Dear Meredith (6 page)

            My second swimming lesson had went, well, swimmingly, I suppose. This time, Milo had coaxed us into getting into the water, allowing us to plant our toes firmly on the pool floor while we maintained death grips on the pool's edge.

            I was honestly quite amazed with myself as I stood there with the water lapping around my shoulders. But to my dismay, I was now forced to admit to myself that I found Grant quite attractive, although why that was so when I seemed completely immune to the hunk of man meat that was Milo was a complete mystery to me.

            There is just something elusive about him, although he seems friendly enough. However, he doesn't speak much except to his adorable daughter, who showed up this time in a green bathing suit with a dinosaur print.

            But for a minute there, as I hovered between euphoria and panic in the water, I felt him looking at me as though he wanted to say something.

            My happy mood suddenly ebbs away at this memory, replaced with a stab of guilt. I have no idea why I'm even thinking about Grant, when I'm still very much in love with Mike.

            Suddenly, impulsively, I decide to pay a visit to Mike's grave even though I just went yesterday. I swing by the house to collect Bandit, who bounds exuberantly into my car after giving me joyful licks despite seeing me just half an hour ago.

            The sun is midway down the horizon when we arrive and a cool breeze greets us. I clip on her leash and we wind our way down towards Mike's grave.

            It's a familiar ritual now for the both of us and Bandit stretches out beside me as I make myself comfortable in front of his gravestone.

            "Hi, baby," I say, while she pricks up her ears. I am silent for a while, partly because there are so many things inside my head that I barely know where to begin.

            I don't know why, but I've always felt Mike's presence here. It doesn't feel like an absent, cold silence, but a warm, listening one. As though he really is here, sitting in his favourite position, arms hugging his legs, as he listens to me talking.

            "So, the bookstore is almost ready for opening day. I think we'll be able to pop the bubbly about a week from now. The workers are almost done with the platform and Laney and I have picked out the most darling armchairs. In fact, they're so amazingly comfortable that we were almost ready to fall asleep in them. I also visited your mom and I think she's even more excited about the bookstore than I am," I tell him.

            "As for the swimming lessons, well, Milo isn't half bad a teacher, I suppose. You should have seen me yesterday! I was actually in the water up to my shoulders. I was shivering with fear but I did it."

            I pause. "I guess I'm almost ready to forgive you for signing me up for the lessons now. But not yet. Milo hasn't made us swim a stroke yet and I'll consider forgiving you again if I pass
that
milestone."

            I fall silent for a long while after that, just letting time pass as I think my thoughts and stroke Bandit. I can't believe it's been almost four months since Mike left me. I  grieve his loss, but the pain isn't quite as sharp now, nor as vicious. It's a more muted, dull kind of ache in my heart, although I still have great difficulty talking to people other than Janet or Laney about his death.

            I reflect once more on his letters. Just simple words scrawled in black ink, the essence of Mike distilled into sentences. No matter how many times I read his letters, I am filled with the same amazement and wonder every single time. It hit me during one of these musings, that I now understand the true value of the written word and how the postman's arrival must have felt for women separated from their sweethearts during the war.

            Because those letters mean the difference between carrying on life with hope or despair. And although my sweetheart won't be coming back, his letters still have brought me back from the brink, at a time when I thought I would never be able to stand again.

Chapter 7

            I should have known I was getting on too well with the swim lessons for it to last.             It is our fourth lesson, and Milo isn't quite his normal, exuberant self today. I don't want to ask him about it, but I had noticed him having a heated argument with someone on the phone as I drove into the carpark.

            I had tried to sneak past unobtrusively, but I couldn't help overhearing the parts when he had raised his voice dramatically. I also couldn't help but notice this makes him sound like Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge.             

            "You told me you were at your sister's graduation last night!", "No, I
don't
need to take a time-out, Mr. I'm-So-Cool" and "Maybe you need to rethink this relationship," were some of the phrases that drifted into my hearing.

            Grant seems to notice Milo's listless behaviour and raises a dark brow at me. Ginny is oblivious to the adult tension in the air and dives immediately into the water after a "work hard, daddy!"

            I shrug and mouth "bad day".

            We slip into the water by virtue of holding onto the sides of the pool and lowering ourselves in, which to me, felt like voluntarily dipping myself into a frying pan filled with hot oil when I tried it for the first time last week.

