The last place we went was the waterfall garden, where a fifty-foot waterfall roared down a hillside and into landscaped pools. I was looking at a cluster of weeping conifers and rubbing the rough green leaves, even though the guidebook asked us to refrain from touching the plants, when I heard my husband, who was standing near the base of the waterfall, cry for help. I dropped the conifer leaf and rushed down the bank.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said.
“I thought you were calling for help.”
“No,” he said. “I was saying heron, heron. A black-crowned one just flew over the falls.” He opened our guidebook and flipped through the pages. “It was really beautiful,” he said. “I wanted you to see it.”
On the hottest night in August, I had drinks with a friend who’d come into Chicago for the weekend. She used to be a university colleague, but had married two years earlier and moved to Aurora. At the bar, she ordered white wine. I ordered a whiskey, no ice. Right away, she asked about my husband. Her eyes were such a pale blue, I felt something inside me go cold if I looked at her for too long.
“How’s he been since he left the Federation? Has he found something else yet?”
“In a way,” I said. “He’s still very interested in the lake.” I wanted badly to tell her about Dean, about what we did in my office and going to the roof, about how it frightened me that I wasn’t more frightened — for myself, for him. But I knew she would only lecture me about marriage and job security and good judgment. The life she was leading now would demand that of her. When she asked about my work, I told her I was making good progress on a new paper and expected to have a draft by the end of the summer. I considered the misunderstandings my imagination had started churning out during my office hours or when I was bored in department meetings: the rebellions that led to the Persian War started when Croesus misquoted the rate of tax increases in a proclamation; the Greco-Turkish conflict began over a misunderstanding about the borders of Crete.
“Did you know the War of the Pacific started over a miscommunication about using guano to make explosives?” I said.
“That’s remarkable,” my friend said. “Amazing, really.”
I was preparing to spin her another story when she started telling me about something that had happened to her and her husband, Rick, earlier in the summer. “We went to Montrose Beach for the day,” she said. “And this young man, he couldn’t have been more than seventeen, swam out too far and got sucked into a strong current. Or so we thought.”
The waiter came by and we ordered another round. My friend said the young man had been spotted by a lifeguard, but he was actually saved by someone who was already in the water — a woman who just happened to be a champion swimmer. My friend and her husband had watched the whole thing from the shore. They were there when the lifeguard blew his whistle, when the swimmer cut across the water, hooked her arm around the young man, and dragged him to dry land. My friend said it would have been a wonderful story — inspirational, even — if it weren’t for the way the young man struggled against the champion swimmer, and when she finally yelled I’m saving you, I’m saving you, he cried back, I’d rather you didn’t, I’d rather you didn’t.
“He said it just like that,” she told me. “‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ I’d rather you didn’t. Can you imagine?”
“Imagine working up the nerve to swim that far out, only to have your plans botched by some do-gooder Olympian,” I said.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about that day all summer,” she said. “I couldn’t tell you why. I know it affected Rick too. He refuses to talk about it.”
My second whiskey was gone. I traced the edge of the glass with my fingertip.
“The boy was taken away by ambulance,” she continued.
“He could be locked up in a hospital. Or he could have gone home and shot himself in the head.” She stared into her empty wine glass, as though she might find something she’d misplaced there. “I wanted to find him and tell him I saw everything and that I hoped things got better for him, but Rick was against it.”
“Maybe he made it,” I said. “There’s a chance he pulled through.”
“I know this probably wasn’t a story you wanted to hear, Diane.” She wrapped her hands around the stem of her glass and leaned in close. “But it was just so troubling. I had to tell somebody.”
“All bodies of water look the same to me now,” I said. “Places to get lost in.”
When the waiter came to see how we were, I asked for the check.
I knew my next meeting with Dean would be the last when he announced his plans to stay in Chicago after graduation. He sat on top of my desk, cross-legged, picking at the hem of his white tube socks. His pale shoulders gleamed. The young man my friend had told me about was still on my mind, and I wondered what it was — drugs? a love affair? — that made him swim out into the ocean and try to leave himself there.
“But the whole reason you wanted to graduate early was so you could go somewhere else,” I said, getting dressed.
“I’d been thinking Columbia or Princeton, but DePaul or Loyola would be pretty good too,” he said. “And then we could keep seeing each other.”
“Dean,” I said. “Where did the word marriage come from?”
“Latin. Maritare.”
“And nightmare?”
“Old English. Maere.”
“And story?”
“Latin. Historia.”
“And trial by fire?”
“Old English, your favorite again. Comes from ordal, meaning a trial in which a person’s guilt is determined by a hazardous physical test.”
“Good,” I said. “You’re ready for the final exam.”
“The final isn’t for another week.”
“Summer’s almost gone,” I said. “Time for the next thing.”
“Why does there always have to be a next thing?”
“I blame the impermanence of existence.”
“You think I’m so young,” he said.
“You are so young.”
“You think I don’t have opinions of my own, but I do.” He stood and stepped toward me, his arms outstretched. “I have lots of them.”
“Dean,” I said. “Put on your clothes.”
“No,” he said. “I won’t do it.”
His clothes were piled in a chair. I scooped them into my arms. I was tired of the games I’d been playing with him, of the games I’d been playing with everyone. I wanted to make sure he understood me. I told him it was fine if he wanted to be stubborn, that he could just spend the night in my office, then left. On my way home, I dumped his clothes into a trashcan. When I looked down, his jeans and boxers had disappeared underneath silver shopping bags from the Atrium Mall, but his black T-shirt was still visible, splayed across a red gasoline can. It would be a mistake, I knew, to keep looking at his shirt. To touch it. To smell it. I reached down and pinched the sleeve. For the first time, I noticed the collar was faded and pocked with tiny holes. I smelled gasoline, felt grease on my fingertips. I was tempted to take his shirt with me, a keepsake from the summer when I took my life apart, piece by piece, like someone unsolving a puzzle. But instead I just kept walking.