Monday morning, I pushed through a gaggle of girls to get into the Y’s locker room. Half-naked teenagers were shedding their flannel pajama pants like winter plumage before shoving their long hair into silicone swim caps.
Seriously? The one morning I was actually looking forward to the pool being deserted so I can do some real thinking, I have to listen to a bunch of chickie-poos complain about their American history homework?
I stowed my things in a locker, then climbed over the pile of backpacks blocking the door to the pool deck. Elkie stood beside the pool talking with the head lifeguard. “What’s the deal, Elkie?” I asked after looping my towel over the skimmer hanging on the wall. “Why are all these kids here before dawn?”
“The city pool is closed for repairs. We’ll have to share the pool with the high school swim teams for the next week or so. I was just trying to negotiate us a couple of lanes. Dwight can only give us one today.”
“It’s amazing that high school kids would voluntarily get up this early to practice.”
“When lane space is scarce, you take what you can get. Where’s Vanessa?”
“I think she’s sleeping in this morning. We had kind of a hard weekend.”
“You need to take it easy on that woman,” Elkie said with a wry smile. “At least we’ll be down one person this morning. I’ll try to figure out if there is a better time for us to train before tomorrow morning.” As it turned out, Lara’s Ladies only consisted of Elkie, Celeste, and me that morning. We were easily able to share the one lane without swimming into each other. Still, the increased noise and splashing coming from the other lanes made it difficult to find my rhythm. I had to stop twice and restart my stroke count. At one point, I hung on to the wall and pretended to be drinking from my water bottle in order to watch the girls in the next lane chat. They seemed so comfortable with each other. High school would have been different if I had felt the support of a team.
I pushed off the pool wall to do another thousand yards. The water muffled the high school kids’ voices into a soothing ambience. I drifted further into a meditative state with each repetitive motion. The revelations of the paper bag floated through my mind as if they were scenes in a book. Each time I read through its pages, the truth became easier to absorb.
Mama was gone; I was still alive.
Dale had found me; I was still alive.
He knows where I am. I can stop running.
I flipped over and switched to backstroke for a few lengths. I looked up at the spinning fans in the roof releasing noxious fumes from the room. PawPaw’s letter had released poisonous lies from my memory.
My grandparents wanted me. Mama did not.
I tried to feel something akin to compassion for my mother. I wanted to see her as a girl that didn’t know any better, but that wasn’t the truth. She had parents that were good, loving people. She had a home. It might have been difficult, but she could have gone back to Alders.
And where was she during those years I was with Grammy and PawPaw? Rehab? Jail? Why bother coming back at all? If she didn’t want me, she could have put me up for adoption or given me to the state. For Christ’s sake, an orphanage would have been better than the farm.
I tried to empty my mind and concentrate on counting my strokes until my heart stopped pounding in my ears. Mama is dead. Really, really dead.
I am alive.
I flipped toward the concrete pool bottom and kicked off the wall. I felt powerful sliding through the water in a streamline position. It felt strange to think that I could ever be free of my memories of Mama and Dale. It would be painful to loosen the heavy chain of hate around my heart; my heart muscles had grown around the iron links.
***
Swept up in a wave of youthful exuberance, I followed the girls into the locker room at 6:30. Like an ornithologist observing a flock of birds, I watched them while I slowly brushed my teeth. Their slender limbs bent at odd angles as their pink bodies quivered in the cold locker room air. They showered in their bathing suits, hiding their nearly perfect young bodies under wet lycra as they lobbed shampoo and bars back and forth. A hush fell over the room when Elkie entered the shower room naked. Her well-muscled body was beautiful, although time and disease had left their marks on it. Her right breast sagged next to the neat pink scar marking where her left breast had once been. An older scar, now faded to a slick white line, snaked across her belly. Elkie proudly wore her scars like badges of honor.
Are they grossed out by Elkie’s scars? Do they think she should hide them under a towel? What are these girls hiding under their suits?
When I was their age I would have been hiding the black and blue handprints on my arms and hips. I would have been hiding my shame.
What am I hiding from now?
