SWISHER SWEETS

Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Late Summer

I pulled open the top of my one-piece bathing suit and poured a good amount of my ex-husband’s ashes down the front. It felt like gritty talcum. When I let go of the elastic front, some ash dust puffed up into my face. I managed to resist licking my lips but I could feel it in my eyes. The best thing to do was to just hurry up and jump in the lake. So I did.

The lake was heartlessly cold — it’d just as soon kill ya as anything; freeze a body into a sunken, blue-veined, alabaster statue. But I’d been in this lake many times, water so clean a child could drink it through a straw. I knew what to do. Big breath, start kicking. My goal was an outcropping of granite rocks not too far away. The idea was that as I swam the ashes would dissipate from my suit and follow the drift in some spiritual, afterlife way. Peaceful. But I kind of felt the way I would feel peeing in someone’s pool. I was pretty certain it was illegal to dump human remains in the environmentally protected Lake Tahoe. But this was our lake. Ben’s lake.

Dead at 58, heart attack. Imagine being attacked by your own heart.

I could see some of the ash coming out and floating on top of the water. Little pieces of Ben, floating away, sinking, glinting like mica in the late afternoon sun. He was literally next to my heart. I remembered the way Ben looked behind the oil-glossed wooden steering wheel of his Boston Whaler, a place that did not require a college degree. The big mackinaw trout and the smaller rainbow, color ghosted out of their scales as they drowned in the air. The smell of pine needles and fish scales, the thwack of the waves on the side of the Whaler and the thwack of the fish on the deck. Ben cleaned the fish with efficiency, but I felt the little deaths and smelled them on his fingers.

Did I love him then, in those early years when we went fishing and after we jumped off the side of the boat together and cooked the fish in a cast-iron pan over a rose-gold fire? On those nights, when it was cold even in deep summer, I know I loved his shoulders and the way he filled up the space of the plaid flannel sleeping bags, side by side, zipped together.

I climbed out on the rocks, expecting my suit to be empty. But as the water shed off my body, I realized the bulk of the ashes remained in my suit and had turned into a sort of mud, clumping to my skin. The weight of it pulled my suit down a bit and collected at the low point of my