Backstroke at Midnight

The greenhouse smelled like wet soil and orchids. It was ten at night and I was the only idiot in the building.

Let me back up. I'm Tamara, forty-six years old, county clerk, and for the last eight years I've also run the volunteer schedule for this high school's greenhouse. Don't ask how a clerk ends up running a greenhouse program. Nobody planned it. It just happened, like most of my life.

Tomorrow is my forty-seventh birthday. So tonight I was in the greenhouse at ten p.m., watering orchids for the winter exhibit, which is maybe the least reckless thing a woman can do. I was fine with that. I'd made my peace with it years ago.

Mostly.

The greenhouse sits behind the school, connected to the natatorium by a short hallway. The pool is a shallow four-foot teaching pool, and it's been drained down for repairs since October. Well, mostly drained. There's a leaky valve at the far end and the district won't fix it until spring, so there's about three feet of green-tinged chlorinated water sitting down there, a foot below the deck, like a bad mood.

I had the little space heater going and the grow lights on and my phone playing old songs, and I was working my way down the benches with the watering can when I opened the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet and found the disk.

A floppy disk. An actual floppy disk, in a paper sleeve, with handwriting on the label in black marker. DO NOT THROW AWAY.

I knew the handwriting. You don't forget handwriting like that. Big loops, letters that lean like they're in a hurry.

Clint.

Clint runs the greenhouse. Biology teacher, forty-eight, been here forever. He's been here since before I first walked in, twenty years ago, back when he was a twenty-eight-year-old TA and I was a twenty-six-year-old grad student working the county side of the youth science program. We were coworkers for a year. We were also, apparently, two idiots, because I'll get to that.

I stood there holding the disk like it was going to bite me.

The drawer was a mess. Old seed packets, extension cords, a box of latex gloves, three dead markers. But the disk sat on top like it had been placed there. Like somebody put it in this drawer on purpose, in the one cabinet in the building that never gets cleaned out because nobody's been assigned to clean it out in thirty years.

"Okay," I said, out loud, to nobody. "Okay."

I have a habit of talking to empty rooms. Occupational hazard of being single, probably. Anyway.

The greenhouse has an ancient computer in the corner. It's a beige tower from sometime in the early two thousands, and it's there because the old climate controller plugs into it and nobody wants to touch the climate controller. The monitor is huge and the whole thing wheezes when it starts up.

It had a floppy drive. Of course it did. Everything back then had a floppy drive.

I sat down on the rolling chair, which was shorter than it used to be because one wheel had died, and I slid the disk in. It made that sound. That grinding chunky sound. God, I hadn't heard that sound in twenty years.

The computer thought about it for a long time. Then a window popped up with one file on it.

letter.doc

I should have stopped there. I want you to understand that I knew, sitting right there in that dead-wheel chair, that I was about to read something I wasn't supposed to read. The label said DO NOT THROW AWAY, not DO NOT READ. But come on. Nobody labels a disk like that and leaves it in a shared cabinet and expects privacy. That's not how labeling works. That's not how cabinets work.

I opened it.

It took a second to load. Then there it was, in black text on a gray screen, in a font that hadn't been fashionable when I was young.

Tamara,

I'm writing this at 2 in the morning because I can't sleep and because I chickened out again today and I need to say it somewhere or it's going to eat me alive.

You know when you lean over the seed trays and your hair falls forward and you tuck it back with two fingers? I think about that constantly. It's pathetic. I'm twenty-eight years old and I think about a woman tucking back her hair and I can't concentrate on mitosis.

You wore the green dress at the winter banquet. I'm sure you wore it for somebody. I hope it wasn't for Henderson. If it was for Henderson I'm going to quit this job and move to the coast.

Here is what I should have said by the pool that night. I'm writing it down so I stop pretending I'll ever say it out loud.

I think about your mouth. I think about your hands. I think about what you'd sound like if somebody finally touched you the way you deserve, and that somebody is supposed to be me, and I keep not doing it, because you're going back to the county office in June and I'm going to be here grading tests, and what if I ruin the whole thing. What if I ruin you even wanting to come back to this greenhouse.

So instead I fix your watering schedule when you're not looking. That's my grand passion. I adjust drip rates.

I should have kissed you by the pool that night. You know the night. You had your feet in the shallow end and you said, "Well, aren't you going to say something," and I said something about chlorine levels. Chlorine levels. I'd like to go back and drown that version of me.

If you ever read this, it means I'm dead or stupid. Probably stupid. I keep the disk in the cabinet because throwing it away felt like admitting the whole year didn't happen.

It happened. It was the best year of my twenties and you were never mine and that's my own fault.

Happy graduation, almost. Come back and visit the orchids sometime.

Clint

I sat there.

The grow lights hummed. The heater ticked. Somewhere down the hall, the leaky valve dripped into three feet of standing water, plink, plink, patient as anything.

"Well," I said to the empty greenhouse. "Well, hell."

Because I knew the night. Of course I knew the night. I was twenty-six and he was twenty-eight and it was the end of my first spring here, and there was a staff pool party at somebody's house, and at some point the party moved to the backyard and I sat on the edge of the pool with my feet in the water, and Clint came and sat next to me with two beers, and I looked at him and I said, "Well, aren't you going to say something."

And he talked about chlorine.

I remember thinking, that's a no, then. And I finished my beer and I went home and I took the county job in June and I told myself it was about the salary, which was true, but it wasn't only true. I walked away from a man who couldn't talk to me and told myself that was the same thing as him not wanting me.

Twenty years. Twenty years of that sitting in a filing cabinet twelve feet from the orchids.

I want to tell you I thought about it carefully. I did not think about it carefully. I read it twice, I took a photo of the screen with my phone because some part of me already knew I'd want it later, and then I looked at the clock.

