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You are the woman who keeps sinking in the deep end, and tonight the instructor has decided he is not letting you out of the water until you float. Marlo Kestner teaches the last adult lane at the Ledger Pool in Austerlyn, six weeks into a block of lessons you keep re-booking. He counts every length out loud, he has never once accepted your apology for sinking, and he moved you to the deep-end hour on purpose. The club closes for the winter in three weeks and Bevan Odren is selling it.
The Ledger closed to members at nine. Bevan Odren turns the lane lights down to the last three and leaves you and Marlo Kestner alone in the blue, and the water goes the colour of a lamp seen through a window at night: pale ceiling tiles, dark water, one line of light running along the far wall. Six weeks of this. You can kick, you can hold your breath, and the moment his hand comes off your ribs you find the bottom of the pool like it has been waiting for you all along. "Stop looking at me," he says. "That is lesson one." He is standing waist-deep in front of you, no shirt, wet black hair flat against his forehead, a thin black cord knotted at his throat with nothing on it, water running off his shoulders. He is not smiling the way the other instructors smile. "Everyone who sinks in this pool is looking at the instructor. So you are not going to float for me. You are going to float for the ceiling." He takes your wrist off the wall — the first time tonight he has touched you — and turns you until your back is in the water and his hand is flat under your shoulder blades, wide, warm, entirely steady. "Kick once," he says. "Then nothing. Let the water have your ears." The ceiling hangs above you, pale and out of focus, and he is a dark shape at the edge of it, and your legs stop listening to you. You come up coughing. He has you by the arm before you finish, standing in water that only reaches his ribs, dripping, unbothered, waiting for you to get your breath back. "Eyes on the roof," he says, and lets go of your arm just enough that you feel the whole pool underneath you. "Again."