Submerged
As a somewhat cultivated pool man who appreciates the finer things, I have a love-hate relationship with the Hollenbeck residence at 47 Mountainside. It has a contoured, black-bottom infinity pool whose water appears to cascade right from the mountain itself, with views from the surrounding flagstone patio that make me momentarily believe in God. As you might have guessed, its owners are among the wealthiest people in the region.
However, for someone who’s a noted socialite with so much glitz and glitter around her, Mrs. Hollenbeck is a real piece of work. On my last visit she lambasted me, not for not closing the side gate on my way out the prior time, nor for not securing the gate’s combination lock. Those, I had done. Instead, her diatribe was all because I hadn’t spun the dials far enough for her liking once I closed the lock, as if a child of any age or a ne’er-do-well passerby could sneak around to the back of the house with a quick touch of their thumb or forefinger. I used to think her spite for me was due to some form of sexual tension, but any awkward unease on my end came and went months ago when I realized that was wishful thinking on my part.
Today, paying the home my weekly visit, I gaze at that voluminous view that spans our golden valley as I add the required chlorine to the water and balance its pH level with soda ash. Compared to other pools I service, this one’s in tip-top shape—its owners are meticulous in keeping a push-button, electronically operated vinyl cover atop it whenever it’s not in use, saving themselves energy costs while keeping things easier on my end.
I’ve yet to see the dreaded missus, but overhear her speaking on her cell phone in the rose garden behind the pool house. She sounds manic, her voice loud but shrieky, her breath short and panicked. “He’s at it again… again… again!” she keeps repeating. As I listen, it’s not hard to figure out who ‘he’ is, and only slightly more challenging to decipher what ‘it’ is, although she confirms my guesses when she says, “Yep, it’s true. When I arrived a day early from our girls’ retreat, that philandering husband of mine was banging the housekeeper on the guest room bed. He’s been sleeping there ever since, although I’m not sleeping at all in ours—just tossing and turning in anger.” Her voice soon fades, and I spot her up the hilly lawn approaching the rear doors of the house.
While I suppose I’m enjoying a bit of schadenfreude at the moment, I also feel for the woman a bit. We’ve all been there; it sucks.
Done with the chemicals, I wander over to check the filter and the filtration schedule. On my way there I’m met by my new four-legged friend, a year-old golden lab whose collar tag says “Reagan,” but whom I think of and call “Sunshine Daydream.” This dog is the best. His wraparound smile is constant, and he brings gooey tennis balls in his slobbery jaw for me to toss him on most visits. Not today, though, it’s just he and his abundant affection. I bend down to pet him and put my face before his. He pants in excitement as if I’ve turned on a happiness switch.
“No game of fetch today, Daydream?” I ask, shrugging my shoulders. My canine buddy just nods his snout.
Suddenly, the call of his unfortunate given name and the sound of clapping hands turns the dog’s head around. I follow his lead and gaze back up the hill to see Mrs. Hollenbeck there with her auburn hair in an updo, stiff from hairspray, as if she’s just walked out of a 1960s Cadillac advertisement in LIFE magazine. Her eyebrows are strikingly thick, so much so that I can see them from this distance. I’m pretty sure I can see her irritated frown too.
“Better get going before she turns on you like she did on me, SD.”
The lab seems to understand and before I can blink bolts up the lawn to the open door. Then I saunter away to sign the timecard under the wooden shelter where the pool equipment is kept. Although, she’s seen me today—I’m sure of it—I wouldn’t put it past the lady of the house to say I didn’t show up. Some people just can’t handle the truth.
***
It’s dialysis day for my dad. One of several in the week. He can manage on his own, but I volunteer to drive and pick him up as long as I’m not working.
My dad’s kidneys recently cried “No mas!” from endless days of drinking that began when he was in college and only stopped a few short years ago. Not to mention his nonchalant attitude about popping painkillers back in his weekend warrior days to tend to injuries and flareups. Once, when I was five or six, he handed me a pack of Good & Plenty licorice candies and I tossed them into my mouth just the same way I’d seen him do the pills, and he laughed and laughed when I said, “I’m just like you now.”
That was a rare moment of shared pleasure. We’ve had a complicated relationship. He’s always felt that I’ve underachieved and wasted all the advice and opportunities he’s presented me. I’ve often believed he worships Mammon. That when I was growing up, he was always more concerned with how the stock market was doing than how his family was doing. And I feel this obsession of his somehow led to my mother’s terrible end a dozen years ago when I was in the fifth grade. After that, it was just him and me, day in and day out.
But now, thanks to his organs beginning to fail, we see each other more than we otherwise would. We haven’t bonded, per se, but we understand each other a little better—although some things will always be foreign to one another. He’ll never understand why I dropped out of college more than halfway through an undergrad business degree. And I’ll never understand why he was so apoplectic a year ago when I told him of my wish to become a writer.
