She has to be the one who breaks the stare. She looks up when Mitchell comes out in his swimsuit. His scrawny chest is bare. He has little rabbit muscles and I can see his ribs. He looks just like I did at his age, so active that it’s impossible to put any bulk on him.
“Nice trunks,” Abigail says. She gives him a thumbs-up.
“You had better hurry, Dad,” Mitchell warns. He looks up toward the sun. “It’ll be dark soon.”
I go and change, walking back out the same way Mitchell did, with no shirt on. Abigail licks her lips. Her eyes dance across my chest, and I feel them move over me like a physical caress.
“Let’s go, Dad,” Mitchell says. I grab the cake of soap and the shampoo, and I pull two towels off the clothesline.
When we get down to the lake, which is not much more than a short walk, Abigail shields her eyes with her hand to keep the setting sun out of them and looks around the still surface of the water. “I don’t see Wilbur,” she says. She looks at me like she’s worried. “If he comes
back, you should get one of those little tracker things so you can keep up with where he is.”
I think it might be better if I don’t know where he is, or I’ll worry about him non-stop. I’ll think he’s clamped tightly in the jaws of a red fox, if I can’t find him. At least if he goes and does his own thing, I can let myself believe he’s fine.
And besides, after my recent incarceration, I’m loath to impose any sort of restriction of freedom on any other living creature. Even a duck that thinks he’s human.
Suddenly, Abigail points up toward the skyline where a small flock of ducks are coming in to land on the lake. “Can Wilbur fly?” She looks at me, expectation on her face.
“He couldn’t this morning. But by now he could have learned all sorts of things.”
“Can I go in the water, Dad?” Mitchell asks.
Suddenly I freeze with uncertainty. “Can you swim?”
He punches his hands onto his hips, tips his head to the side, and glares at me with one eye open and one eye closed. “Of course, I can swim,” he says, and he looks so much like old pictures of me in that moment that I do a double take. I can see his mother in him, too. That smile is all hers.
“Then go for it,” I say, and I motion toward the lake.
Mitchell grimaces as he walks gingerly into the water, holding his breath, because the water can get really cool this time of the year.
“Are you coming, Dad?”
“I am,” I say. And then I do something that I know ahead of time may very well get me slapped. I bend, shove my shoulder into Abigail’s midsection, and haul her out there with us. She screams and pounds on my back as I walk deeper and deeper into the lake. “Better hold your nose!”
Then I flip her off my shoulder, into the water. Her eyes aren’t even open yet when she comes back up and says, “I can’t believe you did that.” Water runs down over her face, and she blows her lips to clear them.
“Sorry, not sorry,” I say flippantly.
Then she suddenly launches herself at me. She hits me so hard that I fall backwards into the water, with her on top of me. I reach to wrap my arms around her and hold her close. “Sorry, not sorry,” she says, repeating the words I just used on her.
She laughs and shoves herself back, as she swims toward Mitchell. She goes over to him, cups her hand around his ear, and whispers something to him. He whispers back to her, and they both grin. Then they start advancing toward me. I pretend to swim away but, in reality, I don’t want to swim away. I want to get caught.
I scoop Mitchell up when he gets close to me and I toss him into the air. He lands right next to me in the water, close enough that I could reach him if I needed to. But he pops up just like Abigail did, and he says, “Do it again!”
So I do. I spend almost a half hour scooping him up and throwing him away from me over and over, and I’ve never been happier.
“Fatherhood suits you,” Abigail says as Mitchell hits the water again.
I look at her, my soul absolutely filled with joy. “You think so?”
“Yeah,” she says softly. “I do think so.” Then she splashes me right in the face and takes off in the other direction.
I swim after her and catch her foot, drawing her back to me. She’s so pretty, with little wet smears of mascara under her eyes and her hair a big riotous mass of wet curls. “I’m still in like,” I say quietly, right next to her ear.
“Me too,” she replies. She sobers. “But I do still want to know more about you.”
I nod. “It’s coming.”