For his entire life, Eli Danhauser had been good. Except for four days, more than twenty years ago, when Eli had not been good, when he’d been the exact opposite of good. And now, he feared, the result of that single, brief lapse had come back to haunt him, the way he always knew it would, and the truth, instead of setting anyone free, was going to destroy everything he’d worked for and hurt everyone he’d loved.
Ronnie
Veronica Levy hung her towel and her cover-up, one of Lee’s old button-down shirts, on the knobby branch of a scrub pine. She kicked off her Crocs and stood, looking out at the pond, its water the gray of a tarnished nickel in the early morning light. Wisps of steam rose from the surface and dissolved into the air. The water would be cold, but there was no better feeling than the handful of seconds after that first wincing shock, when she’d force her arms to paddle and her feet to kick, and she would feel her heart start beating again, her skin tingling, her body absolutely, irrefutably alive.
Ronnie clipped an inflatable float on a belt around her waist and made her way down to the water. Once, the belt hadn’t had quite so far to travel, and her legs hadn’t been quite so jiggly, or her skin so fine and slack. Once, she’d been deliciously curvy, even though she’d wasted years despairing of her body, trying to wish and diet and Jazzercise the weight away; starving off the same ten or fifteen pounds that always came back, usually with friends. She’d been pretty back then, her skin smooth, hair shiny, eyes bright. These days, everything was dulled and faded, and every part of her body from her breasts on down had developed an unseemly droop. In clothes, or even in a swimsuit, she could still look not-terrible. Out of clothes… well, out of clothes she just tried not to look. She tried to be grateful for everything that her body could still do, that she could still drive and carry her own groceries; that she could walk. That she could swim. That she was still here at all.
Veronica waded out until the water lapped her thighs, then took a deep breath, braced herself, and submerged, ducking down, shuddering as the water rose over her shoulders, her neck, her face, sending her hair drifting in a cloud around head.
She rose to the surface, gasping, wiped water from her eyes, and set off across the pond, her arms lifting and falling smoothly, legs flutter-kicking, the flotation device trailing on its rope behind her. She was not as fast as she’d once been, but she could still make it across the pond and back again in under an hour.
This early in the morning, this early in the season, there were no other swimmers. Just Veronica, and the schools of darting, silvery minnows, the croaking frogs and the tadpoles, the sunfish and the snapping turtles who hadn’t yet emerged to take their place on the sun-warmed rocks. Veronica stroked smoothly through the water, feeling it lapping at her shoulders, cupping her body and bearing her up, like a strong hand in a silken glove.
When she’d made it across the pond she slowed her pace, dog-paddling into the reeds, peering around to see if the Pond People, the families who owned the cabins and camps in the woods, had put up new signs yet. Yes, there they were: three ankle-high admonishments painted on planks of scrap wood, hammered into crosses, with the words NO TRESPASSING in blaze orange, jutting out of the soft sand.
Ronnie swam closer, treading water, trying to be quiet. She could see an older woman—in other words, a woman about her age—standing on the shore, observing her. The other woman wore a linen caftan in faded pink, with an oversized sun hat on her head. Her feet were bare; her legs were deeply tanned, with varicose veins twisting over her calves and up her thighs. She was probably naked underneath that caftan. The Pond People were avid skinny-dippers. Veronica used to tell her husband that it was weaponized nudity; another way for them to claim the pond as their own. Which it wasn’t. People on the Cape could own land right up to the shoreline. They could not own the water, either salt or brackish or fresh. Not the ocean, not the bay, not the marshes, and not the ponds. This fact did not prevent the Pond People from scowling, or shouting, at any swimmer who dared come too close to shore. “Get off of our PRAH-per-ty!” she remembered a little boy yelling at her, and at Sam and Sarah, when they’d made the swim one summer. Stalwart Sarah had glared right back at him. “Make me,” she’d muttered under her breath. While Sarah was giving the boy her most scorching stink-eye, Sam, her sensitive soul, had turned and started swimming back. He’d spent the rest of the morning brooding on the shore.
“Why are they so mean?” he’d asked on the bayside beach later that day. “We weren’t even on their property!”