This next section is called "Val"
and this part is entitled "Held Under."
It's 17 years later.
Val was running out of time.
Was it already too late?
Should he try to reach his father in Connecticut again?
The sun huge, white and undulating overhead,
Val was stabbed by a sudden burning need for air.
He pushed up and burst the surface of the water,
his backyard swimming pool.
Before he could take a breath, he was grabbed from behind,
and a forearm crushing his Adam's apple,
legs locked around his waist.
Val lost his balance and was pulled over backward,
submerged.
Still trying to draw breath, he sucked in water instead of air,
gasped sharply.
Suffocating and grabbing the man sized forearms of his son
with both hands, Val yanked frantically
at Michael's locked arms and tried to slip beneath his grip.
Michael held on.
Val felt a stinging sensation against his shoulder,
and the two of them sank to the bottom of the pool.
Val sucked in yet another convulsing mouthful of water,
desperately drove his legs against the bottom,
burst the surface, pushed as hard
as he could against Michael, and jabbed his elbows
into Michael's stomach.
With Michael's grip releasing, Val escaped to the shallow end.
Doubled over, hoarsely, ludicrously gasping in loud,
whistling inhalations like a seal,
Val struggled to get his breath.
Michael surfaced beside him, rubbing his arms and stomach,
eyes hurt and enraged.
"Jesus Christ, Dad!
I was just kidding around!
You almost killed me!"
Still gasping for air, Val shook his head no,
coughing and half-puking out pool water.
In another few moments, he drew a smaller, less frantic breath,
another.
As he started to calm down, his throat opened
and he could finally draw in air and smell
the sweet orange blossoms and honeysuckle of late May.
He became aware of the deep penetration of the desert sun
on the skin of his back, tenderly
probed his bruised Adam's Apple.
"I had no idea you were out here!"
Val gasped and coughed.
"And if that's your idea of kidding,
then I was kidding, too!"
"Dad!
You're, like, always so fucking serious!
Get your butt chapped!"
Val coughed, managed to whistle out,
"You can use that four letter word--"
"Seven letters, Dad!
fuck-ing."
"You really can, if that's the way you want to talk,
but just don't do it around me, Michael."
At 14, Michael was as tall as Val,
had Davis's fierce strength.
Val rubbed at a stinging place somewhere high on his back
at the same moment Michael noticed and started
probing a cut on his own chest.
He looked at a diluted flow of blood on his fingertips.
"Look what you did to me, Dad!"
Val took Michael's medallion between his fingertips,
felt the jagged sharp edges.
It was a quarter that Michael had
placed on the railroad tracks.
He wore the coin, a hole a hole drilled through the middle,
on a chain around his neck.
Now, Val dropped the medallion against Michael's chest.
"I've told you the edges on this are dangerous, Michael.
It's like a jagged razor blade.
Must have gotten caught between us."
"Must have been you!
The way you just tried to hammer me!"
He rubbed at the scratches on his forearm.
"Look what you did to me!"
Val heard the push of the sliding glass door
and saw Kazzie moving in the shadows of the porch.
Having heard the tones rising from the pool,
without knowing what it was about,
she pushed the flat of her hand down
toward the ground, a gesture to diminish sound, volume, pitch,
emotion, she stopped abruptly as Michael turned,
but before he could see the gesture.
"Little humor here, boys!"
Seeing her walking toward them, Val felt buffered, reassured.
Fit from walking and hiking, Kazzie
had an easy, athletic grace, which, Val had come to realize,
was an extension of a belief she had in herself.
She had large, beautiful, smooth hands, tapered fingers,
a lovely way of handling and touching things.
Michael pulled himself out of the pool
in a cascade of splashing water, and glaring one last time
at Val, grabbed a towel.
"Little humor for Dad!
Butt-head!
God, I hate him!
And he's all, like, such a hypocrite.
He's always telling me not to use that dumb word.
Fuck.
Fuck!
Don't use the word fuck!
But I hear him!
He uses that word!"
Michael stalked across the grass.
"Don't walk into the house wet, Michael!
I just did the floor!"
Kazzie shouted.
Michael slammed open the sliding glass door with a loud bang
and, dripping, walked in.
"Michael!"
Val shrugged.
"You're yelling at him, Kazz."
Kazzie shook her head.
"He's the one who's 14.
You can't both be 14.
Humor is the only way with them right now.
The only way.
I know it's hard, but you have to remember that.
Why do you let it reach this pitch?"
"God, Kazzie.
Why do I let it reach this pitch?
I was taking a swim and next thing Michael's got me
in a choke-hold!"
Kazz sighed.
She knelt beside the pool, half turned him around,
touched a place on his back.
"What's this?
You're cut."
"The flattened quarter Michael wears got caught between us."
She smoothed the edges of the cut with her fingertips.
She half turned him and kissed his wet lips, regarded him.
Her face softened, became thoughtful.
Her eyes filled with water-light, green, speckled.
"What?"
"That streak of silver in your hair,
wet like this, the way the sun's catching it, is beautiful."
Val shrugged.
"43 in a week."
"Whatever else being 43 is, it's kind of a privilege
to get there," Kazzie mused as she stared into the water.
"And at least you've got a full head of hair."
She smoothed his water-slick hair with her hand,
kissed him, found his lips and kissed him again.
She started to rise.
He took her hand.
"Kazz, my mother hasn't called while I've been out here?"
"No, still nothing."
"I don't want to miss her."
"If we don't hear the phone, the machine will pick it up."
"If she's at the hospital with my father,
it can be hard to get through to her."
"Take your swim.
Just try to relax for a few minutes.
I can get to the phone.
It's OK."
