Up Till Now: The Autobiography

checked the garage and all the cars were there. I began to get a very strange feeling.
    The phone rang. My first thought was that it was her, calling to tell me where she was, asking me to pick her up. It was her AA sponsor. “I don’t know where she is,” I told her. “I can’t find her.”
    Her sponsor asked, “Have you checked the pool?”
    A chill went down my back, but I quickly dismissed it. “No. The gate was closed and the dogs were downstairs.”
    “Check it,” she insisted. I put her on hold and went outside. The pool area was dark, although part of it was dimly illuminated by lights from the second level. “Nerine?” There was no one around the pool. I looked into the pool, and in the darkness I saw a dark shape in the deep end. I wasn’t certain, it could have been a shadow—or it could have been...It had to be a shadow. It couldn’t be my wife. I took several steps backward to try to avoid the horror in front of me. I turned my back on the pool as I picked up the phone. This wasn’t possible. How could this be happening? “She’s in the pool.”
    “Call nine-one-one.”
    “Help me. Call nine-one-one.” I hung up on her and called the number I knew so very well. Nine-one-one. “Oh my God,” I said. “My poor wife is at the bottom of the pool.”
    The dispatcher spoke evenly, just as I’d heard so many times on the show. “OK. Did you get her out of the pool yet, sir?”
    “No. Not yet.” “I want you to take her out of the pool right now.”
    I put down the phone and dived into the pool. I had enough breath for one deep dive. One of her arms was floating above her and I grabbed her by that arm and lifted her, pulling her toward the shallow end. As I did that I remember screaming, “What have you done! What have you done!” As I did that I looked up into the sky—and a helicopter was hovering over my house. I may have realized that it was a news copter, which had been monitoring the 911 calls.
    I laid her down on the side of the pool. Her skin was blue. Her strawberry-blond hair was still curled. I remember every second. I put my finger in her throat to try to breathe life into her, and I heard a click. Later a policeman suggested that was her neck breaking, but it wasn’t. Something was caught in her throat. This was my nightmare. This was grotesquery. I couldn’t believe this was really happening.
    Until that moment I had never truly experienced horror in my life. But this was horror. Oddly, I had never seen a dead body. I’d seen countless thousands of actors play dead, but death . . . She was dead.There was nothing I could do to save her. She was dead. The emergency responders arrived within minutes. I had to go down and open the gate for them, but I was confused, I didn’t want to leave her body alone. This time there would be no happy ending. My daughters came quickly. Reporters and news crews gathered outside the front gate. Everything was happening so quickly. I was in shock, in complete and absolute shock. This didn’t happen to me and the people I loved. This was the type of event I read about in the newspapers, it wasn’t about me.
    My memory is that I spoke with the police that night. At least I think it was that night. “This is an accident,” the commanding officer told me. They had seen this scenario before. What appeared to have happened is that she had been drinking outside by the pool— they found a broken bottle—slipped and hit her head, and blacked out. An autopsy eventually found that her blood-alcohol level was 0.28, more than three times the amount considered intoxicated, as well as that there were traces of Valium in her system. But this officer did say to me, “I have to tell you, if there was any hint of foul play, you’re the first suspect.”
    Maybe he didn’t actually use the word “suspect,” but that certainly was his inference. It sounded like dialogue from...from Hooker. It was absurd. Who could possibly think any such thing? “What are you talking about?” I said. “I mean, this is the woman I loved more than my life. I wouldn’t hurt her.”
    I remember lying in bed that night. The police had left, the coroner had come, my children started taking turns staying with me. I remember my head pounding, I remember feeling that my head was moving in time with my heartbeat. The shock and the grief were overwhelming, and along with that came the knowledge and the fear that I was alone again.
    Very early the next morning I walked