Swimmer Read Free

but she never answered the phone and she never brought him a beer out of the icebox.
    â€˜Mr Rook?’
    â€˜Yes, it is. Jim Rook here. Who wants him?’
    â€˜Well, I don’t know whether you’ll remember me. Jennie Oppenheimer. Well, Jennie Bauer when I was single. I was in your class in ’91.’
    â€˜Jennie Bauer … Jennie Bauer … Hey, yes! Of course I remember you! Sure! I remember all of my students, even the students I’d rather forget. Let me see now …
King Lear
… when Cordelia weeps over the dying king, and says, “Had you not been their father, these white flakes Did challenge pity of them” – what did you say? “Does that mean he had dandruff?” Yes, Jennie. I remember you. I remember you
clearly
. Long blond hair. Very cute. Short span of attention, I’m afraid to say.’
    â€˜My son’s dead.’
    Jim didn’t know what to say. He very rarely heard from his students after they had left Special Class II at West Grove Community College. They always swore that they would write, and keep in touch, but he always knew they wouldn’t. Those who had been saved by his remedial English class from a life of car-washing and dog-walking and other McJobs were always too busy to remember the scruffy teacher who had shown them the difference between Hamlet and ham-and-eggs, and who had brought them to the edge of tears with his recitation of poetry by John Frederick Nims: ‘
Inference of night wind, a rumor of rain
.’
    â€˜I’m very sorry to hear that,’ said Jim, thinking, Why is she telling me? I haven’t heard from her since the leaving party after her final exams. ‘What happened? Was it an accident?’
    â€˜He drowned. It happened yesterday morning. Mike and his sister were playing in the pool and I left them alone for only a moment, but he drowned.’
    â€˜I’m so sorry. That’s a tragedy. How old was he?’
    â€˜Nine, and he was such a good swimmer.’
    â€˜I don’t know what to say, Jennie. My heart goes out to you. Was Mike your only boy?’
    â€˜His father’s devastated. We can’t have any more children and he’s blaming me.’
    â€˜It’s the shock, that’s all,’ Jim reassured her. ‘He’ll get over it. An accident is an accident.’
    â€˜But this is the point, Mr Rook. This is why I’m calling you.’
    â€˜Hey, listen. I think you can call me Jim now. We’re not in Special Class II any more.’
    â€˜I know … But you do still have that ability, don’t you?’
    â€˜Ability?’
    â€˜You can still see – well, you can still see ghosts and things like that?’
    Jim didn’t say anything, but he thought, Uh-oh, what’s coming now? So many people who found out that he could see spirits and other supernatural presences wanted him to help them with all kinds of other-worldly problems. Either they wanted him to summon up their late Uncle Charlie to find out what he’d done with all of his rare Civil War coins, or else they wanted to discover if a chilly presence in their kitchen was the cause of all of their rotten luck. They never seemed to accept that supernatural manifestations walk among us all the time, with their own tragic problems and their own complicated agendas, and spirits are hardly ever interested either in contacting the still-living or helping them, and especially not in harming them. They were benign, most of them – benign and slightly stunned, like the victims of a bus crash.
    But Jennie didn’t say what he expected her to say. ‘Listen, Mr Rook, I came out of the house and I was sure that somebody had just pushed their way through the bushes. Then – when I was trying to save Mike – I saw wet footprints on the bricks around the side of the pool. They weren’t a child’s footprints – they weren’t Mikey’s or Tracey’s