The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls (23 page)

We were going to leave as soon as we went a little bit deeper, just to the middle of the pool, so Wallis could share the feeling of being almost weightless. We held her up, our eight legs flashing, pale, like reeds in the water.

Jill saw him first. “Shit,” she said.

All I saw was a shape running toward us. I gave Wallis a shove in the direction of the shallow end.

“I’m getting my phone,” CeeCee said, but then the
shape came to a sudden stop at the edge of the pool: it was Jeff.

“You jerk. You scared us,” CeeCee said.

He peeled off his shirt and cannonballed into the water.

“Let’s go,” Jill said. “It’s time to leave.”

CeeCee started to get out of the pool but Jeff grabbed her ankle. “I didn’t think anything scared CeeCee Christiansen,” he said. “You don’t need to go. You haven’t finished your striptease.”

“You’re drunk,” CeeCee said. “Drunk and disgusting.” She splashed him and dived under the water; when she surfaced, Jeff dunked her.

She spluttered and coughed. “Don’t touch me,” she said.

Jeff laughed. He said a few things I won’t repeat here.

“Is he the one who emailed our pictures?” Wallis asked.

Jeff spun around in the water. “Maybe
you
want to finish the striptease.”

“Leave her alone.” CeeCee grabbed at his leg. Jeff lunged at her and dunked her again.

All over the inside of the fence around the pool, clearly printed signs warned swimmers that there was
NO RUNNING NO CLIMBING ON LIFEGUARD CHAIRS NO HORSEPLAY NO TALKING TO GUARDS
.

“You think you’re strong?” Jeff asked. He pulled CeeCee in the direction of the diving board. “Show me how strong you are.”

CeeCee was thrashing; I heard her swear.

“Where are the life preservers?” Jill asked. She got out of the pool and ran toward the fence.

NO DIVING AT THIS END
, the signs warned.
SAFETY FIRST SHALLOW WATER PLEASE DO NOT REARRANGE POOL FURNITURE NO RUNNING

“Get the hell off me!” CeeCee yelled.

I wasn’t sure whether I should help her or stay with Wallis.

Lights were coming toward us from the main road. “It’s a car,” I said, and for the first time, it occurred to me that getting out—climbing back up the stack of recliners and the dangling branch to get to the locker room’s roof—would be much harder than getting in.

“Come on!” Jill was shouting. “CeeCee, let’s go.”

I heard someone coughing.

“I can’t find my glasses,” Wallis said. She was behind me; we were both getting out of the water. I felt something bump against my leg.

The headlight beams were gliding across the chain-link fence.

I wanted to find my clothes; Jill told me to forget them. We ran.

We ran past the lifeguard stands and across the shuffleboard court and around the baby pool (I heard someone stumbling heavily through it), then around the deck chairs by the crumpled fence (there was no way that, without help, I would be able to climb it), under the awning where Jill had sold Italian water ice and soda and ice cream, and into the mildewed cavern of the girls’ locker room.

I rammed my knee into a bench.

“Quiet,” somebody said.

I stuffed my wrist into my mouth to keep from shouting because of the pain. I crawled to the back of the shower
room, which was as dark as a dungeon—the darkness was a warm black cloth held in front of my eyes.

“I don’t want to be arrested half naked.” Jill’s whispered voice came from the opposite side of the room. “I’m going to find something to wear in the lost and found.”

I heard a soft scuffling. I imagined what my mother would say when she saw me in the back of a police car. The air smelled of chlorine and moldy flip-flops. “Here’s a towel, I think,” Jill said.

I thought about Edna Pontellier, in her muslin gown, walking down to the water.

“And this might be a shirt.” Jill was still rustling through the lost and found. Was someone breathing behind me? “I think Adrienne fell in the baby pool,” Jill said.

“I didn’t fall.” We weren’t whispering anymore. I was clutching my knee. The car seemed to have gone.

“Where are you?” Jill asked.

“I’m right over here.”

