Never Have I Ever(67)
If one thing had been different . . . If she’d spent her summers on the beach getting over her nerves about the water instead of riding herd on her little brother. If she’d gone to the support group at the Baptist church instead of the one the Methodists hosted. If Davis hadn’t told her about the foreclosure down the street, so that newlyweds Phillip and Char became his neighbors in a house they otherwise could not have afforded.
But all these things had happened, one after another, until the afternoon grown-up Lolly Shipley poked her head in the door at Divers Down, asking if I taught adult swim lessons. I did not recognize her. She was only Charlotte Baxter, a new bride, confessing that she had both a fear of water and a cute, athletic husband who snorkeled and boated and surfed.
Earlier that morning I’d started driving to Mobile to face Tig Simms. Again. I’d turned back before I hit the state line. Again. In the wake of that shame, I looked at Char and I thought, Here. Here is a small, good thing that I can do today.
“Of course,” I said, and led her to the water.
We sat dangling our feet in the indoor, heated pool, and she told me about drowning. If she’d said Paul’s name then, I might have put it together. But she didn’t. She kept it short, tearing up as she spoke, only calling him “my little brother.”
We worked together twice a week. I admired her tenacity and her humor as I coaxed her to stand in the shallow end, then bend to touch the water with her lips, then to look under the surface through a scuba mask with a snorkel. It was weeks before she would lie on her back with me supporting her, both arms over her head so she could keep a two-hand death grip on the concrete edge, her wide eyes fixed on the ceiling.
I liked her orderly, checklist approach to terror, as lesson by lesson she gave up one hand’s clutch and then the other’s, until she was floating with only one of my hands on the small of her back. Once she was actually swimming in the pool, we went out together to the ocean. She was scared that something alive might squirm under her feet, so I put her in scuba booties. She was scared of jellyfish, so I put her in a skin suit. That’s how she first waded in—covered neck to toes. But she did it.
Over the weeks we worked together, I came to like her. She was chatty and funny and a distraction from my inability to face Tig; I found comfort in her victory over fear, because I was losing my battle with my own.
Maybe that was why I accepted her invitation to celebrate at Coffee Nation after her first successful ocean swim. I wanted a sugary iced latte and to bask in that small triumph, because I had finally accepted that I wasn’t going to make it all the way to Mobile. Not then. Maybe not ever. In the wake of that admission, I’d begun working on my secret way to repay Tig, but I still felt coated in cowardice and failure. Helping Char was my only real win in months.
On the surface we didn’t seem well suited to be friends. I was more than a decade her senior, single where she was married, introverted when she was a dedicated extrovert. But we ended up chatting happily for hours. We talked about books, our jobs, her husband, my grumpy landlord. Neither of us talked about our extended families much, though she said enough for me to gather that her mother had passed and she had minimal contact with her father. My quasi estrangement from my own parents doubled our common ground; we shared both a wound and a desire not to talk about it.
It was the nicest time I’d had since I’d arrived, so I said yes to sushi lunch the next week, and then to a girls’-night movie, and so on. Then I found myself saying yes to ice cream when she brought Davis to Divers Down to hook me up.
It was two months later, when Maddy was already the boldest of my Seal Team kids and my secret favorite, when I’d been on nine dates with Davis, that Char invited us, as a couple, to a dinner party. It was an escalation of our odd friendship; we’d never yet gone to each other’s home. By then the lawyers were setting up my bogus foundation to pay Tig’s mortgage anonymously. All the wheels were in motion, and I could have left Florida.
I didn’t. I wanted to keep seeing Davis and Madison Whey.
At dinner I met Phillip for the first time. He was a salesman, compact and attractive in a frat-boy way, with a pug nose and a ruddy complexion under a flop of blown-out hair. Char clearly adored him, catering to him like a 1950s housewife, but I thought the only thing they had in common was a firm and unfounded belief that Phillip was amazing.
Davis was there, and two other neighborhood couples, the Fentons and the Blakes. It was a lovely night, in spite of how little I liked Char’s husband. Maybe even because of it, in a weird, small way. Davis didn’t care for Phillip either, and we knew this without speaking. It was telegraphed in a single, shared glance that made me realize how well we understood each other. If Char’s intention was to show me the sweet possibilities of a life with Davis Whey, then it worked.
At the end of the evening, we were saying our good-byes in the foyer when Phillip asked Davis about his putter. Phillip was in the market for a new one, and it sparked a heated debate. Char grinned at me, giving a little eye roll at how excited they’d gotten over mallets versus blades. I grinned back, but less condescendingly. I was just as bad if anyone asked me to compare different kinds of regulators. Waiting them out, I glanced around the foyer, and my gaze landed on a photo grouping from their wedding.
There was a large picture of the two of them facing each other at the end of the aisle, hands clasped, exchanging vows. Char seemed a little lost inside her enormous dress, but her smile was radiant. Beside it, two smaller frames were hung in a vertical stack, one a photo of Char’s and Phillip’s newly ringed hands and, under that, a matted, framed copy of their wedding invitation. Thick cream paper with dark brown ink, rich as chocolate, in such a squirrelly font that I had to squint to read the words. As I did, I felt a fist closing around my heart.