Summer House with Swimming Pool: A Novel (21 page)

“Marc,” she whispered. “My mother … my mother is awake. She—”

“Judith,” I said into her ear. “My sweet, lovely Judith.”

Then I felt her hand. Her fingers. They were doing something to the front of my body, around my stomach. I was wearing a buttoned sport shirt that hung loosely over my shorts. She pulled the shirt up and at the same time loosened two of the
buttons. With her nails she tickled the area under my navel, then her fingers slid down. It was only a short distance from her ear to her lips. A short distance over which I tried to take an eternity. Meanwhile, I had my whole hand in her bikini bottoms. I spread my fingers over her buttocks and pressed, first gently, then harder. She tilted her head and stuck the tip of her tongue between my lips. She licked a little at the tip of my own tongue, then pulled hers back. I saw that she had her eyes closed. Like all women. I kept mine open. Like all men. And because I had my eyes open, I also saw the kitchen door. Behind Judith’s hair. Behind my own forearm and the hand (my other hand, the hand that wasn’t pressing against her buttocks) that still had its fingers in that hair.

You have it sometimes with a book you’ve left on the table. You go out of the room for a minute, and when you come back there’s something different. In that same way, I knew for sure that Judith had left the kitchen door slightly ajar when she came back. Not closed, no, slightly ajar.

I remembered, in any case, that the door had been open a crack at the moment when I first pulled her up against me, and that now it was open just a fraction more. Still a crack, but a
bigger
crack.

At that same moment I saw something move on the other side of the crack. A shadow on the floor, nothing more than that. There was no sound. Sometimes seconds stretch out into a new unit of time. A unit that corresponds exactly with your heartbeat. I stared at the door. Maybe I was imagining things. But then the shadow moved again. There could be no mistake about it. Someone was behind the door.

I pulled my hand out of Judith’s bottoms and placed it
against her stomach. I pushed her away gently, removing my hand from her hair at the same time.

Apparently Judith thought it was all part of a teasing sort of foreplay, that I was simply trying out a new variation. Attracting. Repelling. Delaying. She made a little sound, somewhere between a moan and a sigh. She smiled and wrapped her own hand around mine, which was pressing against her stomach.

But she did open her eyes. She looked at my mouth. At my lips, which soundlessly formed the words:
The door. There’s someone behind the door
.

Judith was still standing on tiptoes. Now she slowly sank back down until she was three inches shorter again. She looked up at me and I saw her pupils, dilating and then contracting. She let go of my hand and pushed me away.

“Would you like another beer, Marc?” she asked. “I’ll take a look. I hope we still have some.”

Her voice sounded normal.
Too
normal. The way a voice sounds when it’s doing its utmost to sound normal. She used both hands to arrange her hair. I pulled my shirt back down over my pants and buttoned it.

And so we stood there, like two teenagers caught in the act. I saw the blush on Judith’s cheeks. My face had undoubtedly changed color, too. Our hair might be neatly arranged, our clothing straightened as much as possible, but it was the blushing that would give us away.

Judith took a few steps back toward the door. At the same time she gestured to me:
Open the fridge
.

But that isn’t what I did. I did something else. Later I would often ask myself why. A premonition, people say, but it was stronger than that. A shiver. A pounding heart. Or more
like a heart that skips a beat. A moment in a horror movie: The bloodied sheet is pulled back and, indeed, there is someone underneath. A corpse. A corpse with a crushed skull. The arms and legs have been expertly sawn off and divided among various garbage bags.

I stepped to the window and looked out. There was no one by the pool anymore. The deck chair where Alex and Julia had just been lying was empty.

“Mom?”

I turned around and saw Judith push open the kitchen door. “Mom?”

I leaned out the window, but it was one of those with a low frame; I leaned out so far that I almost lost my balance. The pounding of my heart was growing louder all the time. Panic. Adrenaline. The heart is preparing for flight, I knew that as a doctor. For flight or a fight. It pumps at full speed to get oxygen out to all parts of the body as quickly as possible. The parts where the oxygen is needed most: the legs for running, the hands to enable fists to be planted as hard as possible in the opponent’s face.

I saw no one. I listened.
I pricked up my ears
, as they say, but only animals can prick up their ears. I didn’t hear anything. There wasn’t a breath of wind. The leaves hung still and limp on the trees. You often heard crickets on hot days like this, but apparently it was too hot even for the crickets.

There was something missing, although at first I didn’t know exactly what. A sound in the silence. A sound that had been there just a little while ago.

Ping-Pong balls! The sound of bouncing Ping-Pong balls
.

I held my breath. But I wasn’t mistaken. Behind the house, where the Ping-Pong table stood, everything was silent, too.

“Mom?” Judith had now gone through the doorway and was standing in the living room. “Mom?”

Now it was my turn to walk to the kitchen door. As calmly as possible. As normally as possible. Nothing had happened, I told myself. Not yet. I tried to smile. A lighthearted smile. But my lips were so dry they hurt.

I slipped past Judith and made a beeline for the front door.

“Marc …”

She was standing at the bathroom door, trying to open it, but it was locked. “Mom? Are you in there?”

“I’ll take a look outside first,” I said, and I was gone, out the front door, down the stairs and the tiled path to the pool.

A little too quickly, I realized just in time. Nothing was wrong. Nothing unseemly had happened. If my daughters were still in the yard, it was important that I not seem alarmed. A panting, red-faced father would give the wrong signal.
What’s wrong, Daddy? Your face is all red! You’re panting! You look like you’ve seen a ghost
.

I slowed down. Beside the deserted swimming pool, I stopped. For the space of one indivisible second I stared into the water. The glistening water that reflected the treetops and the bright blue sky. Squinting, I examined the bottom of the pool. But there was nothing there. No motionless body with hair fanning out from its head. Only the blue tiles.

