Learning to Swim

She drove down in the last week of August, alone.

Curtis had taken the boys to Destin for ten days, and he had not argued about it, which she took as evidence of something — that he had finally understood, or that he had finally stopped trying to. She took LA-1 out of the city and over the bridge and down the long spine of the island with the shrimp boats tied up in the canal and the water on both sides of the road, and she did not stop until the shell path.

Trent put her in the small cabin behind the main house. The Landrys had filled the rest of the place with a family from Baton Rouge. Marisol, who was nineteen now and had a car, saw the truck and came straight over and stood in the yard with her arms folded and said, "You came back by yourself."

"I came back by herself."

"Where's——"

"Mexico," said Marin.

Marisol, who had never in her life been careful with a grown woman, said, "He was stupid about it," and Marin laughed, and it was the last thing anybody said to her that was funny.

She did not swim the first day. She sat on the steps of the cabin and let the parakeets shout at her from the eave, and she did not paint, and she did not read, and she understood that she was waiting for something and that she did not know what it was, and that everybody waits like this and calls it a vacation.

On the second day she swam to the sandbar and stood on it.

On the third day she went past it, and it was not a victory. She had thought, in July a year ago, that the sandbar was the thing; it had never been the thing. The thing was what lay past the place where the floor dropped, and the floor dropped and dropped and dropped, and the arithmetic of it was the only arithmetic she had ever been able to bear thinking about.

She came in and sat on the steps with her hair drying in the sun and thought about Nadia, who was up at the far cottage with the door shut, and about something Nadia had said to her once on a gallery, shouting, as if Marin were across a field:

The artist must possess the courageous soul that dares and defies.

Marin had never in her life thought of herself as an artist. She had painted forty-one porches and a fig tree and, once, badly, her own hand. What she had done instead — the only thing she had done — was to stop consenting. She saw that clearly now: that the whole of the past year had not been a search for a man or for a room or even for a self, but a long, slow, unglamorous withdrawal of consent, and that she had finished it, and that there was nothing on the other side of it. No career, no new house, no version of the sentence that made her a heroine. She had simply run out of things she was willing to pretend about.

On the fourth evening she did not go to dinner.

The water was flat and the light was going and the gulf had that sheet-iron look it gets when the wind drops, and she walked down the shell path and across the road with a towel over her arm, and she went in up to her knees, up to her waist, out to where the sand goes.

She was still wearing the rings. She had put them on again in June without deciding to, the way you put on a coat; she had not thought about them in two months. She took them off in the water — her wedding band and her mother's thin gold band — and held them for a moment, and then put them in the pocket of the suit she was wearing, because there was nobody on the beach and there was nowhere else to put them and because it did not matter, and the not-mattering was the whole of it.

Far up the beach the Baton Rouge family had a fire going. Somebody was playing music on a phone. The parakeets were beginning to settle in the eave and making the small complaints they made at dusk.

She thought of the boys. She thought of them exactly as Camille had told her to, and she did not flinch from it: Noah's cowlick, Theo's way of standing with his weight on one foot, the fact that in ten years they would be told what had happened to their mother and would have to decide what to do with it. And she thought the thought that is not permitted to women, which was that she loved them more than her life and that she would not give herself to them, and that the two facts sat side by side in her without either of them diminishing the other.

Then she thought: the word is free, and it does not mean anything anymore.

She had said it at her own table in May with eight people around her and it had been a real word then. It was not a real word now. It had been a word for leaving a house, and she had left the house, and there was nothing on the other side of the word.

She took off the suit and left it on the sand with the towel — and with the two rings in the pocket of it, her wedding band and her mother's thin gold band, which she had handed to her husband a year ago before going into the water and which she now had no use for — because there had been a time when the body had to be covered and there was no longer anybody left to cover it from, and she went in.

She had named a piece of music Solitude once, for a naked man standing beside a desolate rock on a shore, watching a bird fly away from him. She had been looking at the wrong person in that picture for years; it had never been a man.

The voice of the sea was seductive. She had mocked the sentence a year ago on the porch of the main house, standing in a T-shirt in the dark — it's water, it's water on sand — and it was water on sand, and it was also, at the same time and without contradiction, the other thing: something that had been talking for a very long time and had no intention of stopping, and which did not require her to answer it.

She swam.

It was easier than she had expected and harder than she had expected, and the two were the same fact. She was strong now — she had been strong for a year — and the strength was the unbearable part, because it meant that the distance was a question she was capable of asking. The fear came at the point where it had come in July a year ago, and she recognized it, and it was smaller than she remembered and it did not turn her around.

She thought of Dr. Broussard, and of time, which was not a treatment.

She thought of Nadia's hands coming down on the keys.

She thought of Wyatt saying the bottom goes for one step, then it comes back, and she understood that he had been wrong about that, and that he had been wrong in the way that kindly people are wrong, and that she forgave him for it, and that the bottom did not come back, and that she had known that all along.

The lights on the porch were very small behind her. The sky had gone the color of nothing. Her arms began to go heavy, and when they did she did not stop and she did not hurry, and she was not thinking about dying, and she was not, exactly, thinking about living; she was thinking about how far it was, and how far she had already come, and how nobody in the world knew she was out here, and how little that turned out to weigh.

A long way off, a man on the beach called somebody's name.