For the first time, Jamie actually felt connected to Flip and she wondered if that connected feeling was the soul of true love.
And then she heard the hooting laughter of her mother, and the gauzy cloud of love cracked open and plunged her back to reality.
“We better check on the trampoline,” Jamie said. “Make sure everyone’s safe.”
“Cool,” Flip said, putting his hand around Jamie’s waist as they walked. The song “Love Roller Coaster” came on and Flip started bobbing his head like he was dancing. Jamie laughed.
“Ohio Players,” he said.
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “You know that album cover with the girl smothered in honey?”
“I know,” Flip said. “Everyone says she died from lack of oxygen.”
“You don’t believe it?”
“Yeah. Right. And her death scream is on the album.”
“It’s so creepy that they’d keep her dying scream on the song, don’t you think?”
“Ah, to be fourteen again,” Jamie’s seventeen-year-old boyfriend said, and he gave her a paternal peck on the cheek.
“Hey, there’s this girl at school and her dad’s a record producer and he told her it was true.”
“Yeah,” Flip said, “right.”
As they approached the trampoline, ten-year-old Franny, whom Jamie thought looked far larger and more mature than she had last summer, was loading one-year-old Lacey up for a jump. There were three big kids already jumping.
“Hey,” Jamie said, “don’t put her up there, she could get trampled and killed.”
Flip reached up and took Lacey off the trampoline, an act that made Jamie bite her lip to hold in a love-struck sigh.
“I’m babysitting,” Franny said. “They’re paying me a dollar an hour.”
“That’s good,” Jamie said. “But, listen, don’t put her up there when the big kids are jumping.” Jamie liked the sound of her voice as she said this, the gentle authority.
Two kids climbed down and Franny climbed up with Lacey. Jamie’s job was done, she felt, so she wandered away with Flip, their arms loosely draped across each other’s backs.
Jamie and Flip settled on a poolside boulder. They sat side-by-side, talking while staring down at their tangled-together bare, brown feet. Almost twenty-five minutes passed like this, and when they finally looked up the pool was quiet and empty, like it had been closed.
“Where is everyone?” Jamie asked Jesus, who was walking by with a tray of empty glasses.
Jesus smiled and nodded his head toward the trampoline.
“Let’s go,” Flip said, and they jogged down the hill.
The trampoline was covered with naked, jumping adults.
Betty was near the edge, her giant breasts heaving and plummeting. Leon was right in front of her, his eyes following the bouncing breasts, his teeth showing. More adults were congregated around the trampoline. They were laughing, shouting at the jumpers, cheering as if they were watching a football game. Rod was jumping with Lacey in his arms.
Jamie worried that she’d be knocked out of his grip, sent flying in the air. Perhaps Lacey’s mother, Bridget, was worried about this too, for she reached up to Rod and yelled at him to hand the baby down.
“This is so fucking cool,” Flip said. “I wish my parents were like this.”
“Believe me, you do not want to watch your parents jumping naked on a trampoline.” Jamie looked back up to the trampoline and saw that Bridget was now jumping with Rod. This was the first time she had seen the married couple within the same frame of vision. They always seemed divided by an expanse of room, or water, or lawn.
And now there they were, hand in hand, jumping together.
“I think the trampoline unifies people,” Jamie said to Flip.
“That’s such a totally cool way of looking at it,” he said, and he leaned forward and latched his lips onto Jamie’s, his tongue flickering in her mouth. Jamie looked up to see if either of her parents witnessed this kiss, but they were oblivious. Everyone on the trampoline, in fact, was oblivious; they seemed to be caught under an invisible net of naked drunkenness. Jamie thought that if she slit her throat and ran around the trampoline with her head dangling off her neck by a string, none of these people would have noticed.
Jamie and Flip walked back to the pool where the kids had begun to congregate. They stood, the way normal parents might, at the edge of the pool, surveying the scene.
Renee was sitting on the base of the diving board with Paul. Jamie wondered if they had kissed; and if they had, could it possibly have felt as good as what she and Flip had just done against the fence? The Layman sisters and a few boys were gathered in the shallow end working out the rules to a game of Marco Polo. The furry-headed Olsen boy was standing on his head on the end of the diving board.
He lived with his parents and four cats on a yacht and was homeschooled by his father. Each time Jamie saw him, he seemed more feral than the time before.
