Three months after Jack’s wife died, an old high school flame, Maryanne, found him on Facebook. She’d heard about his wife’s death through a long and convoluted grapevine of classmates neither of them talked to anymore. She sent him a private message offering her sympathy and a road trip to come see her in Missouri to take a dip in her condo’s healing pool. She lived in a complex, in a small town in the southwest corner of the state, about a 4-hour drive from where Jack lived in Southern Illinois.  

“Nearby Cherokee Country,” she wrote. “Everyone’s got a healing pool. Works wonders.” 

The pool, she explained when he wrote back, was why she’d bought the place. It was after her divorce from a man she referred to in all caps as THE IDIOT. Never thought to ask what was in the water, but she swore it helped take the edge off.  

The thought of a long stretch of road blinding him for four hours, give or take, sounded right. Lately, driving to his construction sites for work, he never wanted to stop. He wanted to keep going, heavy on the gas pedal, make the wheat blur. He asked Maryanne for her address, jotted it down on the back of a napkin leftover from Dunkin’s, and told the guys he’d be off for a couple of days. They didn’t ask why. They’d known Joan.  

Jack was an efficient man even in sleep, taking his 5-6 hours like a pill every night, up at dawn with just enough rest to make him steady as he drank his cup of coffee at the stove. He worked construction outside of Springfield, managing the sites. When he and Joan married and found out about his sperm, they wore down two mutts in lieu of offspring, until the dogs grew old and lopsided.  

He always felt he had enough. Commercials on the radio, billboards along stretches of roads to multiple construction sites, fat jets with their skywriting—everyone selling something. He didn’t need any of it. He had Joan, the pups, the ranch house he rehabbed himself and the patio, where he and Joan would spend evenings sitting on beach chairs, throwing a hairy tennis ball to the dogs till it got dark.  

Then Jack turned fifty-four and Joan turned fifty-two and she got sick.  

Still, he went to work, drove past those billboards which seemed even more off the mark as he held the wheel with both hands thinking how in the hell. And the dogs slowed down at the same time, the two of them gone, together, just like that. And Jack held his wife in bed, kept his face in her hair, his large, calloused hands on her shrinking frame, as they cursed the world. As she worsened, a well of need opened inside of Jack, and then he did want more. More time, more Joan. He wanted everything to just stop moving, slow the fuck down so he could think a minute. Then she died. And he wanted the dogs back, too.  

Maryanne’s complex was five miles outside the small strip of town which was mostly boarded-up windows along a dusty road. Everything out of business, aside from a generic gas station mini-mart, where he took a piss and bought a pack of peppermint gum. A group of teenagers hung out by a pump, smoking and blasting music from a phone. Jack thought about what sort of trouble a kid could make in a town like this, thought of himself at that age, he and Maryanne making out in the back of his pop’s old pickup truck. The kids at the pump let out a burst of laughter, like an insult. So full of themselves, their lives.  

He reset his phone’s directions and drove past a still-in-business bowling alley advertising pizza slices and beer, which sounded like a meal right about now.  

Maryanne was waiting on a low balcony overlooking the condominium’s parking lot. From afar, he recognized her stance, her reddish curly hair, and her curvy figure, heavier than over three decades ago when he knew her in high school, and a memory flashed in his mind of her going down on him outside the closed schoolyard one night when they both had nothing to do. He’d always liked Maryanne.  

She whistled the way he used to for his dogs and held up her hand in a wave. He slammed the car door.  

When she greeted him with a cheek-to-cheek hug, he didn’t recognize her smell, some kind of flowery vanilla. It wasn’t bad, just different. She asked if he wanted a glass for his beer, which she’d already opened for him. He declined and took the bottle of Corona to his parched lips, sucking back half with one swallow.  

Her apartment was a small, open-floor plan with beige wall-to-wall carpeting. In the bathroom, a can of floral air-freshener. He glanced at a tube of prescription cream but didn’t open the medicine cabinet. Her hairbrush was knotted with her long, auburn hair streaked with silvery highlights. He flushed the toilet and splashed water on his face, avoiding the mirror.  

