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Dot remembers that pond better than Ted does.
The July water, warm and waist-deep. Clear as summer wine if they’d stood still long enough, toes touching, feet sinking in the clay; churned to cloudy cider if minnows had nibbled, if sunk branches had scratched, if milfoil had brushed her shins. Any excuse and she’d squealed, jumped into Teddy’s arms, kicked up silt. Any excuse and he’d lifted her, held her right close, goosebumps roughing his skin despite the afternoon heat. Dottie with no varicose veins, no cellulite. The red floral maillot Mama had bought her cupping and accentuating, not digging in. Teddy trim from a season’s planting up north, muscles lean from all that hoeing. The two of them, sun-glazed but shivering. Curved hardnesses pressed against soft.
Dinner bells had rung while they swam, crickets droning around them in the long grass. Poplars had rained yellow-green. Old man willow had averted his gaze, bowed his head to the shallows and wept. Teddy had teased and tickled and pinched. He’d hauled Dottie underwater to keep the horseflies from gouging chunks out their scalps. Only then, her squeal had been genuine; all that time spent curling, pinning up her hair, all that wasted effort. They’d emerged gasping, sputtering, speckled with leaves. Teddy had brushed maple keys from her shoulder blades, called her angel as the little green wings spun free. She couldn’t help but smile.
A fine screen of reeds had spiked the banks, long stems broken where retrievers had ploughed through chasing ducks. In Dot’s mind, those shoots are still tall and swaying and backlit, black dusted with gold. She’d been fifteen when they’d splashed into that darkness together, that first time, on Teddy’s birthday. Fifteen when she’d torn the leg elastic on her new swimsuit, pulling the fabric too quickly aside. The ripping high-pitched, a whip-crack that had stopped Teddy’s clumsy prodding. He’d stopped and looked at her. Waited for her say-so.
He’d waited.
It’d been all the comfort Dottie needed.
Don’t worry, she’d said, teeth chattering between kisses. Keep going.
She’d bled for him in that pond. Without worrying too much about love or marriage or what Mama would say when she saw what Dottie’d done to her new suit. She didn’t care about all the possible thens; she was focused on now. On Teddy. On not getting caught.
The reeds were magic camouflage, hiding their bare nethers from all but Jesus’ sight. They’d kissed in the shade, lips bluing. His thighs beneath hers strong but so cold. She’d flinched as his chill pushed its way up and in. Freezing her from the inside out.
It’ll get better, Dottie had told herself, tasting salt and iron. Hang in there.
The water had roiled painfully between them for a couple of minutes, and then it was still. After, Teddy explored Dot’s smoothnesses and nubs, places where she was now slick or tender or numb. He’d blushed and fumbled to re-lace his trunks. “Here,” she’d said, taking the strings, double-knotting them. Tugging to make sure the bow would hold.
Laughing, the bold Teddy she’d always known had returned, replacing the shy. With a wink, he’d clasped her shoulders, puckered for another kiss. Dot had leaned in—and Teddy heaved, dunking her head-first. Water simmered past her nose and ears, fizzing like popping candy. The world was muted, a shimmer of light above the murk. Holding her breath, Dottie had stayed under. Listening to the hollow thump of Teddy’s feet running away. Squinting against the grit. Exhaling bubble by bubble. Sinking deeper, into silence.
Her lungs burned by the time she’d heard muted sloshing, Teddy’s trophy-winning stroke pulling him smoothly back. A few seconds later, his shadow sailed over her. He’d kicked carefully, arms scooping, reaching down. Grinning, she’d dodged his hands. Made him squirm a bit before surfacing.
• • •
They’d taken their honeymoon in a tent by the pond’s shores. Drifted their summers away on orange air mattresses. Swam through the sadness after one Baby Boy and two Baby Girl Brantferds were born quiet and blue. They’d gone there so much over the years, Ted used to joke, their skin hasn’t grown old—it’s just permanently water-wrinkled.
