The Last Swim

Chapter 1: The Lip of the Deep End

The pool had been empty for six years, but nobody in Darrow, Wisconsin, could agree on when the water actually left.

Some said the pumps failed in '83, the summer the town council voted to reroute the water main. Others swore the pool had been drained deliberately after the incident with the Vorhees boy and the diving board, which was really just a scraped chin and a lawsuit that went nowhere but still spooked the insurance people. A few old-timers, the kind who sat on the bench outside Kappel's Hardware and remembered when the pool opened in 1938, said the water had been leaving for decades — not all at once, but in the slow, invisible way things leave when nobody is watching.

By October 1989, the Darrow Municipal Pool was a rectangle of cracked concrete surrounded by a chain-link fence with a padlocked gate. Leaves collected in the shallow end. The diving board had been removed, leaving four bolt holes in the platform like missing teeth. The painted lane lines — once crisp blue on white — had faded to pale suggestions, visible only in certain light, the way old roads show through new pavement.

Faye Pahl stood at the deep end and looked down.

She was fifty years old. Her hair was gray at the temples and pulled back with a tortoiseshell clip she'd bought in Vienna. She wore a camel coat that was too warm for the weather but that she'd grabbed without thinking when she left the hotel in Milwaukee that morning. Her hands were in her pockets. Her face, which had been photographed for album covers and magazine profiles and the jacket of a biography she hadn't authorized, was perfectly still.

Below her, the deep end dropped nine feet to a floor webbed with cracks. A puddle of brown rainwater sat in the lowest corner, and in it floated a single paper cup from the Dairy Queen on Route 12.

"Ms. Pahl?"

She turned. A young man in a blue windbreaker was approaching along the pool deck, stepping carefully over the buckled concrete. He carried a clipboard and wore the earnest, slightly nervous expression of someone who had been sent to manage a situation he didn't fully understand.

"I'm Kevin Stoll, from the mayor's office. We spoke on the phone."

"We did," Faye said.

"I hope the drive wasn't too bad. The construction on 51 is—"

"It was fine."

Kevin Stoll consulted his clipboard. He was perhaps twenty-five, with a thin mustache he was still deciding whether to keep. "So the ceremony is set for Saturday at ten. We've got the high school band, the mayor's remarks, Reverend Popp from First Lutheran doing an invocation. The demolition crew will be standing by — Griesbach Brothers out of Merrill, they've done the old creamery and the grain elevator on Elm, very professional outfit."

Faye said nothing.

"And then, of course, the piece." Kevin looked up from his clipboard with the careful brightness of a man delivering what he believed to be good news. "Still Water. The band director, Mr. Huebner, has been rehearsing the arrangement for six weeks. He's very excited. The whole town is, really. Having the piece played here, at the pool where — well, where it all began. It's a real full-circle moment."

Faye watched a brown leaf skitter across the pool deck in a gust of wind and drop into the shallow end.

"No," she said.

Kevin's smile held for a moment, the way a clock's second hand sometimes seems to pause before it moves.

"I'm sorry?"

"I don't want them to play it."

"The — Still Water?"

"That's right."

Kevin looked at his clipboard as though the answer to this development might be written there. "Ms. Pahl, the committee has been planning this for months. The arrangement was commissioned specifically for—"

"I understand. And I'm telling you no."

She said it without heat, without apology. The way you might decline a second cup of coffee. Kevin opened his mouth, closed it, and wrote something on his clipboard with the slow deliberation of a man buying time.

"Can I ask — is there a reason?"

"The piece isn't theirs to play."

"Well, technically, the publishing rights are held by—"

"I know who holds the rights. I wrote it."

Kevin Stoll looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, made another note, and said he would relay her wishes to the committee. He walked back across the pool deck, and Faye watched him go, and then she was alone again at the lip of the deep end.

The wind picked up. It smelled of wood smoke and cold earth, the particular smell of a Wisconsin October that she had not encountered in all her years in New York and London and the concert halls of Europe. It was the smell of her childhood, and it reached into her chest and closed its hand.

Her agent, Pauline Dresch, had called that morning from New York.

"I don't understand," Pauline had said, her voice carrying the clipped exasperation of a woman who had spent thirty years understanding things and resented any interruption to the pattern. "This is a gift. Hometown genius returns for the demolition of the pool that inspired her masterwork. The Times would cover it. NPR would cover it. You haven't had press like this since the Kennedy Center."

"I don't want press."

"Everyone wants press, Faye. Some people just want it more quietly."

"The piece was never theirs."

"It's been performed by every major orchestra in the Western world. It belongs to everyone."

"No," Faye had said. "It doesn't."

She had hung up, and Pauline had not called back, which meant Pauline was furious, which meant Pauline would call tomorrow with a new strategy. Pauline always had a new strategy. It was what made her an excellent agent and an exhausting human being.

Faye looked down into the deep end again.

Nine feet. It had seemed like ninety when she was thirteen. The water had been so blue it looked artificial, the chlorine so strong it turned your eyes pink and your hair brittle. On hot days the water was thick with children, and the lifeguard — Tommy Brandt, seventeen, with shoulders like a man and a whistle he blew with the authority of a general — would stand on the platform and shout at the boys who ran on the deck.

Gene had never run on the deck. Gene had walked to the edge of the deep end with the calm, purposeful stride of a much older person, curled his toes over the lip, and entered the water so cleanly that the splash was barely a whisper.

Gene.

She had not said his name aloud in years. She did not say it now. But she felt it move through her the way a low note moves through a piano — not heard so much as felt, a vibration in the wood and wire that the body registers before the ear.

She closed her eyes.

The wind moved through the empty pool and made a sound like breathing.

And Faye Pahl, fifty years old, celebrated, accomplished, alone at the edge of a ruin, let herself remember the summer everything broke.

It started, as most disasters do, with something ordinary.

It started with the heat.