U Is for Undertow

his tracks. He wasn’t accustomed to reprimands. He looked from her to Greg. His face crumpled and he burst into tears, his mouth coming open in a howl so profound there wasn’t any sound at first. He clutched his penis for comfort, perhaps realizing for the first time how vulnerable he was without clothes on. Deborah couldn’t even bear to look at him. When his tears failed to have the desired effect, he added screams. “I hate you. I want my mama. I want my mama.”
    Deborah waited for his tantrum to subside, but he just revved it up a notch, the tone of his screams climbing up the scale.
    Greg said, “Hey, hey, hey,” doing what he could to calm him, trying to reason and explain while Shawn collapsed on the kitchen floor. He lay on his back and kicked his feet hard, catching Deborah’s ankle in the process.
    “Shit,” she said, knowing she’d be bruised for a month.
    Shelly appeared in the door, the picture of righteous indignation. Her face was puffy and her hair was matted from sleep. She took one look at Shawn and turned on Deborah. “What did you do to him? You have no right. How dare you lay a hand on my child? I won’t have you interfering with my discipline.”
    Adopting a pleasant tone, Deborah said, “What discipline, Shelly? All I did was tell him to stop running around, shrieking, while Greg and I were in the middle of a conversation. That’s common courtesy, though I don’t expect you to embrace anything as bourgeois as that.”
    “Bitch!” Shelly grabbed Shawn and lifted him, turning on her heel and hurrying him from the room as though saving him from personal assault. Deborah gave Greg a long, cool look, daring him to take Shelly’s part.
    “Jesus, Mom. Now look what you’ve done.” He shook his head, aggrieved, got up, and left the house.
    For the next hour, Deborah could hear Shelly out in the bus, yelling and weeping. Accusations, recriminations. She leaned forward and laid her cheek on the cool surface of the kitchen table. Dear god, how would she get through the next four months?

4

    Thursday morning, April 7, 1988

    Thursday, I woke at 6:00 A.M. and pulled on my running shoes for my three-mile jog. I brushed my teeth but left the rest of my “toilette” for the damp morning air. When the weather’s hot the run leaves my hair sweaty and when it’s cool, as it was that day, the fog makes a mess of it anyway. At the beach, the only people I see are as unkempt and baggy-eyed as I am. I don’t jog for the health benefits, which are probably minimal at best. I do the (almost) daily three-mile run for the sake of vanity and peace of mind. I see couples walking or running while they chat or lone individuals with their headsets in place, listening to god knows what. I crave the quiet, which allows me to sort out my thoughts.
    Home from my run, I showered, dressed, and grabbed an apple, which I ate in the car. I’d intended to hit the public library first thing, but I put that on hold until I made a visit to Climping Academy. At 10:13, I drove through the two stone pillars that mark the entrance to Horton Ravine. I took the first left, turning onto Via Beatriz, a narrow two-lane road that wound up the hill to the academy, which overlooked a spring-fed lake. The main building was the former residence of a wealthy Englishman named Albert Climping, who arrived in Santa Teresa on his retirement in 1901. Prior to immigrating, he was engaged in the manufacturing of inlet valves and flotation devices for toilets, and while he’d amassed a fortune, the source of his money ruled out acceptance in polite society. At a lawn party, really , how could one converse with a toilet valve magnate?
    If he was aware that the nature of his livelihood forever barred him from hobnobbing with the Horton Ravine elite, he gave no sign of it. He purchased a hilly thirty-five-acre parcel, which had languished, undeveloped, near the Ravine’s front entrance. The property boasted a natural spring, but the general location was deemed undesirable because it was too far from the ocean and too close to town. Undismayed by these deficits, Climping brought in heavy equipment and excavated a crater-sized containment pond for the spring water that bubbled up out of the hillside. Having created Climping Lake, he set up an extensive network of water pipes that crisscrossed his land. He flattened the peak on the steepest of two hills and began construction on a fake English manor house, complete with stables, a