The Things We Wish Were True (6 page)

LANCE

He was standing there staring into the water, thinking about the beautiful woman’s comment about finding Camelot, feeling like the furthest cry from a brave and gallant knight, when he saw the little boy, a dark shape gone still beneath the water. It took him a moment to realize the child wasn’t playing; he wasn’t seeing how long he could hold his breath or pulling a prank on his friends. Lance dove in without thinking, a reflex that extended, it turned out, beyond his own children. As he pushed deeper under the water toward the boy, he had two thoughts:
What do I do now? And where the hell is the lifeguard?

He reached the child in seconds, but it felt like it took half an hour to get his hands on him. Eyes wide in spite of the way the chlorine was burning them, he scooped the boy up, just like he did when his own children fell asleep watching TV and he had to carry them up to bed. But this child wasn’t sleeping.

Unready for the heft of the boy’s weight—the words
dead weight
flashed through his mind, but he pushed them away—he struggled for a second, his lungs beginning to burn as he dragged both himself and the child to the surface. At the surface, there was air, there was solid ground, there was surely someone who knew CPR. He cursed himself for never learning it. From under the water, he could hear the clamor as people responded to what was happening—a whistle blew, a child screeched, a woman yelled. He could make out someone yelling, “Call 911!”

He broke through the surface just as the lifeguard materialized at his side saying, “I got him. I got him,” in a confident voice that made Lance want to say, “Well, you didn’t have him when it mattered.” But the lifeguard knew CPR; the lifeguard was trained in things like this. He’d probably waited his whole lifeguarding career for this, the moment he got to play hero.

Lance loosened his grip on the boy, and the child was taken from his arms. A trio of lifeguards gathered on the hot concrete as they laid out the too-still child and began working on him. Lance swam to the side and, exhausted, balanced his elbows on the edge to watch what was happening as he caught his breath. His eyes burned and he blinked rapidly. He sucked big, grateful gulps of air into his lungs.

The entire pool had gone quiet. All around him the people stood still and watched the little boy, the silence simultaneously eerie and reverent. Someone had turned off the never-ending radio they kept cranked over the speakers at an obnoxious volume. He looked around for the child’s mother, but no one stepped forward. A little girl was crying hysterically; he assumed she was the boy’s sister. He saw Zell slip an arm around her, and the girl struggled against the restraint, trying in vain to get to the boy’s side. The lifeguards kept working on the boy, who was blue and unconscious. Lance prayed for the first time in a very long time. “Please, please, please,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

Suddenly he remembered his own son and scanned around to account for his children. He found Alec frozen in his spot in line for the diving board. Their eyes met, and Alec gave him a smile so fleeting he wasn’t sure he saw it, then gave him a thumbs-up, an affirmation that his father had done something right when it counted most. But would it count if the boy didn’t survive? Lance pulled himself from the water just as the distant wail of sirens approached. He caught the eye of the beautiful woman, and they exchanged grim looks.

After the EMTs arrived, things moved fast. From a distance, it was hard to make out exactly what they were doing. Lance just saw arms flying and faces frowning. In short order they’d secured the boy’s neck, put him on a stretcher, and headed to the ambulance. The boy’s older sister, a little girl Lance had seen playing with Lilah just a few minutes before the whole episode began, ran after him, screaming his name. “Cutter!” And then, “I have to go with him!” Lilah and Jencey’s daughters did their best to comfort her, but she was inconsolable, shaking them off and attempting to catch up to the ambulance and climb inside.

The EMTs, intent on helping the child and seemingly unconcerned about his hysterical sister, bustled past as if she wasn’t there. One, filled with a grace the other two did not possess, turned back. “We’re going to take your brother now,” he said. “We’re going to help him.” He squeezed the little girl’s thin shoulder and raced after his coworkers. Moments later the ambulance shrieked away with lights flashing and siren blaring. The nearby adults, suddenly linked by the situation, formed a messy circle around the girl, offering words of comfort and trying to decide what to do. The children gathered there, too, wide-eyed and silent.

Zell, ever helpful, rubbed the little girl’s back and assured her that she could go to the hospital just as soon as they got the boy settled in. She said “settled in” as if he were going to a bed-and-breakfast. But her voice was soothing and even and seemed to calm them all down.

“Someone needs to call his mother.” The woman standing beside Jencey spoke up, her voice shaky. She had scooped up her little boy and was more clinging to him than holding him.

Zell spoke to the girl. “Do you know your mom’s number, honey?” Zell leaned over to Lilah. “What’s her name again?” she stage-whispered.

