Light Lifting (15 page)

She sees the water coming and then she doesn't. The river rolls in and out of her vision as she falls. She is halfway around, on her side, when she hits and the surface stings hot against her skin like an open-palmed slap extending from her cheek all the way down to her left pinkie toe. Spread out across the top, the impact knocks the wind out of her and for a second, while everything is distorted, she thinks maybe she has ruptured an ear drum and tastes a trace of blood spilling into her mouth. The fall is so awkward she barely sinks and instead burps back to the surface. She pulls in one clear gulp of air, and though she can't feel anything, not the temperature of the water or the air, she knows she is nearly perfectly unhurt. She forces her mind all the way down her arms and legs and makes her fingers and toes wiggle on command. She concentrates and tries to look below, but the dark and the silt obscure everything beyond her knees. When she extends her big toe and tries to feel around with her feet, she registers only an emptiness that might continue all the way to the bottom or might end in a wall of metal six inches farther down. As far as she can tell, the only hardness is the water itself and there is nothing else, no trap, waiting underneath.

She looks up at the hotel bedrooms, shakes her head, and wonders if any insomniac business travellers or romantic getaway couples caught a glimpse as she plummeted past their windows. The water really does taste like nothing and for a moment, as a warm exalted sense of relief washes all the way through her system, the current seems to be pushing her back to the side, back to the pilings and guiding her over to the good climbing out spot where there are two solid footholds and a bit of rope hanging down. Her ears are still foggy so she doesn't hear and doesn't respond to the worried calls from above. The mist casts a shadow over everything. They can't see her and she can't see them.

She is almost all the way back, almost out, the rope nearly in her hand, when she looks up at the M-shaped string of white lights hanging on the Ambassador Bridge like understated Christmas decorations. There is a faded image of the old Boblo boat, the Mississippi Paddler, painted on the side of a warehouse and permanent fires burning on Zug Island. The smokestacks leak unnatural combinations of purple and grey and almost pink.

She thinks about that man, the guy who jumped off the bridge several years ago in a failed suicide attempt. It was in the papers for weeks but it took a long time before the real story, the scandal, came out. They say he tried to kill himself but accidentally survived. That was the official version. Other people believed it was faked from the beginning. Even though dozens of witnesses had seen him jump, they still thought there had to be a trick behind it, some David Copperfield illusion.

Before tonight, Stace had never given one second of her time to this guy or his story. He was less than a fragment, a particle floating in her memory, one of the million unconnected facts you hear about and can't forget. Before tonight, she didn't know what to believe. Now, though, everything seems different and there is no confusion. She knows the fall could not have been planned or staged. Not from the bridge. Look at it. Not from that height. You couldn't try to survive something like that; you just lived through it. A fluke occurrence.

It must have been strange. He'd have been hurt for sure, broken bones and internal bleeding and the rest, but it must have been shocking to be awake and completely aware of what was happening. The guy on the bridge, he wanted everything to stop when he reached the river. He was hoping to hit on a real ending, but then – surprise, surprise – all these new choices, the nasty ones, showed up only after he found himself floating on his back and he could still breathe and still see out through his eyes.

That's probably when it came to him, she thinks, while he was moving in the current and looking at the sky.

Police on both sides of the border looked for his body for weeks. They dredged the river and sent dogs sniffing along the shore. When nothing turned up, the family believed he was lost for good. There was a funeral and a little insurance money. They went on and lived without him for years, building up entirely new versions of themselves. The kids moved away and the wife met somebody else.

Then the postcards started to arrive from some messed-up version of heaven. Miami, maybe, or The Magic Kingdom. The handwriting was unmistakable and the postmarks were recent. He wrote about how he missed them and loved them very much. He said he didn't want them to worry anymore.

STACE BRINGS HER ARM out of the water, circles it through the air, and cuts back in. It feels almost like the beginning and she is surprised by the relaxed, instinctive slice of her hand moving through. Her body can do something it couldn't do before. She looks at her fingers, barely visible beneath the surface and has to remind herself of what is happening. She is swimming at night by herself in the Detroit River. On the other side, the windows and elevators of the Renaissance Center shine like a downtown lighthouse only a mile away. In the pure terms of distance, it is not that far. One mile. In the pool, the whole expanse would be cut into 64 equal lengths and she does that almost every other day. If she really wanted to, Stace could swim to America, all the way to Hart Plaza. She could pull herself out, climb over the little fence, walk into the middle of the city and stand there in her dripping bathing suit, right in front of the statue of Joe Louis's big hanging fist.

She thinks about the decisions people make about themselves, the man on the bridge, gains and losses. It has been almost a year, but it still feels strange, sometimes even disturbing and wrong. Water cannot hold her anymore. She enters and leaves as she pleases. Climbs out and dives back in. When she moves through the river, she sculpts it around her body, makes it go exactly where she wants. The sting is fading and she is almost back to the side, getting ready to pull herself out, when she sees it: the pale outline of a human body streaking out of the sky like a hero from Greek myth. Like an actual guardian, a protector of life. He is a lightning bolt fired from the top of a building and he is purposely aimed, she can see it in the way he flies, aimed for her rescue.

“This is how it is supposed to be. Don't you feel it? We've been on our way to this since the very beginning. Like a collision.”

They were on the floor at Vertigo, dancing in the strobe light, flashing in and out, a series of still photographs.

“I know,” she said.

“You remember the first day? When you were tossed in there with everybody else? I didn't know what to do. Couldn't figure you out.”

“Yes,” she said. “I remember it. Of course I do. But it was different for me. You wouldn't understand. You couldn't.”