But this new puddle on their front lawn, this mattress-sized pool trenched between the begonias and the curb, this is not their pond. Theirs was filled with concrete thirty-odd years ago. Capped with a drive-in, then a parking lot, then a discount outlet mall. Theirs is cement supporting cement, smoothed without a ripple.
This one is all wrong, all Ted’s.
A lace of white cloud scudders overhead, as if God’s drawn Chantilly across His window this morning. Sunlight filters through the gaps, bright but not all that warm. In frost on the porch railing, Dot’s handprints melt into her husband’s as she huffs down the steps. Slowly, slowly, she follows his trail to the water. It’s deep green, impenetrable, black where muck meets grass. She shudders, seeing the night sky trapped in its surface; thousands of stars glinting between ghosted branches of elms, larches, pine. There are no crickets chirping here, no sunny birdsong, just a low-level electric hum. The shore is fringed with ferns, not reeds. Around it, the air smells like rain.
Ted’s been gawking at the thing, on and off, for days. Gaze unfixed. Arms crossed or hanging listless. Sometimes rocking gently, squelching from heel to toe, sometimes barely moving. That’s how Dot finds him now, standing right where her marigolds and peonies should be, a lone sentinel planted in the embankment. Barefoot and still wearing the same overbleached boxers he slept in. The knobs of his spine showing through a thin undershirt, hardly any meat left on him. She used to love running her hands up under Teddy’s work shirts, feeling the heat of his skin, the ridged muscles, the fur on his solid belly—but Ted’s mostly wisp now. If Dot scratched his back the way she used to, he’d probably catch under her fingernails, crumble, and blow away.
“Where’s your housecoat, love? Where’s your shoes?”
Her guts clench when he doesn’t answer.
“You’ll catch your death,” she says, louder this time, just in case. No response. For all his flaws, Ted isn’t deaf. Mama used to call him a master of selective hearing—he’d tune out whenever fishing shows came on, or when the in-laws popped by, or when the dishes needing doing—but most of the time Dot couldn’t complain. Teddy’s got a head full of figures, she’d kid, wriggling her arse, which is why he sticks with me.
But at breakfast this morning, Ted flat ignored her. Almond milk and rolled oats turned to concrete in the bowl while he stared out the window, not eating no matter how much honey Dot added. Few weeks ago, he’d started drifting when she was only half through explaining what happened on Days, and wouldn’t clue in again until Final Jeopardy. A couple days later, he’d traipsed round their front garden for hours, not mowing the nice little lawn, not picking her any daisies, just moseying here and there. Trampling the impatiens. Snagging his pants on the bleedin’ heart bush. Paying no attention to where his feet strayed. And last Tuesday, when she got home from visiting Mama at the boneyard, when she’d hollered herself red at the shocking state of their yard—the grass submerged under God-knows how much water, her blue-ribbon roses lagooned, the little pottery boy and girl disappeared with their little pottery umbrella, and tropical ferns bursting round the shoreline instead of reeds—Ted hadn’t said a single thing.
“What you doing out here?” she asks now, quiet as her slippers, when, really, she still wants to yell, What the hell’d you get this for?
She can’t make head nor tails of it. Ted pale as a fish belly, stringy-legged by this unexpected pool, ready to dive. Ready to go—who knows where. Who knows why. Ted’s never been much of a traveler. Come harvest, he’d go where the work took him and no further. He got in good with local farmers, charmed them with his broad shoulders, his stamina. Before long, he got first dibs on the nearest fields; so if he wasn’t in by dinner each night, guaranteed he’d be back for bed. And when the crops started growing too thick and fast for his old body to reap, he drove right down to the local carpet factory, took a job assembling samples for other men to schlepp door-to-door. Must’ve bored him shitless, Dottie thought, being inside all day, doing that fiddly, repetitive work. But Teddy swore he didn’t mind. He’d just grin and say he got more than enough excitement each night, right here at home. As usual, Dot would snort or flick him with a tea towel and say, Be serious—but she knew, deep down, he was honest. He wasn’t a wanderer, her Teddy. He liked things the way they’d always been.
