Chapter 1 - The Afternoon Everything ChangedMy mother-in-law went into the pool at four forty in the afternoon, and I was standing six feet away from her when it happened.
I want that on the record before anything else, because I have spent a long time turning those few seconds over in my head.
It was the last Sunday in September, the day of Vivian's fiftieth anniversary lunch.
She had been married to Robert's father for thirty-one years and widowed for nineteen, and every year she still set the long table on the terrace and invited everyone who was left.
The house sits on four acres above the Sound, a stone mansion her husband built in the eighties, and the pool is the center of everything — you can see it from the kitchen, the library, and every window on the west side.
I had been married to her son Robert for eleven years by then, and I had never once felt like I belonged in that house.
Vivian was eighty-four, small and straight-backed, and she still wore white in September like a woman who had decided long ago that the season did not apply to her.
I noticed things about her that day that I should have paid more attention to.
She came down late, which she never did.
She ate almost nothing.
Twice I watched her start a sentence at the table and then close her mouth, as if she had changed her mind about who she was speaking to.
And when her son Daniel reached past her to pour himself a drink, she flinched — barely, a small movement in the shoulders — and I remember thinking it was strange, because Daniel had always been her favorite.
After the plates were cleared, Vivian asked me to walk her down to the pool.
She said she wanted to put her feet in the water one more time before the weather turned.
I said of course.
The terrace was behind us, up a short flight of stone steps, and Robert was up there with the other guests, standing in his dark suit with a drink in his hand, talking to the caterer.
Vivian sat on the edge and rolled up the hem of her white dress and put her legs in the water.
Then she said something I did not understand at the time.
"Claire," she said, "I have been meaning to talk to you about something for two weeks now, and I keep waiting for the right moment."
I asked her what it was.
She looked up at the terrace before she answered, the way a person checks to see who is watching.
And then she stood up.
I did not see her lose her footing.
I did not see anyone's hands on her.
I saw her rise, and I saw her turn toward me, and the next thing I knew the water was closing over her white dress and her arms were going up and she was reaching for the tile edge and missing it.
She went under once and came up coughing.
Her eyes were open and terrified, and she was trying to say something, and the water kept taking it.
"Help!"
I screamed.
"Someone help her!"
I got down onto the stone and reached for her wrist and caught it, and I held it while I screamed again, and her fingers dug into my forearm hard enough to leave marks that lasted four days.
I heard the chairs scrape on the terrace above me.
I heard a glass break.
And then Robert's voice behind me, sharp and loud.
"What did you do?"
He said it to me.
Not to the water, not to his drowning mother, not to the house — to me, as he came down the steps.
I remember exactly how he looked, because he was wearing the same suit he is wearing in the photograph the caterer took that afternoon, the one everybody keeps passing around.
Dark jacket, white shirt open at the collar, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide and startled.
I thought it was shock.
I found out, much later, that it was something else, but I am not going to get to that yet.
Together he and I pulled his mother out of the pool.
She was conscious.
She was shaking so hard her teeth knocked together, and she had swallowed water, and she was pale, but she knew all of us.
She knew me, anyway.
Because while Robert was yelling for somebody to call an ambulance and while the caterer was running up the lawn with a phone in her hand, Vivian pulled my head down close to her mouth, so close I could smell the chlorine on her breath, and she whispered one sentence into my ear.
"Don't let them change the will."
Then her eyes rolled back and she went quiet, and I got up off that stone deck with her words in my head and my husband's question standing between us like a wall.
What did you do.
I have thought about that question every day since.
May you like
The ambulance took fourteen minutes to come up the drive.
By the time it left, the pool was empty again and the water was still, and every single person at that lunch was looking at me, and I understood that the afternoon had ended in a way that was going to follow me for the rest of my life.