I spit out the toothpaste in my mouth and stepped into the closest shower. I turned my back to the girls and stripped off my suit. Nothing happened. No fireworks. No earthquake. The girls didn’t laugh at me. I didn’t offend their sensibilities because I didn’t carry my scars on the outside of my body. They ignored me and accepted me as being part of the same species. I let the warm water relax both my muscles and my nerves. Standing naked among strangers was a big step and I wasn’t going to rush through it.
The girls continued to flap around until I heard someone yell that the bus was there. Suddenly, the girls were gone. Only Elkie and I were left in the locker room. “What a madhouse!” Elkie said, shaking her hair out. “They put their bags everywhere and they used up all the hot water. Celeste was smart to do a few more yards and let them clear out before she showers.” Elkie dried off and stepped into a pair of jeans. A faded sweatshirt completed her outfit. From the back she could have been one of the teenagers. She hooked a pair of heavy suede gloves to her belt loop and stepped into yellow work boots for her volunteer work at the local raptor rehab center. “I’m off to nurse an owl that was hit by a car. Will we see you tonight?”
“Yeah,” I replied as I wound a towel around my torso and grabbed a second out of my bag. My skin tingled as I dried off. I had opened myself up to scrutiny and had been accepted. When I left the pool that day, I felt cleansed of another small portion of the shame still weighing down my heart.
***
On my way to the office, I called Jane. She’d left four messages on my cell phone in the last two days. The most recent message was about contacting a lawyer about the deeds in the paper bag.
Tom answered the phone. I could hear him cooking something in the background. “Is she eating again?” I asked.
“The Prednisone seems to have kicked in. She’s eating everything in sight.” Jane mumbled something in the background about paying him back for his teenaged years. Tom chuckled under his breath. “I’m making omelets. You want to come over?”
“Thanks, but I’m already on my way to work. She called earlier. Can I talk to her?”
Tom handed the phone to his mother. Jane’s voice sounded stronger when she said, “Did you get my message? I keep thinking about those properties. I was doing some research on the web last night. Was one of those mines the Alders Asbestos mine?”
“I don’t know. Probably. My grandfather managed several of the mines in Alders.”
Jane sucked in her breath. “Lara, that land is worth a fortune. You have got to talk to a lawyer about that.”
“That’s nice, but the money is not what’s important to me at this point. Look, I’ll call the lawyer that drew up the will today, okay?”
“Are you in the car?”
“I just left the Y. I’m pulling into the Bettel parking lot now.”
“How’s the training going?”
“It’s going well. I think I’ll be ready for the race in March.”
“I think it’s great that you’re doing this. I never did things like that. I jogged every day for years but always by myself. In retrospect, it would have been nice to have people to run with. I was never very good with the whole friends thing.”
“Something else we have in common.” I pulled into a parking space near the entrance and sat in the cold car to finish our conversation.
“Yeah but you’re young. You still have time to do something about that. You don’t want to end up like me, old and decrepit. Can you believe, not one of the people from the Rotary Club or the museum board have even as much as called to see how I’m doing? I’ve known those people for decades and—poof—totally forgotten. Stick with this triathlon thing. It’s good to have people who understand what you’ve been through.”
“We don’t talk about it very much.”
“Still, they know.” I could hear Jane cover the mouthpiece and cough. The coughing seemed shallower these days. “So, what do you say we actually go on that shopping trip? I’m still feeling pretty good.” I smiled at myself in the rearview mirror as I tucked a loose strand of hair into the loose bun on the top of my head. Jane had yet to directly say anything about meeting Dale on Saturday. I suspected she was too polite to say what she thought about him. She preferred to talk around the subject like this.
“Sure. It’s a date. We’ll go this weekend.” Just then, Letitia minced her way between the cars and yanked the lobby doors open. She was carrying a tall cup of coffee with a gas station logo on the side.
“Jane, can we talk about this later? Letitia just walked by. She must be in a wicked bad mood if she stopped at the Kwiky Mart for coffee instead of going to Starbucks. I want to save my new interns before Letitia starts stacking up bodies on the eighth floor.” I hung up and texted Stacy and Brad, the two interns Frank Mariano had assigned to me: “Letitia in bad mood. Don’t work at the empty desks on the 8th floor. Work in my office today.”