But I was already gone, lifting the safety latch on the iron gate and walking past the elaborate hut with its Bermuda shutters that served as the pool bar. There were a dozen or so sunbathers lounging around the perimeter of the pool, some in full sun and others under the club’s black-and-white-stripedumbrellas. Children splashed and played in the water. Even in my state, I couldn’t help but smile at their joy.
Palm trees swayed above the white wooden cabanas. The trees weren’t native to this area, but the club kept them alive by wrapping them through the winter. The view across the pool of the otherworldly blue ocean was transportive, and it made this little oasis in Cape Carolina feel like a tropical mini-vacation. Not that I was eager to return to the tropics after last time.
“Gray,” I heard Brooke calling again from behind me, louder than before.Good Lord, leave me alone,I thought. I was being immature, I knew. Still unable to locate Marcy, I quickly and calmly removed my sunglasses, hat, flip-flops, and pareo and set them in a pile by the edge of the pool. There was one place I knew Brooke wouldn’t follow me. She would never ruin a perfectly good blowout, which, to be fair, I respected.
I had been mature when Greg told me, on our trip to the British Virgin Islands, as we were sipping mimosas on the stern of our boat—still sex-sticky, no less—that he was leaving me. I had been mature when he moved out of my house and straight into Brooke’s the day after we buried my mother. I had been mature when they asked to take my only child on a three-week vacation to Europe, which they were leaving for tonight. I was done being mature.
As I heard Brooke’s footsteps behind me, I flashed back to the BVIs, to Greg looking me in the eyes and saying, “Gray, you are the mother of my child, and I will always love you. But I think it’s time for us to go our separate ways.”
Ten years of holding his hand and smelling his particular brand of morning breath and feeling his cold feet underneath our sheets. Ten years of his bad jokes at my office and even worse show tunes in the shower. My husband—the man I had made love to less than thirty minutes earlier, the man who had held my leg in the delivery room, who had stood at the other end of the aisle when I was in a white dress—was out.
Trapped on that boat with Greg, I panicked. I had just found out my mother was sick a few days earlier, and now this? All I wanted to do was flee. Before I could gather my thoughts to respond, before Greg could try to stop me, I climbed onto the side of the boat and dove off into the clearest aqua water. I held my breath, ears roaring from the pressure of my descent. I could feel my hair, which I’d had tinted that perfect island blond for this trip, for this husband, streaming out in a sleek V behind me.
Now, feeling the same primal urge to escape the clutches of Brooke, I raised my arms above my head, bent my knees ever so slightly, and dove gracefully into the deep end. No splash, no fanfare, just a simple, swift motion that united me with the water. I had known that day in the islands that that dive, like it or not, was the beginning of something for me, the start of a new life. Now, as the water covered my streamlined body, it washed away all the things those people on the terrace and the pool deck were saying about me, all those judgments, all the hurt and fear that losing my mother and my husband and, for all intents and purposes, my sister in such short order had caused.
Safe from the noisy world above the surface, I told myself things would get better. I was strong, I was smart, I was proud, and I was worthy of being loved, even if I had forgotten those things during the past few months. My dive, that tiny snapshot of fearlessness, of freedom, did more than set me a pool’s length apart from Brooke; it offered a moment of meditation that would propel me forward into a summer of change. There is nothing like the deep, immersive water to cleanse us of even our darkest demons, to wash us whole and set us free, until we can emerge, as I did that day, gasping, reborn into the light.
diana: royalty
My brothers and sister and me, we’re all named after royalty. Diana, Charles, Elizabeth, and Phillip. But my momma was wrong when she said naming people after royalty would make them grow up to be like royalty. My boyfriend was a case in point.
“Harry, I don’t give a damn where you were all night,” I said. “All I care about is that you get out of my sight.” I threw one more wrinkled shirt into my duffel and put my hand up to my throbbing jaw.
Harry was behind me, his breath stale from the night before, pleading, “But, babe, I’m gonna win it all back. Don’t you know your man well enough to know that he’s an ace at poker?”
I turned around, so pissed I could hardly speak. “Are you freaking kidding me? An ace? You blew all my money on thatpoker tournament. You got any damn idea how long it takes to save a thousand bucks? You got any damn idea how I’m going to fix this toothache, now that you spent all my money?”