"I know she hasn't been telling me everything."
Kazz squeezed his shoulder and stood, her knee clicking.
She dropped a stack of mail enclosed within a folded New
Yorker onto a chair in the shade beneath the olive tree
and drifted over to pluck dried leaves
from the flowering red hibiscus.
Val pushed into the deeper end.
Long hair fanning out around his face, Val sank into the silence
at the bottom of the pool, laced his fingers
into the black holes of the drain grating,
and knew though the phone call still--
though the phone call hadn't come yet,
that he was running out of time.
When he surfaced again, Kazzie was
sitting in a lawn chair in the dappled shade
beneath the olive tree, she sorted the mail on her lap,
then stopped.
She frowned, thrust a card in Val's direction.
"Can you just read it to me?"
He asked.
She vigorously shook her head no.
"Do I have to look at it right this second, Kazz?"
She continued to extend the card and look beyond him.
"Guess that means I do."
Val pulled his top half out of the pool and a flood
of water, leaned across the burning deck.
His outstretched hand trembled short of the card.
Kazzie stood and thrust it at him.
Val pinched the corner between his wet fingers,
and, sliding back into the pool, turned it over.
The card didn't carry a Salutation, none of them
ever did, but just began as if something once started
had never stopped.
The lack of beginning implied a greater intimacy.
The cards were never signed, also as if to say
they were beyond that necessity.
This one simply said.
Dreamed of you again, you were coming to visit me,
you came in a boat.
Then you were standing in my house.
It was night.
You stood in front of the window and even though it was dark,
I could see the ocean behind you.
She had added in the lower right hand corner in smaller writing.
I forgive you nothing.
The cards had come in flurries over the years,
with irregular intervals in between.
They were always postcards, never signed,
and they carried a simple PO box as a return address.
They had been canceled in North Cove, New York.
The messages were simple, cryptic, often enigmatic,
like fragments of a dream.
There might be three or four cards for several days, weeks,
or months, and then nothing for years,
and then again, like a seismograph recording movement
on a fault line, the cards would start again.
They both fascinated Val and filled him
with a kind of dread.
At times he had the feeling that a picture was
starting to emerge, The sense of which had--
the sense of which just eluded him.
He remembered Davis had once said, "Lee Anne never
lets anything go, and she never lets
anyone get away with anything."
Val reread the card: you were coming to visit.
You were standing in my house.
There had never been a card like this one before.
Standing in my house.
It seemed to bring something too near.
And, I forgive you nothing.
What was that?
But without being able to put it into words, in a way he knew.
There had been a card several weeks ago
with a single word, damage.
That, too, had stayed with him for days, damage.
The word had turned over and over,
slipped in and out of his fingers.
Damage.
Damage coming to him?
Damage in her own life?
What damage?
Val carefully composed his face and glanced
at Kazz, who watched him with uncharacteristic resentment.
"I don't get it.
I have never gotten it.
Whatever your life was before, we've been married 15 years.
You have a son, a whole other life.
Isn't there some way to put a stop to this?
Who is she, Val?"
"I've told you.
She was a girlfriend.
And that's all.
There's nothing more."
"What does she want?"
Kazz stared at him.
"I don't know."
Val shook his head.
"I honestly don't know."
"Somehow, somewhere, you have to know.
A person doesn't keep writing to someone
without his having an idea why.
She must want something.
Even I can see, and I know nothing about her,
that she wants you standing in her house.
That means she wants me pushed out."
"Forget it."
"I might if I felt you could."
Val shook his head.
Everything he'd said was true.
Lee Anne had been a girlfriend.
Kind of.
He hadn't gone into detail.
No one really wanted to hear about previous lovers .
Kazzie had been with other men before they'd gotten together,
and Val didn't want to know the particulars.
Kazzie slapped through the rest of the mail.
She gathered her hair, pulled it back from her forehead
and said with a touch of contempt
and a country twang, "What do you think, Val,
I'd be more interesting to you if I dyed my hair black, cut
it short like KD Lang?"
She sang "Catherine, Catherine, why do you--"
Val said, "Please stop.
I love you the way you are.
And I've never once answered her, Kazz."
"How would you like it if I'd been getting postcards
from some old boyfriend the whole time we'd been married?
Someone you'd never met."
She mimed the blankness of his face.
"Somehow, she knows she's got something,
some hold on you, because she hasn't given up!"
Val pushed off the side of the pool, swam
across, hoping to break the momentum
of Kazzie's angry mood.
He knew Lee Anne's postcards were meant to disrupt.
And they did, preoccupying him for days.
It was as if she were saying, if I'm not free of something,
then you won't be, either.
Still, he told Kazzie the truth when
he said he hadn't spoken to Lee Anne
since they were married, that he hadn't said
a word to her, though one day several years ago,
someone, a woman, had called to renew magazine subscriptions,
and the moment he'd heard her southern accent he'd barely
been able to follow her words.
"A special rate of $26 for two years,
and if you renew now for three years, we throw in a blowjob."
Val had been stunned for a moment
before he burst out laughing and the person hung up.
Lee Anne?
As Val surfaced on the other side of the pool,
he heard Kazz saying "and you know something else, Val?
If someone kept knocking on my door,
sooner or later, I might just open it to find out why."
She stood.
"What I mean to say here, Val, is
that if I were trying to sabotage someone's marriage,
this is exactly the way I'd do it."
She was right.
Perhaps the lie wasn't that he'd done anything
or even admitted anything, but that he wasn't indifferent.
The lie was that without his understanding it,
Lee Anne was always somehow there,
and he couldn't say that to Kazz.
He didn't understand it himself.
Thank you.