“Cailey.” Lilah’s attempt at a stage whisper came out sounding more like a hiss.

The little girl ceased crying long enough to give her a “duh” look and nodded. Zell handed her a phone, and she punched in the numbers. Before it could start ringing, Zell took the phone from her hand.

“But I want to talk to her,” the girl cried out, trying unsuccessfully to get the phone from Zell.

Zell turned to the girl. “Cailey,” she said, gentle but firm in the face of the girl’s hysterics, “you can talk to her once I’ve explained the situation.” She took a few steps away from them and turned her back to speak to the boy’s mother, a woman who, at that moment, had no idea that something terrible had just happened to her son. Lance could hear Zell’s voice, slow and deliberate, relaying the news in a way that was almost businesslike.

Cailey went back to sobbing, repeating the same words over and over again. “She’s going to be so mad at me. She told me to watch him.” Lance and Lilah looked at each other as, helplessly, Lilah attempted to stroke the girl’s bare back, flanked by two straps of her bathing suit, the little nodules of her spine poking out from beneath her skin. Lance got a towel and wrapped it around Cailey, who turned to see who had done so. She looked up at him.

“Are you the guy who saved him?” she asked. Her eyes bored into him, unsettled him.

He nodded and attempted to give her a little smile, but it fell flat. He wanted to offer her something, promise her that her brother would be OK, but he couldn’t say that, not with any certainty. He didn’t make a habit of lying to kids, at least not any more than he had to. He’d had to lie to his own children a fair amount lately, more than he ever thought he’d have to in his entire parenting career. It was for their own good, he told himself. It was so they’d believe there was still some good in the world. Of course that was a lie. Just look at what had happened here, today, in a place that should be reserved for happiness.

“Will you take me to him now?” Cailey asked.

He searched for the right words to respond. Trucking over to the hospital with his kids and this girl all in wet bathing suits in search of a little boy who may or may not be dying didn’t sound like the most prudent thing to do at that moment. And yet, how could he say no?

Suddenly Jencey was at his side. She looked knowingly at Lance, then crouched down and looked at Cailey. She spoke in that same measured, even tone Zell had been using. It must be a mom reflex. Standing so close to Jencey, he could smell her skin. It smelled like Coppertone and sunshine. He inhaled deeply, imagining the scent of her going inside him, inflating his battered lungs. He scolded himself for thinking such a thing at a time like this.

“Cailey, honey, why don’t you let one of us take you home and wait for your mom to call and let us know what she’d like us to do? I’m not sure that going to be with Cutter right now is the best thing for any of us.” She gestured to the girl’s bathing suit. “Wouldn’t you like to get some dry clothes?”

Cailey shook her head emphatically. “I want to be with Cutter!” The three of them—Jencey, the woman holding the little boy, and Lance—all looked at one another helplessly. Just then Zell bustled back over and handed the phone to Cailey.

“Your mama wants to speak to you,” she said.

“Is she mad?” Cailey asked, her voice gone hoarse.

“She’s upset, honey. But not at you.” Zell patted her shoulder. She took a few steps away and motioned for the others to follow her. Lance obeyed, as did the rest of them. “That mother is a basket case,” Zell said quietly. “I mean imagine getting news like this in the middle of your workday. I don’t think she even entirely understood what I was telling her. She just burst into tears and didn’t make a whole lot of sense after that. I told her I’d be happy to take Cailey home with me until we can figure out what to do.” She looked into the pairs of eyes looking back at her for confirmation.

They all nodded dumbly, lacking a better idea. There was no protocol for such things.

Zell nodded twice. “OK. That’s what we’ll do.”

Lance had no idea how these strangers had suddenly become a “we.” Zell was his next-door neighbor who had somehow made herself indispensable to him since summer began. The other woman was someone he’d met five seconds before he saw the boy in the pool, and he still didn’t know the other woman’s name at all. He glanced over at Cailey, hunched over in a white plastic chair, her body all but curled into a ball around that phone, and thought of the weight of her brother in his arms. Something terrifying had happened in their midst, and they were the witnesses, now united by the trauma.

“So, right,” he spoke up. “Zell will take Cailey home with her. I’m right next door, so maybe Alec and Lilah can check in on her, or I can answer any questions she may have or . . . whatever. And we’ll just wait for news from the mother and go from there?”

“That sounds like as good a plan as any.” Zell’s voice was less hearty than usual. She went over to get Cailey. Lance heard her say, her voice comforting, “Your mom needs to drive to the hospital now, honey. She needs to get off the phone so she can drive safely, OK?”

