Below the surface, though, it was not what she expected. The underside of the swimming pool did not feel like the ocean. Not the same element, not water the way she remembered it to be. In the pool, all the valves and pipes that made the place possible — the pumps and filters and automated heating elements — sent out waves of precisely controlled sound. She exhaled through her nose as she descended and listened to the humming: a boring, competent drone, a hmmmmmmmmmmm that might go on forever, like the buzz of office lighting or the murmur that leaks from computers.
There was a trance, a hypnotic suggestion, inside that sound. She yielded to it and let herself be absorbed. It made her think of cubicles and automatic pencil sharpeners and taking a number from the dispenser to wait in line for your driver’s license to be renewed.
That’s when it happened. An understanding, a new realization, came into her head and triggered a transformation that was almost total. Maybe this was how all learning worked in the end. The right kind of concentration deployed in the right way at the right time. If you paid attention and sorted carefully, put things in the right place at the right time, it was possible to think yourself away from yourself, away from the things you could not do. Like a child bicycle rider who hits on that ancient balancing trick for the first time and races away from her parents, Stace felt herself changing, her capacities expanding. In one moment of insight, an action that once seemed mysterious and impossible entered the realm of the clear and knowable.
She saw it now: A swimming pool was more parking lot than ocean. Right angles, a perfect square with no secrets, utterly transparent, bleached. It was like a beaker in the lab, an ice cube tray under the tap. If you did not fear it, you could not be scared.
She rolled back through the advice she’d been given. It really was in your head. That was true. You had to relax, yes, and, no, you could not fight it. If you knew that going under, that submersion, was only a temporary condition and if you accepted that little bit of pressure, the water pushing back, then you could open your eyes and hold a breath without worrying about the next one. You could go to the bottom, feel the tiles under your toes and look up at other people’s feet, other bodies floating above your head. See through to the light on the other side.
And if you truly figured it out — if you really understood a swimming pool — you could wait there on the bottom for a few calm seconds. You could shrug off years of wrong-headed pain and leave it on the floor like an overburdened backpack. You could Blast Off in reverse. Push up and away, fly back to the surface. Your life could be altered, changed forever, in less than ten seconds.
SHE PASSED BRAD on her way up and he missed her for the second time. When they surfaced, he was the one panting, obviously flustered and angry.
“What the hell was that?” he said. “Is this a joke? Were you trying to do that, go down as fast as you could?”
“No,” she said. She smiled at him. “No.”
She put one hand on the gutter and looked down, first at her feet scissoring back and forth in the waveless warm water, then lower, all the way to the bottom.
“Maybe you aren’t ready for this,” he said. “Maybe we need to go back to the shallow end and start again.”
“ No,” she said again. “No.” It came out crisp and fast.
“I’m sorry about all this,” she said. “It was my fault. But it’s okay now, I think. Let’s pretend it never happened.”
IT COULD NOT BE EXPLAINED. And it would have been impossible to lead another person down the strange corridors and passageways, the new-firing synapses of her brain. Brad had never seen anything like it: Water letting go. The film of worry cleared completely from somebody’s eyes. A girl turning herself around so quickly.
She moved forward every week. First the floats and the introductory front swim. She could see them now, understand how everything fit together, the breathing and the basic movements flowing into each other. He made precise adjustments, guided her arms and legs with just the tips of his fingers, moved her head with an open palm on her cheek. The back swim and the kneeling front dive and the stride jump. She went down to the bottom and retrieved three or four rubber rings at a time. At the end of each class, they treaded water for thirty seconds longer. His head bobbed close to hers as he counted off the time and she could see droplets of water hanging in his eyelashes.
He gave her a copy of the Royal Life Saving Society manual. The book was a yellow and blue three-ring binder with the society’s logo printed on the cover. An oar crossed with a grappling hook and knotted together with a shamrock of coiled rope. Everything you needed to know was in there: what to do with poison, electrocution, a severed finger in a glass of milk, plucked eyeballs. If you fell into sub-zero water you were supposed to float on your back with your knees curled up to your chest. This kept your dwindling body heat concentrated in the core area. It was called H.E.L.P. — the Heat Escape Lessening Position. A drowning victim would grasp at anything to survive and a rescuer would have to ensure personal safety before trying to aid another. If a victim pulled you down you were supposed to strike hard and move back immediately, kick to the face or stomach or groin if necessary. And if they became hysterical or violent, you had to stand by, just out of reach, and wait until they lost consciousness before moving in to help.
She took everything in. At the end of the session Brad made her a construction paper report card and drew happy faces and stars beside all the skills she had completed. He gave her five coloured badges from the Red Cross Kids program.
“I guess you’re in Green now,” he laughed. “And not too far from a shiny Bronze Medallion if you keep it up.”
The ladies were not impressed.
“He’s not supposed to do that, you know,” one of them said.
“Those badges are for children. He’s not supposed to do that. I’m sure you have to pay extra for badges.”
SHE LEFT THE CLASS after fourteen weeks and never came back for Advanced Beginner II. On the last day, Brad helped her fine-tune the front crawl.
“Keep your head down, face in,” he told her. “When you breathe, you have to turn your head instead of lifting it. Like this. You have to move your head from side to side instead of up and down. Like you’re saying a big ‘No’ instead of a ‘Yes.’”
She incorporated the breathing into the efficient cycle of her stroke, her head turning just enough to raise the corner of her mouth out of the water. At Christmas, they offered a fifty-percent discount for students who signed up for a full-year membership. She got a card and started coming almost every day to practice her lengths. The accuracy of the place, she liked that most. One length, a trip to the opposite wall, was worth twenty-five metres and the return gave you fifty. The day always ended on a nice round number.