“I’d a recognized you in the grocery store,” she told him, curled sideways on her white vinyl couch, her knees bare beneath a miniskirt. “You got the lines now.” She drew her finger along the side of her face. “Very distinguished.” When she laughed, she bore a wide set of teeth that were vaguely familiar. Her curly hair was held up in a clip. 

Jack pulled back the rest of the beer, steady on both feet as he stood in the middle of the living room. The whole apartment—kitchen, living room, balcony—blended together. He appreciated the compactness. Each corner had its function.    

“You want another?” She nodded at his bottle and got up from the couch. She headed to the curved countertop separating the kitchen.   

“How long you lived here,” Jack asked, “in Missouri?” following her the few feet to the fridge. A magnet in the shape of an apple stuck to the front.  

“Could be anywhere,” she said and handed him another bottle of cold beer.  

A plastic bowl with cool-ranch-flavored chips sat on the counter. She shook it toward him, offering. Jack arranged himself awkwardly against the counter. He felt like his t-shirt might be on backwards. Couldn’t get comfortable.  

She told him she was sorry when she’d heard about his wife passing.  

Jack didn’t like the word passing. Joan was dead. Gone. She was there and then she wasn’t anywhere. Whenever some loose part rattled in his chest, he’d taken to the habit of rubbing it with the heel of his fist or knuckle of this thumb. First time in his life, he couldn’t fix something. He sucked back the beer. 

Maryanne’s skirt stretched crooked across her thighs. Her bare feet on the tiles, toenails painted a bloody red. She lifted one foot, cracked the tops of her toes against the floor. The air felt like molasses. His thumb found his belt loop and hooked tight, elbow flayed. He took another swig, and the bottle made a suction sound as it pulled from his lips, a little bubble of froth rose to the top, threatening to spillover.  

 “Gets hot down here,” Jack said, by way of conversation.  

“Not like Texas. My brother’s in Houston. I went down there once, but never again. Came back with a nasty sunburn. All over,” she motioned across her chest where the skin was mottled and exposed.  

It felt like too much information.  

Buckle up, Joan used to say whenever their neighbor Sheila came around and spilled her love troubles to the two of them on the patio while they were with the dogs. Joan had a big soft heart, but she wasn’t one to take on other people’s stories. He’d always liked that about her.  

Buckle up, he heard Joan say now as his old high school flame talked about the sunburn on her chest. Jack knocked at his sternum with his thumb knuckle while she talked.  

A snortle came from the corner of the living room. A wrinkled, pig-faced bulldog was sleeping on an oversized pillow. Jack hadn’t noticed him before. He nodded at the dog with approval.  

Then, Maryanne was right up close, watching Jack’s face with interest. In the yearbook, she was Maryanne Molton. In high school, they’d called her Hot Lava. He had no idea if that was still her last name now. Her Facebook profile said Marylinn Monroe (the real Marilyn Monroe was taken) because she wanted to keep her privacy. Apparently, she’d had a bad divorce. 

She was close enough for him to see a dewy perspiration beading beneath her powdery deodorant marking the edges of her tank top. Her breath, a mix of cigarettes and cool ranch, didn’t bother him.  

What bothered him about these past three months was how things didn’t make sense anymore.  

“Hey, heyya,” he said, his voice gravel. She took another step closer. He hooked both thumbs on his loops, his feet cemented to the linoleum floor. 

And suddenly, her fingers were walking around his t-shirt’s collar. She lightly tapped his Adam’s apple.  

“You ready for a dip?” she asked, her voice covered in gauze.  At the soft spot in his neck, her finger paused. She scratched her painted nail through the tufts of hair sprouting upward from his t-shirt.  

 He took hold of her index finger and wrapped it gently in his calloused hand. She gave him a wry smile. Then she reached behind and squeezed his back pocket where he kept his wallet. He wondered if Maryanne Molton/Marylinn Monroe was going to rob him. All he wanted was the photo of Joan that he’d folded inside the worn billfold. She could take the rest, his driver’s license stating his birthdate, address, and organ donor status. Sure, go ahead. What good were his organs to him if he was a dead man?  

