The Water Witch and the Shark

I'm thirty-four years old, I have a car payment, a knee that clicks when it's cold, and a text message from my former coach that I've now read eleven times. Some swimmers just age out. Whitney sends it with no punctuation and no emoji, which is somehow worse than if she'd added a smiley face. A smiley face would at least mean she was being cruel on purpose. This one reads as a weather report would. Like she's just informing me of the tide.

I'm on a ferry, by the way. Not just any ferry, a luxury coastal ferry going up the Inside Passage from Vancouver, three nights, half empty, late autumn so the whole thing smells like wet coats and expensive coffee. I booked it at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday with her text still sitting there, and I told myself it was about clearing my head. That was a lie and I knew it at the time. It was about being somewhere she wasn't, doing something she'd say was pointless, and doing it anyway. Spite is a fuel source. It's not a clean one, but it burns.

I stuff the phone in my bag, walk out to the deck, and lean on the rail like a woman in a movie about grief. The water out here is the color of a dishrag. Grey sea, grey sky, no line between them, just a soft blurry in-between where the horizon gave up. Wind pulls at my hood. A couple in matching rain jackets takes a selfie and leaves. I stay.

And I think my spiteful thoughts, because that's what the deck is for.

I keep circling this: Whitney didn't drop me. A selection committee dropped me, at thirty-three, on a technicality of times and taper schedules, and Whitney just said the quiet part out loud a year later. But it's her voice I hear in the water. It's her text I'm swimming against. Six years we competed together, from twenty-two to twenty-eight, and then her hip went and she quit and became a coach of the landlocked variety, and somewhere in there she decided that her ending had to be everyone's ending. If she aged out, then the water belongs to the young. If I'm still in it at thirty-four, I'm embarrassing her by existing.

So I stand at the rail and I inform the dishrag-colored Pacific that it can have my resignation when it pries it out of my cold, chlorine-bleached hands.

* * *

The ship has an indoor pool. Heated, glass-roofed, open until two a.m., and on a half-empty crossing in November it is basically my private facility. Night one, I show up at eleven in my practice suit with my goggles pushed up on my forehead like I own the place. There's one crew guy, Elliott, hospitality officer, twenty-eight, friendly in the way of someone paid to be, who asks if I want a towel reserved. I say yes. He says, "You're the night swimmer, huh? We noticed. It's kind of nice, honestly. Nobody uses the pool." I don't know what to do with that, so I say thanks and get in.

Fifty laps. I count them out of pride and punish myself with them out of anger, and somewhere around lap twenty the two feelings merge into one ugly thing that keeps my arms turning over. My stroke is still good. That's the part that gets me. I'm not slow. I aged out of a selection, not out of the water, and those are different sentences no matter what Whitney's thumbs think. I curse my own pride under my breath between breaths, a little bubble of syllables each time my face dips down, because the alternative is cursing hers and she doesn't deserve the air.

By lap forty I've stopped thinking at all, which is the actual reason I swim. There's just the black line on the bottom, the warm water, the sound of my own breathing turned into rhythm. The ship's engines hum through the hull and into the pool like the whole tub is plugged into something. I notice that, vaguely. Filed under later. Then fifty, done, I hang on the wall and breathe and feel I am a person and not a grudge with arms.

I do it again the next night. Eleven p.m., empty pool, towel from Elliott, fifty laps. This is where the story stops being about spite.

* * *

I'm on lap nineteen, mid-length, face down, breathing to my left every third stroke, when there is suddenly a man in the lane with me.

Not at the wall. Not getting in. In the water, beside me, half a body away, keeping pace, and I do not mean he swam up and caught me. I mean he is matching me stroke for stroke at speed, and I have not seen him enter, and there is no splash. His arms go in and out of the water like the water is agreeing to it. His skin is pale in a way that the underwater lights pick up and answer, a faint glow, like moonlight got bored of the sky and settled in him instead. Silver streaks his dark hair. He's got a jaw on him, and shoulders, and he looks late thirties, and none of that is the point. The point is that I swim like I'm angry and nobody keeps pace with me when I'm like this.

I stop. I grab the wall. He stops too, turns in the water without touching the bottom, which I register later, the not-touching-the-bottom part, and looks at me with eyes the color of deep water over sand.

"Okay," I say, standing up in the shallow end, because if I'm getting murdered in a heated pool I'd at least like my feet down. "That was creepy. Impressive, but creepy. Where did you come from?"

He tilts his head, and when he speaks, I feel it before I hear it. The voice comes through the water, through the deck, through my ribs, a vibration like waves collapsing against rock somewhere under the floor.

"You push the water like you're angry at it," he says. "Why swim if you hate it?"

"I don't hate it." That comes out faster than I mean it to. "I hate a lot of things, but not the water. The water's the only one of them that never let me down."

He considers that with a seriousness I don't usually get from men. From anyone, honestly. Most people hear a joke and laugh or don't. He takes it like a statement being weighed.

"You push it," he says again, "like it owes you something. I have watched swimmers for a long time. Most of them love the water or fear it. You are doing neither."

"And you are?" I ask. "Watching?"

"Yes." No embarrassment in it. He says it the way I'd say I have a sister. "I watch. You are the angriest in the fleet this crossing."

"The fleet." I look around the glass-roofed room, at the stacked loungers, empty since ten. "There are four hundred people on this boat."

"There are four hundred people on this boat," he agrees, and something in the way the sentence lands makes it clear he's counted, and that people is doing a lot of work in that sentence for him.

I should get out. That's the reasonable read of the situation, a stranger appears beside me in an empty pool at midnight without entering it, glowing faintly, talking about watching. A younger Mia would have been out of the water and into a hoodie in four seconds. But I'm thirty-four and I've been dropped from things and told I aged out, and there is a specific, ugly, glorious freedom in having nothing left to protect. I stay in the pool. I turn to face him fully.

"What are you?" I ask.

"I am a salt-walker." He says it plainly, no drama, and then, because apparently even creatures of the deep have manners, he adds, "The name I use near humans is Silas."

"Near humans. Not with."

"With is a thing that has to be offered." He drifts a little closer, and the water around him is warmer, I swear it on my knee that clicks, warmer by a degree where he passes. "I can hold this shape in deep water only. Here, this pool, this ship, the strait under it, that is deep enough. On land I am something else. Something the beach would not thank you for meeting."

I laugh. It just comes out of me, sharp and surprised, and his head tilts again, tracking it. He's listening to my laugh the way I listen to splits on a pace clock. Taking the number.

"You're telling me you're a monster from the ocean," I say, "and you swam up to my lane to critique my emotional relationship with freestyle."

"I am telling you I have watched humans desire things for a very long time," Silas says, and the vibration of his voice goes through the water and up through my hands where they grip the wall. "And I wanted, once, to be near one who wanted something badly. You want very badly. It shakes the water."