MARTA sat on the fold-down seat of her walker, her feet firmly planted on the white tile that lined the pool’s edge. The ruffled skirt of her pink bathing suit peeked out from beneath the folds of her abdomen like the tendrils of a sea anemone. Hooked up to a portable oxygen machine, she sounded like a living, breathing wet vac. The cabled prongs that curled inside her  nostrils reminded her of shriveled escargot. She wanted to tell this to her daughter but thought the better of it. Sunlight flecked the water. 

Marta’s physical therapist had canceled their appointment at the last minute. Having  already trundled their way to the pool, Bella and Marta were now waiting for Solomon—Bella’s  brother and Marta’s youngest—to pick them up. Solomon, however, was stuck behind an  overturned truck. The truck, bound for the Denver Mint, had spilled several tons of blank pennies across the  highway. “It’s mayhem over here,” Solomon had said to Bella before their call dropped. Bella imagined people rushing from their cars to scoop up the copper-plated zinc disks by the handfuls. 

“We’re stranded,” Marta began. “If you had a car . . . ” 

“But I don’t,” Bella replied.  

“If you would let me drive . . .” 

“But I won’t.”  

“We’d be home by now.”  

“Your car,” Bella said, “is a Soviet-bloc biohazard.” 

The last time Bella had driven her mother’s car, a 1982 Yugo, its engine had burst into flames in the parking lot of the farmer’s  market. A quick-moving fish vendor had dumped buckets of ice over the hood. Unfortunately, the buckets had also held filets of tilapia, salmon, and sardines, which Bella had been forced to purchase. The engine still reeked of charred fish, and Bella had sworn off ever driving the Yugo again.  

Bella felt the humidity coiling her hair. Her head would soon be a mass of tight ringlets.  Marta fiddled with the cord of the oxygen tank and pushed her bifocals up her slender nose. So  this is what recovery looks like, Bella thought, staring at her mother. Marta fidgeted with the  ruffles of her suit. On the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, Marta used to be off the charts: a diamond, one mark above the crystalline corundum. Her personality: cutting. Her beauty: sharp. Many had considered her handsome. Now Marta was talc, more powder than mineral. Even her skin was paper white and flaking. They hadn’t anticipated her hair would fall out, but it did. Clumps of it still fell from her skull like wads of meringue. Stress, apparently, was as damaging as chemo. At least the hematoma on her thigh had gotten smaller, its color more mango now than its original eggplant hue. Bella had begun to fear that people suspected her of elder abuse.  

Bella sat on the pool’s edge and wriggled her toes under the water. It felt cooler than last  week, even though the reading on the temperature gauge was no different. A kid’s submarine toy  listed in the pool’s deep end. Bella imagined a platoon of little plastic soldiers floundering inside  the hull, their rifles thrashing in the chlorinated water.  

Marta pulled the prongs from her nostrils and recklessly twirled them in the air, a motion  that made Bella uncomfortable; it made her think of strippers’ tassels. Marta made an  announcement: “Today’s special is grilled cheese and tomato soup.” Although she was  discharged from the ICU two months ago, Marta still phoned the hospital’s cafeteria to hear its  daily menu. 

Bella sighed. “Why do you keep calling the lunch lady?”  

“Because she always answers.”  

“And I don’t?” 

“You don’t cook.” 

“I do.” 

“No. You reheat.” 

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you miss the hospital. Ice chips and IV drips. Vanilla  Ensure.” 

Marta was silent. “Are you getting in the water?” 

“At least they cared about me.” 

“A bit melodramatic, don’t you think?” 

“I was dead for three months. I’m entitled.” 

“Lucky me. You survived.” 

“Damn right. I came back from the dead. Lucky us,” she said. Her voice wavered but was  defiant. 

“Anyway, I won’t get in the water without Marcus. You don’t know how to hold me.”  

This was true. Marta’s PT, Marcus, a former nurse with the physique of a beach-toned bodybuilder, was accustomed to carrying around and moving weight in ways that Bella obviously was not. Bella loved the moment when Marcus would maneuver her mother’s bloated body into the pool. Marta’s left leg, still partially paralyzed from nerve damage caused by the hematoma, would reanimate itself in three feet of water. It was amazing. It flopped with wild abandon, writhing and turning while Marcus gently encouraged the movement, saying things like, “Dive  deep. Surface now. Spin the ocean.” These were names of exercises that Marta was supposed to translate into strength-building movements, but which yielded only identical looking convulsions. 

“I’m getting in,” Bella said. 

“You’d probably let me drown anyway,” Marta said.

Bella tucked her ears beneath her swim cap. 