Then a nibble at his neck and her tongue was in his ear. It didn’t take much. He swung his arm around her backside, and she pressed against him, groin to groin. She knew what to do.  

A growl came from somewhere, the snoring bulldog or Maryanne, he wasn’t sure, and he didn’t care anymore if she was going to rob him or if he was a dead man.  

Right there in her white condo, on the beige wall-to-wall carpeting, a rubber somehow in her hands, her painted nails uncurling the second skin around his erection, she squeezed a pop of air from the tip, and crawled on top of him. Heavier than Joan, her auburn hair released from its clip bursting in all directions, as she thrust a few minutes, pinning him to his back, arms spread wide eagle. A little numb from the pressure and the rubber, the carpet chafing his backside, the room spun. Where the hell was he? She bucked and he came inside her.  

After, they both lay naked on the living room carpet, staring up at the ceiling fan slowly rotating. She tapped a soft pack of Parliaments against her palm and offered him a cigarette. He accepted one, but didn’t light it. He rolled the barrel between his thumb and forefinger while she smoked.  

*

Later, in the bean-shaped pool behind the building’s parking lot, she pointed to the field beyond the busy road where two semi-trucks were passing. In the flat distance, two large piles of dirt rose into wide mounds.  

“Gus used to call them the hilltops” she said, adjusting a strap of her bathing suit. “Like we’re in the Rocky Mountains or something. We’d argue about that. It’s Missouri, you dumb fuck, I told him.”  

Jack laughed. He felt more relaxed than a few hours ago when he’d first arrived. His boxer shorts ballooned slightly as he waded up to his hips in the lukewarm pool full of alien green water. It smelled a little sour and bits of debris floated along the surface. The healing pool. It looked like a motel-style, shitty pool that’d never been cleaned or taken care of or treated with any kind of chlorine.  

Maryanne was a mermaid, adept in the water, light and flexible, her girth graceful.  

“He thought he was a real cowboy.” 

Jack felt disoriented.  

“Your husband?” He corrected himself, “ex.”  

She laughed without smiling. 

He nodded. “Right.” 

The sky was overcast, but a streak of light broke through the clouds, shining across Maryanne’s face. Elbows bent, she glided her hands atop the water, turning slightly left and right in a soft dance with herself. In the glare, she looked almost pixilated. Jack noticed an old man sitting on one of the complex’s balconies. From there, Jack wondered what they must’ve looked like. Two middle-aged, out of shape, out of sort, lonely people soaking in a warm piss hole in the ground, waiting for its healing properties to do something.  

Maryanne slipped down under the water in one smooth motion, leaving a slow ripple across the murky surface.  

Jack squinted out at mounds of dirt, the hilltops, as Gus called them. They would’ve been friends, he decided. If he and Joan lived here in this complex. He pictured drinking a beer with Gus; Joan and Maryanne sitting by the pool; the dogs howling at the fat moon which was already visible against the pale sky.  

Maryanne resurfaced, her frizzy hair matted to her head.  

“I spend a good ten hours a week in here,” she said. “My spa treatments.” She spit out a stream of dark water. “You’ll see. Just wait.” She pushed onto her frontside, doing small breast strokes towards him where he remained waist-high.  

He could still taste her in his mouth. It was strange, unrecognizable.  

“What, you don’t swim?” 

The sun broke through more and pinched his eyes, casting her in shards. He swayed a little side to side.  

“Never took to it,” he told her. He’d been with his father, fishing in an old rowboat on a lake. Not more than 6, 7 years old, his father didn’t believe in life vests. He rocked the boat wildly as Jack gripped the sides with small fists. The only way to learn, his father told him, is to throw yourself in. That’s a life lesson for you, he said, the empty beer cans rolling at his feet. A puddle of water collected in the bottom of the rowboat. And then he was overboard. He remembered his father’s grip on the back of his neck, the look of terror behind a hearty laugh as he dragged him back over the side. Jack sat shivering on the cold metal seat the entire way back to shore. Never swam again. He didn’t tell this story to Maryanne. Just said, “Almost drowned once. When I was a kid.” 

She blew a funnel of water through her pursed lips again. It fell in a limp arc. “Who hasn’t?”  

