Swimming

Winter brought huge waves and stormy skies. The roads erupted with traffic on sunny weekends. Hotels that blocked too many people’s views were burned to the ground. The harbor hadn’t been dredged in so long the water was dirtier than anywhere else for miles. Beyond the safety of the groin a circle of surfers sat, bodies lifting and falling with the water. Scattered flower petals popped red, orange, and pink against the water’s reflection of the cool gray sky overhead. Safely past the place where the ocean floor rose to become land and pushed the water into waves, they reached out and held hands.

“Sam left us much too early.”

“Lived a full, full life.”

“He was always kind, always there to lend a hand.”

“Always halfway to the beach.”

His mother, Rebecca sat in the back of a double kayak. She was not the water creature her son had been, and his surf coach, Mark, had paddled her out to be part of the ceremony. At her slightest shifts in weight the boat tipped toward the surface of the dark cold water. The heads of Sam’s friends and acquaintances were stuffed into black wetsuit hoods and damp strands of hair poked out around their faces. Rebecca tried to fix them into her memory and hold on, knowing that all too soon she’d be back on the firm and unyielding land.

People came to the house in pairs mostly, and the refrigerator filled with meals in glass dishes Rebecca could reheat. She got flowers with notes written in the looping handwriting of the only florist in town. Nurses that Rebecca had worked with at the hospital sent big cards with swans that floated against impressionistic garden scenes. Sam’s third-grade teacher dropped off The Giving Tree, the kind of book that as a child he had been able to sit through because it had few enough words. Sam’s dad’s brother, who Rebecca hadn’t seen in years, called and offered stiff condolences. At the dry land funeral her aunt sputtered about how the loss of a child was the worst thing that could happen to a person until Rebecca’s cousin grabbed her, stopping just short of clamping a hand over her mother’s mouth. For weeks Rebecca kept the cards standing upright on the kitchen table in a small paper city of good thoughts. When she drank coffee in the morning she stared with tunnel vision at the flowers and avoided looking anywhere else.

In the grocery store she drew a tub of yogurt out of the refrigerator and the extra weight threatened to tip her over. When she shut the glass door a woman in a yellow sweater was there on the other side. The woman said her son had gone to middle school with Sam and there was something in her sad gaze and the solid plant of her feet that gave Rebecca the impression that the woman was poised to catch her.

“I’m doing okay,” Rebecca said.

She hadn’t heard the question and hoped that it was the right shaped answer. The woman’s name would not come to her so she smiled. At the meat counter, Margarita stood, wrapping chicken breast and pink steaks in thick white paper. She had been there since Sam had been a wriggling toddler in the cart. Margarita wiped the red juices from her hands on a towel and walked around to the other side of the counter to put her arms around Rebecca. It was a feat to get up out of bed where the covers and dregs of sleep sheltered her from the recurring process of recalling with a renewed ache that he was gone. Getting dressed and going outside into a world that misted memories of Sam was like lifting iron off her chest every day. Some weeks she grocery shopped in the next town over and cried in the car.

One morning when Rebecca stepped outside to collect the mail there was a pot with an orchid sitting on the ground beside the front door. A white bloom was open at the top. The rest of the stem was peppered by a smattering of shiny round buds. The attached note was written in an unfamiliar scrawl.

With love from all of us on the team!

There were no instructions attached for caring for the plant. Up until that point the flowers that came were all cut, clearly and without question temporary. Rebecca could bear their slow droop and shedding of petals and pollen because they were already gone. As she eyed this living plant on the ground at her feet she felt angry because she had failed to keep it alive. She took it into the backyard and ripped the bloom off and threw it down but it landed so softly she felt nothing. Raising the plant over her head, she threw the whole thing down. The smooth brown terra cotta pot shattered and the orchid lay there with its gray tentacle roots akimbo in the debris of bark and dirt. She looked down, thought about reaching for the turquoise garden hose and really going in on it. Someone cleared their throat. Her neighbor was standing there, tall enough to poke his face over the fence.

'“I heard a crash so I thought I’d investigate. Everything okay?” His swirl of white hair fluffed up above his head.

“Yes, I’m fine.”

“Well, while I’m here, I just wanted to let you know that Dana gets tired of cooking just for me. You’re welcome to join us for dinner anytime.”

“Thank you, that would be lovely.”

“And,” he dropped his voice, “please know that it’s absolutely fine for you to cry.” He gave the fence a hearty pat and was gone.

She thought of Sam’s father and how tall he’d looked the first time she saw him standing on the dock beside his boat, his body long and lean, apt for swimming. It was where Sam’s fishlike tendencies had come from. Rebecca picked up the orchid, now just a stem and roots, and threw it in the trash in the kitchen. But that evening as she sipped potato leek soup, drank a bottle of wine, and futzed over a puzzle she kept thinking of it there, shriveling slowly, deprived of air in the dark plastic bag.