Dismantled Read Online Free PDF Page B

up, gasping, her eyes bright red from chlorine. “One minute, nine seconds, Dad!”
    He gives her a smile, nods wearily. “You’re the champ,” he says. “Where are your goggles?”
    But she’s already underwater again and doesn’t hear him.
    She starts doing laps. Nine times back and forth across the pool, touching the edge, counting out loud.
    He should have filled in the pool when his father died. Put in a tennis court or a greenhouse for Tess. Anything but this. He knows one day his daughter will drown. Feels it in his bones. In his shaking muscles each time she jumps in. Swan dive. Belly flop. Sinking down, down, nearly to the bottom while he gnaws the insides of his cheeks like a desperate animal, until he tastes blood.
    In his dreams she’s there in the water, reaching for him, calling, Daddy! as she goes under, sinking down, down, down.
     

    H ENRY LOOKS MUCH THE same as he did when he graduated from college. Same close-to-the-skull haircut, same way of walking with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Only he wears chinos these days more than ripped jeans. The scruffy beard is gone. And there are faint wrinkles around his eyes. He’s still very boyish. Fidgety. A stranger would look at him and call him handsome. Would say he was a lucky man with a beautiful wife and daughter, a successful business, a swimming pool. A stranger would look at him and think Henry would be a fool not to be in love with his life.
    But a stranger wouldn’t know that Henry actually lives in a converted barn out back beyond the pool and hasn’t slept in bed with his wife for nearly a year. And as far as sleeping with his wife in the conjugal sense, it had been a year and a half. Sex had become increasingly unsatisfying and more of a trial than anything else. Tess put more of an effort into reviving it than he did. She bought books, sensual massage oils (including one that was supposed to be arousingly warming but caused an allergic reaction, burning his penis), but in the end, he just didn’t feel all that interested. Passion, Henry told himself, was for young lovers, poets and artists. None of which he was or would be ever again.
    But a stranger would not know any of this. They would have no idea that Henry sees every part of his life as a miserable failure. True, he loves Emma profoundly, painfully—yet surely he is failing her too.
    Fuddy Duddy Daddy. Take a chill pill.
    Fuck.
    Henry chews the inside of his cheeks. Feels a headache coming on. It always starts with a little tickle just behind his eye. Then the tickle turns to a pinprick and Henry imagines his skull, like the body of a pinhole camera: that little pinprick lets in the pain and magnifies it; projects it onto the wall of his skull where it vibrates until even his jaw and teeth are sore. He carries aspirin around in his pocket the way some people carry breath mints. He shakes the bottle with his fingers, hears it rattle. There’s comfort in that. He pulls it out, pries off the lid, lets three tablets fall into his open palm, tosses them into his mouth and chews. The aspirin burns the cuts on the inside of his cheeks. Eats away at the exposed flesh there—wounds that never heal.
     

    A T FIRST, HE’D MADE Emma wear a bright orange life jacket. Then water wings. Eventually, Tess argued that Emma was too old, too strong a swimmer, that the flotation devices did more harm than good. Into the garage they went, any hope of saving his daughter piled up with the mildewed camping gear and bald tires.
    Henry doesn’t even own swimming trunks. Doesn’t take baths, just three-minute showers. Lather, rinse, out. Tess calls it a phobia.
    “Survival instinct,” Henry says. “We were not born with fins.”
    Sometimes, though neither of them says it, when they look out at the pool, they remember the dark water of the lake.
    Tess remembers out loud what a good swimmer Henry used to be. How he and Suz would race out to the rocks from their beach at the lake. They’d have