And then Jamie noticed it: a bandana floating in the deep end. She couldn’t get the words out when she realized that it was not a bandana; it was Lacey, facedown. Jesus was nearby, picking up wet towels; Jamie turned to him, gasping and pointing at Lacey in the pool. Before she could take another breath, Jesus dove into the pool and pulled the baby out. He thrust her to the side of the pool, jumped out, and kneeled over her. Jesus slipped his right hand under Lacey’s neck and her head flopped back like a baby doll’s. He plunged his mouth over her, covering Lacey’s entire face, it seemed, and puffed out two quick breaths. Then with his thick, dark fingers, Jesus rapidly thumped Lacey’s chest, just where her mounded belly met her ribcage. Jamie watched Jesus’s eyes—they were steady, black marbles. He was moving with the fluid efficiency of a machine: mouth to chest to mouth to chest. Jamie wondered if Jesus had done this before, in Mexico, perhaps. And then Jamie wondered why she was thinking about Jesus and why wasn’t she screaming or running for more help, or thumping her hand on Lacey’s chest while Jesus blew into her mouth and nose.
None of the kids, it seemed, had noticed, for the debate on the Marco Polo rules continued. Flip was no longer
standing beside Jamie; he was running toward her with a group of naked adults. Jamie saw her mother’s face: white, rigid, her mouth in the shape of a scream.
Renee was on the poolside phone and she was crying.
Allen took the phone from her. It was so quiet, even with all the people present, that Jamie could hear everything he said: a one-year-old girl, yes, someone is giving her mouth-to-mouth. Rod and Bridget were kneeling beside Lacey.
Bridget was rubbing the baby’s feet and hands, talking to her, telling her to wake up. Rod tried to give Lacey mouth-to-mouth but he couldn’t breathe, he said, so Jesus resumed the job.
Lacey was limp and still. She looked rubbery, fake.
Allen sent the kids away when the ambulance arrived.
They went into the house and Jamie watched out the living room window as men in white jumpsuits loaded the weightless Lacey doll onto a white stretcher into the back of the ambulance. Rod and Bridget were behind her. They were wrapped in towels and were naked beneath them. Betty, in a towel herself, handed Rod a bundle of clothes with shoes on the bottom. He looked at them blankly, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with them, then pulled them against his chest and climbed into the ambulance. The men in jumpsuits shut the doors and the ambulance drove away. Left behind on the street was a yellow leather sandal—Bridget’s, Jamie presumed. Her mind would not think about Lacey, would not enter the room that held the visions she’d just taken in. Instead, her thoughts were stuck on the yellow sandal: how Bridget would limp around the hospital with one unshod foot; what she’d look like in the hallways; if anyone would notice the skinny woman with one shoe.
The kids stayed in the living room, herded together, each
person recounting exactly what they were doing when they realized what was going on. Renee started crying small, tight tears. Jamie looked at her and felt she should cry with her, but she was too aware of Flip beside her, too aware of herself standing in the center of the room watching everything with a dreamy detachment. Flip rubbed circles on Jamie’s back; he sniffed. Jamie was taken by the gesture, enraptured by the sniff, which may have indicated the edge of a cry. And then, unexpectedly, she was listening to her own, weak, whimperings—a sound that reminded her of the sounds of sex. With horror, Jamie realized that as Lacey was on her way to the hospital, Jamie’s thoughts were on standing up against a fence and doing it with her boyfriend.
Her mother had spoken often of karma and Jamie wondered what bad karma would befall her for her lack of proper focus on the tragedy that had just occurred.
The police pulled up in two cars that, like the ambulance, they parked in the middle of the street. One car had two men, the other had only one. All three men were big, bulky, and slow-moving. They ambled toward the house.
“You get the door,” Renee said to Jamie, “and I’ll warn Mom and Dad.”
“They should probably get dressed to talk to the police,” Jamie said.
“No duh!” Renee said, running out of the room to fetch their parents.
Jamie brought the police into the living room and asked them to sit. The ten kids in the room stared at them.
“Why don’t you guys go into the TV room,” Jamie said, and Flip jumped up and corralled the kids, like a pack of dogs, into the TV room.
It seemed like forever before Allen and Leon entered the
living room. Allen was in jeans and a white T-shirt; Leon had on shorts and a button-down shirt. They looked like normal, reasonable people. And then Betty wandered in wearing cutoff jean shorts and nothing else. All three police officers shifted and sat up in their seats as they stared at Betty.