            But today, it comes quite easily to me and I am quite willing to follow Milo's instructions as he asks us to turn onto our stomachs and try floating on the water with our hands still holding onto the pool's edge.

            I suddenly realise my chin is now actually touching the water and that the only thing keeping my mouth from going under is my neck muscles. Despite this being just a pool, I can feel subtle currents in the water constantly pushing me towards and pulling me away from the edge.

           
Whoa, relax, Meredith, you can do this,
I tell myself as we stretch out in a Superman pose, my hands never losing their firm grip. I can feel the sun's warmth on the back of my legs, reassuring me that they aren't fully submerged. At the back of my mind, I still have this jumpy feeling that someone's gonna grab onto my leg and drag me under.

            "Good. You guys are doing great. Now, start kicking your legs like we practised earlier on the floor," Milo says after watching us float for five minutes.

            I start my frog kicks, extremely ungracefully, I can tell, because droplets of water start flying into the air and landing all around me, including on my head. My face starts burning with embarassment and I turn to check out Grant's progress.

            To my consolation, he isn't doing much better either, although at least he isn't creating artificial rainfall like me.

            "Meredith, lower your butt down into the water and kick
under the water,
not on the surface," Milo shouts, demonstrating for me to see. However, he is doing it correctly, I gather, as the water all around him remains smooth and calm.        

I suppress a semi-hysterical giggle. How am I supposed to check out his kicks then? However, I merely nod and wonder what he means by lowering my butt into the water. How does one do that?

            What happens next happens so quickly that I only piece it together much later.

            We suddenly hear a scream of distress from the middle of the pool and Milo heads off so swiftly towards the commotion that I barely register him swimming away.

            Grant immediately starts looking around for his daughter, calling her name frantically. Since I'm still floating facing away from the pool, I suddenly spot her sitting down on one of the pool chairs, slurping thirstily from her purple waterbottle.

            Relieved, I twist towards Grant, who is surveying the pool with wide eyes, and start to tell him where Ginny is.        

Only, my body reacts quicker than my brain as my hands let go of the pool edge to point at her.

            "
Grant
," is as far as I get before I realise I'm actually floating without anything to anchor me to the edge of the pool. And I'm floating
away
from the safety of the edge of the pool.

            All thoughts of frog kicks fly out of my mind as sheer panic sets in and sends me thrashing. As my limbs flail in underwater slow motion, I don't realise that I'm actually propelling myself towards the deeper end. Then, the inevitable happens. My head goes under several times and my vision suddenly turns into a sea of blue with white bubbles fizzing frantically around like a popped soda can.

            My temples are pounding. I had forgotten the unique silence being underwater gives you, as though the whole water is a giant cotton plug. All these thoughts flash through my panicked brain in the space of seconds when I feel something seize onto my wrist. I instinctively flinch away but I feel a tremendous
yank
and I suddenly shoot forward like a cork flying out of a champagne bottle.

            Helpless to resist my momentum, I suddenly crash into something soft and yet hard. Even in my frightened animal state, I realise it's got to be a human body. Then something swiftly wraps itself around my neck and drags my head upwards, and I am suddenly inhaling blessed, glorious air and the sun is beating down on my face again.

            "Meredith,
stop
!" I suddenly hear Grant yelling and I realise he is the one holding my head above water while his other hand is still wrapped around my wrist. Abruptly, I sag in relief, my limbs ceasing their fight against some horrible unknown monster.

            And as my legs float downwards, my toes suddenly touch the floor of the pool.

            Oh.

            Well, this is embarassing. My eyes move upwards and I lock gazes with Grant's emerald green ones. He is panting lightly with the exertion of keeping me from drowning in four feet of water.

            I don't know how long we would have stayed there like that, with me paralysed in utter mortification, if Milo hadn't blithely swanned back as though I hadn't almost just died.

            "Sorry about that. One of the girls suffered a cramp right in the middle of the pool, poor thing," he tells us before stopping short in astonishment. So near towards the shallow end, Milo's impressive pectoral region rises above the water and I see some of the mothers who are reclining on the pool chairs lean forward, their hands going up to their eyes to lower their sunglasses. "What are you guys doing?"

