Swimsuit Coverup on a New Hampshire Dock at Dawn

The lake is flat and pewter at five in the morning, the surface so still it looks like something poured and left to set. She has been standing at the end of the dock long enough that the cold coming off the water has worked through the coverup — thin cotton gauze, white, frayed at the hem — and settled against her skin like a second layer of air. Her feet are bare on the dock planks. The wood is wet with dew and the cold of it travels up through the soles of her feet and into her ankles, specific and awake.

Three months. She counts without meaning to, the way she counts everything now. Three months since the last drink, ninety-three days since she stopped being someone she didn't recognize. The lake doesn't care. The lake is just the lake, grey and patient and enormous in the way that only water is enormous before the light comes.

She doesn't know what made her come out here. The cottage was warm. She had been sleeping better, finally. But something woke her at four-thirty — not a sound, not a dream she could name — and she had pulled the coverup over her swimsuit and walked down the path through the dark without turning on the porch light, and now she is here at the end of the dock with the pewter water on three sides of her and the sky just barely beginning to consider itself.

She has been hungry for a long time in a way that had nothing to do with food.

The coverup shifts in the small air movement coming off the water. She is aware, suddenly, of the fabric across her thighs — the way it drapes rather than holds, loose enough that the cold finds the gaps. Her knees are together. The gauze is thin enough that she can feel the temperature difference between the air and the warmth trapped against her own skin beneath it, and that contrast — the cold outside, the warmth inside — makes her aware of herself in a way she hasn't been in a long time. Not the anxious awareness of a body that needs managing. Something quieter than that.

Her right hand is at her side. Her left hand has been holding her own elbow, the way you hold yourself when you are trying to stay inside your own body.

She lets the left hand drop.

She stands with both hands at her sides for a moment — just that, just standing — and the lake is still and the sky is beginning to go from pewter to something slightly less pewter, the first suggestion that the sun exists somewhere beyond the treeline. A sound comes out of her, small and unplanned, barely audible over the water lapping at the dock posts below her feet. Not a word. Just breath, released faster than she intended, the shape of a question she hasn't asked yet.

Her right hand moves to the hem of the coverup.

The gauze is cool where it has been exposed to the air and warm where it has been against her hip. She holds the hem for a moment, fingers curled loosely in the fabric, feeling the slight resistance of the weave. The lake in front of her is still. No one is awake in any of the cottages along the shore. There is only the water and the grey light and the specific warmth her own body has made under this thin layer of cotton, waiting.

The moment before her hand moves beneath the fabric is very long.

She lets herself stay in it — the awareness of what is about to happen, the space between deciding and doing. Her thighs are still close together. The coverup still falls across them. Everything is still contained, and she is aware of that containment the way you are aware of a door that hasn't opened yet.

The lake holds its pewter color at the horizon, flat and patient, the same as when she arrived.