Marta dangled the nasal prongs over the handle of her walker and squinted at her  daughter. Through her goggles, Bella squinted back. Marta’s eyes looked like two black raisins  stuck in the doughy contours of her face. “When I was a girl,” Marta said, speaking loudly,  “COPD didn’t exist. I smoked on airplanes. Doctors smoked with their patients. Imagine, Bella,  if you were forced to give up something you loved: coffee, or men, or your . . . your rock  collection.” Bella refrained from telling Marta that, as a field geologist, her “rock collection” was her livelihood and that she had, in essence, done exactly that: given it up, abandoned her career post on a museum dig in Tanzania to come stateside, bedside even, to stand watch over Marta in what Bella had thought were her mother’s final days. The doctors had suspected cancer, then the cancer turned out to be COPD. Diabetes and septic shock caused by a freak colon rupture were among the long list of other ailments wreaking havoc on Marta, a sixty-nine-year old woman whose profound distrust of the medical profession had kept her out of a doctor’s  office for over thirty years. 

Before she slid into the water, Bella said, “Solomon would scold me for not telling you to  put those back in,” indicating the prongs of her nasal cannula. “And you don’t have to yell. It’s a swim cap. I can hear you.” 

“It’s the—” 

“I know, I know . . . the smell. It’s the smell. You miss the smell.” 

“Most of all,” Marta said, nodding. She waved her fingers in the air as if hoping a cigarette would magically appear.

Bella adjusted her goggles and dove in, swimming the length of the pool in a single  breath. She cut through a swath of floating plastic soldiers with each stroke of her hand. They spiraled in every direction. Bella loved this rinky-dink indoor pool, with its overly chlorinated water, bins of children’s toys, and overhead skylight flanked with plastic leaves nailed to the  ceiling. Tucked inside the western-most cul-de-sac of her mother’s high-rise condo complex, the pool was largely empty save for summertime, when hordes of grandkids showed up and the condo begrudgingly hired a roster of bored teenagers to lifeguard.  

Bella didn’t consider herself athletic, but swimming was different. She thought of  swimming less as exercise and more a place to be, the water a room her body could inhabit. She knew one stroke—freestyle—and breathed only when she turned her head to the left. There was another woman in the complex, a Holocaust survivor named Hilda, who swam most afternoons, and Bella marveled at the ease with which this woman switched between strokes, the evenness of her breathing, and the way, in freestyle, her elbow and wrist formed a sharp angle to the water’s surface, making a small, triangular-shaped window through which Hilda’s head surfaced as she sipped in air. She made it look easy; Bella was less polished, but she didn’t care. With her body submerged, she felt water-chiseled, streamlined, and she liked that feeling very much. The fat that clung to her midsection seemingly dissipated. She felt her body stretch itself in every  direction. Her fingers pulled, her toes pushed, and yet, strangely, it was as though her body—the  head, shoulders, knees, and toes of her—no longer mattered. She was both embodied and  disembodied, a moving arrow with no beginning and no end. The essence of  water itself, she bore the chemical makeup of being mineral without its crystallized form. 

Bella touched the opposite wall with her fingertips. She gulped air and turned to complete the lap as the water closed in on her. From beneath the water’s surface, Bella made out the wavy contours of her mother. Hers was a presence Bella couldn’t see clearly but felt nonetheless. Ribbons of sunlight wavered on the pool’s floor. She surfaced for a breath.The plastic body of a soldier floated past her mouth. She bit his head and spat him out on an exhale. Then she put her head down and swam, counting the laps as she went. 

## 

Bella had given up something she loved: men, caffeine, and alcohol, though not in that order.  She’d sworn off caffeine after her own health scare—a heart murmur—several months previous.  She’d neglected to tell Marta and Solomon that the blood swishing around her heart was restless. “Turbulent,” her doctor had said, putting her arrhythmia in layman’s terms. “Perhaps innocent, perhaps not. Time will tell.” Bella  remembered this word: turbulent. She was shocked that a physical ailment could so perfectly dovetail with a lifelong emotional state. She wanted to tell her mother everything—the swirling turbulence of her heart, its corresponding restlessness—but Marta was already in a coma by then. “I’m doing it again,” she’d wanted to confess. 

“Stop sleeping with married men,” Marta would have said. Perhaps she would have slammed something down on the counter for emphasis, a rolling pin, maybe, or the long wooden spoon she kept from Bella’s childhood. Bella craved motherly recrimination. It never arrived. 

As a child, Marta had showered her daughter with attention only when she did something wrong. Bella had lived for these moments. Her mother’s ice-blue eyes would bear down on her, harsh and unforgiving, and Bella would be forced to stutter a confession of wrongdoing. Marta’s punishments could be cruel: no supper, weeks spent grounded in her bedroom, no social calls, and once, memorably, the paddle of a hairbrush swift and hard against Bella’s backside. Bella knew, however, that Marta loved her, and that if she weathered the punishments with no complaint, if she simply soldiered on, she’d win her admiration. Marta was training Bella to be a diamond, just like her. Hard. Cutting. Beautiful. This time was different, though. Even if Bella had yelled her confession at the top of her lungs, Marta wouldn’t have been able to hear her. Gita, Marta’s morning nurse, argued with Bella on this point. “The spirit listens,” she’d said, more than once, but Bella hadn’t bought it.  

