The Half Mile I Swam Beside Grandma

Halfway

At about the halfway mark, the lake changes. Out in the middle of that bay, there is a drop-off where the bottom falls from eight feet to thirty, and the water goes from clear green to dark blue-black. It is colder, too. You feel it on your legs first.

Grandma felt it. I saw her shoulders tighten. Her next breath came quicker than the one before it, and then quicker again.

“Okay?” I said. It was not a fifty-stroke check. It was just me.

“Cramp,” she said through her teeth. “Left calf.”

I moved in close, right against her shoulder. The kayak drifted up behind me on its line, red and bobbing, its handle no more than an arm’s length from her hand.

“Roll over,” I said. “Float on your back. I’ve got you. Flex your foot up toward your face. Pull your toes back. That’s it. Breathe out slow.”

She rolled. I put my palm flat under her shoulder blade, not holding her up, just there. Her face was pointed straight at the sky. Her goggles were fogged. She was breathing hard through her nose.

“The kayak’s right here,” I said. “Right by your hand. You can hold it, Grandma. Nobody will think anything.”

She turned her head and looked at it. The red hull, the handle, the yellow line running back to my waist. She looked at it for a long time.

Then she looked at me.

“Not today,” she said.

She flexed her foot one more time, hard, and I watched the knot in her calf let go. She rolled back onto her front. She found her rhythm again in three strokes.

Pull, breathe, kick, glide.

The Count

That was when I heard it.

It came across the water from the beach, thin at first, so I thought it was a radio. Then it got clearer. It was a man’s voice, deep and steady, counting.

“Two hundred sixty-one. Two hundred sixty-two. Two hundred sixty-three.”

Grandma heard it too. Her head came up a little higher.

Grandpa used to do that. I had forgotten. For forty-one years, after he rowed her to within a hundred yards of the beach, he would let the boat drift and start counting her strokes out loud, all the way in. The whole beach knew to wait for it. When I was small, I thought it was just how swimming worked.

Nobody had counted since the summer of 2002. Dad was always in the boat. There was no one on the beach who knew to do it.

Somebody knew to do it now.

“Two hundred ninety-eight. Two hundred ninety-nine.”

And then other voices picked it up. Two, then five, then every family on that little beach. I could not see faces from the water, only shapes under the flags, but I could hear them, strangers counting my grandmother home.

“Three hundred!”

Grandma’s kick got stronger. I swear it did. I had to speed up to stay at her shoulder.