She threw me a shirt and I put it on. “CeeCee, where are you?”

“Behind you.” CeeCee sighed. “I can’t believe Jeff showed up. What a jackass.”

“Then it must have been Wallis who fell,” Jill said.

I remembered Wallis’s glasses, bumping into my leg on their way to the bottom of the pool. But Wallis and I were both in the shallow end. “Wallis?” I asked. “Are you in here?”

The darkness was thick. Edna Pontellier entered the water.

“Wallis?”

18. RESOLUTION: The part of the book you spend a lot of pages waiting for; the part where you get your questions answered. (But I’m not sure if that’s true in my essay.)

“I
am very sorry to hear about the death of your friend,” Dr. Ramsan said. He’d read the article in the paper, which had mentioned my name. “It is a terrible thing when a young person dies.”

My knee was back in its brace, and I was back in Dr. Ramsan’s office, as if it were the beginning of the summer instead of almost the end.

“Please sit at the center of the table,” he said.

I sat. I took off my brace. Meanwhile my mind, like a private theater with a crazed projectionist, began to play its favorite film from the Extremely Unbearable Book Club Meeting #5, our last night at the pool. I saw CeeCee, in her underwear, running out of the locker room in front of me, and Jill crashing into a mountain of deck chairs, both of them illuminated by the sudden appearance of a quarter
moon. Limping behind them, I already knew, as if I had memorized the details in a photograph, what we would see when we reached the water: the glassy surface gone still again, and imprisoned within it, Wallis, facedown, one hand gesturing toward the glasses that were just out of reach.

I closed my eyes.

“Can you straighten your leg?” Dr. Ramsan asked.

Jill had called me on the morning of the funeral. “We’re idiots,” she said. “We should never have gone into the pool. Or climbed the fence. We should have stayed home.”

“Now bend your leg,” Dr. Ramsan said. “Good. Like that.”

I had tried to hang up, but Jill wouldn’t let me. She needed to call us both some more names. “And there’s something else I have to tell you.” Her mother had found the missing pills. She’d been cleaning the bathroom, and something had rattled up the nozzle of her vacuum cleaner, stopping the hose. When she took the vacuum apart and found the small plastic bottle, she had shouted for Jill, and they both sat on the bathroom floor and cried. “They were here in our house the whole time,” Jill said. “They must have fallen out of the cabinet.” She asked me if I was wearing black to the funeral.

In the film in my head, which ran even when my eyes were tightly closed, Wallis’s glasses continued bumping along the bottom of the pool as if pulled by a string. Jill called an ambulance, which seemed to take forever to reach us. I hadn’t heard the siren because I was kneeling on the cement, the scar on my leg torn open; I was trying
to talk myself through the steps I had paid attention to only casually when we learned them at school:
tilt the head back, pinch the nose shut; one–one thousand, two–one thousand
 … Eventually, a paramedic pulled me aside, and only then did I become aware of the blood, and the red and blue lights revolving and flashing outside the gate.

“Does this hurt?” Dr. Ramsan asked.

One of the paramedics asked me some questions but I was confused and didn’t answer.

“And this? Does it hurt?” Dr. Ramsan asked.

“Yes,” I said.

He let go of my leg and put his arm around my shoulders. “Such a painful and difficult thing. The parts of our lives that don’t yet make sense to us,” he said. “There is always hope that we will understand them.”

He handed me a tissue and bowed his head while I blew my nose. Then he handed me my brace, and I put it on while he typed up his notes. “Are you still a member of a book club?” he asked. He looked at the keyboard while he typed.

“No, that’s over now,” I said. “It was just for the summer.”

“Ah. That’s too bad. I was hoping you would recommend something for me. I enjoyed the Le Guin.”

“You read it?” I asked.

“On your recommendation—of course.” He was typing with only three of his fingers. “Books are a distraction but also a comfort. Don’t you agree?”

“I guess so,” I said.

