Ice Pool Reunion

My name is Rita, I'm forty-three years old, and I've been carrying a grudge against my ex-husband for five years, which is about as useful as carrying an anchor up a hill. We were married sixteen years. He was a harbor pilot, gone for days at a stretch, and somewhere in there he decided that what he did in St. John's on his layovers was his own business. I found out the way wives usually find out. I divorced him and went back to school, and now I'm a marine biology grad student, which means I'm forty-five, broke, and smarter than I was, so I guess I'm ahead on the deal.

But I still wanted to spit on his boat.

Here's how I ended up in a swimming pool with him anyway.

I'd flown home to Newfoundland for my mother's hip surgery, and I had a return flight booked for the Friday. Then the sky turned grey, then white, then it turned into a wall. The blizzard shut the airport down Thursday night and the radio said flights were grounded until the storm blew itself out. My mother's neighbor lent me a car with half a tank, and I drove around town looking for anything open, because my mother's house was cold, the power had flickered twice, and I wasn't going to sit in the dark knitting with a woman high on painkillers who kept telling me I'd lost weight.

Everything was closed. The diner. The hotel, full. Then I saw light coming off the municipal pool, that flat green glow through frosted windows, and I pulled in.

The guy who opened the side door was Raul. He'd worked there seven years, and I knew him from when I used to swim laps before the divorce, back when I still had a reason to keep my arms strong. He was thirty-eight now, still built like someone who hauls ropes for a living, and he recognized me before I got a word out.

"Rita. Jesus, you're still alive!"

"Barely. Can I stand here until I turn into an icicle or do you have heat?"

He pulled me inside. The lobby smelled like chlorine and coffee. There was a young woman behind the desk, twenty-nine maybe, dark hair pulled back, name tag said Jess. She said she'd moved to town three years ago and had never seen weather like this.

"You can stay," Raul said. "We're not going anywhere either. Roads are gone. Nobody's coming in the morning, so we'll just lock the doors and ride it out. Got a cot in the office, a microwave, a TV that gets two channels."

"That's more than the hotel was offering," I said.

Then I heard a voice from the pool deck, and my stomach did that thing it does, that drop like an elevator cable snapping.

"That better not be who I think it is," the voice said.

Tommy came around the corner wearing a Town of Bonavista rec staff hoodie he had no right to be wearing, forty-seven years old, grey coming in at the sides, same dumb way of walking like the deck of a boat was under him at all times. My ex-husband. Stranded same as me, except he'd known Raul for twenty years, which is how he got the hoodie and probably the coffee too.

"Rita," he said.

"Tommy."

"You look good."

"Don't start."

* * *

Here's what you need to know about us, so you understand the temperature in that room. We were married from when I was twenty-four until I was forty. He never touched anybody in our house that I know of, but he touched plenty on the mainland, and when I finally got proof he didn't even fight the divorce. That was the insult on top of the insult. He just said, well, I guess you know, and signed the papers like he was signing a delivery slip.

Five years, and the man looks at me and says I look good.

Jess came out from the desk with an armful of towels, clearly sensing weather of her own brewing. "So you two know each other?"

"Married," Tommy said, at the same time I said, "Divorced."

"Okay," Jess said, drawing the word out. "Well, there's a whole pool back there and a shallow tank and a hot shower, so whatever you are, you can be it warm."

Raul laughed and slapped Tommy on the shoulder. "Small world, eh? Her flight's dead, your flight's dead, my truck's under four feet of snow."

"The whole town's under four feet of snow," Jess said. "The plow guy quit answering his phone."

I took my bag to the office and sat on the cot and did the math on how long a night could possibly last. When I came back out, Tommy was sitting on the edge of the big pool with his boots off and his feet in the water like he was a child at his grandmother's. I sat in the lifeguard chair on the far side, out of principle.

"How's your mother," he said.

"She had hip surgery. She's fine."

"Good. That's good."

"You flew in for it?"

"I flew in for work. Contract fell through because of the storm. I heard about your mother from Cathy at the church."

Cathy. He kept tabs through Cathy. Of course he did. "Well. Hope your contract finds another port."

"Rita." He turned around so he was facing me, feet still in the water. "I know you don't want to hear anything from me. But I'm not the same guy."

