Dive

 

 

Dive

  

Samuel brought his knees tight to his chest, pulling hard with his arms as he somersaulted backward into one rotation after another. Then he piked out, a near-perfect vertical, feeling the rush of air as he plummeted toward the water, fingers outstretched. It was the only way he knew to clear his head, that total concentration of energy as he bounced at the tip of the board before giving into the ecstasy of flight. When he ripped through the surface, the release was complete. He let himself drop farther and farther, till his fingertips brushed the pool’s rough bottom at the edge of the drain cover. For a moment he hovered there, suspended and still, then arched up, kicking back to the air.

The gust that had almost pushed him off center was welcome now. He breathed deeply through his mouth. The sun was just cresting over the trees beyond the clubhouse, and he was still alone, still the only one up so early. Even Ella May had never tried to beat him to practice. He would pick up an iced black coffee for her when he stopped for his own, and she, more night owl than lark, would nod at him as she took it, wordless and groggy.

Turning onto his back, he let the water lull him, then swam languidly to the side to pull himself onto the deck. He reached for his towel, rubbing at his hair and body, then slipped on his t-shirt and pushed the towel down into his bag. No sense letting the coach guess he’d been here diving by himself. No solos on the board, the coach said. What’s past is past, the coach said.

He sat on the side, dangling his feet in the water so that when the coach arrived there’d be a reason for the wet decking around him.

He looked over to the river, quiet now though still high from the quick late-winter thaw that two months ago had set it churning. Behind him was the club parking lot and beyond that the road. A car would pass every so often, but none slowed to turn into the gate. He decided to run his laps, then work on his abs and back. While he ran he thought of how it felt to arc out over the water, of those sweet seconds when it seemed he was weightless and the air was his.

He’d taught himself to dive off the side of the club pool when he was four. When he was seven, he joined the swim team—he and Ella May the two youngest, both fast enough to make the relays. He broke the pool record in his age group for butterfly, but swimming didn’t interest him. He did it only because the club manager cleared the pool for team practice, and he could dive for a few minutes before warmups. He and Ella May would take turns. In October, his mother bought him a trampoline. It will give you something to do until the pool opens again, she said—the club maintenance man wouldn’t keep the pool open just for two kids, and besides didn’t they feel how cold the water was? Samuel tried gymnastics, too, but it was too earthbound, the thud of the floor under his feet. Too much noise, too much gravity. When he turned ten, his mother took a membership at the Y, so he could use the indoor pool and dive all winter and she could sit in a chair a few feet away, where the water wouldn’t splash onto her book.

When he was twelve he’d prayed for speed and height. He raced the other children to the edge of the decking, pretending it was a springboard under his feet, the first one in his group to do a clean standing dive. Ella May was second.

“Look at you guys,” his mother said, proud as anything. “Like a pair of flying fish.”

And they were: both dark haired, golden eyed, lean and eager. Tall for their age, equally determined. In photo after photo they’d stand angled toward each other, mirror images.

This year, the club installed a solar heater and opened the pool on the first of May, instead of waiting till Memorial Day. But it was still early morning, earlier than any of the maintenance workers or his coach ever arrived. Having jumped the gate, he was alone as the ghostly mist rose off the pool’s surface into the morning chill, brushing him like an imploring translucent hand. He liked this better than the Y, with its echoing walls and Mommy and Me swim classes.

 “Hey, boy, what’s your ass doing there?”

“Waiting on you, sir.” Samuel kept his eyes on the water, visualized it splitting beneath him. Focus, he said to himself. Don’t think. Focus. He stood up, giving the decking a quick check. But his coach was already walking toward the ladder leading to the high board.

“You’ve been diving on your own, haven’t you? I can tell that you have. The rungs are damp, and your ears are turning all red. Damn it, Samuel.” His coach slammed his swim bag onto the pavement. “You are one dumb shit, diving from that height by yourself. No one here to spot you. Those pikes you do, you could smack your head right on the end of the board if your timing is off. You could hit the water unconscious and be gone from this world in seconds. Seconds!”

Samuel knew this. He always was aware of that moment, that half breath, when he could go either way. The right momentum as you come off the board, the right timing, and your entry is smooth, barely a splash. A little too much push off, a twist that angles too far to one side or the other, and you are head first toward the deck. Every diver knows this: it is God’s hand that guides you. Samuel felt safe in God’s hand. God wouldn’t fuck with him again. Or maybe he would. Maybe God would just let him go.

“I didn’t. . . .”

“You did. Do some laps, boy. I ain’t here to yap at you.”

When he finished, he came out and stood next to the coach panting, his elbows braced on his thighs.

“Thank you for the coffee, by the way,” the coach said, his tone gentler now. “You did bring the second one for me, didn’t you? Seeing as there is no one else here or expected.”

Samuel swallowed hard and nodded.

“It’s done, Samuel. You can’t change that by throwing yourself into the air, betting on whether the Lord will catch you.”

