D. Elliot Wedge

DROWNING

Tom and his wife Cathie stand next to each other on the dock. They lean over its wooden rail, their faces reflecting in the water. As he looks into the wavy mirror and sees his wife in the ripples, he wonders if he should push her in or dive in by himself. Or, maybe they should hold hands and go down together.

“It’s so pretty here,” Cathie says.

He looks up to meet her eyes, but he studies her bit by bit as his focus moves from the water: red polished toenails; toned, long legs, the nice poochy bottom. If he could stop here and see only her body, things would be good, but he sees her face. That face – he could swim through the water to the very bottom where it’s dark and thick as gravy and he’d be away from her forever, but then he’d see that face and hear her voice: “Thomas. Come on. Come up now.”

“Yeah,” he says. “It’s pretty.”

She wears sunglasses, and there he is in her lenses – two of him, on two docks running out to two rivers with two boats skimming over the water behind him. His fingers are clasped as if in prayer, and he wears the faded pink shirt that his first wife bought for him when they vacationed in Hilton Head a dozen years ago. In her lenses, though, the shirt, along with everything else, is tinged yellow.

“I think I’d start walking every day if I lived here where it’s so pretty,” she says.

“No. You’d get tired of it and come up with some excuse and stop that too after a while.” He thinks this. He’s placed himself on a sort of delay to review his thoughts before announcing them in more palatable terms. “It’d be the same as going back to school and finishing your degree, but you’ve dropped out twice at mid-semester since I’ve been with you. It’d be the same as the accounting job you were so gung-ho about. Remember? You quit after your boss called me to come over to talk you out of the bathroom. You locked yourself in there after a shouting match with one of your co-workers. Remember that?”

“Sure,” he says. “You’d walk all the time.”

She slinks closer to him. She runs a finger down his forearm. “We could walk together. That’s how we could start our days. Every morning, we’d get up and walk.”

Chills bristle where she traced a line with her fingertip. “Every morning.” He smiles. At home, every morning is the same. They cross paths when he wakes up. He steps out of the bedroom and pads down the hall and sees her in the spare room where they keep the computer. She’s expressionless and unblinking, her face washed pale from the screen in front of her, her finger clicking the mouse button.

“Hey,” he says. “Good morning.”

She squints and rubs her neck. “God. Is it already morning?”

“Yeah. Come on. I’ll make coffee.”

They go downstairs, and she sits at the kitchen table. She drinks half of a cup while he prepares lunch for her daughter to take to school.

“Did you know that your family was close friends with Abraham Lincoln?” she asks.

“No. Hadn’t heard that.”

“It’s true. He often stayed with your family when he was traveling from Springfield.” She pauses to drink her coffee. “Mmm. The Whitleys are one of the more interesting families I’ve researched. More interesting than my own, anyway. I’m surprised at everything I’ve found out about them on line.”

He doesn’t say anything; he just spreads peanut butter and jelly over slices of white bread. Although he didn’t know this particular bit of trivia, nothing is new about her revealing some obscurity about a dead relative that she learned the night before while everyone else in the house was asleep. Abe Lincoln, Indian hunters, a Green Bay Packer – they’ve all become the same thing to him: something she says to justify her obsession with genealogy.

She brings her legs up to her chest and tucks her chin between her knees. “Genealogy’s so fascinating. It’s like a big puzzle, a story, with all these scattered pieces you try to pull together.”

He nods, wondering if there’s a way she can turn this interest into a job that pays her something. She could tout herself as a researcher and work at a library. Or she could do all this family tree research for the people who don’t want to stay up all night to learn these things – they could pay her a small fee and she would do this for them. After all, they need the money. His new job pays him less, and, with Cathie not working, there’s even fewer dollars coming in each month. And, she knows this. “We’re barely getting by,” he tells her when she suggests ordering digital cable and its faster internet connection. Or when she says they should splurge and go to El Chicos for dinner.

“Oh, I know,” she says. “I need to find something. I’ll look at the classifieds on Sunday, I promise.”

But something always comes up, and the jobs aren’t the right fit or what she’s looking for, and things have stayed the same for a while now.

She yawns and looks at her coffee mug.

“I better not drink this, or I’ll never sleep.”

She stands and pats his shoulder and tells him to have a good day. She returns to their room and the mussed covers, and he places a bag of Cheetos in the lunch sack and locks the door behind him as he goes to work.

Breeze rustles the fronds of the palms flanking the dock’s end.