He finished typing, then folded his stethoscope into
his jacket pocket, embroidered with bright blue letters:
V. Ramsan, MD
. He stood up. “Again, my deepest condolences on the death of your friend.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But—we weren’t friends.”

Dr. Ramsan paused in the doorway and tugged at his beard.

“The article in the paper made it sound like we were.” I stepped down, carefully, from the table. “But I barely knew him,” I said. “He dated the sister of a friend of mine. His name was Jeff.”

The ending of a good book, I had always thought—at least, a book that sticks with you—should be satisfying but also sad. A character should die, or almost die, and the people left behind should see things differently. They should change.

And the final pages of a book should suggest that, even though difficult and ugly and unexpected things happen, they happen within a pattern or a framework, and can be understood. They might seem random, but the reader will be able to find meaning in them. Believing in books, I thought, was almost like believing in God.

In real life, though, the details didn’t always add up. I didn’t generally get the feeling that an author was pointing to the relevant parts of my life with an enormous, omniscient finger, connecting the dots between a novel written in the 1800s, a fallen tree, and a pair of glasses spilled at night into a swimming pool. Jeff had probably tripped, the police decided. He was drunk and had suffered a “significant blow to the head,” drowning in water (the baby pool)
that barely covered his ankles. He was so heavy. And it was so hard to turn him over and get him out of the water. I was afraid to look at the gash above his eyebrow. There was blood on the cement and more blood in the pool.

Jill ran for her phone while CeeCee grabbed a towel and pressed it to Jeff’s head to stop the bleeding. She was shouting at me to do something, but I was already kneeling beside him with my hands on his chest. Was his heart still beating? I pinched his nose shut, feeling my own heart pounding against my ribs. Then I covered Jeff’s mouth with mine the way CeeCee had always told me I would. His eyes were half open, and his skin, maybe from the temperature of the water, was cool.

I had almost forgotten about Wallis, but when I turned my head, putting my ear on Jeff’s chest to listen for a heartbeat, I saw her coming out of the boys’ locker room.
One–one thousand, two–one thousand
. She was wearing her glasses. She must have run through the wrong doorway, I thought. It was understandable: she hadn’t been to the pool as often as we had, and she had probably lost track of us as we were running toward the locker room in the dark.

The pool closed for the summer. It would take several days to clear away the fallen tree and fix the fence; and the water would have to be drained because of the blood.

Jill said she would have quit her job anyway. “I don’t ever want to swim in that pool again,” she said. After the funeral she went to visit her grandparents in Virginia. Meanwhile, CeeCee and her parents left for two weeks in Paris. (I got a single short text from her:
Au revoir
.)

My mother and I stayed in West New Hope. She took several days off during the week of the funeral, saying that she didn’t want me to be alone. But I avoided her when I could. I sat on the porch, refusing her offers to play Scrabble (I didn’t need the humiliation) or to take a bike ride (my knee hurt) or to talk.

It wasn’t like her to hover, but she was definitely hovering.

“I guess you heard that Wallis and her mother are leaving town,” she said, lingering in the doorway of the porch.

I said I had heard.

“Apparently, her mother finished writing her book. It’s called
A Study of Existence
. With a long subtitle. Maybe we’ll buy a copy and read it.”

I couldn’t imagine reading a book called
A Study of Existence
. It would probably just take up space on our shelves. There were so many other books to read, anyway, because at that very moment people in coffee shops and at kitchen tables and on buses all over the world were linking phrases and sentences together like boxcars and shipping them off to be published.

“Liz will be back next week, won’t she?” my mother asked.

“Thursday,” I said.

My mother dusted the surface of the table with her hand, then sat down next to me on the wicker couch. The problem with wicker: bugs and dirt were always stuck in its crevices. I poked at a grimy spot on the armrest.

“Adrienne,” my mother said. “You might feel better if you talked about it.”

I pulled at a thread on the hem of my shirt. What was there to say? I was in a mother-daughter book club that killed a person.