“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.