, but where would you begin to amputate, or stop?” He gave her another swirl. “You don’t really know how to swim, do you? Do you want to learn?”
Dulcy smiled. “Maybe later.”
“We have time to kill.” He towed her a little deeper. “I can pry things out of your head while we’re at it. What’s your favorite poem? You must like something.”
“Of course I like something . I like Yeats, these days.”
“A love poem,” he insisted.
“Why would I have thought of love poems in the last year?”
“Jesus, Maria. I thought you liked to read.”
“Jesus, Lewis. I thought you were a gentleman. How about ‘true love is mute’?”
He smiled; he liked this turn in the conversation. Audrey and Beryl ran by, and Lewis towed her further away from the edge. “It’s your turn,” she said.
“Well,” said Lewis. “I like Yeats, and I like the loony French, but what’s wonderful about Donne is that he goes both ways. He can talk about air and angels, or he can say, ‘Enter these armes, for since thou thoughtst it best, not to dreame all my dreame, let’s act the rest.’”
Dulcy focused on the back of his neck and thought about the strangeness of holding on to someone else’s arm this tightly. “Or,” said Lewis, “‘Licence my roving hands, and let them go before, behind, between, above, below.’”
“Take me to shore,” she said.
“It’s not a shore,” said Lewis. “It’s cement. Are you blushing? The water makes you look blue, and it’s hard to tell. Do you think, ‘Oh poor Lewis, he’s missing some fingers, no wonder he likes a hand poem. He must worry about his abilities as a lover.’”
They were in the far corner, out of the ring of light. “No,” she said. “I don’t think you’re worried at all, and I can’t believe you’re saying this to me.”
“Who else would I want to say it to?” He slid his arm around her waist. “And what else should I want? Not to waste my life? To be happy for a while?”
“That’s all?”
“Of course not,” said Lewis. “I want to eat you up. If you pull away, you’ll drown.”
They kissed, then paused and looked at each other. He pushed her up against the edge and they kissed again before the door opened and they were flooded with cold air and the sound of Hubie screaming in earnest. Rex ran by without noticing them.
Everyone left the pool and slipped off across the dark lawn. The towels were too small, and Dulcy was still wet when she ended up in a bunk above Margaret, who would not stop talking about all the bad things she wished she’d never said about Hubie Fenoways.
???
In the morning, their carriages were delayed by a flock of sheep, and the train reached Fridley an hour late while Hubie cackled on a stretcher. They saw another casket on the siding, this one simple pine, but the sky was blue and the rocks above the mining town were cinnamon-colored. Dulcy had a corner seat against the window as they moved north, next to Margaret and across from Lewis and Samuel. No one had slept through the screams the night before, and now no one talked, not even Audrey and Beryl.
Dulcy fell asleep and woke with a start at a bend south of town, roasting in the afternoon sun through the train window, sticky and parched, terrified by a dream she’d already forgotten. She could not place herself, and she looked for Carrie before she was back to the burned man and the plunge, the way Lewis watched from the facing seat as if he could track her alarm, as if he remembered everything they’d never talked about.
Lewis handed her a flask. He’d gotten sun on his face. He had to be exhausted, but he looked younger and tighter, healthier, better in all sorts of ways. “Water,” he said.
“He’s not leading you astray,” said Margaret.
She was amused by everything, wrong about everything. Lewis watched Dulcy, and the expression was both sidelong and direct. “You’re an optimist, Margaret,” Dulcy snapped.