faith and will behind it.
It was, in some ways, a relief to have the topic so forbidden. I had no right to ask anything of the Shipleys, least of all forgiveness. In the face of their huge and permanent loss, my need to apologize was a dust mote, a speck. The best thing I could do, I believed, was leave them to mourn in peace. So I didn’t know until after my life and Char’s had intertwined that my parents had only been discussing their move out of our neighborhood.
Mr. Shipley could no longer afford to live there; his small import-export business had fallen apart with him. Char had grown up in Pensacola after all, her childhood marked by scarcity. She grew up missing a parent and also short on both money and simple time to be young, because she had to step into the gap I’d made, mothering her little brother.
When Paul was two, he walked into the neighborhood pool, sinking like a stone, and Charlotte, only five, leaped in right after him. She’d been a novice swimmer, barnacled to a baby, thrashing down in the blue. She could see the surface, but she couldn’t get them there. She kicked and churned, Paul’s panicked little hands yanking her hair. Her father, dozy from beer, was unaware that both his kids were underwater.
Someone—a lifeguard or a nearby mother, Char could not remember—had fished them out. I’d left them there, though. I’d told Roux the same lie that I told myself: There was no Lolly Shipley anymore. As for Char, nearly drowning had left her with both a fear of the water and the understanding that if she did not look out for Paul, no one would. Their father was very busy drinking.
That’s how Char came to know Davis so well, at a support group for children and spouses and parents of alcoholics.
It was so intricate, so precise, all the little turning wheels and moving pieces that brought Char to me. I marveled at it later, as I gleaned her history piecemeal from the thousand conversations we had after I’d realized who she was. It astonished me, how everything had unfolded in this perfect chain.
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