He looked around at the pool, the water now still and empty. The lifeguards were in panic mode, calling their bosses and filling out forms, unaware that anyone else was there. The music was still off, and the place had cleared out. Their own children spoke in hushed tones, huddled off to the side to process what had happened without the aid of an adult perspective. They probably thought the boy was dead. Lance wasn’t sure he wasn’t.

He looked back at Jencey and her friend.

“This is Lance,” Jencey said to her friend. “The hero.” She gave him a smile, one that was genuine but fleeting. He missed it as soon as it was gone.

CAILEY

When the snooty girl talked to me, I thought she thought I was someone else. When she smiled at me, I looked over my shoulder to see who she was looking at. I know my face looked shocked when I realized she was talking to me. We’d been coming up to the pool for almost a whole month, played a few feet away from each other in the water many times, and stood next to each other in line for the diving board more than once. But she’d never acted like she knew I was alive. So I’d stuck with Cutter, keeping an eye on him like I was supposed to, and pretended I didn’t notice that the girls my own age didn’t care two flips about talking to me.

What was different about that day? I don’t know. I was in the right place at the right time or the wrong place at the wrong time. It was one way, then it was another. The two things switched like how one minute the sun is there, the next minute it’s the moon and you’re not quite sure how it happened. Why did she decide to pay attention to me, and why did I have to respond? If I’d ignored her, everything might’ve been different. But I didn’t. She asked me my name. I told her. She told me hers (I already knew; I’d heard her sister shout it about a hundred times by then), and we started playing Cross Pool. Everything that came after that was irreversible. It just was.

Once when Mom was between both jobs and boyfriends, she sent us to stay with her aunt Ruby, who lived on a farm out in the country. We stayed there for a long time, though Mom says it wasn’t that long. I’m not sure that’s true, but it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that while we were there, I saw two things I’ll never forget: a calf get born and then, a few days later, that calf dying. I still remember how we found it, cold and stiff in a corner of the stall. Aunt Ruby didn’t know what happened to the calf. She said that sometimes things just aren’t strong enough to make it in this world.

Standing there with those strangers at the pool all looking at me, I thought of that calf, and about Cutter splashing around all desperate-like every time he got in the water. He wasn’t strong enough, either. But I was supposed to be strong for him. I thought of all the times I’d been cruel to him, ignored him, said awful things to him. I hoped he knew I didn’t mean any of it. I felt the tears sliding down my face, and I didn’t bother to wipe them away. I didn’t care if those strangers saw me cry.

The adults held a little meeting and decided I should go to the old lady’s house, the one who always brought Alec and Lilah up to the pool. She always had good snacks, so I figured it wouldn’t be awful to go with her, even if she was a stranger and my mom told me never to go with strangers. My mom also told me to keep an eye on Cutter at all times, and I didn’t do that, so maybe I deserved whatever happened to me at a stranger’s house.

But when we got there, nothing terrible happened. The old lady—who told me to call her Zell—made me a glass of Coke in a bright turquoise metal cup that turned as cold as the ice she put in it. My throat was so tight I couldn’t swallow the Coke, so I just held the cup in my hand until it got too cold to stand, then I put it on the coffee table and watched the condensation drip down the sides while the old lady—Zell—went to find me a coaster.

Her house was nice. Cozy. The kind of house you’d see on a TV show. Zell also seemed like she could be on a TV show, playing the plump neighbor who’s nice but kind of obnoxious, the one you just have to love because she means well. She stared at me while I took a polite sip of that Coke, and that’s what I told myself:
She means well.
She’d brought me there, hadn’t she? She’d taken me in when she didn’t have to. The whole lot of them could’ve left me there, crying and wailing like I was, all of them hoping I’d get myself together and get myself home eventually.

But they didn’t leave me. They huddled like a football team and made a decision. Maybe they drew straws and Zell got the short one. But however they made it, she was the one elected. She told me I was going home with her as if it were the best news she’d ever heard. And when we left, the other people walked out with us, each of them promising to check in on me later, like they actually cared. Alec and Lilah’s dad said, “Feel better,” and looked really sad, and I wished I had a dad like him. I knew they didn’t have a mom, but sometimes I thought a dad would be better anyway. I mean, if you had to pick just one.

As I drifted off to sleep on Zell’s couch underneath the afghan she put over me when I couldn’t stop shivering, I thought about the sign at the pool’s entrance that said:
W
E
’
RE ALL FAMILY HERE
.
Maybe, I decided, it wasn’t a lie.