In the hospital room, Marta’s eyelids had fluttered open whenever Gita swabbed her lips with Vaseline. Then they’d abruptly slid shut, her baby blues rolling back into her head like glassy marbles playing Shoot the Moon. So many tubes and wires protruded from her sun-starved body that Bella had thought of her mother as a science experiment gone awry. And yet whenever Bella had gotten used to Marta’s vegetative state, she’d do something Herculean like yank the breathing tube from her nose or aggressively swat the water pic from Gita’s hand. She clung to her diamond status like a person possessed. It would take more than a stint in the hospital to pull  Marta Pierson down a rung. Solomon and Bella had suspected that Marta was trying to fuck with  them, maybe with Death itself: Is that all you got? 

“You know, like, in The Twilight Zone? That part in the movie when the doctors think that guy is dead but he’s just paralyzed? He can still hear and think and feel? Maybe it’s like that  for Mom,” Solomon had theorized. He’d read The New Yorker and award-winning books out loud to her—stuff Marta wouldn’t have been caught dead reading if she were conscious. He’d played Mozart from his iPhone. Who the fuck has Mozart on their playlist? Bella had thought. Nonetheless, the message had been clear: Solomon believed in Marta’s recovery, while Bella did not. He had held his mother’s hands and mopped her face of its sweat. He had applied rose-scented lotion to her skin and arnica for her bruises. He was the first to arrive at her hospital room and the last to leave, and he had done this, all of it, without jeopardizing his job security or his long-distance relationship with his boyfriend Eduardo. If anything, Marta’s impending death had only strengthened Solomon’s personal resolve. He and Eduardo were going to get married. “Next spring, maybe,” he’d told Bella. “September if there’s a funeral. Life is short, Bella. You love and then you die. You should try it: loving.”  

You should try it: loving.  

Bella knew life was short—everyone knew that—but she wasn’t willing to wager it on  love. What was that, really? Love was a hypothesis she couldn’t prove.  

During Solomon’s displays of filial affection, Bella had snuck vodka into bottles of Sprite and chewed peppermint gum around the clock. She’d bitten her nails to dirty nubs. Days passed. Then a month. Then two. She had listened to rounds of doctors who ran tests and more tests, and she promptly forgot what they said the moment they left the room. She had watched her brother watch Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, and she watched him watch their mother. They’d watched the Kentucky Derby together, and Marta jostled awake long enough to deliver a drug-induced  punchline: “That jockey has something your father never did. Stamina!” Bella had refrained from  noting that the Derby was the fastest two minutes in sports—not exactly an endurance test. The  horses kicked dirt up and down the backside, the jockeys pointillism in motion against the dun-colored track. 

Bella had lied to her mother’s friends and distant relatives, telling them that Marta was making progress, so they’d leave the three of them alone. She’d contemplated reaching out to Pete, her high school boyfriend, while she was in town, and obsessively checked Facebook to admire his two young daughters, Becca and Maggie. She’d dreamt of the life she could have had as the wife of a prominent Colorado politician. The girls had auburn-colored hair and freckles the shade of new soil. 

At night, she’d spent hours alone in her mother’s condo, while Solomon slept in a luxury  hotel downtown. She had unearthed her childhood mineral collection from a cardboard box Marta had labeled Bella’s Rocks & Equipment and kept in the hallway closet behind rows of partially-used bottles of lotion and bathroom sprays. Just as she had done countless times when she was a child, Bella color-sorted piles of minerals against the green ceramic tile of her mother’s kitchen table, separating amethyst from jasper, tiger’s eye from aragonite, carnelian from brown goldstone. Discovering her old rock tumbler, along with bags of unopened grit and satchels filled with coarse brown rocks, she’d filled the barrel of the tumbler with rough rocks and added different types of grit or polish, eyeing the water level as she worked. The sound of rocks churning against one another was loud, yet deeply soothing to Bella, and she would fall asleep on the couch listening to it, her arrhythmic heart pumping furiously.  

At the end of six months, Marta was discharged from the hospital. When Bella moved  into an apartment two blocks away, she lined her newly polished gemstones along the  windowsill. She stopped drinking. The heart medication worked, but the restlessness was still  there, the turbulence. She couldn’t make it go away. When she slept, she dreamt of the African  sun, the savannah, and of Saul, her married lover she’d met there. In her dream state, she  confused the heat of the radiator, licking her naked, sleeping body, with Saul’s fingers and tongue. She took to keeping a water bottle by the side of her bed and gulped from it compulsively throughout the night. Awake, she saw flashes of Saul’s wedding ring everywhere: on her brother’s hand as he helped Marta into the rental car, reflected in the golden barrel of her rock tumbler, and floating in the clear night sky.