THE FIRST CLASS was the second Tuesday after Labour Day. He checked her name off his clipboard list and she felt the way his eyes slid up and then down over the tight black contours of her new suit. It had been there from the beginning.

“You sure you're in the right place?” he asked.

She wanted to keep it light. That had always been the plan. Treat it like nothing and get through.

“Think so,” she said. “I mean this is the first level, right? Adult Beginner I?”

She showed him the receipt.

“See? Seven-thirty to eight-fifteen. The Rec-Guide says this is the place to start. The place for people who don't swim at all. The first class. For people who don't go in over their heads.”

His eyes wavered and he shook his hand like he needed her to stop talking.

“My fault,” he said. “Sorry. My fault. Adult Beginner I. Yes. Right place. Totally fine. No problem. My mistake.”

He told her later, weeks afterward, when everything was different, that she didn't look right. Not like one of his normal students. The others in the class were older ladies, senior citizens taking advantage of their discounts. Some were regulars, back for their fourth or fifth session with Brad.

“He's the absolute best.” A lady with a thick blue bathing cap embossed with flowers told her that early on.

“So patient and so kind and so nice. He tries to make it fun for us.”

The women in the class were the other kind of elderly. Spunky, silver-haired adventurers. Takers of tango lessons and passengers on European tour buses. They wore waterproof makeup in the pool and their bathing suits came in the cruise colours – citrus yellow and orange and lime green – with tropical prints of toucans and palm trees and extra frilly layers of fabric stitched around the middle.

Brad's every movement sent vibrations through their bodies. Whenever he dove in or pulled himself back onto the deck – picture a slick performing dolphin at Marineland – the girls gasped and turned to each other, bubbling and giggling. Stace could imagine them sixty-five years ago, in braids and pig tails, passing folded notes at the back of a one-room school house.

They would do anything he asked. Whenever he called or waved his hands, another one pushed away from the side and went lustily flopping out to join him in the middle of the deep end. Stace didn't like these women. She thought they lacked solid convictions and reliable stick-to-itiveness. They gave up without struggle or protest and they hurried for improvement, rushing to fix up all their old deficiencies and sacrifice their fears to this boy in his Speedo.

Brad made them practice a manoeuvre he called
The Blast
Off.
Or sometimes
The Rocket Ship
. You had to reach back with your arms locked straight at the elbow and face out into the middle of the diving well. With your fingers clawed into the gutter, you leaned all the way forward, submerged up to your neck. Your chin rested on the surface, your legs coiled, and your feet pushed flat against the vertical tile of the pool wall. All the tension in your body strained forward, preparing for ignition. It was horrible. Whenever he got Stace into that position, she felt trapped by her own contorted limbs, folded-up, like a person in a straightjacket. An uncomfortable pressure seeped through her insides, a near-bursting feeling, like the desperate urge to pee.

The ladies tried their best, tried to do it right, tried to look as if underneath the jokes and silly pretending, they really could swim any time they wanted. They wanted to Blast Off and join Brad in the middle of the deep end, but it never worked like that. Instead, as soon as they released, as soon as they let go, their smiles flattened and their bodies hardened. They failed so completely, so quickly and perfectly, that Brad sometimes had to flash over and dive down or sink his hand way below his knees to get hold of an armpit or a flailing hand or the corner of a bathing suit. When he brought them back to the surface, the women broke to the air spitting and sputtering and sometimes they let out these huge pressurized belches that sounded like they came from deep in their stomachs. He'd cover up the uglier sounds with encouragement and say things like, “That was a good try, Gladys,” or “No problems here. We're getting closer every day.”

When they tried to share in his optimism, tried to smile back into Brad's face, that was true conversation, the kind of perfect communication Stace could understand. The way it all returned: old terrors carving themselves back into the familiar creases around their eyes. The deep end was like a reversed fountain of youth. Confident ladies full of laughs went out and went under, but the people who came back were thin-haired and fragile. The people who came back were panicked and stiff and confused and not sure of anything anymore. Lines of mascara ran down their faces and the whitest of the bathing suits went all the way over to transparent, revealing knots of pubic hair and leaving nothing to the imagination anymore. The women sobbed sometimes and cried out. They dug their fingernails into Brad's neck and shoulders. Stace could see a fresh constellation of half-moons and purplish crescents cut out of his skin, layered over older scars.

She resisted him for the first four weeks and always passed when it was her turn to Blast Off. She felt no attraction when his eyes locked on hers and she did not want to be in the same place with him.

“Come out to me,” he said.

“It's not far. Just breathe and relax and let yourself go. It's easy, easy, easy. Let it go. Come on. Out to me. Right now. Come on.”

His hand reached over to her with the palm up, but he kept the tips of his fingers just out of range. He could stay like that for hours, dropped in the middle, with both hands and half his chest out of the water, relaxed and conversational, like he was standing on the top rung of a glass ladder that went all the way to the bottom.

But she could see the strategy. As soon as she trusted and let go, he'd move backwards, slither away and leave her out there by herself.

“It's all in your head,” he said. “That's where it starts and where it ends. Trust me. Come on. Now. Come out to me right now.”

There was a catch in his voice sometimes. A small hesitation, like he was holding back on a secret he couldn't tell them yet. This was his job, work he got paid to do, and there were moments, she could see them, moments when he really had to try hard to keep his true feelings down. How many times in a week did he end up like this? How much waiting and coaxing and lying were required to get through an average Tuesday night? The worn out pick-up lines of the swimming teacher: how many times did he have to burn through them?