Free Blood Memory by Greg Iles Page B

titles—refused to build me a practice pool. My request was not that of a spoiled child. My high school, St. Stephen’s, had no swimming pool, so our team was forced to practice wherever we could get permission at different times of the year. My mother and grandmother gave my suggestion their usual shaky support, but since the original Malmaison had no pool, my grandfather refused to desecrate “his” grounds with one. To remedy this, I did my daily laps in the Hemmeters’ pool in Brookwood. The old couple always sat on their patio to watch, and they became my biggest fans at local meets. Mr. Hemmeter died a couple of years ago, but his widow kept the house.
    Something about the place looks different as I approach, but that’s only to be expected after the man of the house has died. At least the pool is being kept up. Mrs. Hemmeter stopped swimming several years ago, so the clear water sparkling in the sun strikes me much as my bedroom did—something maintained in the hope that I will return to it someday. Vanity, perhaps, but I suspect I’m right.
    I jog around the house and check the garage. Empty. Returning to the pool, I strip off my jeans and blouse and dive cleanly into the deep end, leaving hardly a ripple behind me. The dive carries me halfway to the far wall. I breaststroke to the shallows, then get out and search the flower bed until I find a flat, heavy rock about the size of a serving platter. This I carry down the steps into the shallow end. After a period of pre-immersion meditation, during which my heart slows to around sixty beats per minute, I lie down on my back beneath the water and set the rock on my chest.
    The water is just under ninety degrees, like the sea under an equatorial sun. I lie on the bottom for three minutes, until my chest spasms in its first “physical scream” for oxygen. Free divers train themselves to ignore this reflex, which would send a normal person into full-blown panic. After enduring a varying number of these spasms, humans can move into a far more primitive mammalian state, one the body dimly remembers from its genetic heritage as a waterborne animal. In the beginning, I endured as many as twenty spasms before entering the primitive dive state. Now the miraculous transition is almost painless. Once in the dive state, my heartbeat decreases dramatically, sometimes to as low as fifteen beats per minute. My blood circulation alters to serve only my core organs, and blood plasma slowly fills my lungs to resist the increasing pressure of deep water.
    I can feel it now, the steady descent to a state of relaxation I can find nowhere else in my life. Not in sleep, where nightmares trouble me. Not in sex, where frantic urgency drives me to numb a pain I cannot even name. Not in the hunt for predators, where the triumph of trapping my quarry brings only transitory peace. Somehow, when I am submerged in water, the chaos that is my mind on the surface discharges itself, and my thoughts either go flat or pattern themselves into a comprehensible order that eludes me in the air. With the pool water gently swaying my body, the crazed events of the past week begin to come clear.
    I’m not alone today. A child is growing in my belly, eating what I eat, breathing my air. Being pregnant doesn’t seem as frightening down here. The child’s conception is no mystery, after all. A simple combination of carelessness and lust. Sean’s kids were gone to summer camp, his wife was visiting her mother in Florida…he stayed over at my house from a Thursday to a Sunday. By Saturday morning I’d developed cystitis from too much sex—what they called honeymoon syndrome in medical school—so I took a brief course of Cipro to cure it. The antibiotic interfered with my birth control pills, and that was that. I was “with child,” as my grandmother used to say.
    The mystery is why I haven’t yet told Sean. I love him. He loves me. Up to now, we’ve shared every thought and feeling. We’ve even