Dawn Watch

I got fired on a Friday afternoon, which is a terrible day to get fired because you have all weekend to sit with it. My name is Nellie, I'm thirty-four, and up until that afternoon I taught swim lessons at the Glenmore Club, the fancy private one out past the golf course. The details don't matter much, except that a member's husband grabbed my arm hard enough to bruise and I shoved him into the shallow end, and somehow I was the problem. His wife writes the checks, so there you go.

Here's the part I probably shouldn't admit. I didn't go home. I sat in my car in their parking lot until the staff lot emptied out, and then I remembered that Deva, my coworker, kept her staff ID in the lost and found drawer because she was always losing it. I took it. I walked through the back hall like I still belonged there, and I let myself into the natatorium after midnight.

The pool at night is the best room in the world. The underwater lane lights were on, that soft blue glow, and the whole hall smelled like chlorine and quiet. No kids, no moms on the benches, no man in a polo telling me to smile more. Just water, warm and still, glowing like something off a postcard.

I set my clothes on a lounge chair. Bra, underwear, everything, in a little pile, and I didn't even fold them, which for me is genuinely wild. Then I walked down the steps and slid in, and oh my god, the water. Eighty-four degrees, I checked the board a hundred times over two years, and it just took me. I pushed off the wall and did a slow breaststroke lap with nothing on, and I laughed out loud in the empty room. That's the freedom of it, being unseen. Nobody watching, nobody grading my form, nobody's husband telling me I'd look better with less shoulder. Just me and the water that never once asked me to be smaller.

I did maybe four laps before the door handle clicked.

I want to back up and tell it from the other side, or at least how I pieced it together later, because what happened next was not my plan. There was a wedding that night. Big one, banquet hall packed, and the glass lounge next to the natatorium overlooks the pool, so the whole reception had been spilling drinks and noise under that wall all evening. I'd heard the music thudding through while I changed. Apparently around midnight the toasts started, and one uncle got up and went long.

That's when the door opened and a woman came in. Not a staff woman. A wedding guest, heels in one hand, dress shimmery, dark hair half down. She pushed the door shut behind her and stood there in the dark by the entrance, and I swear she froze like she'd walked into a glass wall.

I saw her before she knew I'd seen her. The exit sign above the door lit her dress up, this greenish glow, and I could tell she was staring at the water. At me. At the pale shape of me gliding under the lane lights, which, I'll be honest, does not hide a thing. The pool lights make everything a stage.

So here's where I made a choice. I could have ducked behind the lane rope and grabbed a towel and done the whole mortified stranger routine. I was fired, I was leaving town Monday, my car was packed except for a lamp. What exactly was I protecting? A job I didn't have? A town I was already halfway out of?

Instead I kept swimming. Slow, deliberate, one full lap, my body rolling through that blue light with nothing on, and I let her look. I could feel her looking. It wasn't creepy, it was electric, like the water had gotten ten degrees warmer. I finished the lap at her end of the pool and came up at the wall, hair slicked back, and I looked right at her.

"Hi!" I called, and my voice bounced around the whole empty hall. "You're not the drunk uncle, are you?"

She laughed, this surprised little burst, and came a few steps closer. "God, no. I escaped during his third anecdote about the bride in diapers." She held up her heels like evidence. "I'm Leela. My brother's the one who got legally trapped in there a few hours ago."

"Congratulations to him!" I said. "I'm Nellie. I, uh, used to work here. As of about four o'clock today, actually, I don't work here at all."

"Oh no!" She sat down on the edge, right at the corner, and dunked her feet in. She was wearing this dark green dress and she'd kicked her shoes off by the ladder. "Fired the same day as a wedding? That's a rough Friday."

"It's a rough Friday and a great pool," I said, treading water. "Are you going to tell on me?"

She looked at the water, then at me, and I want to be careful how I describe this because it matters. She didn't look shocked. She looked curious, like I was a photo she hadn't expected to get. "What would I even say? That the pool has excellent company tonight?"

"Exactly that," I laughed. "Leave a five star review."

We talked a while like that, me floating at the wall, her feet making little circles in the water, her dress still glowing under that stupid exit sign. She's a photographer, she told me, freelance, and she hates posed pictures. She said the reception photographer kept making people line up and she'd wandered off to avoid being arranged into anything. She was thirty-one, she'd driven in that morning, and she had a flight home Sunday. I did that math in my head without meaning to. Two days. Less, really.

"You know what's funny?" she said, watching her own feet. "Everyone in that room keeps telling me to smile and hold still. And then I open one door in this building and there's a naked woman doing the least posed thing I've ever seen."

"That's me, professional unlatched door," I said, and she laughed again, and I thought, okay, this is a person I like.

The air was cool on my shoulders whenever I rose up, and the water was warm everywhere else, and the difference made my skin feel loud. She was right there at the corner, feet in, calves bare to the knee, and something in me that had been shoved around all day by a man in a fleece vest