Until this goddamn pool appeared out of nowhere. Smothering her plants. Looking nothing like their pond, what with Ted getting the details so wrong. The foreign waters washing him so far away.
“A cup of coffee would go down nice,” Dot says, changing tack. She takes him by the elbow, musters a weak smile. “Come on inside. If you’re good, I’ll even give you a bit of sugar.”
Without the punch line, the old gag falls flat. On the double-double, Teddy used to say, making a lewd gesture that Dot never quite got—but now Ted misses his cue, distracted by reflections.
“Please.” He balks at her touch and for one stupid second Dot thinks, My hands are too cold. But they aren’t, they aren’t. They’re spotted and creased, with bulbed knuckles that trap precious rings on her fingers, and so hot they’re bloated smooth. He balks, Dot thinks, because she’s a stranger. Shriveled where she used to be plump, more than plump where she used to be taut. Over the years, she’s become Mrs. Sprat. And poor Ted is more and more Jack.
“Wait,” Dot says, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t. He’s up to the hips in water. “Wait.” He keels over without a splash. Arms and legs starfishing. He doesn’t wait. Doesn’t float. Doesn’t sink. He dissolves in the shimmering black.
“Wait,” she says, knowing she should plunge after him, clothes and all. She should dredge the deeps, tow him out of there with teeth and nails, claw his thin undershirt to ribbons if she has to. She should squeal and jump into his arms—any excuse—but Teddy’s not there to catch her, and this pond is his, not theirs.
“Come back,” she whispers, reaching out to nothing. Her mind leaps as her body edges. Fighting thoughts of hospital bills and nosy neighbors and what will happen to his pension and how to fill a casket if they don’t have a body. She stops well back from the waterline. Afraid to touch that darkness. Afraid of getting lost in it, too. Just plain afraid.
Closing her eyes, she prays so hard her temples ache. Sweet Jesus, she thinks, over and over, until a scratchy old voice interrupts.
“Keep your goddamned oats,” Ted says, horking a gob of phlegm on her feet.
“You scared me,” Dot says, scrubbing the mess off with a tissue. Wishing she could stuff him full of fried-egg sandwiches. Fish and chips. Grease and starch and dripping red meat. Wishing she could dig her fingers into his back, pull him close, press her ear to his chest. Wishing she could hear the dry thump of his heart. Wishing she could be sure he’s here and whole and solid. Wishing it was really him.
• • •
Next morning when Dot rolls over, the bed is empty beside her. The blankets are thrown back, cooling. She gropes at the bedside table, gets her eyes on. Eases her legs over the mattress edge, joints stiff and aching. She swears she can hear them swelling, if she listens hard, liquid slopping around knuckles and knees. Her wrists splash as she takes her pills, two pinks and a blue. Outside, there’s a squeal of laughter. Childish and overly loud. More splashing—yes, Dot can definitely hear it—the swirl of limbs through water. She groans to her feet, hips and ankles sloshing her over to the window.
The pond is still there.
A flash of scarlet in the ferns. Floral and ribbons. A glimpse of slender legs bowed. Fronds tremble, leaves scissoring in the breeze. Dot blinks and the color is confetti. It’s red petals lilting. It’s vanishing in black water. Another blink and there’s only Ted, not splashing. Disintegrating in starlight.
She picks up the phone, dials Mama’s number. It rings twice before she remembers.
Cradling the receiver, she concentrates on breathing. Don’t panic, she tells herself, but her heart is chugging and the rest of her’s trying to outpace it. She races past the bathroom on her way to the front door. “Ted?” she calls down the hall—“Ted?”—poking her head into the spare room, the nursery, the kitchen. “Ted?”
It’s pointless, Dot knows—God, she saw what she saw—but each time he goes a part of her refuses to believe it. A part is always surprised.
Another part wonders what it’ll be like. If, when.
On the way out, she grabs a fleece jacket and throws it on over her flannel. She jams her feet into sheepskin boots, hands into wool mittens. After twenty minutes outside, her beige leathers are soaked dark brown, the frilled hem of her nightie drenched with dew. Circling the pond, she wears a path in the mud where dahlias once bloomed, where the crab-apple tree dropped its fruit, where poor little Whiskers fertilized the roses. All of it, all of it, is covered in water and sludge. All of it drowned with Ted.