A surprising laugh erupted from his throat. Tingles on his skin. “Never thought of that before.” 

She plunged headfirst and swam between his legs, her body pressing against his thighs as she wiggled through.  

He wanted to fuck again. He wanted to drive the endless stretch of highway back home. He wanted his old mutts to be waiting for him at his ranch house on the edge of the forest preserve. He wanted to die. He was glad his wife, Joan, would never be in a bean-shaped pool, swimming through some lonely bastard’s shaky legs.   

Half of a brown leaf was stuck to his wrist. He flicked it away.  

Maryanne Molton resurfaced behind him.  

*

He didn’t bother toweling off with the rough half-sheets the complex provided stacked on a plastic table. He stood dripping at the pool’s edge, pulling on his t-shirt, pushing back his hair.  

“What’cha you gonna do now?” she asked, her head floating as her body submerged under the water.  

Jack shrugged. “Same as always.” 

“There’s nothing much you can do about it. So that’s right, I suppose.” 

“I’m gonna get into my truck. I’m gonna drive home. Wake up.” 

Maryanne nodded. “Wake up. Every day you wake up.” 

“Go to work. Go to bed. That’s it. And then again.” 

“That’s right.”  

She kicked her feet out in front of her.  

He had a strange feeling of wanting to hug this woman. He didn’t know her anymore and yet he didn’t know this Jack standing here dripping either. Maybe the pool did something to him. 

“You staying in there?” 

“Oh, honey, I’m just getting started.” 

Jacked laughed, a genuine, full laugh that set off a small burst of electricity, warming up the back of his neck, down his arms, inside his chest. Made him think of that powdered Kool-Aid turning the water red. He could still feel the pressure of her swimsuit rubbing through his legs.   

“Well then,” Jack said. “Thank you for the beer. And the pool. And…you know.” 

She smiled. Her lip stuck to her front tooth. “You can come back anytime and find me right here. You ever feel like another dip, you come on down.” 

“Yeah.” Jack squinted into the sun breaking fully through the overcast now. “Maybe I will.” 

“Just head toward the hills.” 

Jack laughed along with her.  

*

The drive home was dark, and Jack might as well have been driving into space, or some bottomless abyss because he could not feel the truck on the road, everything was smooth, the sky an enormous black ocean in which he was floating. He wondered about that healing pool. About Maryanne. About what Joan would think of him now, but he didn’t feel bad. He felt like maybe it was Joan who’d sent him there, to Missouri, to Maryanne…What a load, he cut himself off and punched on the radio to snap himself out of it. But the DJ’s voice felt wrong, and Jack’s skin suddenly hurt, thorns scratching up and down his forearms as the guy talked, and he couldn’t even understand what he was saying, and he turned off the radio.  

This time he just let himself float into space, into the black ocean outside, and he felt like he was nothing, like maybe he was dead, no longer attached to the Jack on a worksite in Southern Illinois or to the Jack in Missouri standing in Maryanne’s pool. His body still existed in both of those places, but without him in it. He was suspended, a collection of molecules, not attached to anything. Nothing but a cluster of ions. Like a ghost. If it wasn’t for the annoying nag of his bladder, he would have believed it. But he had to pee.  

At the service station, he bought a scratch-off lottery ticket and tucked it into his back pocket. Then he bought a corndog from the metal roller rack. The cashier was a lanky teenager with boiled acne along his jaw. Jack had the unusual urge to talk to him. He wanted to assure the kid the acne would go away one day. It might leave scars, a crater or two, but nothing a little scruff wouldn’t hide. On his service station shirt, the kid wore a button that read Jared.  

Jared handed Jack his change, and Jack took a bite of the corndog, suddenly ravenous. The kid bent over the counter, going back to his phone, and Jack just stood there chewing, watching the kid play his video game. The store was so bright with all its electrical fluorescents. 

