The Palmer Pool

5 | Just Pretend

When I surfaced, my gasp for air cut through silence. The pool was empty. The midday sun shone down through a break in the clouds. I climbed up the ladder and ran to the locker room to get out, only to be stopped by the metal security gate stretched across the doorway. For some reason, the pool was closed in the middle of a summer day.

As I climbed the chain link fence, the metal loops pinched my fingers and toes. I let go once I was a few feet off the ground on the other side, stumbled when I landed and a sharp pain tore through my leg. I hopped on one foot while I checked out a deep cut on the ball of my other foot. There were shards of brown glass from a broken beer bottle all over the sidewalk. I tried to pivot on my good leg, wobbled and landed face first into the navy blue uniform of a police officer.

He grabbed me by the shoulders and held me at arm's length. He was a little scary looking, with a deep furrow between his eyebrows and hairy hands.

Before he could say anything I blurted out, "I'm sorry, Officer! I-"

"Vanessa?"

"Yes?"

"Vanessa Brooks?"

"Uh huh."

He looked relieved. "Where have you been?"

I struggled to come up with any logical sounding answer. I didn't want to say, 'Oh, just walking around barefoot in a time-warped version of Palmer.' And when I considered telling him that I got a ride from a stranger, and I might have been drugged and woke up in a bedroom I didn't recognize, I couldn't say the words. Tears began to slip down my cheeks.

"I don't remember?" I finally said as I guiltily bit my lip.

"Okay, it's okay," he tried to reassure me in a gruff voice, then pointed at the stream of blood running down my foot. "You're going to need some stitches though."

Soon I was sitting in a police car, wrapped in an aluminum foil blanket, staring out the window, only processing a few words here and there. "She says she has no recollection....St. Joseph's....her parents."

It was weird to hear my parents referred to in the plural form, like they were a cohesive unit. Ever since they divorced I thought of them individually as "my mom" or "my dad" and hardly ever "my parents". David and Suzanne Brooks.  My mom had held onto my dad's last name for whatever reason. They'd probably both be there to meet me and Officer Hairy Hands at St. Joseph's Hospital. I couldn't even picture them in the same room together. One of the bright sides of having divorced parents was that usually only one of them could harass me at a time. This was going to be horrible.

After fourteen stitches and a clean drug test, I stood outside the door to the emergency department with my mom and dad. My mom brought me a change of clothes; leggings and a giant white t-shirt I wore for pajamas that said, "She who reads is booked every night". I crossed my arms over my chest to cover the words.

Surprisingly, during the ordeal at the hospital my mom and dad didn't attack each other- only me. First with affection and joyful exclamations of their relief, then with grisly descriptions of their worst fears (the classic "dead in a ditch somewhere" and more) and worried questions about how I was feeling. When it turned out there were no drugs in my system and nothing was physically wrong with me other than the gash on my foot, they interrogated me in the hospital room until my stitches were done and we were ushered back into the waiting room.

"Is that your grandma's ring?" my dad asked, gesturing to my right hand.

"Yeah." I tilted my hand and the tiny blue stones sparkled in the sun.

"Pretty," he muttered, frown lines wrinkling his forehead. "So you really don't remember anything?" my dad asked yet again, tracing his goatee with his thumb and index finger with suspicion, like an investigator on a bad crime solving TV show. With his black tee shirt and jeans, tattooed forearms and shiny bald head, he could have intimidated someone else into a confession, but I was standing by my previous statements.