Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [41]
Rocky’s body went into the automatic training that had been ingrained into her brain and into every cell since she had first been trained as a lifeguard in high school. Here was a victim, and everything else about him was irrelevant. She gave a huge kick that brought her body down until her feet touched the slick bottom of the pool and she wrapped one arm around his neck and torso, and at the same time that she kicked off, she heaved him up and got her hip under him. She had never pulled anyone off the bottom except in practice and never anyone filled with granite. She aimed up and diagonally for the side of the pool. As they broke the surface, her fury gave an extra bolt of strength and she nearly threw him on the edge.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she spit out.
Bob had swallowed a bit of water and coughed it out of his lungs. The lifeguard on duty came over and said, “Do you need help over here, Rocky?”
“I was just giving lessons to an idiot who decided to sit on the bottom of the pool and exhale.” She waved off the lifeguard. She glared at Bob, checked to see that he was pulling himself up on the ladder, then strong-armed herself on the side of the pool. “Don’t ever pull that stunt again,” she said.
“Look, I wanted to see what it would be like to be saved, to be really saved by an incredibly beautiful woman.” He reached for her hand. “I was an asshole. I’m sorry.”
As soon as he touched her she felt the jolt of energy going through her all over again. He smiled his big-toothed smile. “But if you had to, would you do it again, would you save me again?”
His penance was to be the official victim for the water-safety class. After they made love for the first time, he whispered to her, “I’m in love with a woman who won’t let me drown. What an incredible extra.”
She was ten years out of graduate school, and swimming took less and less time in her life. But she had still used it as a meditative cleansing, swimming laps, feeling her body blur with the watery sounds. Lunch hour offered her just enough time to swim thirty laps, shower, and dry her hair. Had she stopped when Bob died? She had to think back. Yes, there was the world before Bob died and the world after. It occurred to her that her swimsuit and towel waited for her back in a locker in a Massachusetts university along with shower gel, deodorant, and skin lotion.
She was going back to another archery lesson in seven days. She would pull back the damn child’s bow and move up five pounds. She set up a practice target in back of Tess’s house. She had already decided that Lloyd shouldn’t see her in the act of archery. She didn’t know what kind of post-traumatic stress disorder dogs could muster up, but it seemed cruel to expose him to a reminder of his nearly fatal encounter. And she was going to have to build her body back up again.
She spent the next day in Portland searching for an athletic club, signed up at the YMCA and got a trainer to work with her for an hour. The trainer was young and eager. He admonished her to go for a full-body, free-weights regime, and not just upper bodywork as she had requested.
“It doesn’t matter if you used to be fit, you’re starting from scratch,” he said as he wrote down the number of the free weight that Rocky pushed over her head. Rocky stopped, and the two plastic coated, six-pound weights paused overhead like heavy birds. She slowly lowered them.
“You’re right, I’m starting from scratch, aren’t I?” She knew that this happened sometimes, that strangers could speak as sages, pulling truths from the air so deep that it seemed like they were momentarily inhabited by wisdom completely beyond them. Sometimes people get the offer of free advice from the gods, spoken by innocents, and there is always the choice of whether to listen or not, whether to act or not.
“That’s what I’ll do, then. Start from the beginning.”
Chapter 11
The track coach was surprisingly easy to fool. He was old, maybe as old as fifty. Melissa knew he was from pre-anorexia times; he just didn’t get