The Palmer Pool

11 | Weary Head

After leaving a still, sweltering evening in the 1950s, I felt disoriented by the light rain that fell on my head when I surfaced again.  I was alone treading water in the deep end of the pool.  A lifeguard sat slumped in a chair below an umbrella, his face hidden from view by the oversized hood of his red sweatshirt.

He was preoccupied with his phone so I launched myself out of the water and up the ladder, and then bolted for the door.  When I opened the locker and checked my phone, I found that I'd missed three messages from work.  I was supposed to be there at eight o'clock that morning, and it was after nine.  When I snuck into the pool around midnight, my plan was to return within a couple of hours.  But I got wrapped up again, forgetting that time continued to slip by in the year I belonged.  Luckily, I had my uniform in my car, which I left parked on the street.

Brandon slowly shook his head when I walked into the office to punch in.

"I'm sorry!  Is Steve here yet?"  Steve was the harbormaster, my boss, and friends with my dad.  If he knew I was over an hour late for work, it could get back to my dad and then there would be lectures about timeliness and personal responsibility.

"Not yet."

"Will he notice if I clock in late? You'll probably tell him anyway, right?"

"Well, obviously we haven't been very busy," he gestured at rain falling outside the window, "so maybe if you clean the bathrooms, and empty all the trash cans, he won't find out."

"Thank you," I sighed with relief.

As I grabbed the cleaning supplies, Brandon hollered, "Women's and men's!"

It was still raining when I got home late that afternoon.  After dragging myself through the day like a zombie, I was ready to collapse.  But instead of going inside, I sat down on the squishy ground and stared at the river for a few minutes.  I leaned back in the wet grass and stretched out my arms and legs in a snow angel position.

The rain was warm and gentle and I relaxed as the drops rolled down my skin like tears and soothed my sunburn. Then I remembered my finger injury, which I had forgotten about since it had stopped stinging that morning.  I held my bandaged finger up in front of my face and said aloud, "This Band-Aid is from 1953.  Nineteen fifty-three." 

Was it really, though?  It was only a Band-Aid.  The fabric kind, not plastic.  We had some of those in the bathroom closet.  Could I have put them on my own finger and imagined that Pete did?  Part of me wanted to keep those bandages on forever, or at least until they got all grimy and unraveled.  But I had to see if my finger injury was real or imagined.

I pulled the Band-Aids off and the skin underneath was...fine.  No scab, no scar or red mark. When I looked at myself in the mirror in Pete's bathroom I knew it was all real, but sitting in the rain staring at my uninjured hand I wasn't sure anymore.

There had been times when I'd get really upset; something would set me off like a major weather event that reminded me of the threat of a climate change-induced apocalypse, another school shooting, or some other senseless horrible thing that made me lose my faith in humanity and I'd cry until there was nothing left.  Then usually I'd fall asleep and wake up a few hours later feeling a little better.  When I got that way, my mom muttered about teenage hormones, so I figured it happened to everyone sometimes.  I'd felt sad before, but never out of touch with reality.

When I inspected my finger again, I noticed an auburn stain on my skin.  We didn't have iodine in our first aid kit at home.  I cupped the bandage in my hand and said, in my head this time, This is a Band-Aid from 1953.  Pete put this on me.

The urgency in Mom's voice was jarring as she yelled from a window, "Hey!  What are you doing?"

"Nothing!"  I shouted back.