It wouldn’t have to be like that here, though. They could wake up like she said just as the sun peeked through the clouds and was the color of a cantaloupe. They could lace up their New Balances and walk briskly by the river and over the tidal creeks. He sees them, their arms pumping to have a cardiovascular workout, while they’re talking about something interesting, like last night’s book club meeting or what flowers they should plant in their yard (it’s so warm here, it feels tropical and like anything can grow). He can see it for a fleeting second, but he looks down and touches his paunch of gut. Then he watches the river, cold and grey, lapping against the dock over and over again. Nothing will change until he hits the surface, and then a jolt will rock his body, but he’ll keep kicking his feet to push himself down.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

“Sure,” he says. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

“Okay.” She leans down and folds her arms on the railing. Her rear pushes out toward the middle of the dock’s path. Such a fine, meaty booty. It would be so easy to step behind her, place his hands on those supple cheeks one last time, give them a swift, hard push, and she could taste the water.

“Is there anything you’d like to do while we’re here? You’ve been so nice and let me do what I wanted.” She looks at him. “I know you weren’t really interested in going on a carriage ride. Thanks for doing that for me.”

“Well . . .” He turns so his backside leans against the rail. “Hell, no, I didn’t want to go on a carriage ride. Twenty-five bucks a pop. We could’ve just driven around downtown real slow with the windows down, and it would’ve been the same thing, and we’d’ve saved the money for dinner. Our credit card bill is going to be staggering this month.”

“No, that wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it was . . .” He pauses. “Neat.”

“So, what’s something you’d like to do?”

He crosses his arms. “Something cheap. Something where I don’t have to pay admission. Some place peaceful and warm and calm and where I don’t think about anything and you leave me alone in my mind for a little while.”

He thinks a while before answering. “I’d like to go to the beach. I’d like to just sit there and pick up shells or read a book or look at the water.”

She moves in front of him. She wraps her arms around his waist. Their faces are so close, their noses almost touch.

“I’ll go to the beach whenever you want.” She tousles his hair and steps away. She looks toward the water, and she inhales deeply, holding the air in her lungs a while before releasing her breath. “God,” she gasps. “It’s so beautiful here.”

He looks to the shore and sees the moss hanging in the live oaks. He agrees with her: “Mmm.”

She grips his forearm. It’s hard and firm, almost icy, and it pulls him toward her. He can’t gaze away as she talks.

“You know, I think a change of scenery might be good for us. For all of us.” She takes off her sunglasses and looks at him. “I think things would be different if we were here.”

She’ll talk, and she’ll sound reasonable and justified, but it will be dead wrong. He knows this as he stares at her green eyes that are so big they remind him of cocktail olives with slight yellow stripes. But since he’s been with her, he’s looked into those eyes and wound up nodding and agreeing to every crazy thing she’s suggested. They bought the Camry even though he’d lost his job and he was doing temp work. They dipped into his retirement account to pay for her fall semester tuition, and then she dropped out just before Thanksgiving. They met that first time after not seeing each other or even keeping in touch for years and she said it was God or something bigger than themselves bringing their paths together again. Sometimes he catches himself, wondering where he’d be if he’d just paid for her drinks and wished her well and walked away that night.

“I’m serious, Tom. I think it’s time for a fresh start.”

He turns away and faces the water. She sidles next to him.

“I’ve talked with Maura. We can stay with her and Billy in their garage apartment. I can work for her spa at the front desk. I’ll answer phones and greet people and run their credit cards. Meanwhile, I can take classes and become an esthetician or a massage therapist, I don’t know which. I can figure that out later. And you, you can get a good job with computers anywhere. In no time, we’ll be able to save some money, pay off some bills, and buy a little place and start over.”

Even though it took him a long time to find this job after he was laid off, even though he was thankful to land something, anything (he had long gotten over the idea of a 401k contribution and paid time off), he knows he will leave it. He will follow her to this place where he knows no one other than her sister, a place he hadn’t thought about until earlier this summer when Cathie suggested visiting Maura and making a vacation out of it.

The water will be so cold as it pours into his lungs and fills them until there isn’t room for anything else.

“It’s something to think about.”

She smiles. She kisses his lips. “I’m so glad you’ll think about it. I know it sounds wacky, but honestly, I’ve got a good feeling about this.”

She runs her hand down and weaves her fingers into his. She moves toward the end of the dock and the walking path that led them there and that will take them back to her sister’s house. She tugs at his hand, but he stays at the rail. Their arms stretch into a long line, their fingers still linked. “Tom? You ready to head back?”

He takes one last look at the water, and then he steps away to follow her.

D. Elliot Wedge holds degrees in English from The University of Tulsa and The University of South Carolina. In 2008, The South Carolina Arts Commission selected his story, "What Are You Doing?", as the winner of its short fiction contest, and the story was published in the Charleston Post & Courier. He lives in Charleston, and believes that South Carolina should legalize handfishing/noodling.