You pull the car over. Slowly it rumbles over dead leaves and crackling branches until coming to a rest behind a tree leaning out into the street.
The Perfect Secret Parking Spot.
“Focus on the next thing that will kill you”. Like an astronaut, you transfer your anxieties. The “Getting Ticketed/Getting Towed”, flows easily into “Forgetting Things”. Should you leave a towel on a tree in case the car gets towed? And if it does, should you keep your cell phone with the towel? Why not throw them into a bag with some water. And a snack. Maybe some shoes. And what if someone sees you?
And then you decide to just get out of the car.
This funny, hidden patch of water. “Hardy” Pond, named after a family, but oddly enough, maybe named for its sturdiness. The ability to always bounce back.
Dirty as the Charles River, with nothing to recommend a real estate category of Waterfront View. All these houses around have turned their backs to the water. As if it’s just a forest, or a desert. As if everyone looks past it, and not at it. If you ever got an apartment where you could see this, you’d sit staring at it with all your lights off. Every night.
Your house was built on the top of the hill, 50 years before you were born. As a “vacation cabin” for fancy families from Boston. (But there was a couple who lived there, the only owners-the time machine you wish so desperately for could really come in handy to meet them)
Hardy Pond was known as a swimmer’s paradise. You easily imagine your forefathers as kids skipping down the dirt roads in early April, lilacs blooming like crazy. And they would jump in with no hesitation. Swim clear across with not a care in the world.
But the entire time you were growing up,all you heard about was pollution. Drowned shopping carts, all covered with weeds. And you vaguely remember hearing stories of it being “cleaned up” since then. Dredged, trash removed. What do they do to the water to purify it? If there’s no chemical factory, what’s the worst that could be in the water?
As long as you don’t put your head under, you’ll be safe, you tell yourself. No danger of swallowing, or getting that eye disease that Katherine Hepburn got when she was thrown into a canal in Venice (was that sewage?). She cried constantly for the rest of her life.
And then there’s that ghost story movie about young college boys in the 20’s, in love with a woman. She hits her head on a stone fireplace and they think she’s dead. Naturally, they sacrifice their Model T and run it into the lake, with her in the backseat.
She revives just long enough for them to see her clutching at the back window.
“I’m still alive”
Why didn’t they jump in to save her?
Too much trouble to undo the spats and fling your waistcoat aside.
===
He had already died once.
She was 14, so he must’ve been 17. The brink of graduating to Real Life. The first adult she had known as a child, her first and constant hero. He was a tall blonde man when he first met her again.
It took a long time for it to register that this was the boy she had played with, The one she had followed around wherever he would allow her. And when he began the Games of Cruelty, she was his eager assistant. She played right along, even when she had to play captive.
What do you call it when you like it? When you like to see the fire in his eyes? Like being hurt because it’s for him? Knowing that he has to do all of this to you.
Because there are the words he can’t say, can’t express all those things like a lover. But he has his books of philosophy, and he was teaching her well. All those grand words.
After that, any other boy was ruined for her. The reason you shouldn’t kiss your brother is . . . (nobody else can take his place)
She thought he died at 17.
And he did.
He drank too much, took some pills and went swimming. Tried everything he could to kill himself without getting hurt.
No, he saved his hurt for his Note. But it was talked about, and she never saw him after he walked out of the kitchen. (SCENE!) He was sad, scrunched, not talking, especially not to her. And he was screaming just a little too loud.
He was found floating. Which was ironic, because he never could float. Not when he was alive.
==
This man who was writing to her. Who yes, said he was her brother and yes, he had been found. A sudden new ending to the story. Not floating, but trying. In the water. And rushed to a hospital. Or was it a jail?
And they didn’t let him out until just now. 4 weeks earlier. That was how long it took to find her.
And she looked into the eyes of this man, with crinkles around his eyes. Homeless, dirty blonde hair genuinely dirty. But still his halo. And she fell in love with him all over again. The body she had watched him grow into awkwardly, was now his own. But he still felt like a giant, too big for normal people furniture. His beautiful hands and legs sticking out at funny angles, no matter how much he tried to keep himself folded up into a tiny shape.
It was the same man, and an imposter at the same time. She was eager to greet him, to bring him back, no matter who he was. He even told her about all his past lives, all the people he was before this moment. But she knew the scar on his neck, on his wrist (the one that matched hers, when they were first playing at suicide.) These telltale landmarks brought his body back to her. The mirror of her own body.
A dream come true, a ghost returning.
==
Before you realize it, your naked feet touch the wet cold shore. Funny how the transition comes only when the fingers of cold touch your toes. Everything else is a dream until the water’s edge wakes you up. Lots of rocks and maybe glass, you keep an eye out and only put your feet down gingerly. Up to your knees now, cold. The thought of glass makes you more eager to save your feet, you step further and further in, wanting to float. Your hips. There is a brown seaweed floating on the top of the water, stringy like hair, but somehow, not as gross. You clear the water in front of you and soon you find it was only a phenomenon of the shore. Deep breath, your breasts and your shoulders. You keep an eye out for anyone who might be watching you. Anyone who keeps off their lights to look at the water.
The morning is slightly cold, but not so bad. If you do this at first light, you risk mosquitoes, another reason for quick full body immersion. You’ll avoid the commuters who want to distinguish their days by calling in an emergency. An Evil Do-Gooder who wants to “save” you from waters where you must’ve fallen in. You have no desire to be rescued, or to be interrupted.
Especially if you are going to swim across today.
There are a family of ducks. They make ducks sounds to scare you, and then scare themselves enough to fly away. Nothing out of the ordinary. No sense of alarm, like you are a crocodile. Crocodile. Now, you are well aware that is a false fear. But there are other critters, a snapping turtle would be the worst. Probably. Do they always swim underwater? Do they attack unprovoked? And now, you’ve been doing strokes for a few minutes now. Flip over to get a new perspective. Everything looks different now. The bumper of your red car is barely visible behind the tall grass by the shore. You are a good way out now. There’s no easy way to measure the distance, but it’s further than the kiddie area would be. No safety lines here. Further than you ventured in your teens. The first time you swam across any pond was Walden when you were 19. And even then, you weren’t sure why you waited so long. Like taking a journey, just put one foot in front of the other. The main thing to get over was fear.
Don’t think about the turtles.
Next time wear flippers. You can heal if they nip at your legs, but you want to keep all your toes.
==
if you should tell anyone at all about swimming across all the ponds of Massachusetts?
Why bother? It only matters to him.
==
You had kept swimming because your parents told you to.
If you stop now, if you hesitate because of him now, you’ll never go back into the water. And he wants and wanted you to be happy.
So you kept swimming. Swam farther, swam deeper. Never knowing that he was trapped. in a white building. In a white belted jacket. The hero prince tied up in a fortress, reports of his death greatly exaggerated and believed. Caught in a colorless world. Maybe white, maybe in the clouds.
While you were out in the world. Mooning over him, seeing him in every tree in the North American landscape. Blooming flowers, the peach tree in the backyard. Every spring, you imagined he’d return to Earth, like Persephone. He just didn’t take the form of a human anymore. It’s a lot harder to be loyal to someone, to be patient, when they cannot ever talk to you again. When they are only a tree.
