It happened when she took the highest dive I had ever seen her take, perhaps the highest she was ever to take in her life. I saw her climbing up, slow, then pass the board she had been using, the twenty-foot board, and go on up. I called to her, but she didn't even look at me. I knew she had heard me. I also knew that she would go on where she was going, no matter what I said now, now that she had started. I didn't call again.
She made the dive. I knew it was a good one from the very instant she left the board, but I jumped to my feet, just the same, and stood at the edge of the float, holding my breath, my eyes fixed on her flight. Just as she entered the water, clean as a whistle, I plunged in, too, diving deep and drawing down with my stroke. I saw the silvery tangle and trail of bubbles and the glimmer of her legs and arms in the dark water when she turned. She had gone down deep. Now that she had to go down deep, for she could whisk out shallow if she wanted. But that time–and other times–she went in deep, as if to continue the flight as long as possible through the denser medium. I pulled deep and met her as she began to rise. I put my arms around her waist and drew her to me and put our lips together. She let her arms trail down, loose, not making a motion, while I held her body to me and pressed her face back and our legs trailed down together as we rose slowly and waveringly through the blackness of the water and the silver of ascending bubbles. We rose very slowly, or at least it seemed very slowly, and I was holding my breath so long there was a pain in my chest and a whirling dizziness in my head, but the pain and dizziness had passed the line over into a rapture like that I had had in my room the night I had first taken her to a movie and had stopped on the way home. I thought we would never reach the surface, we rose so slowly.
Then we were there, with the moonlight brittle and fractured on the water all about our eyes. We hung there together, still not breathing, for another moment, then I released her and we fell apart to float on our backs and gaspingly draw the air in and stare up at the high, whirling, star-stung sky.
After a little while I realized that she was swimming away. I thought that she would be taking a few strokes to the float. But when I did finally roll over and swim to the float, she was already at the beach. I saw her pick up her robe, wrap it around her, and stoop to put on her sandals. I called to her. She waved back, then shaking her hair loose out of the cap, began to run up the beach toward home. I swam in, but by the time I reached the beach she was near her house. I knew I couldn't catch her. So I walked on up the beach, taking my time.
I didn't see her for two days after that. Then she appeared at the tennis court, swinging her racket, friendly and cool, getting ready to beat the hell out of me as soon as Adam had given me his lacing.
We were in September then. In a few days Anne was to leave to go back up East to Miss Pound's School. Her father was going to take her a few days early and stop with her in Washington and then in New York before sending her on to Boston, where Miss Pound would get her hooks in. Anne hadn't seemed particularly excited about the trip, or about getting back to Miss Pound. She liked the school fine, she had told me, but I hadn't been overwhelmed by tales of midnight snacks and memory books and that darling teacher of French, and her vocabulary wasn't slimed up with offensive bits of esoteric finishing-school slang. Back in August she had mentioned the plan, the date of departure, but without pleasure or displeasure, as though it were something completely irrelevant to us, the way a young person mentions death. When she mentioned it, I had felt a sudden twinge, but I had managed to put the thought aside, for even though the calendar said it was August I had not been able to believe that the summer, and the world, would ever end. But that morning when Anne reappeared at the tennis court, my first thought was that she would be going soon. It really came over me then. I went up to her, not even saying hello, and took her hand, feeling a kind of unformulated desperation and urgency.
She looked at me with an expression of mild surprise.
"Don't you love me?" I demanded, angrily.
She burst out laughing, and fixed her eyes on me, with the laughter making innocent, mocking crinkles at the outer corners of the absolutely clear eyes. "Sure," she said, laughing, the idle racket swinging in her free hand, "sure, I love you, Jackie-Boy, Jackie-Bird, who said I didn't love poor old Jackie-Bird?"
"Don't be silly," I said, for the language of all our nights in the roadster and in the porch swing suddenly seemed, in the glare of the morning and with the desperation in me, fatuous and loathsome. "Don't be silly," I repeated, "and don't call me Jackie-Bird."
"But you _are__ Jackie-Bird," she replied gravely, but with the crinkles still at the corners of the eyes.
"Don't you love me?" I demanded, ignoring what she had said.
"I love Jackie-Bird," she said, "poor Jackie-Bird."
"God damn it," I said, "don't you love me?"
She studied me a moment, with the crinkles entirely gone now. "Yes," she said then, "I do," and pulled her hand out of mine and walked across the court, with a kind of finality in the stride as though she had made up her mind to go somewhere and it was quite a way and she had better start walking. She only walked across the court, to sit on the bench in the feathery shade of the mimosa, but I watched her as though the court were as wide as the Sahara and she were dwindling into distance.
Then Adam came, and we played tennis.
She had come back that morning, but it was not to be as it had been before. She had come back, all right, but not all of her. She was with me as much as before, but she seemed to be wrapped in her own thoughts, and when I caressed her she seemed to submit out of a sense of duty or at the best out of kindness which wasn't quite contemptuous. That was the way it was for the last week, while the days stayed hot and breathless, and the clouds piled up in the late afternoon as though promising a squall but the squall didn't come, and the nights were as heavy and blunt as a big black silver-dusted grape ready to burst.
Two nights before she was supposed to leave we went in to the Landing to a movie. It was raining when we came out of the movie. We had intended to go for a swim after the show, but we didn't. We had taken lots of swims in the rain, that summer and the summer before when Adam had been with us. We would no doubt have gone that night too, if the rain had been a different kind of rain, if it had been a light sweet rain, falling out of a high sky, the kind that barely whispers with a silky sound on the surface of the water you are swimming in, or if it had been a driven, needle-pointed, cold, cathartic rain to make you want to run along the beach and yell before you took refuge in the sea, or even if it had been a torrent, the kind you get on the Gulf that is like nothing so much as what happens when the bottom finally bursts out of a big paper bag suspended full of water. But it wasn't like any of those kinds of rain. It was as though the sky had sagged down as low as possible and there were a universal leaking of bilge down through the black, gummy, dispirited air.
So we put to top up on the roadster, getting well wet doing it, got in, and drove toward home. The light was blazing in my mother's place and on the gallery, and so we decided to go in there and make some coffee and sandwiches. It was still early, about nine-thirty. My mother, I remembered, had gone down the Row to play bridge with the Pattons and some fellow who was visiting them and was stuck on her. We wheeled up the drive and ground to a stop with a great crunching and spraying of shells and rain water. We ran up the right-hand sweep of the twin flights of steps leading to the gallery, then safe under the gallery roof began to stamp and shake the water from us like dogs. The running and stamping and the wet made Anne's hair come loose. It was hanging down her back, with some odd wet strands plastered across her brow and one over her cheek to make her look like a child coming out of a bath. She laughed as she cocked her head to one side and shook it, the way girls do, to make the hair to fall free. She ran her spread fingers through the hair like a big comb the catch the stray hairpins. A couple of them fell to the gallery floor. "I'm a fright," she said, "I'm an awful fright," and kept on cocking her head over and laughing and looking up at me sidewise with bright eyes. She was more like she had been before.