When David McGlynn was 15 and growing up in Houston, his best friend and swim teammate, Jeremy, was murdered in his home, shot in an execution-style killing along with his brother and father.
Jeremy had been on the phone with David only minutes beforehand. Jeremy's parents had advertised their piano for sale and had an appointment with a potential buyer that night, but an investigation turned up no suspects, no motive, no weapon. The case was never solved.
A different kind of investigation takes place in McGlynn's heartfelt memoir, "A Door in the Ocean," which charts his painfully honest, confused search for something to cling to in the aftermath of Jeremy's murder. For days, weeks, months and years afterward, he will seek a doorway of sorts, a place where he can catch a glimpse of meaning in what he sees as such random evil that "it could happen to anyone at any time."
It's not a book that concentrates on the crime; McGlynn devotes a single paragraph to describing the incident that, in the space of an evening, transformed his world from one fraught with the usual teenage angst — divorced parents, a weight problem, girl troubles — to one so shattered he'll spend decades coming to terms with it.
Grief takes a chaotic toll on the lives of the other boys on the swim team, who embark on self-destructive paths involving drugs and violence, but McGlynn, for whom even "seeing someone crying in the school corridor" evokes agonizing visions of Jeremy's final moments, looks for another way out.
Not long after, he slips through the door of the title — for the first time, in a place he discovers while swimming off the coast of California, where he goes to live with his father and stepmother:
"I surfaced and swam beyond the edge of the cove, into the open ocean. The waves out there were rolling big and shapeless ... All around me, phytoplankton glowed like stars in the moonlight. I felt like I had entered a world unhinged from the laws of physics, without a floor or ceiling or sides. It felt like the door through time I'd been looking for last spring; if I dove to the bottom and touched the sand I could return to last September and rescue Jeremy before it was too late."
McGlynn comes back to this image several times in the book, but the door that beckons to him most powerfully is evangelicalism. It lures him first in the form of his father and stepmother's fundamentalist beliefs, which promise a home "no evil could invade," and later, in the closely knit community he finds in a Christian campus group for whom "lust was the gravest of sins."
Aside from his embrace of celibacy and a youthful enthusiasm for theological discussion, McGlynn is not very good at this kind of dogmatic Christian life. Descriptions of his fellow pilgrims, though fair and sensitive, reveal a Woody Allen-esque distaste for the very group he clings to. He's embarrassed by the prospect of saving souls and suspicious of the organization's deceptive advertising, their desire to spread the word rather than "build homes or clothe and shelter the weak" in foreign countries.
Deep down, he isn't much of a believer, especially in himself, and much of "A Door in the Ocean" records his gradual drift toward yet another door, the one he'll have to walk through to cultivate a philosophical belief system he can live with.
Even as the trappings of evangelicalism fall away, sexual innocence continues to be the heavy price McGlynn pays for his friend's murder. The bargain with God he's kept since his teens, intended to safeguard him, has trapped him in a time warp: At 25, he's as innocent as Jeremy was when he died. Happily, in the second half of the book, he overcomes this crippling concern to fall in love with a young woman (a lifeguard!), marry and have children.
Still an active swimmer who these days competes in open-water races across the country, McGlynn's descriptions of indoor pools, humid locker rooms, and, of course, the ocean are some of the most eloquent in the book: "The water grew greener with the changing seasons so that by winter's onset, it was the color of a pine tree, a layer of foam as thick as cappuccino."
His twin, troubled relationship with faith and water informs every page. He loses a dear friend, a swim coach, in a drowning accident. In a chapter both revealing and sadly funny, new father and proud homeowner McGlynn spends days anxiously anticipating leaks in his walls, obsessing over a potential flooding problem with the house's foundations. It's while swimming that Jeremy returns to him "more often, and more forcefully, than anywhere else."
"All my stories," he says, "lead to water."
"A Door in the Ocean" originally began as a series of essays; now strung together, the chapters trace the continuing evolution of the author's hard-won faith, his realization that it wasn't "a kind of insurance policy against misfortune." In the process, he finally recovers that once-hopeful, brave kid, now grown up and back on the swim team, having found his door in the ocean and come safely out the other side.
Book review
"A Door in the Ocean"
David McGlynn
Counterpoint, $26, 288 pages
