In Galveston, Texas, Clara Vane, fifty-eight, died in the empty swimming pool of the Sea Herald Motor Lodge while demonstrating what she called “the right way to fall.”

The pool had been drained for resurfacing.

This was posted on the office door.

It was also visible from the pool deck, where the absence of water produced a bright blue silence. There are few things more abandoned-looking than a swimming pool without water. It becomes a bowl for leaves, wrappers, pennies, wasps, and echoes. It reveals the stains people were not meant to study. It makes ladders pointless. It turns the painted depth markers into historical claims.

Clara had managed the Sea Herald for eleven years.

Before that, she had been a stunt diver at aquariums, water shows, amusement parks, traveling exhibitions, and one dinner theater in Branson where she entered a tank dressed as a jewel thief and emerged with a plastic necklace between her teeth. In her twenties she could dive from sixty feet into a tank that looked too small from below and much smaller from above. In her thirties she trained younger divers not to look down too long. In her forties she stopped diving after her right shoulder began clicking like a pen.

She moved to Galveston with a woman named Marti, who repaired boat upholstery and loved storms until one took the roof off their rental. Marti died six years ago of pancreatic cancer. Clara kept her sewing machine in the motel office and used it sometimes to mend towels, curtains, guest jeans, and one wedding dress after a groom stepped on the train while attempting to do the worm.

The Sea Herald Motor Lodge had twenty-eight rooms, a broken ice machine, a lobby aquarium with no fish, and a sign out front showing a dolphin wearing sunglasses. The dolphin had lost one lens in a hurricane and looked, afterward, as if it had begun questioning the business.

Clara understood tourists, which is to say she understood temporary selves.

People arrived at the Sea Herald believing vacation would make them kinder, freer, sexier, more patient with their children, less afraid of their marriages, more willing to eat fried things, and immune to sunburn. By the second day, most had discovered they were still themselves near water.

Clara liked them anyway.

She kept aloe in the office refrigerator, extra phone chargers in a cigar box, and a list of guests who were no longer allowed to rent room seventeen because of an incident involving a ferret, though she admitted privately that the ferret was not the worst part.

Her old diving life remained with her in pieces.

A framed photograph in the office showed Clara in a sequined green costume standing on a platform above a tank, one hand lifted as if blessing the water. The costume itself hung in a garment bag behind her apartment door, along with two others, a silver cape, a pair of cracked diving shoes, and a sash from the Gulf Coast Aquacade reading MISS PLUNGE, nineteen eighty-eight.

She was not embarrassed by any of it.

Embarrassment, Clara said, was for people who thought dignity was a fixed address.

On the afternoon of her death, three guests from Lubbock were drinking beer near the empty pool despite the caution tape. One of them, a man named Gary, slipped while pretending to tightrope the curb and landed on his backside on the shallow-end deck. He was not badly hurt. He was loudly hurt. Clara came out with the first-aid kit.

Gary said, “I know how to fall.”

Clara said, “No, honey. You know how to arrive.”

The men laughed.

Clara should have stopped there.

Most deaths include a sentence like that.

She should have stopped there. He should have gone home. They should have called again. She should have taken the west stairwell. He should have seen the doctor. They should have let the hat go.

The sentence is almost never useful, but the living cannot stop making it.

Clara stepped over the caution tape and stood at the edge of the empty pool. She was wearing white shorts, a Sea Herald polo shirt, motel sandals, and a ring of keys clipped to her belt. She demonstrated how to bend the knees, tuck the chin, turn the shoulder, let the body distribute impact.

She had done this thousands of times.

That is another dangerous sentence.

The pool floor below her was not water. It was concrete, dust, two leaves, and a penny flattened green by chemicals.

Gary said something no one can now remember.

Clara laughed.

Then she leaned, perhaps to show the first inch of the fall, perhaps because her sandal slipped on grit, perhaps because the old body remembered water more quickly than the present world offered it.

She dropped into the deep end.

The fall was not far by diving standards.

It was far enough.

Clara Vane died at the hospital at six oh two p.m.

She is survived by her sister Pauline; by Marti’s nephew, who called her Aunt Clara without paperwork; by the staff of the Sea Herald; by several former divers; by a parrot in room nine whose owner has not yet been located; and by a garment bag containing the green sequined costume, the silver cape, and a laminated card reading:

FALL WITH THE BODY YOU HAVE, NOT THE BODY YOU MISS.

The motel has covered the pool with plywood.

Someone has placed the office aloe on top of it.

No one knows why.