Night Swimming, by Therese Gleason

Sally jerks awake, sweaty and fitful, slats of blue light from the battered blinds splitting her face. A dirge of crickets floats through the window open to the muggy night. Under the streetlamp, a halo of buzzing insects greedy for light flits dangerously close to the white-hot bulb. She hears her mother pacing the bedroom across the hall, muffled weeping. Whatever pills the doctor gave her weren’t working. She knows she can’t go in there again. Remembering that first night, her mother ghostly in a white nightgown—I never could sleep till he came home—makes her stomach bunch, throat tightening.

Sally hasn’t slept for a week, either. As soon as she starts sinking into darkness, flashes snag at her consciousness, pulling her back to the surface: Everything but shoes (the undertaker). Helping her mother pick an outfit to bury him in (his best black suit, fresh from the cleaners). Selecting the coffin from a showroom in the funeral home like a car dealership for the bereaved (red cherrywood, white satin lining). How Maymie and Lou had brushed his silky black hair to the side and put his glasses on, even with the taped crack in the frame, so he’d look like himself. How cold his stony hands, the orange cast of the makeup, the black rosary beads entwined in his nail-bitten fingers. How Jimmy had said Dad’s eyes were rolled back when he found him in the driveway, his face a bloodless gray.

Suddenly, she’s furious at crazy Aunt Gigi, who had sobbed the loudest at the wake and said she would sneak into the cemetery at night to bury her neurotic Pekinese, Caravaggio, next to their father, her sister’s husband, when the yappy runt died. Throwing off the damp sheet, Sally slips on her sneakers, tiptoeing down the hall in her flowered pajamas. She opens the front door, mindful of the squeak, and closes it gently, pushing the button on the inside of the door so it won’t lock behind her.  Eyes avoiding the driveway, she jogs down the front steps. She feels herself running the familiar route she and her sisters walked daily, every summer, to Lakeside Swim Club, the old limestone quarry turned neighborhood pool.

It’s dark, and mostly quiet except for the bugs and the sound of her Nikes slapping the asphalt. Sweat drips down her back almost immediately. She crosses Dundee, past the old Belknap school, running down the curved street till she reaches the gazebo at Lakeside’s entrance gate. Panting, she looks around, ducking to follow the hedge line to the chain-link fence enclosing the bike lot and badminton courts. Sally scurries up, finding footholds in the hollows between the metal wires, straddling the top and then hopping down, sticking a wobbly landing. The security guard is probably gone by now, but just in case she scans the path skirting the kiddie pool, lap lanes, and diving boards for flickers of flashlight.

Strange, she’s not afraid. So many times she’d shivered hearing the stories about the little drowned girl who haunted the back pier. She heads to the deepest part of the pool, the diving well, where jagged rocks poke up from concrete poured when the quarry was drained and refilled with city water, where she and her sisters had raced to touch the bottom, pushing off the side, prepubescent bodies like missiles with pointed toes. She’d always panicked before her feet grazed the cement twenty feet down, kicking her legs and paddling her arms in a frenzy to shoot back upward toward the surface, the light.

Slipping off her shoes, Sally climbs the lifeguard chair, the one she’d leapt from a couple years ago to rescue a kid who’d swum out too far in the deep end. She dives in, arcing into the cool darkness so smoothly that the water barely ruffles to receive her body. Surfacing, she treads water, then lays back to float, gaze skyward, arms outstretched. A few stars blink behind a haze of clouds. She wonders if he can see her there, wherever he is, how it would feel to close her eyes, curl into a cannonball, and sink gently, slowly, down, lungs deflating, heart pounding, pressure building, her chest about to implode. Like her father’s heart—its final, labored contraction a blast to extract stone, a reverberation of underwater ripples pulling everyone, everything, down with him.

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Therese Gleason is author of three poetry chapbooks: Hemicrania (forthcoming, Chestnut Review, 2024); Matrilineal (Finishing Line, 2021), and Libation (co-winner, South Carolina Poetry Initiative, 2006). Her poetry, essays, and hybrid work appear/are forthcoming in 32 Poems, Atticus Review, Cincinnati Review, Indiana Review, New Ohio Review, Notre Dame Review, Rattle, West Trade Review,and elsewhere.  Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, she teaches language and literacy to multilingual kindergarteners in Worcester, MA, where she lives with her family. (Online: https://theresegleason.com/.)

© 2024, Therese Gleason