Come back, she thinks, then aloud, so he’ll know he’s missed. “Please come back.”
For a second, the pool contracts. Dot calls again, again. Echoes distort her voice, filling her hearing aid with robotic feedback. Words screech and deepen; now girlish, now rasping. Now an exhausted old man’s.
“Sorry, angel.”
Hunkering over, Dot wrings the damp from her nightgown with furious twists. Don’t look, she thinks, knotting the pain up in her skirts. Her hands are shaking. His are whittling air. It isn’t him yet. Not ’til he gets his bearings.
“Where’d you go,” she says at last, risking a glance up. Ted is dripping, blue-lipped. His eyes are full of the pond.
“Nowhere,” he says. “Right here.”
• • •
They need groceries but Dot just doesn’t have the energy. The trolleys are too big nowadays, the carry-baskets too heavy. She can’t maneuver either while swatting Ted’s hands away from the cherries, the shrink-wrapped cold cuts, the coloring books, the cotton undies, the fizzy drinks, the gross milk chocolate eggs hiding cheap toys inside. If she turns her back for a second, just one second, he’s gone. Then everyone looks at her funny—how could you lose your husband so goddamn quick, they all say, without saying a thing, talking with smirks and side-eyes—and she blushes until sweating, searching for some nice aproned boy to mop up the fern leaves and puddles Ted’s left behind him.
Sometimes Dot wonders if a harness would be best, clip a leash to his back the way mamas do when they’re too tired to run after their toddlers.
Sometimes she avoids the supermarket altogether, takes Ted to Jim’s Surf ’n’ Turf instead.
We got enough to survive until tomorrow, she thinks, a brass bell clanging as they push open the restaurant’s glass door. Inside, Jim Bluinn’s hanging glasses behind the bar. Chatting with the lunch crew. The beer-swillers in fluorescent vests. The interstate drivers. The girls talking books, their rosy-cheeked bundles asleep in prams. Jim’s polite to them all, even when they gawp at his bulging eyes and the badly stitched cleft above his lip. Mama always said Jimmy was drop-dead gorgeous on the inside, though it took years for Dot to agree. Doesn’t matter now, she thinks. Mama’s gone and Jim’s a hell-bent bachelor. He’s too old to be serving up drinks, slipping maraschino cherries into Shirley Temples, knifing the heads off overfull pints. Too well-off to be waiting.
“Dorothy,” Jim says and Dot mumbles a greeting. He lifts his chin at Ted. Ted grunts, follows a pretty hostess to the furthest available booth.
“Thank you,” Dot says as the girl doles out menus. Across the table, Ted’s washed out, thin and gray as the early winter light. Beside them, the picture window’s blinds are rolled right up to the valance. What a view, she thinks, scowling at the parking lot. Jim’s shiny new pickup. Three-way traffic lights, pulsing red. Cars taking turns at the intersection. The highway stretching away, away, away, through a light flurry of snow. Dot looks for the little ball-bearing cord to lower the shade, finds it triple-looped around a hook near her hip. She works at it for a minute, but the metal’s too flimsy to grip. When the waitress comes over to help, Dot says, It’s fine, dear, really—just a whim, and orders a club sandwich and fries for Ted, with extra mayo on the side.
“And you?”
“Oh, I’m fine.” Dot pats her belly, acid burning from bowels to craw. It was a dumb idea, coming here. Another stupid splurge. “Got to watch my waistline.”
Staring outside, Ted eats mechanically. Bacon grease and ketchup drip down his skinny wrists as he nibbles instead of biting, packing his cheeks like a chipmunk. Off-white mush foams down his chin as he takes in too much, forgetting to swallow.
“Here,” Dot says, wiping, wiping. “Better in than out—right, love?”
A glob of half-chewed bread splats on the table.