Ten forty.

His truck was in the faculty lot. I'd seen it when I came in. He was here. He was here at ten at night during winter break, which meant he was in his classroom or he was down the hall in the natatorium office, because those are the two places Clint goes when he can't sleep, and he'd told me that himself, two years ago, standing right where I'm standing now, like it was small talk.

I put the disk back in its sleeve. I put the sleeve in my coat pocket, which was stealing, technically, from a filing cabinet I technically manage. I decided I'd feel bad about it later. There's a lot of things I decided I'd feel bad about later.

I walked down the hallway. It was cold. The pool has been drained since October, so the natatorium is unheated and the air has that flat dead smell of a room built around water that has no water in it. Except for the pool itself, which had its three feet of water, pale green under the one emergency light, still as glass.

And there was Clint, sitting on the pool deck with his legs hanging over the edge, shoes off, feet in the water.

Forty-eight years old. Bare feet in cold pool water. In the dark.

"Clint," I said.

He jumped so hard he nearly went in. "Jesus, Tamara. What are you doing here? It's almost eleven."

"Watering orchids. What are you doing here?"

"Thinking." He squinted at me. His hair's gone gray at the temples and he's thicker than he was, but it's the same face. "Why are you walking around in the dark natatorium?"

I pulled the disk out of my pocket and held it up.

He went very still. In the emergency light I watched it land on him, watched him figure out exactly what I was holding, exactly where I'd found it, exactly what was on it.

"That's," he said. "That's not."

"It's labeled DO NOT THROW AWAY," I said. "In your handwriting. In the bottom drawer. Where it's been for twenty years, apparently."

"That cabinet hasn't been opened since," he stopped. "Huh."

"Huh," I said. "That's it? Huh?"

He looked at the water. He looked at me. He laughed once, a strange helpless sound.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. So you read it."

"I read it."

"And now you're standing there with it and I'm sitting here with my feet in cold water like an idiot, and tomorrow's your birthday, because yes, I know when your birthday is, Tamara, I've known it for twenty years."

"Tomorrow I'm forty-seven," I said.

"Tomorrow you're forty-seven," he agreed.

I walked over and sat down next to him on the deck, close enough that our shoulders touched. The water was cold on my ankles when I put my feet in. I hadn't taken my shoes off. I did it anyway, right there, socks and all.

"Chlorine levels seem fine," I said.

He made that helpless laugh again. "You're going to kill me."

"Clint." I turned to look at him. My heart was loud but my voice came out steady, which surprised me. "You wrote that I should have kissed you by the pool that night. You were off by a pool and twenty years, but this is a pool, and it's nearly my birthday, and I found your letter, and I'm asking. Are you going to say something?"

He was quiet for maybe three seconds. Longest three seconds of my life.

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, I am. I'm gonna say I've thought about that night every damn week for twenty years and I never once thought I'd get a second chance at it, and I don't want to blow it again, so I'm gonna do this slow and I'm gonna do it right."

"Slow," I said. "Okay. Start slow."

"I'm gonna kiss you now," he said. "If that's all right."

"It's more than all right," I said. "It's about time."

He turned toward me and cupped my jaw with one hand, careful, like I was one of the orchids, and he kissed me.

He kissed me for a long time. Not a movie kiss. A real one, slow, careful, like he was relearning something. His hand moved from my jaw to the back of my neck. My hand found the front of his jacket and held on.

When he pulled back, we were both breathing hard.

"Twenty years," he said. "You tasted exactly like I remembered."

"You didn't know how I tasted. You never got past the kiss part."

"Well. Twenty years of guessing, then. Let me tell you, the guess was close."

I laughed. I actually laughed, sitting on the edge of a drained pool at night in January, and it felt like something breaking loose in my chest. I put my forehead against his shoulder for a second, just to steady myself.

"Okay," I said. "So. The letter."

"The letter."

"You wrote it at 2 a.m. and then you put it on a floppy disk instead of printing it, which might be the most Clint thing I've ever heard."

"It was 2005-ish. Disks felt safer. A printed page could show up somewhere."

"Where? Like, slipped under the wrong door?"

"Slipped under MY nerve," he said. "I chickened out before I even finished typing. I sat in that greenhouse and wrote the whole thing and then I thought, she's your coworker, she's twenty-six, she's got the whole world ahead of her, and you're the guy who talks about chlorine levels when a woman asks you to say something. I thought you'd laugh. I thought if you laughed I'd have to quit my job and move to another county."

"Clint."

"I know."

"I was WAITING," I said. "Do you understand that? I stood in that banquet hall in a green dress I bought specifically, and I watched you look at me and then go talk to the catering guy about the coffee urn. And I thought, well. He's not interested. That's that. So I took the other job and I moved and I married a man who called me Tabitha instead of Tamara because he never listened long enough to hear the whole name."

He didn't say anything right away. He looked at the green water.

"I've been married too," he said. "Twenty years last June. Divorced since spring."

"I know. The volunteer forms. Emergency contact changed in April."

"You read my forms?"

"I read everything. I run that schedule. I know which substitute is terrified of the boa and which one steals granola bars from the faculty lounge. I know you alphabetize the seed packets by Latin name like a lunatic."

"That's just correct," he said, and I laughed again, and then neither of us said anything for a minute, because there it was. Both of us. Sitting in the dark. Twenty years of almost.

"I was waiting too," he said finally. "Every year on your birthday I'd think, maybe this year I'll call. Maybe this year I'll send something. And then I wouldn't. And then one day you were just the woman who ran the volunteer schedule, and I thought, that ship sailed, buddy, it sailed twenty years ago, let it go."

"It didn't sail. It was parked in the faculty lot at ten p.m. this whole time."

He made that helpless laugh a third time. Then he went quiet, and I could tell something was