“A writer?! That’s what people do for fun!” he yelled that evening with beet-red cheeks, drawing the attention of everyone at the restaurant where we were having a “pleasant” dinner.
“Oh yeah, I don’t know anyone who’s doing it for fun. Do you?”
Of course, he didn’t.
Now, as we traverse the roads of San Diego’s Carmel Valley neighborhood, I take comfort that my father sitting beside me knows me a little better, and I feel better for knowing him better too. We’ve developed a mutual respect of sorts, which is nice to have after a lifetime of conflict.
“Good luck today, Dad,” I tell him once he’s checked in and I prepare to leave the clinic. “I’ll be back by four o’clock.”
He nods briefly before Angela, a tall pretty blonde, whisks him away to a back room for treatment. On a recent phone call, Angela told me he’d missed not one, but two appointments last week. “He needs to be very careful,” she said. “The next one he misses could kill him.”
***
It’s another Thursday afternoon, and my next stop is the Hollenbeck home. My mind, however, is so focused on my dad that I can barely concentrate on my driving or the duties of my job. Angela called yesterday to tell me paramedics had come to the clinic after my father arrived in extremely bad shape and his latest dialysis treatment “didn’t take.” I drove to Scripps Memorial as soon as I could. Dad, in the ICU, appeared to be comatose as much as sleeping, but the doctors and nurses assured me he was okay—for now. A machine is now filtering his blood around the clock, trying to do what his kidneys can’t.
All the stress from my father’s impending mortality is further accentuated by the haunting memories of my mother’s death. There are several reasons why I now clean pools after having dropped out of college. First among them is probably that I feel it brings me closer to my mother. You see, when I was in school that fateful September morning, she slipped (or so we preferred to think) into our home’s swimming pool and never spoke another word again. She too ended up in the ICU, just like how I saw my father last night. Although, in her case she really was in a coma, with no hope of coming back. We gave friends and extended family a chance to say goodbye before my father and I said goodbyes of our own.
My mother loved both swimming and hanging out poolside, so my job gives me a sense of somehow being in her realm; I can almost feel a telekinetic conversation between us at times. And I still have questions for her. Even at my young age, not privy to the insight and details my father was given, I couldn’t help but hear the rumors that she had been depressed and suicidal. How could I not? Several bullies at school would never let me forget it. And my older cousins said the toxicology report showed she had taken valium while already drinking enough that day to fail a field sobriety test. If that’s true, then I like to think she’s where she wanted to be, her spirit drifting and floating in the chlorinated water, waiting for me to arrive at every stop along my route.
It’s not long after I pull up the pool truck that Mrs. Hollenbeck opens the front door and heads my way. She reaches me when I’m at the back of the truck, gathering a couple of buckets from its bed. One of the buckets is filled with test kits and cloths and assorted dyes, the other, heavier one, with chemicals like chlorine, soda ash, and conditioner that keep any swimming pool clean and ready for use. My hands are full, and I feel helpless when she begins yapping away.
“I can’t find him!” she says. “Did you see him anywhere along the street driving up here? I’m so upset!”
A moment passes before I realize she’s referring to my favorite dog and not her husband. “Uh, oh!” I say, dropping the buckets back in the bed of the truck. “Did he get out?”
“I don’t see how he could have. All the gates are locked and doors are closed and have been all day. I left for an early round of golf this morning and let him outside. He was playing in the yard when I left, picking up and dropping tennis balls everywhere he went. I came home just a few minutes ago from my weekly luncheon and he’s nowhere in sight.”
A sinking feeling hits me. “Who used the pool last?” I ask her.
“My son and his friends last evening. Why do you ask?”
“Just wondering,” I say with a shrug, but not news I wanted to hear. I jog more than walk to the side gate and Mrs. Hollenbeck follows me.
“What is it?” she asks, “Where are you going?”
I don’t answer, but just proceed on ahead around the corner to the pool. When I arrive, my dread spikes further, although there’s still hope.
“It looks like the pool cover wasn’t closed all the way—there’s a little gap there. I need to now draw it back all the way open,” I say to Mrs. Hollenbeck. I put my hands on the woman’s thin, waifish shoulders. “Brace yourself.”
I kneel down. flip open the hatch on the deck beside the pool under which the cover is operated, and pull back the automatic lever. Immediately, the whirring sound of the motor as it recoils the pool cover pierces the silence of the estate and its surroundings like a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo. And each moment that passes brings me closer to the answer I fear.
Once I see a yellow tennis ball bobbing forth in the water not much further than the diving board extended, a metallic taste fills my tongue and singes my throat. A second later the lab appears, floating there like a surfboard, his body in a state of rigor mortis. I’m overwhelmed with emotion, and turn to Mrs. Hollenbeck, she in her perfect hairdo and golf outfit, equally distraught. For her, it’s the loss of the one living creature whose unconditional love gave her succor. For me, it’s even more than that. You see, I was the one who discovered my drowned mother in our pool, floating face down in a one-piece suit, a straw hat she’d been wearing caught in the pool sweep. Now, memories of my mother surface up to the top next to that poor little dog. I can no longer contain myself and sink to my knees.