Once the plates are cleared, Dot lies and tells the waitress it’s Ted’s birthday, just for the free cake. A team of fake smiles brings it over, singing and sparkling. They take one look at Ted and refrain from making him stand while they clap and sing. Jim sends over a beer that Ted won’t drink, so Dot sips at it until her heart palpitates.
Mashing the chocolate wedge on her plate, she makes a paste that won’t need much chewing and spoons it into Ted’s mouth. Pale worms of light twist across his face, twitching on his bony beak and slack jaw. Constellations twinkle in his wide pupils, reflected off the pond bogging up the parking lot outside.
“We’ll get caught, Dottie,” Ted says, brown guck drying in the corners of his mouth. “We’re dead meat if we’re caught.”
“Look here,” Dot says, stopping his ramble with another mouthful. She rubs his throat with unsteady fingers, coaxes the dessert down. “Look at me.” Palm greens unfurl in her peripheral vision. It should be reeds, she thinks, again and again. Where the hell are the reeds? A dark sedan skims over the water outside, honking at a blurred streak of red. Ted’s gaze swims from the window to Dot and back. A slow, blank lap.
“Come on.” Dot licks, thumbs his lips. Tosses a handful of bills on the table and a few coins for the waitress, for Jim. Putting on her coat, she glares at the pool. Prays Ted doesn’t fall in on the way to the car. “Let’s go for a drive.”
• • •
They’d ridden double home from their pond that day, Teddy steering, Dottie on the handlebars, leaning back with legs outstretched, throbbing between. On her own, she could’ve raced back to Mama’s in fifteen minutes, tops. But Teddy was being extra careful. And Dottie had made him go the long way, just to prolong the moment.
In the car, it takes more than half an hour to reach the old gully; fifty years of commercial development, blocked shortcuts and traffic have done a real number on travel time. On the way, Dot points out where things used to be. The Dairy Queen. The Pop Shoppe. The JP’s office where she and Teddy jumped the broom. The Women’s & Children’s hospital. The drop-in clinic Mama brought Teddy to after Jimmy Bluinn broke his nose that time.
Once in a while, Ted butts in and corrects her. Sometimes he’s even right.
“Here we are,” Dot says as they pull into the outlet mall’s lot. She angles the car between faded white lines, switches off the windshield wipers and ignition. Between hatchbacks and sedans and SUVs, poplars stand naked in curbed cement beds. Willows huddle on raised medians, branches trailing in slush. Maple leaves blanket the knees of pale stick figures painted flat in simple wheelchairs. “We’re here, Ted. We’re here. Can’t you see?”
Static sparks as she squeezes his knee. Twigs rub against twigs. Snow falls but doesn’t last; the flakes melt into puddles, small and lined with salt.
“Are you with me, love?” Clutching hard, Dot jerks her head at the window, at the concrete pillars and lampposts and trolley bays. Their pond is long dried, long buried. “Are you with me?”
Ted sighs and unbuckles his seatbelt. Vines curl out of vents in the dashboard. Cattails sprout from the hood. Ferns get tangled in the door as he opens it, letting in a gust of warm cedar air. Long grasses shield the car from passers-by; people checking their phones, pushing carts, crossing the lot with hardly a splash. Well-used to avoiding winter boot-soakings, they skirt the wrong pond’s shore without looking up even once. Without noticing it’s even there.
Among parkas and dark jeans: frills and red flowers. Ribbons. Sun-browned legs.
“Don’t go,” Dot says to Ted, leaning over to kiss him. His wrinkled cheek has no firm left to it, the muscle sagged to jowl. Pink lipstick smears on papyrus skin. Flesh presses against bone. Through rough whiskers, she feels the hard edge of Ted’s molars.
“Are you sure?”
“Of course,” she replies. “Yes, of course.”
“We’ll get caught,” Teddy says, whispering but excited. As he shimmies to get out, Dot yanks on his sleeve, clings. He writhes, bull-snorting, hankering for escape. She scrabbles at his narrow chest, pins it with an elbow. Makes a cage of her hand and traps the seat buckle. Panting, she clips him back in place.
