Swimming Lessons

Dec 18, 2025

Swimming Lessons

By Imani Brooks

The pool smells like it did thirty-two years ago. Margot knows this the way she knows her childhood phone number or the sound of her mother's car pulling into the driveway - knowledge that lives somewhere below thought, in the body's own memory.

She stands at the edge of the pool in a maternity swimsuit she bought online at 2 AM. A micro camo print with an a-line silhouette that the model made look fashionable but which she makes look like exactly what it is: a tent for growing someone.

The water is too blue, that artificial Caribbean that only exists in hotel pools and travel commercials. Above her, the glass atrium lets in gray Seattle light.

She is eight and half months pregnant. She has driven forty minutes to a hotel where she is not a guest, paid fifty dollars for a day pass, and told no one where she is going.

Her mother taught her to float in this pool when she was four years old. They'd been staying here for a cousin's wedding, one of those big Catholic affairs with a band and a cookie table.

Margot had refused to get in the water. She remembers the refusal more than the reason-some fear that made complete sense when she was four.

Her mother, twenty-eight then, younger than Margot is now, had gotten in first. Had held out her arms.

"The water will hold you. You just have to let it."

Margot had not let it. Not that day.

But her mother kept bringing her back - the next morning, the morning after that. On the last day of their trip, Margot finally laid back into her mother's waiting palms.

She felt the water rise around her ears and turn the world into something muffled and strange. Then her mother's hands slipped away and she was floating.

Suspended. Held by nothing and everything at once.

She has carried that feeling her whole life. Pulls it out in waiting rooms and during turbulence and in the small hours when sleep won't come.

The memory of surrender that didn't end in falling.

Now she lowers herself down the pool ladder, one careful step at a time, her center of gravity a foreign country. The water is warmer than she expected.

It rises around her belly, and for a moment the weight she's been carrying for months lifts. The baby shifts - she can feel it even in the water, that slow roll like a whale turning in the deep.

"Hi," she whispers. "This is where Grandma taught me to be brave."

She doesn't know why she's here, exactly. Her mother has been dead for eighteen months.

Ovarian cancer, fast and mean, the kind that announces itself only when it's already won. Margot was holding her hand at the end.

What she remembers most is how small that hand had become. How it didn't seem possible that it had ever held her above water.

She pushes off from the wall and floats on her back, belly rising like an island. The ceiling above her is gridded with skylights, and through them she can see the clouds moving.

She wonders if the baby can sense the light changing. If she knows the difference between fluorescent hospital brightness and this - the soft gray of a Wednesday afternoon, the echo of water against tile.

She will bring her daughter here. That's what she's decided, though she hasn't told Marcus yet.

He'll ask why they can't use the pool at the community center, the one five minutes from their house. She won’t have the words.

How do you explain that some places hold things? That the pool here smells like the last time she felt completely safe?

Her mother never saw her pregnant. Never even knew she was trying.

Those two years of ovulation tests and timed intercourse and one devastating miscarriage at eleven weeks happened in the dark. Margot had been unable to speak it out loud while her mother was dying, unable to add another loss to the pile.

And then her mother was gone. Ten months later, the pregnancy test was positive.

Margot stood in the bathroom holding the result and understood for the first time what it meant to be haunted by good news.

She floats. The baby kicks.

There's a mother and son in the shallow end now. The boy is maybe two or three, wearing orange floaties and shrieking with joy every time he splashes.

The mother looks tired in the way all mothers of young children look tired - that bone-deep exhaustion that reads on the face like something ancient. But she's smiling.

She's in the water with him.

Margot watches them and feels something shift. Not the baby this time - something in her head.

A rearrangement.

She will not be able to give her daughter a grandmother. That absence will be there always, a chair at the table that stays empty.

But she can give her this. The water, the surrender, the memory of being held until you realize you're holding yourself.

She closes her eyes and lets her arms drift out. The water laps at her ears, turns the shrieking boy into something distant and musical.

She imagines her mother beside her, floating too. Both of them looking up at the same gray sky through the same glass ceiling.

"The water will hold you. You just have to let it."

Margot has spent eighteen months not letting anything hold her. Staying rigid, staying busy, staying above the surface of her grief because she was afraid that if she went under, she wouldn't come back up.

But here, now, eight and half months pregnant in a hotel pool that smells like childhood, she feels herself letting go.

Not of her mother. Never that.

But of the clenched-fist way she's been carrying the loss.

She floats. The water holds her.

Both of them.

One day she'll come back with her daughter. She'll pay fifty dollars and change into her suit and lower herself into water that's too blue and exactly right.

She'll hold her daughter in her palms. She'll feel that small body tense with animal fear.

And she'll say the words her mother said to her.

She doesn't know if her daughter will let go that first day, or the second, or the tenth.

It doesn't matter.

She'll keep bringing her back.