Night Swimming

Maria’s Melody bobbed gently on the tranquil waters. Brendan had dropped anchor about 7 miles off the Caseville shoreline as Dayna set out their lunch: tomato and avocado sandwiches and a chilled bottle of Vigonier that tasted faintly of cantaloupe. That had been two hours ago, and now Brendan stood at the stern looking through the field glasses he’d retrieved from one of the cabinets. Dayna lay on her back, rubbing the underside of her right breast, and then plucking the stray hair that had sprung – seemingly overnight – from the top edge of the areola. She held the hair up to her index finger and guessed the length at an inch. That wasn’t there yesterday, she thought. How could that have grown so quickly?

She released the hair into the light breeze and brought her left knee up to her chest, squeezing it with her arms, stretching the muscles in her back, and felt the last of Brendan’s warm fluids drip from inside her. Their lovemaking had been sudden and unexpected, as it often was. Brendan was a strongly passionate man and would reach for his wife whenever the mood struck him, which was, to Dayna’s satisfaction, quite often, but almost always from out of nowhere. This time had been particularly good, the best in the months that had passed since her mother had died. Dayna had struggled to move on from the loss, even though their relationship had always been strained at best.

But this had been a good day, and Dayna was finally feeling like herself again, thanks mostly to the fresh Lake Huron air and the weight of her husband upon her thin body. She smiled at the feeling of him coming inside of her, the way he throbbed, and the quiet moan that escaped from his lips before he withdrew. Neither of them had spoken after. Brendan had stood up and pulled his shorts on, waving off a schooner sailing by a few dozen yards of the starboard side of the Melody, acting out the common courtesy of checking on an apparently unmanned boat to make sure nothing was amiss. It was hard to know when not to come a-knockin’ when on the water, everything is rockin’. The sun was dipping into the horizon, and night would hit the lake before long, but with Brendan’s wave, the pilot of the schooner waved back his own acknowledgement and turned east toward shore, leaving the couple to themselves.

Their relationship had been struggling since her mother’s death. As she withdrew into herself more and more, Brendan grew frustrated with her prolonged silences and mood swings. Occasionally she had rebuffed his physical advances – something new to both of them – and that had done nothing to improve the state of affairs. Brendan had begun to grow silent as well, and there were many days over the preceding months where they had spoken fewer than a few hundred words to each other.

She looked back at Brendan, who was still standing there looking out across the water. She saw the dark scar on his back from his disc surgery, remembered his car accident, how afraid she was that he wouldn’t be able to walk again. At this, her mood began to darken again. Her mother had died in a car accident of her own, run down by some drunk teenager as she was crossing the street, never seeing it coming due to the grocery bags she had been cradling high in her arms. Dayna felt the tears coming, and as they spilled down, a sense of wonder that she could still have anything left to cry for.

Brendan chose this moment to look over at his wife. He saw the tears, and dropped the binoculars to the padded bench the spanned the port side of the vessel. “You need to do something,” he said to her sternly. “Do something, for Christ’s sake.”

“What do you mean?” she sniffed.

“Get a job. Take a class. Get a hobby. Something. Anything. I don’t care. Just do something to get your mind off of this.”

Now the tears came easily. “Please,” she started.

“’Please’ nothing,” he scowled. “You have to distract yourself, or give yourself something else to fret. Go peddle your maudlin ass to some lonely business traveler and deal with that guilt for a change. At least it would be something you could maybe get over.”

Now she was angry. “How dare you? How dare you!” At least the tears had dried up.

He muttered something under his breath, something she couldn’t catch. “Brendan,” she started, but he waved her off and sat down behind the boat’s steering wheel, looking back and forth between the compass on the console and the direction he’d been peering through the binoculars. He rested his hands on the wheel and his head upon his hands. The dimming sunlight glinted weakly off the Melody’s key which dangled on an elastic band Brendan wore around his wrist. He muttered again, “Fuck it,” she heard this time, and he slapped one hand down against the console.

“I could see someone,” Dayna said. “I could find someone to talk to.”

“You’ve been saying that for months,” Brendan replied. “It’s getting hard to trust your words. You know I’m trying to be patient, but my patience is all but worn out. You need a good kick in the pants to do something, that’s what you need. You need something else to worry about? Well guess what? You got it, baby.”

At that, he stepped over the port side rail of the Melody and dove into the lake.

“What are you doing?”

“Going for a swim,” he said. “The Charity Islands. They’re about 2 miles west of here, and if I start now I might get there before it’s dark. And if I don’t, well, I hope they got that lighthouse going.”

“The key!” she yelled at his back. “You’ve still got the key on your wrist.”

He turned back, treading water. “Exactly,” he said. “There is a blanket in the console, and you can use a life jacket as a pillow if you want. Sleep well.” He turned away and began a strong crawl.

“Goddamn you, Brendan, you can’t just leave me out here like this!” she yelled at him.

He swam on, aggressively, to the west, ignoring her. He heard her voice for the next half hour or so, slowly growing hoarse, until the rusty squawk of the seagulls covered any noise that might be floating with him on the dark water.