From a work in progress read by the author in April at the Los Angeles Athletic Club.

“My sister’s coming over to swim,” Hal said. “We swim across the lake and back. Want to come?”

I was visiting Hal and his family at their cottage on the lake, staying for a couple of days before picking up my kid from camp. I said yes, I wanted to, but that I usually don’t swim without rests for too long, that I usually swim in pools.

“We go slow,” Hal said, “you’ll be fine.”

Hal’s sister Meg met us at the dock. At the last minute, Hal decided not to swim. He got on a paddleboard with his two little kids to chaperone us across and be on the lookout for speedboats. Out of habit I sized up Meg, who would be swimming beside me. She looked strong. We dove in.

Cold. Then warmer. We chatted as we swam. Meg’s method was ten strokes freestyle, ten breast. I did the same, but since I never open my eyes in lakes, I felt a bit disoriented during the free. I switched to ten backstroke.

We talked, getting straight into it the way you sometimes can with a total stranger, when you are mostly naked and doing something strenuous. We talked about a nearby resort and how they served revolting food from the Sixties like cabbage rolls and ambrosia salad. We talked about menopause and night sweats and hormones. We talked through our breathing, sounding like, we were, using, a lot, of, commas. We talked about kids and how they masturbated so unselfconsciously and how the water felt like maybe there were small bugs in it and how pretty the sky looked. Then we fell silent, and as I stared at the sky while doing backstroke, I thought about work.

We were almost halfway, nearing the gray cottage on the opposite shore, when Hal’s daughter dropped her goggles from the paddleboard and started screaming. I swam to the board and looked for them, hoping they were the kind that floated, although every swimmer knows all goggles sink, and sink fast. Hal pointed at the water. “There! There by your leg! You can dive for them!” And for the little girl I put my face in the water and opened my eyes and looked for the sinking goggles.

Darkness. Nightmare-level ocher to emerald to deep-black darkness. Abysmal, dreadful dark. Particles and blur and the muffled clink and thump of the paddleboard. No sign of goggles. I felt my paralyzing fear of the dark return.

I was ten and I had done something wrong, so my father carried me down the stairs to the basement and put me in a chair and turned out the lights.

I froze. Lifted my head. “Goggles are gone,” I said to the girl. “I’m sorry, kiddo.” I felt ashamed in front of her, in front of Hal, failing at this simple task: get the goggles, return them to the kid. The girl began to cry. “These things happen,” Hal told his daughter. His son asked if they were his goggles, the blue ones. They weren’t.

Meg and I returned to our swim, the gray cabin looming larger. We turned when we were close enough to count the shingles on the roof, and headed back, chatting more, about the lost goggles, about marriage, about joint pain, about New York City. About movies and plays. About leaving plays at intermission: I told her I’d recently met a woman, a boyfriend’s ex, but after getting to know her a little I realized she was like a bad play. The feeling of wanting to leave at intermission.

My father had apologized for the basement punishment, years later. “I knew it was wrong,” he’d said, “when I was at a Christmas party and we were talking about kids and our methods of how to discipline, and my boss pointed out I was terrorizing you.” We were sitting in front of the wood-burning stove after dinner. “I should have known it was wrong by the way you cried and clung to me when I brought you downstairs to the basement.” He shook his head.

I went cold. At his version of the memory. My body remembered it, too, then: legs wrapped around him in my nightgown. Desperate not to be left in the dark.

My dad’s eyes filled with tears. He wanted us to embrace but I leaned away from him, got up. He saw this. “I hope you can forgive me?” He extended his hand, and I looked at it. Then he closed it into a fist, in expectation of a bump. I bumped it and said that it was good to talk to each other about these things, unable to say I forgave him.

Midway back across the lake, the sky opened high behind the yellowing gray clouds, revealing pure-white cumulus and bright-blue expanse. The sun was dipping low; Hal and the kids were backlit. His daughter sat cross-legged in front of her father on the board. I could tell from her slouch she was still sore about the goggles.

Meg and I had been swimming slowly and evenly, and to my surprise I had not tired, but I put my face in the water, closed my eyes, and pulled hard for several meters. When I raised my head, I was nearly at the dock. I flipped onto my back, breathing deep, and kicked closer to Meg, who had been doing her steady crawl and breaststroke routine. “Thanks, for this, swim,” I said between breaths, “I would have, been, way too scared, to do it, alone.”