The kid didn’t seem to mind Jack standing there, and Jack appreciated the decency in this. You didn’t see that too often anymore these days. He suddenly felt overwhelmed with appreciation for this service station with all its lights. It had everything you would ever need. Bars of soap and every kind of soda and all the snacks and sliced bread and little packets of pain medication and disposable razors and rows of magazines and batteries. Outside was nothing but darkness. The glass windows reflected all the brightness; inside was everything. The corndog wasn’t even bad. He could stay here forever. He had nowhere to go.  

Through the doors, a couple entered, bickering loudly, interrupting Jack’s thoughts. He noticed a large mirror overhead, the kind that is curved and warps everything in its wedge, and in it he saw his shrunken self at the counter. 

Enough now, he heard Joan’s voice in his head, and he threw out the rest of his corndog. When he stepped outside, everything smelled like diesel, and trash skittered along the ground.  

He drove the rest of the way home in silence, no longer floating. The sky, no longer a black ocean, the road dipped and cracked as the truck bounced on the uneven asphalt, and as he got closer, he started to feel like Jack again, like Jack in his body, and he had no idea what just happened down there near the border or who in the hell that was wading around in a healing pool, who the hell that was lying sprawled on carpet with his pants around his calves.  

He could still smell Maryanne’s cigarette, its smoke spiraling upwards in little halos. 

*

A couple weeks later, he found the remnants of the unscratched lottery ticket in the washing machine when he pulled out his blue jeans. He had left the ticket in his back pocket. The ticket was torn, bits of silvery paper curled into pieces. He scooped the paper from the basin, gathering all the wet, wilted scraps and threw them away. Then dropped his jeans back into machine to wash them a second time, his knuckle rubbing against his sternum so hard he thought it’d crack. 

*

Outside on the patio, he sat under the nighttime sky, an old tennis ball in hand, the empty recliner beside him. He pitched the ball into the dark. It landed with a quiet thud on the grass. An airy laugh escaped Jack’s lips as he pictured Maryanne’s bulldog snoring in the corner, his wrinkled mug, hanging jowls, steadfast on its pillow, no hurry to go anywhere. It was a good dog. Jack wondered if maybe he had imagined the whole thing—the bulldog, Maryanne, the sex, the pool, the pitch-dark ride home, the kid cashier, the convenient store. It all seemed so far away. Yet part of him felt there was still a Jack eating his corndog inside the bright, bright store, with all its lights that would never turn off, and this Jack would never have to leave, would never have to catch up to where he sat now on the patio, the tennis ball somewhere out there in the dark wet grass. There was still a Jack wading in that strange green pool, too, though that guy was harder to recognize.  

He pictured yet another Jack. Thirty years from now, in his hospital room, a nurse quietly adjusting the machinery ticking around him. His eyes shut. Ready to see his wife. Ready for Joan. He put on his finest shirt, a tie miraculously appearing in his hand, and straightened the knot around his pressed collar. Combed over what little was left of his silver hair. It’d been so long. She’d been alone too many years. She and the dogs, too. This Jack waited with shut eyes for his name to be called, to see his wife, to throw a ball to the old dogs too, if there existed that sort of thing. He had no idea. Jack surveyed his organs, the ones he knew by name anyway. Go on, he said to each one as though demanding away a stray having wandered onto his property. Stubborn, lost, looking for love. Go on, go, find a new body to work for, do the one thing you were designed to do, and do it well. 

And then like bits of flotsam drifting across the murky surface of his aging mind, it was Maryanne Molton wading in green water. That singular day, a lost bit of debris having un-wedged itself from his memory thirty years later. How he’d driven through that endless repetition of flatlands and ended up in her dusty Missouri town, how she’d made him laugh, a sputter from an old faucet, and how it was the one thing he had needed. Maybe in another life, he’d come back and thank Maryanne Molton better, thank her for giving him the one thing he really needed and for somehow being the one to know it; he’d come back in another life, and maybe he’d even learn to swim.  

He straightened his tie. He could feel his wife. Just over there, beyond the haze. Nothing more than a thin veil separating them. Her loose nightshirt, her purple sandals, the hairy tennis ball now in her familiar hand. I’m here, he called to her. I’m coming. Head tossed back, her open mouth releasing curls of relief, smoke signals in the sky. A band sounded in his mind. In the distance, a parade.