"You're wearing a hoodie with a zipper and you've got grey hair. Groundbreaking."

"I mean it. I did the program. I do the steps. I've been..." He stopped, rubbed his jaw. "I've been alone a long time, is what I've been."

"Good. Stay that way."

He shook his head and looked back at the water. I watched the surface shake with his feet and hated that I remembered sitting beside him exactly like that in my parents' pool when we were young and stupid and he still told me the truth.

Jess came back with coffee around eight. Raul fired up the microwave and made us all canned chili, and the four of us ate off the desk with the storm hammering the roof like it wanted in. Raul did most of the talking, stories about pipes freezing and the year the furnace died in February, and Jess kept sneaking looks between Tommy and me like we were a show.

"So how long were you two married?" she finally asked.

"Sixteen years," Tommy said.

"Five years divorced," I said, right after.

"That's a long time," Jess said. "And you never ran into each other since?"

"He lives in St. John's. I live in Halifax. That's the point of the arrangement."

"She's still mad," Tommy told Jess, like they were friends.

"You'd be mad too," I said.

"Probably," Jess said. "What did he do? You don't have to answer that. Ignore me, I'm nosy, it's why I work a desk."

"He was creative," I said.

Tommy put his bowl down. "That's fair. That's fair, yeah."

"See, that," I said, pointing my spoon at him. "That's the thing I can't stand. You agree with everything now. You're agreeable. You'd agree the sun rises in the west if it got you a nod."

"I'm trying to..."

"Trying is what you did at the airport hotel in Gander in 2019, remember? Tried. Tried real hard."

The room got quiet. Raul looked at his chili. Jess looked at her coffee like it had instructions written on the bottom.

"Okay," Raul said, standing up and clapping once. "Well. Pool's warm, storm's not quitting, and I for one am going for a swim before the generator gives up. Jess, you in?"

"Absolutely," she said, way too fast, and started pulling towels off the shelf.

Tommy looked over at me from the pool edge. "You still swim?"

"Every day," I said. "It's the only thing you left me that I kept."

I went to the locker room to change, and I stood in front of the mirror in my old black suit, and I'll tell you exactly what I was thinking, because it matters. I was thinking that five years was long enough to be the injured party. I was thinking that a man stranded in the same building as me, on the worst night in twenty years, was an opportunity, and that I'd spent half a decade wanting him to feel small, and here he was, alone, feet in my water.

I wasn't planning anything yet. That's the truth. I was just done being polite.

I walked out to the deck and the whole place was green light and steam, and Tommy was already in the deep end, and Raul and Jess were swimming lazy laps in the shallow tank, and the storm outside was throwing the town against the windows.

I sat on the edge and put my legs in.

"Cold night for a grudge," Tommy called across the water.

"Good thing I've got a warm pool," I said, and slid in.

There was a cake stand on the counter in the office, glass dome and all, left over from somebody's retirement thing. I noticed it through the window while I floated, and it gave me an idea I'm not proud of and not sorry about either.

I hauled myself out, dripping, and walked into the office and picked the thing up. Crystal dome, silver base. Tommy's mother had one exactly like it, and Tommy used to hide lottery money under the dome when we were first married, thinking I'd never look.

I carried it out and set it on the edge of the pool.

"Recognize this?" I said.

Tommy squinted at it. "It's a cake stand, Rita."

"It's your mother's cake stand. Or its twin. You hid your lottery money under the dome for two years before I caught you. Did you know I knew?"

He sat up straighter in the water. "That's... how'd you know that?"

"Because I looked, Tommy. I looked for years. That's what wives do when their husband comes home smelling like somebody else's shampoo."

"Okay, that's enough with the prop," Raul said from the shallow end, but he was grinning, and Jess had her chin on her folded arms on the pool edge, watching like it was cable TV.

"You're enjoying this," I told her.

"Immensely," she said.

I put the stand back on the counter and came to the edge. "Here's what I want. I dare you to swim with me. Deep end, full lengths, until one of us quits. You used to say you could out-swim me."

"You were better," he said. "You were always better."

"Then this should be quick. Race me."

He pushed off the wall and I dove in over him and caught him at the flags. We went back and forth, four lengths, six, and the water between us got narrower every turn until at the wall on the shallow side he grabbed my ankle and I kicked free and turned around and we were