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voice.
    “Go see your girl, Max,” Billy said.
    “Good night, Billy.”
     
     
    I T WAS LATE when I got to Sherry’s. Light from a half-moon was filtering down through the big oak trees spread throughout her neighborhood. Years before the residential boom in downtown Fort Lauderdale, this had been a quiet collection of 1950s bungalows called Victoria Park. When she bought the house, Sherry used her status as a deputy for the Broward Sheriff’s Office and worked the real estate agent until she got him below eighty thousand dollars.
    “The last house east of Federal Highway that’s ever going to go for under a hundred,” she liked to quote the guy as saying. That was in the late 1980s. The going price went to six times that in the crazy postmillennial years. Now it was sinking back to where it always should have been, and marketing mouths were going back to pass the area off as “historical.”
    I had to admit, if large trees with hanging moss, heavily laden trellises of bougainvillea and plumbago, and minimal street lighting meant historic, then so be it. I liked it because most of the time it was quiet.
    I parked my truck at the end of the driveway and walked up past Sherry’s MG convertible, shrouded with a canvas covering since our ill-fated Everglades trip.
    I bypassed the wooden ramp I’d built to the front door before Sherry was released from the hospital and went on through a gate to the enclosed backyard. I knew she’d be in her refuge. As I closed the gate behind me, I could hear the hum of the water circulators, and the slight
splash-kick-splash
of her relentless, rhythmic swimming stroke.
    I stepped up onto the wooden deck and tossed my backpack into the empty rope hammock. The house was dark save for a small kitchen light we always left on. Out here, there was only the glow of the pool lights, a cast of aqua blue that shimmered up into the oak tree above and played in the leaves there, dappling and flickering with soft color, creating an opposite feeling to what was going on in the water.
    There Sherry was working. After her amputation, she had decided to install a current system at one end of her backyard pool. With the flick of a switch, a series of jet sprays kicked in and shot a steady stream of water in one direction just below the surface. The setup required a big pump for recirculation but effectively created a current Sherry could swim against, stroking at her steady pace for as long as electricity held out. Sometimes I wondered which would give out first.
    I stood with my hands in my pockets, watching. While the pool lights gave the world up here an ethereal look, below it had a paling effect. From here, Sherry’s long, single slender leg appeared as a bloodless white color as she kicked, moving with the constant rhythm of a double thunk—
flump, flump, flump-flump
—like a heartbeat. The crisp movement caused the water around her foot to cleave and then fold in on itself to create a hollow sound. I watched for a full five minutes, and her rhythm never faltered.
    If she could see me through her tinted goggles, she didn’t stop to acknowledge me. Maybe her eyes were closed in concentration, I thought; maybe she didn’t give a damn. I turned and walked inside the house.
    I didn’t turn the lights on, negotiating only by the stove’s overhead. I took two bottles of Rolling Rock from the refrigerator door and then stood at the sink, looking out the window at the rippling aqua glow while I drank the first beer with three long pulls. The coldness gave me a small brain freeze, and when I squeezed my eyes shut, I could feel tears at their edges. I rinsed the empty, dropped it into the recycling bin, and went back outside.
    Sitting in one of the patio chairs, I took off my shoes, rolled up my pant legs, and opened the second beer. I took a smaller sip this time and then sat for a bit, watching Sherry’s movements, the turn of her head, always breathing on the left side, not alternating like they