“Babe, you gotta understand. I can win all that money back like that.” He snapped his fingers. “All I need is another hundred to put in down at the bar tonight. I’m feeling lucky.”
I hoisted an overstuffed bag over each shoulder and marched to the car. “You’re nothing but a drunk and a gambler, Harry, and you can bet your sorry ass I won’t be back this time. Good luck finding your hundred dollars.”
He was lumbering behind, trying to keep up, trying to get between me and the door of the creaky old Impala that I could’ve traded in if he didn’t keep spending all my money. I shoved him away from the door, slammed it shut, and lit a cigarette.
I shivered at the stained pits of his old T-shirt and the beer belly rolling over the band of his cargo shorts as he leaned against the car, fogging up my window. His hairline had receded since I met him, revealing an oddly red scalp. Harry wasn’t ever magazine handsome, but in his day he’d been all right. Some days, when I could get him into a collared shirt, he was even something to look at. Let’s just say, Harry hadn’t aged gracefully.
Maybe I wasn’t some prize pony at the fair either, but I’d kept myself up pretty good. And I figured I’d rather be alone than deal with his crap for the rest of my life. Thank the good Lord I’d had the sense not to marry the bastard. I took a long, slow drag of my Marlboro, feeling it calm my nerves eventhough the smoke made my throbbing tooth hurt worse. Where was I going to go? I didn’t have any family nearby. My girlfriends would take me in in a hot minute, but they’d warned me sideways and backward about Harry from the beginning, given me down the country about dating him. He was worthless. He was no good. I was too proud to admit they had been right.
I sighed and resolved to head to the shelter if I had to. Wouldn’t be the first night I’d spent there. Probably wouldn’t be the last. “One of us has to go to work!” I shouted through the glass, sounding less intimidating than I would’ve if my busted window had rolled down. But that ship had sailed around January. “Get out of my way, you moron. I swear to God, I’ll run over you. Don’t make me do it.”
I shifted the car into reverse, ignoring Harry’s muffled whines. The Impala was rattling and shaking, the air-conditioning blasting and the radio up. It seemed right fitting that “Goodbye to You” was playing as I backed out of the short dirt driveway of the tiny house Harry had inherited from his mother, where we’d been living for eight years. People were always asking why Harry and me didn’t make it official. Well, this was why.
He was all right. I mean, he was a nice guy deep down, the kind of guy who makes them weepy speeches about how beautiful you are and how he’s so lucky he’s got you and all that bull. But then you turn around and he’s lost his job again, and he got ahold of your savings and blew it at some blackjack table at some casino his friend swears he got rich at. The man just didn’t have any sense and that’s the God’s honest truth of it.
I was forty years old and starting over again. I briefly thought that maybe I should stick with Harry, that the devil I knew was better, that at least I wasn’t alone.
But then the tooth pain shot all the way through my ear and reminded me that it wasn’t me that should be feeling bad. If it weren’t for Harry, I’d be on my way to the dentist right now. If it weren’t for Harry, I wouldn’t be in all this pain because I wouldn’t be flat broke with nowhere to go, praying I could make it through the day at work.
“Morning, Mr. Joe,” I said as I walked through the back door of the fluorescent-lit local pharmacy for another long day on my feet in the photo lab. The job at Meds and More made me a living, yeah, but it sure wasn’t what I’d dreamed of back when I was a kid and my momma said that anybody named Diana’d grow up to be a princess.
“You all right there, D?” Mr. Joe asked. He was about the nicest manager you could ever hope to have. He was an inch shorter than me, kind of round, with a nice head of hair even though he was in his early fifties. The thing I liked best about him was that the blue shirts he wore tucked into his khaki pants were always pressed. Either he was good at ironing or he had some kind of generous girlfriend because I knew his wife had died a while back.
I nodded and tried to smile but ended up wincing instead. “My tooth is hurting something fierce again. I’d saved up all the money to get a root canal and whatnot, but thatdamn Harry found my stash and blew all my money in a poker tournament.”
Mr. Joe looked real nervous, and I said, “Now, don’t you worry. I’ll get me something back in the pharmacy to numb it up enough to get through the day.”And I’ll get a bottle from the ABC store to get me through the night, I thought.
“Now, Diana, I’m not gonna have any of my girls running around in pain all day. You get on to the dentist. I’ll cover photo until you get back.”
I shook my head. “I can’t pay for it anyhow. I’ll be all right.”
