The Swimmer Redux

Fingers of frigid air slithered through the kitchen window, night and autumn coming on. Esme Westerhazy settled at the hand-carved oak dining table with a cup of English breakfast tea and a spoonful of honey with a wedge of lemon.

Nothing good on TV tonight, she thought. “Survivor” is a repeat.

She stirred the honey into the hot brown brew and found her mind wandering back to … what year was that?

Stirring and stirring the honey absently with a slender silver demitasse spoon.

 It was 1964. She was thirty-years old that summer when Neddy Merrill did his crazy thing, attempting to swim the eight miles from the pool in the backyard of her parents home in fashionable Shady Hills to his own home eight miles away. One swimming pool at a time, she remembered, that’s how he did it, leaping like a mad frog from one well-manicured backyard to another.

She sipped at her tea. Too hot.

The whole task, she reasoned, should have taken Neddy half a day but in his demented state he would pause in a neighbor’s yard after swimming the shimmering length of their pool and languish in the bushes in his wet swimming trunks, sometimes for days. God knows how he received any nourishment as the months progressed, one swimming pool after another, eight miles stretching into an eternity. By the time he found his own swimming pool at the end of the dark rainbow — and only Neddy himself knew what the ultimate goal was, what the aquatic accomplishment at hand entailed — he found nothing but an empty and haunted house. His wife and children had left him.

The tea was much cooler now. Esme took a long drink and smiled as the cool autumn air carressed her withered cheeks and gray-tinged hair.

A swim would be nice right about now, Esme supposed, I haven’t been swimming in ages.

The community pool on Lakehurst was closed this time of night, of course.

Esme rose from the kitchen table and ambled down the dimly-lit hallway of her modest home to the main bathroom. She drew a lukewarm bath in the porcelain tub with brass feet. She clawed her way out of her nightgown and squeezed into an off-white one-piece bathing suit. It was very snug. She had not worn it in years.

Esme posed on uneasy feet on the creaky toilet lid, held her trembling hands together as if in penitent prayer, and dove into the bath tub head first.