Samuel smiled: we think the same thoughts, we both think in prayer. Then he climbed up to the platform again.

 “What are you doing up here?” Her voice seemed to rise out of nowhere—for a moment he thought she was up on the platform with him, had snuck past while he was running and had been there all along.

“Yeah, you. It’s you I’m talking to.” She was to his right—he could see her from the corner of his eye just beyond the edge of the board, a dark speck flitting against the blue below him. “Ella May,” he whispered. “Not now.” He looked down to the deck, where his coach was talking to one of the club’s maintenance men, gesturing to the bits of slippery mildew starting to spread in the shade at the base of the high-board ladder. The man was holding a spray bottle, nodding.

“Take a dive if you’re going to, Samuel.” Her eyes had been a much deeper blue than the pool shell, almost navy. He closed his eyes and inhaled slowly, then pushed out the air through his mouth in a whoosh. It was something he’d started doing during competitions to shut out the noise and the tension so he could map out the intricacies of the next dive. So he could shut out Ella May.

He opened his eyes, squinting out over the pool. She should be gone. She wasn’t. “Got you this time, Samuel,” she giggled.

He often saw her, just a glimpse, a dark shape that could have been anyone, really. He knew it was her, though. Walking ahead of him in the locker room. Standing by the window when he woke up in the middle of the night. Cartwheeling along the frame of his sunglasses. He never knew where she’d turn up, only that she would. It was rare that she spoke.

“Samuel! You asleep up there?”

“No, coach. Just waiting on you.”

“An easy one first. Back pike. Get working on that elevation. Keep your line of sight over your toes. And don’t over-rotate—I expect to see a rip.”

Samuel was sure he felt Ella May’s breath tickling his back.

The thing about Ella May was that they still hadn’t found her body. The current was still too swift, the river high and rough in the suddenly warmer nights.

On that night the moon had been a faint sliver, the sky mottled with stars.  He and Ella May had walked to Hickey’s Point to watch Lyrid meteors shoot out overhead. Ella May carried a joint in her pocket, Samuel a lighter. Their coats buttoned against the chill, they’d sat cross-legged on the edge of the dock, which swayed as the river flowed underneath, and passed the joint back and forth, letting their hands overlap, their shoulders touch. He’d stood up and pulled her to her feet. No you don’t, she’d said. No you don’t. She laughed, he was sure of it, could recall the sound. He reached for her, tried to pin her arms to her sides as he kissed her neck, which still tasted of chlorine and sweat. Hey, stop it, she’d said, shoving him away. Stop. Maybe he thought she was being playful. Maybe he’d shoved back (maybe hardly at all, a nudge, maybe) as, howling theatrically, he turned and stomped down the dock, his arms lifted toward the stars as if to beg their intervention. When he looked back, she wasn’t there.

Ella May? he’d called. Ella May? He’d called her name over and over again, till his shouting and sobbing had left him hoarse. When he punched 911 into his cellphone he had just enough voice to tell the emergency operator that he was at Hickey’s Point and couldn’t find his friend.

I didn’t see what happened, he told the police that night. I didn’t see. I didn’t see. He shivered in the warm air, leaned in to his mother’s shoulder as she held him.

The fire department organized the search. The six men and two women, all volunteers, used their personal motorboats, as they did every Fourth of July when checking for drunken celebrants setting off fireworks. By the end of the weekend, students from the local college walked the banks on either side, the rush of receiving instructions on what to look for and what to do once it was found nearly equaled by the fear of what it would look like, two, then five, then eight days in the water. By the eighth day people from the towns down water were searching the river, most of them on foot with binoculars hanging on straps from their necks. Most of them  hoping not to be the one who found her but feeling a ghoulish self-importance nonetheless. In all, two sofas, a half-dozen turtles, sixteen railway ties, a baby carriage, a motor scooter (reported stolen), and a bracelet (not hers) were pulled from the foaming water. By the twelfth day, it was assumed that the current had submerged her far down river or that the body—now a patchwork of green, gray, and purple, to shore—had been caught in the rocks somewhere or pulled apart by God knows what.

From his perch at the end of the platform, Samuel could see past the treetops to the river’s far shore. The water flowed placidly now, spring’s rush of melted snow and sudden downpours well over.

“Samuel! Take the damn dive!”

Samuel took another steadying glance at the river. He took one more slow inhale, extending every muscle as he moved swiftly to the edge of the board and propelled himself into the sky. He swung his arms up and over, then forced his legs out till his body was straight and rushing toward the water, where Ella May might be waiting just out of reach.

  

S,L, Wallach

Work by S. L. Wallach appeared recently in Solstice, Kaleidoscope, Thimble Literary Magazine, Seven Hills Review, and Rivanna and is forthcoming in Broad River Review (Rash Award in Fiction finalist) and Black Herald Press. Her opera “Elijah's Violin” was performed in San Francisco several years ago. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.