As a lover, Bella knew that the fastest way to make a man leave, married or single, was by asking him to stay. As a daughter, she knew it was best to make herself small, a grain of sand, the better for her mother to shine. As a geologist, she knew that the creation of rock formations leads to structure. Geology is a slow process, each layer of strata, the minerals themselves, created by the exertion of deep and prolonged pressure over millions of years. Once the irreversible, the unthinkable, happens—the volcano erupts, the earthquake destroys, the body weakens—the terrain markedly changes. Forever. It’s the erosion that tests and creates character.  

## 

Marta coiled and uncoiled the cord of the nasal cannula around her index finger. She fiddled with her swimsuit, tugging hard at the Lycra material until it snapped back into place, leaving a  swollen red line against the skin of her hip. She watched her daughter’s sleek form slice the  water. 

Marta didn’t mean to fall into the pool, but by the time she realized what was happening,  it was too late. Her bifocals began to slide from her nose and, to stall their falling, Marta leaned forward, putting out her hands to catch them. She became off-balanced, her feet caught up in the long cord of the oxygen tank, and in freeing herself of the cord, she began to slip sideways. Her glasses sunk to the bottom of the deep end, their silver arms gleaming as they tripped the light. 

Bella saw her mother’s hand skim the surface of the water and quickly pulled herself out  of the pool. She grabbed the life saver and jumped back in. Marta wrapped herself around the  flotation device. Her eyes blazed. She gasped and wildly flailed her legs until she understood she  wasn’t drowning. Bella touched her mother’s forehead with her own and clung to the other side  of the life saver as counterbalance.

“Easy,” Bella told her mother. “You know how to do this. Spin the ocean. Dive deep.” Marta wordlessly resigned herself to the task and slowed her breathing. Sunlight splayed across the water’s surface, reflecting patterns of liquid gold onto the surrounding walls. Bella gently pushed and pulled her mother to the pool’s stairs. Marta’s heart was pounding. Her chest rose and fell. 

“Good thing I taught you how to swim!” Marta exclaimed between breaths. She chuckled  at the memory. “Do you remember?”  

Bella nodded. “You told me to jump,” she said.  

“That’s right,” Marta said. “I said ‘jump,’ and you did. No safety net—nothing.”  

“No one to catch me.”  

“What do you mean? The water caught you. You did the rest.” Marta beamed at her  daughter. She was beautiful, stronger and more stunning, Marta thought, than she’d ever been  herself. And yet, Bella had no idea. They sat together on the top stair in the shallow end of the pool. Marta clutched the silver handrail. “I could be eating a grilled cheese right now,” she said, trying to lighten the mood.  

Bella swam to the deep end to retrieve her mother’s glasses. When she surfaced, she saw  her brother standing in the doorway, a tray of Starbucks coffee in his hands. He took in Marta’s  overturned walker, the evaporating sprays of water on the pool deck, his mother still heaving in  the shallow end. “Bella, what the fuck?” 

“Your sister saved me,” Marta said. “But you get to fish me out.”  

## 

Later that night, Bella poured grit into the largest of her tumblers. She sat at the kitchen table and  listened as the machine knocked rock against rock. She tugged at the diamond studs in her ears, a  gift from the man with the wife. 

It hadn’t been that simple, really: learning to swim. Bella had categorically refused to enter the mountain lake. Cool air blew across her exposed arms and legs. Her body shivered and the goose bumps came. She gripped the ridge of an immense boulder with her tiny toes. An eagle flew overhead, and Bella prayed it would swoop down and carry her away to some distant land. Marta repeated her command with the seriousness of a drill sergeant.  

“Jump,” she said. “Bella, jump. Godamnit, jump! If you don’t jump, you’re gonna be scared for the rest of your life. I’m not raising a scared little girl.”  

When Bella still refused, Marta had pushed the crying girl into the cold, dark water below.  Bella plummeted like a stone. On the Mohs scale, she entered the water like gypsum or calcite, mere points from talc. There was no quality that set her apart from any of the  moss-covered, algae-eaten stones that lined the bottom and sides of the watering hole. She had begged her body to do something special. When she pushed against the water, she felt it  transforming her, chiseling away at the fear that kept her down. When her head broke the  water’s surface, she screamed; a combined expression of joy, panic, and relief. On the scale to  measure hardness, Bella thought, she’d entered the water a Three and emerged a  Seven: quartz. Sturdy and shining, not quite a diamond, but almost. 

Almost.