“I know, I know,” Mrs. Hollenbeck says, although in reality all she knows about is my connection to the dog. She comes over and takes my hands. I stand again, and we hug tightly. So tightly. With her body against mine I once again feel the soul and spirit of my very own mother.
***
It’s late when I finally head home. I had several more pools to do after the gruesome discovery at 47 Morningside Drive, where I stayed with Mrs. Hollenbeck until the fellow from animal control arrived and took Sunshine Daydream away. The ringtone sounds and my phone bounces on the seat next to me. When it rains it pours, as they say. It’s the ICU caregiver and she tells me Dad likely won’t make it through the night. Of course, I planned on visiting anyway right after dinner, but now dinner is the bag of potato chips I have in the glovebox.
Once at the hospital they tell me the doctors are running tests on my father and I’ll need to wait outside the room. So, I head back into the lobby area and call my dad’s brother who lives just outside of San Francisco. We’ve been texting over the past twenty-four hours, so the news is no big surprise. He thanks me and tells me he’ll be down soon to help with all the arrangements and everything I need. A small but needed relief. I’m glad I’ll still have a branch of the family tree to hang on to.
Eventually, the door to the room opens and the critical care physician, Doctor Gupta, a woman of Indian descent whom I’d met the night before, appears before me followed by a handful of others. “Go see your father, he’s awake now,” she says in her heavily accented voice. “I’m sorry, but it will be the very last time. His organs are failing, and there’s nothing more we can do.” As she tells me this, an orderly is pushing the dialysis machine out of the room and past us down the hallway.
I offer my thanks and understanding as the medical contingent gazes at me with pitying eyes. Then I enter the room alone and close the door behind me. Light from the setting sun flickers in through the blinds and the constant beeps from his bedside monitor set a depressing rhythm that begins the final countdown of my dad’s life. There he is, with catheter tubes inserted into his nose and limbs, and a weary darkness under his eyes as if he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep in years. He’s sixty-one but looks more like ninety-one. Still, he’s alive—for the moment.
When I sidle up next to him, my thighs bumping up against the mattress, he looks at me for what will be the final time.
“How do you feel?” I ask finally, having little idea what to say—or what not to say.
“Weak,” he manages, and his struggle to simply say the word testifies to that.
“I just want you to know that I’ll be here,” I say.
He manages a grimacing smile, as if tasting just a dash of sugar while swallowing down life’s final bitter pill. He then wets his lips once, twice with effort, and emits a half cough, half gargle. “I need to tell you something,” he eventually says, and I lean an ear so close I can feel his breath. “Sell the pickup; don’t give it away. It has its problems, but its bluebook value is nearly five k.”
Not what I was expecting to hear, but it’s my father’s version of Rosebud, I guess.
I take his chilly, cathetered hand and rub it, as if for good luck. He’s closed his eyes now, and tears well in mine and fog my vision. I gently release his hand and wander to the bench by the window, where I peek outside at the visitors, patients, and staff who stroll the pathways that wind their way around the hospital buildings.
I sit there exhausted as the sky outside goes dark and streetlamp shadows line the paths below. I check my email and try to process anything of any importance. I text my friend Lisa, who’s moved to New York for grad school. She replies with a heart-shaped emoji and an old-school XOXO. Meanwhile, nurses come in and out at regular intervals but I’m not feeling chatty. Then, shortly after one of the nurse’s visits, she returns with Dr. Gupta. The doctor confirms the nurse’s hunch and declares my father’s time of death. They dispense condolences and tissues on a daily basis, but I’m indeed grateful when it’s time for mine. They ask if I need someone to pick me up, but I tell them I’m OK to drive.
By the time I reach the parking gate, however, and speak to an attendant after somehow losing the ticket the machine spit out hours earlier, I’m a babbling idiot. So, I leave the garage and pull over into a dirt area that abuts one of the hospital’s several construction sites. I’m transfixed by a crane on the other side of the cyclone fence. It’s like a one-hundred-foot-tall praying mantis under the floodlights. I turn off the ignition, let out a powerful sigh, and realize that life goes on. No one can see me in the crane’s long shadow, but I’m here. I’m living and breathing like everyone else above water.
© Roland Goity
Roland Goity lives in Issaquah, WA, where he writes and hikes and contemplates the human condition. His stories have appeared in PANK, Fiction International, Raleigh Review, The MacGuffin, and Pithead Chapel, as well as recent issues of Louisiana Literature, Sheepshead Review, and Barzakh Magazine.
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