            Ginny, whom I suddenly realise is squatting casually at the edge of the pool, staring at me with fascination, chirps, "Daddy just saved her from drinking a lot of water and dying."

            My face flames and I feel Grant release his grip on me after directing my hand to the comforting edge of the pool, and I silently swear to never let go of it ever again.

            Thankfully, Milo lets it pass and we resume our Superman poses. I'm stunned to realise I
can
continue despite suffering the panic attack a mere five minutes ago. In fact, it feels like one of the nightmares I'd had in the first few weeks after Mike died, horribly nasty and unpleasant but difficult to hold on to after jolting awake.

            When the lesson is finally over, I scramble back onto the safety of dry land with a huge wave of relief flooding through me. Milo tells us he will see us next week, "where you guys will swim your first stroke! Yes, Meredith,
away
from the side of the pool."

            I just shove that horrible thought out of my head. Next week could take care of itself. I turn around to look at Grant, who has wrapped a towel around himself.

            "Hey, thank you," I call to him. "I'm sorry, that must have looked really stupid."

            He gives me a smile, a real one that lights up his eyes. "Well, that looked just a
little
bit stupid. But it was my pleasure. It's not everyday I get to save a damsel in distress."

            "Except in my case, I suppose it was more of an unglamorous octopus in distress."

            As I am about to turn and trudge towards the shower room for a much-needed hot shower, I see his mouth give a twitch from the corner of my eye but he manfully refrains from further comment.

            "So, I nearly died!" I declare dramatically to Laney before swigging back a swallow of ice-cold beer. "I swear, I was this close to opening my mouth in the water today."

            As I tell her the events of the day, more and more people start trickling into the bar. We arrive early, so we have prime spots right in front of the young, handsome bartender, whom Laney set her sights on the moment we arrived. 

            "Wait, wait. So who is Grant? I was under the impression you were the only one Milo was coaching," she interrupts, tipping her bottle at me accusingly. She looks fantastic, her smoky black eyeliner making her eyes look all dark and mysterious under the light, while her blonde head stands out like a neon light.

            "He's just this guy who goes to class with me. He has a little girl, Ginny, and
she
puts the both of us to shame. I think she might be part dolphin," I tell her, conveniently leaving out the part where I think I find him quite attractive.

            I also tell her about how I was able to continue on with the lesson after the panic attack and she is equally astounded. "I wouldn't have believed it possible," she declares, while I shrug in bafflement.

            I catch sight of us in the mirror behind the bar, her blonde head and my red one leaning towards each other in a wordless gesture of long familiarity. I realise, with a surge of pleasure, that I look pretty decent myself. I had made an effort to dress up tonight for our date and I feel pretty for the first time in a long while.

            "So, Avery told me he might need to send me off to South Korea in two weeks' time. But I think it'll just be for a week," she adds quickly after seeing my face fall slightly.

            "No, it's fine. Anyway, we'll have the bookstore well up and running by then," I say, cheered by the thought.

            The paint has dried and the new floor and bookshelves gleam. Stencilled in large, neat black letters on the bottom left of the enormous glass window is the simple word "Books", followed by "Coffee" in smaller letters.

            After one and a half weeks of tearing our hair out, we'd also finally settled on a name: "Dog-Eared Books & Café".

            We'll be moving the books back in over the weekend, along with the furniture and some potted plants. It's hard to believe the shop was once dingy and unwelcoming, when it's so bright and airy now.

            "When all the books are on the shelves, and that wonderful, musty page smell fills the air - well, that's when we will
really
feel that we're in business," Laney says, echoing my thoughts.

            "Yes. It's really starting to sink in now, isn't it, now that everything is coming together? Half the time I still have to pinch myself because I feel this can't possibly be real," I say in bemusement, while she nods vigorously in complete agreement.

            The rest of the night passes in a pleasant haze and I eventually make my way home at around midnight, while Laney heads off with John, the bartender, who just finished his shift.

            I fall into bed, my eyes closing almost immediately. It had been a long day and the episode at the pool today feels light years away. I relive for a brief moment the strange feeling of weightlessness underwater, the curious roar of silence in my ears and the sea of blue stretching out as far as my eyes can see.

            I feel Bandit shoving her head under my arm, so it flops up and comes down to rest over the crook of her neck. She sighs once, satisfied.

            That night, I dream a new dream.