“Shut the door,” Dot says and, eventually, he does. She slumps against the wheel. Closes her eyes. All her shock absorbers are shot. Her forehead bounces on her knuckles as the car rocks back and forth—“Don’t move a muscle,’ she warns—then finally settles. Springs in the seat wail, then fall silent. The car fills with a stale scent. Wet cotton dried on the body. The musk of creases, of yeast.
Dot breathes in deep, holds it. Listens to the hollow thump of her heart. Exhales bubble by bubble. Lungs burning, she looks in the rear-view. Wincing, she says, “Let’s go home.”
Ted smiles and relaxes against the headrest. “Happy birthday to me,” he says, a hint of the old charm flitting across his features. Laughing, he reaches over and takes Dot’s hand. Threads his fingers through hers.
• • •
For half a second, Dot considers gunning the accelerator when they pull into the driveway. Forget stopping, she thinks, with the thirsty pond here again, lapping at the asphalt, waiting to drink Teddy in. Forget stopping, letting him step into those waters, letting him go. Forget stopping. Rev through the living room wall instead. Crash through the chesterfield and the TV. Smash the china cabinet with Ted’s old trophies inside and the porcelain ladies he bought on their anniversaries, forty-eight pastel dancers with arms and legs stretched to forever. Hurtle through them and keep going. Leave tire tracks across the kitchen floor. Grind through the hessian sacks of oats and lentils, the organic wheat germ, the antioxidant red wine, the jarred broccoli and beets that have done him no good, no good at all. Horse-power through everything, she thinks. Make the house collapse in their wake, trapping them in the bedroom together. Just them—no Teddy, no Dottie, no tiny blue-lipped mistakes—just Ted and Dot. Let them be each other’s airbag, each other’s emergency blanket. Let them be here, now, alone.
The car rolls to a halt, its bumper kissing the garage door. The parking brake ratchets up between the front seats. Keys click. The engine pings and pops as it cools. Ted opens his door. Braces himself against the frame. Creaks his way out.
Dot sighs and watches him go.
“You too,” she says to the mirror.
Dot’s joints are rock pools at high tide. Her feet are overfilled water balloons, wobbling as they hit ground. ‘Is this your fault?’ she mutters, getting out of the car, reaching the waterside just in time to see Ted go under. She hates the quaver in her voice, hates knowing she doesn’t have it in her to pull him back out.
Ferns stretch into reeds along the shoreline as she trudges back to the car. Poplars replace sugar dates as she fumbles at the visor, finally pressing the garage door opener. Gunpowder breezes waft across the road. Golden retrievers bark in the distance. She heads inside, aims for a shelf Ted half-built, half-propped on boxes of samples. She digs through tents and tarps and sleeping bags. Rustles up dust. Cobwebs. Finally finds one of their old air mattresses, orange plastic patched with duct tape.
It takes hours for Dot to blow the thing up, one shallow puff after another, but she’s got time. The snow has stopped, the clouds wandering. By her feet, the pool is black and still, its silver stars shining. When the mattress is finally firm, Dot is light-headed. Her arms shake as she slides it into the water. Then she has to sit, right there in the muck, and take a breather before climbing on. The plastic seams are sharp with age; they bite into her hands as she clings, pushing off without getting wet. Floating on outer space.
Afraid to paddle, Dot lets the breeze take her where it wants. Ear pressed to the scalloped pillow, she listens to sounds amplified by water and air. Ripples thrumming beneath her. Wavelets flapping. Bullfrogs croaking. Electricity crackling from shore to shore. At dusk, she looks up as Jim Bluinn’s pickup roars past. She watches the headlights shrink from bonfires to sparks, then lowers her head back down. The temperature has dropped with the sun, but Dot’s been cold so long it makes no difference. Arms tucked in close, she shuts her eyes and listens hard.
There, she imagines, recognizing the smooth rhythm. There, the in and out of Ted’s medal-winning stroke.
It will get better, Dot tells herself, shivering, holding her breath. Waiting for him to come find her.