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house: Thomas on the phone with the lab that he runs arguing with a staff member because for months now, almost a year, batches of bacteria he’s been growing to target a gene are failing and he can’t figure out if it’s due to a virus, contaminated water, or a temperature problem, and it’s driving Thomas crazy. You at the sink staring at your face in the mirror thinking if you were a bride you had to photograph, then you would have a hard time finding the right light to photograph yourself in—you would have to pull far back with the lens in order to capture the slightest hint of youth, of beauty, of any camera-worthiness at all. Those people in the cars below your hill on your road on a sunny summer’s day with the leaves and the blossoms in full riot would not be able to see your girls bent over homework, or standing tall, practicing, holding small chins over the warmly colored wood of old violins.
    This is the dead pool at the away meet, a huge affair built years ago and named after a man who has been dead for years in a town that looks like it’s dead, located on a college campus that looks like it’s dead, where the people shuffling into the store at the gas station to buy weak coffee look like they’re near dead. The dead pool, the moment you enter it, is so hot you feel your blood evaporating and your tongue thickening, and you’re already wanting a drink of water. The course is long, twice as long as the swimmers are used to. This is the national anthem. Who can hear it being played over a sound system so old?
    You eat grapes. The grapes have already become warm because the facility is so warm. You talk to the other parents. “Aren’t we lucky,” you tell each other. “We don’t have to time today. The home team has enough timers.” But you don’t feel lucky. You like to time. You like to be down on deck doing something. The children, the young ones, need to be asked their names. They need to be in the right order. You cannot have someone diving off the blocks who is not in the right order on the heat sheet. The swimmers are nervous and they are bored standing on line at the same time. They play with their goggles. They put them on and take them off so many times. On line, the girls give each other back massages or they spell letters with their fingers on each other’s backs and make each other guess what word they are spelling. They play a game called ninja, which you don’t understand even though your daughters have explained it to you. The girls all jump together and then end up with their hands in different poses as if they were karate-chopping the air. It reminds you of the game of statues you played as a girl, only these statues always end up in a fighting stance.
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    S ince you are not timing today, you have time to think, which is not always a good thing. The first races are the five-hundred frees, and Sofia and Alex are not in this event, and it is a long event. You look around at the crowd in the bleachers, and as usual there is someone who reminds you of your brother. You notice a man with a chipped front tooth and it reminds you of your brother, but your brother only had a chipped tooth for so long. When he was older, after he married, he had the tooth fixed, but still when you picture your brother, it’s always with that chipped front tooth. Maybe it’s because when you played chase with your brother, that tooth looked sharp, like it could tear the skin on your back, on your neck, if he caught you. You try to stop thinking about your brother. You are always thinking about him when you are alone, when Thomas isn’t there talking to you about something he’s read in a magazine, when your girls aren’t there asking you questions, asking you to help with their homework, to tell them the difference between to, too, and two. You are alone because Thomas is too busy with work to come to most of these meets. He