I walked on, around the back of the house. There was no one at the Ping-Pong table, either. The paddles lay on either side of the net. One of them was resting on the ball.

The tent. The zipper was closed. I didn’t want to surprise or startle my daughters. So I coughed.

“Julia …? Lisa …?”

I squatted down and opened the zipper, but the tent was
empty. I walked farther, all the way around the house, till I finally got back to the front steps. Again I had to force myself not to take the steps two at a time.

“My mother’s taking a shower,” said Judith, who was still standing at the bathroom door.

“And the kids? Have you seen the kids?”

Without waiting for her reply, I walked into the hall where the bedrooms were. I knocked on the door of the room Alex and Thomas shared. There was no answer, but I did hear something: a vague murmur, as though a radio were playing very softly.

I opened the door. Alex, Thomas, Lisa, and Julia were lying on the two single beds, which had been slid together. Thomas, in the middle, had a notebook computer on his lap.

“Hi, hello!” I said cheerfully—much too cheerfully, I realized right away, but by then it was too late. “Is this where you guys are?” I went on. What I felt like most was slamming my fist against my face. The way you slam your hand against the TV when the picture goes on the blink. I wanted to knock the false cheerfulness out of my voice.

Lisa glanced at me. Julia acted as though no one had come into the room. Only Alex shifted a little against the pillows, so that his arm hung a bit more loosely around the shoulders of my older daughter.

Thomas laughed at something on the screen. Alex, Julia, and Lisa didn’t laugh with him.

“What are you watching?” I asked.

I had to repeat my question before anyone answered. It was Alex. “
South Park
, Mr. Schlosser.”

Had he ever called me Mr. Schlosser before? Not that I knew of. Not that I could remember. He always called Caroline
“ma’am,” even though we’d told him any number of times that that wasn’t necessary.

I took a deep breath. No more cheeriness! “Do you kids feel like playing Ping-Pong later? A tournament? All of us?”

Once again, at first, there was no answer.

“Maybe,” Alex said at last.

I looked at Lisa and Julia. I might have been imagining it, but it seemed as though Julia in particular wasn’t really interested in the computer screen. As though she was doing her best to ignore me as completely as possible.

“Julia?” My heart started pounding again. I moistened my lips with the tip of my tongue. The
guilty
tip of my tongue, it occurred to me at that same moment. I tried to obliterate the thought, but only half succeeded. At all costs, I had to make sure nothing went shaky. My voice. My lower lip. My arms and legs. My whole body.

“Julia!”

Now, finally, she looked up at me. Listlessly. A neutral look.

“Julia, I’m talking to you!”

She held my gaze. “I can hear that,” she said. “And what was it you wanted to say?”

Indeed, what was it I wanted to say? I had no idea. Something about a Ping-Pong tournament. No, I’d already done that. I looked my daughter right in the eye. I saw nothing. No accusation. No sadness. Maybe she simply found it annoying that I was still standing there in the doorway.

“Are you getting enough liquids, Julia?” I said. “I mean, it’s very hot out. You have to watch out that you don’t become dehydrated. All of you. Do you want me to make you a big jug of lemonade?”

It was way too much, all this crap I was spouting. Too obvious. Julia looked back at the computer screen.

“Whatever,” she said.

“Yes, please, Mr. Schlosser,” Alex said. “Or else maybe you could just bring us some Coke.”

I remained standing there for a couple of seconds. I could say something. I could raise my voice.
That’s no way to talk to your father!
But something inside me whispered that this was not the right moment.
That I didn’t have the right …
This was the other voice that was whispering to me, the voice of the
guilty tongue
.

I walked back to the hallway, where Judith’s mother was just coming out of the bathroom. She was wearing a white bathrobe and had a towel wrapped around her head.

“Hello, Marc,” she said. She looked at me for a moment and smiled. Then she walked past me to her room.

I looked at Judith. Judith shrugged and gestured with her hands. A gesture meant to say
I don’t know, either
. At the same moment, we heard a car door slam outside. And then another. Four car doors in total.

“Jesus!” Judith said. “They didn’t waste any time.”

I went to her. I put my hand on her arm.

“Take it easy,” I said. “We just act normal. Nothing happened.”

I walked to the front door and opened it. At the bottom of the steps, Caroline, Stanley, and Emmanuelle were standing beside Ralph’s car. Ralph was leaning over the open trunk.

“Hello there,” I said. Cheerful again, but at least this time it sounded natural. I welcomed them with a wave of my hand. Only Caroline looked up at me.

“Marc!” Ralph said. “Give us a hand. You and Stanley. This is way too heavy.”

He pulled something halfway out of the trunk. I saw the tailfin of a fish. A gigantic fish.

“A swordfish, Marc!” Ralph shouted. “There was no way we could pass this one up. It’s going on the coals tonight. This is the real thing, buddy!”

That Saturday evening the village was celebrating midsummer’s eve, with fireworks and bonfires on the beach. You could hear the explosions all day long. The fireworks weren’t like the ones at home. No rockets that blew apart in dozens of colors—only dark, heavy detonations. It sounded less like fireworks than like an artillery barrage or bombardment. Thuds you felt deep down in your chest. Beneath your ribs. Behind your heart.

The plan was that we would all go to the beach together. But first, of course, we had to eat. Ralph chopped the swordfish into pieces. With a hatchet, right on the patio tiles. At first the children found it fascinating, but with every blow of the hatchet they moved a few steps back. Organs appeared: the liver, bits of hard roe, the swim bladder, and a glistening, dark-brown organ the size of a rugby ball that no one recognized. On occasion Ralph chopped right through the fish and tile splinters flew in all directions.

“Be a little careful, dear,” Judith said. “We still have to reclaim the security deposit from the rental agency.”