Renee ran into the room holding the gauzy, Mexican blouse that Betty had been wearing earlier that day.
“Oh,” Betty said, as she took the blouse and pulled it on over her head.
“Let’s go.” Renee took Jamie’s arm and led her into the TV room.
Someone had taken a poll while Jamie and Renee were out of the room.
“Do you believe in God?” Paul asked.
“Yes,” Renee said.
“I don’t know,” Jamie said.
“Then you’re agnostic,” Paul said.
“Okay,” Jamie said.
“And you’re a believer,” he said to Renee. “You, Kathy and Pam Layman, and Franny.”
“What’s everyone else?” Renee asked.
“Mostly agnostic, and some atheists.” Ten-year-old Franny said, “I think we should pray even if you guys don’t believe.”
“If we pray,” Paul said, “we need to pray to an all-encompassing god, a nature god, or a spiritual god.”
“Like the human spirit of all things,” said Daniel, a precocious eleven-year-old boy with a long, girly hair like his father’s.
“The Chumash Indians have four gods,” Jamie said, “celestial gods that live in the sky.”
“I’ll pray to those dudes,” Flip said, and he nudged Jamie with his elbow.
“They’re Sky Eagle, Sun, Coyote, and Morning Star,” Jamie said.
“You’re so lame,” Renee said.
“I think that sounds cool,” Paul said, and Renee blushed.
“Raise your hand if you’re willing to pray to the Chumash celestial gods.”
Everyone raised their hands except Franny.
“Who do you want to pray to?” Paul asked.
“God,” she said. “The real one.”
“Okay, so you pray to him and we’ll pray to the Chumash gods.”
They gathered in a circle with the ottoman in the center.
The Game of Life was sitting on the ottoman left over from when Jamie and Renee had played that morning after breakfast. It occurred to Jamie then how odd it was that in the Game of Life there was no such thing as drowning or death, even.
Paul spoke: “We are gathered here to pray for the life of Lacey, and we are begging the Chumash celestial gods . . .” Paul turned his head and stared expectantly at Jamie.
“Sky Eagle, Sun, Coyote, and Morning Star,” Jamie said.
“Sky Eagle, Sun, Coyote, and Morning Star,” Paul repeated, “to look down and make sure that Lacey is okay.” Paul nodded his head to indicate that he was finished and everyone, including Franny, said amen.
The phone rang; Renee and Jamie looked at it but neither answered. A few minutes later Allen came into the TV
room with Mitch and Paul’s dad, Robert, and the Layman sisters’ dad, David.
“Kids.” Allen lifted his hand and wiped at his eyes. Jamie had never seen her father cry and was so stunned and saddened by the sight that she could think only of him and not of the event that had caused his tears. He took a handkerchief from his pocket, blew his nose, and waved his hand to indicate that he couldn’t speak.
“Lacey’s dead,” Robert said, and he put his hand on Allen’s shoulders and rubbed it back and forth a little. Most of the kids in the room started crying. The Layman girls immediately turned to each other and leaned in, head to head, like mating swans. Franny reached over and clutched the wild Olsen boy to her chest. He shut his eyes and his body went still in a way that Jamie had never seen in him.
Mitch was slumped in a chair, staring out, mouth open, eyes a watery smear. The girly-haired Daniel rubbed his eyes with his fists, crying the way a cartoon baby might. Jamie imagined text floating out of his mouth spelling WAAA.
And Paul was entwined with Renee. Renee appeared to be crying on his shoulder, but the stiffness in her back, and the awkward right angles of her arms, made Jamie wonder if her sister were faking her tears as an excuse to be held. Flip put an arm around Jamie’s waist, but she didn’t turn to look at him. She was now focused on her father, who was really crying, shoulders bobbing, tears flowing down his face, small sounds coming out as he tried to speak. Robert held Allen square at the shoulders and looked at him intently, as if he were waiting to hear what Allen had to say. Jamie’s heart hurt in a way she had never felt before—a churning thrombosis in the center of her chest.
Jamie looked away from her father, out the window to
the empty pool. She thought of the last swim party when she had held Lacey in her arms; she remembered the feel of Lacey, the weight of her. How could it be, Jamie wondered, that that warm ball of squirming flesh would no longer exist, was now only as real and permanent as a memory?