When No One Was Looking by Rosemary Wells Page A

hour and a half had passed. I waited till three forty-five, and then Mrs. Chan came, and I didn’t want to hold her up. The girl never showed, Dad. I was lucky this time. I didn’t have to face her, so I didn’t do anything great. I just accepted her default.”
    “Oh,” said her father in a disappointed voice. “Still”—he raised his glass—“here’s to the round of sixteen tomorrow anyway. It was real sporting of you to wait. That shows you were up for her. You would have beaten the pants off her.”
    “It wasn’t necessary,” said her mother. “The NELTA has rules about players being on time. Kathy should have accepted the default after the regulation ten minutes. It may sound picky of me, but champions aren’t champions because—”
    “Mother, would you stop,” Jody interrupted. “Kathy did something nice for once. Champions, whatever that means, are on top because they’re good. Not because they nickel and dime people on a bunch of silly rules. Here’s Oliver. Let’s eat.”
    Oliver walked directly to the kitchen sink, washed his hands, grimaced, and then inspected his fingers in the light. “Steel wool,” he said in a self-important voice. “Did you hear what happened, by the way?” When everyone said no, Oliver explained that he had spent the entire day scrubbing the sides of the swimming pool with six other lifeguards. “Didn’t you hear?” he asked.
    “No, what?” said Kathy.
    “Ruth Gumm drowned this morning.”
    “What?”
    “Molina found her. The police said it was death by drowning.”
    “The police!”
    “He had to get the police. The doors to the pool enclosure were locked from the inside. Apparently she had a key because she did laps before the club opened. She always locked the doors from the inside. Molina had to get the cops to break down the door. He found her in the shallow end. They drained the pool. He tried to revive her, but the doctor said she’d apparently been dead about an hour and a half. My hands are full of these damn steel wool fibers. It’s like a million splinters. They won’t come out.”
    “That’s a shame about the girl,” said Kathy’s mother. “I’ll get you some Lava soap, Oliver.”
    “See what happens when you swim alone?” said Kathy’s father. “A damn shame. Fourteen years old.”
    “But she was such a fantastic swimmer,” said Kathy. “Good swimmers don’t just drown. Why did she lock the doors from the inside?”
    “Molina made her in case anyone came by to rape her. He said she always opened up at eight o’clock when he got there. He was really upset. Last night when they closed after the cocktail party, I watched him lock up. You know his routine? He locks the door, and then he unlocks, and then he locks it all over again and says, ‘The door is locked!’ like that. He’s been at the club thirty-three years, and they’ve never had a drowning before, even in the ocean. You’d have thought it was his kid the way he was carrying on.”
    “Well, accidents do happen,” said Kathy’s mother. “Try some Vaseline, Oliver. Look at that poor girl, that skier who was paralyzed from the neck down. They did a book on her.” She put a plate of franks and beans down in front of Kathy. “Honey, don’t make a face like that,” she said. “You’d think I’d given you a dish of worms.”
    But Kathy’s mind was far away, uneasy, dreaming as if she were deeply asleep. She had it pictured that all the roofs had been somehow removed from all the buildings she would ever find herself in for the rest of time. Individual rooms, with walls only, appeared like so many floor plans. Above the rooms, drifting, watching every move she would ever make, Ruth hovered in a kind of heaven that sat about a hundred feet above the world. She was not transformed in any way in Kathy’s mind. No wings decorated her shoulders. No light emanated from her body. Her complexion was still uneven, her hair still in a Dutch boy cut. She waited, showing