I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(40)

I looked at the lifeguard. His reflective sunglasses were pointed right at her where she bounced.

“So what are you going to do?” my friend asked.

“Hey,” I called to my daughter. “Come back this way.”

I called again, to her brother doing water somersaults nearby, “Tell her to come in.” Neither of them could hear me over their own splashing.

Bob, bob, bob. A foot or two farther. Pop!

“HEY.”

Bob, bob.

She went down. She didn’t pop up.

She stayed down. This is what all the articles and safety courses tell you about drowning, that you’ll expect it to happen with thrashing and screams, but it doesn’t. It’s a quiet slip under the surface.

I looked at the lifeguard, saw his glasses aimed at the surface where my child had gone down. He didn’t move. Wherever his real eyes were looking, he didn’t see her.

I leapt off the step into the pool. “GET HER,” I yelled. To the lifeguard? To myself? My hat flew off and spun away, upside down on the water’s surface.

I yanked my daughter up by the armpits. She choked and gagged, water streaming from her nose. In a second, the lifeguard was in the water next to me. “I thought she was playing,” he said, his voice quavering. I still couldn’t see his eyes, but I could see from his quaking hands, his rapid swallowing, that this boy, this other mother’s baby, felt shaken by guilt and fear. He’d made a mistake. Anyone might have made the same one. It could have turned out so differently.



* * *



A few weeks later, I sat on a folding chair at a table near the pool, surrounded by other women waiting for our children to finish swim team practice. My daughter had returned to the water happily, her incident long forgotten (by her, not by me). We watched the kids do their laps, helped along every few feet by their coaches. In this instance, there really was no need to keep our eyes on them—the coach-to-kid ratio was absurdly high—although I didn’t want to turn too far away.

So I sat and watched the little swimmers as people came and went in the seats next to me, starting conversations I tuned out. I couldn’t concentrate.



* * *



“I can’t believe it,” someone said.

Did somebody get a tragic haircut? Did a toddler pee in the kiddie pool? Did someone forget to salt their chicken salad? What’s so unbelievable now? I pulled out my phone to scroll through messages. I opened a new email.

I’m sorry, the subject line read.

It was from one of my best old friends, a guy I always called “the brother I never had.” (“You have a brother, dummy,” he’d say. “But he’s the brother I do have, and you’re the brother I didn’t have,” I’d reply.) We’d fought over something recently, the kind of fight where each party thinks they’re in the right and that they’ll make the other understand if they just type enough words to make themselves clear, but everyone only gets more hurt and offended.

I assumed I’m sorry was the beginning of his apology. But he wasn’t writing to apologize. I think we should get a platonic divorce, he wrote.



* * *



Whatever unimportant thing we’d fought about in the beginning—some opinion we thought we’d shared but didn’t ultimately see eye-to-eye on—had long since stopped being the point of our argument. Now we were arguing over our arguing: who was being unfair, who was being presumptuous and bossy. He wanted to take a month and not talk, maybe longer, because our last conversation had been so unpleasant.

“If you feel bad about yourself, that’s not my fault,” I had yelled. “Why do you project your problems onto me?”

“I’m sick of this. You’re a vortex. You keep dragging me back into the same conversation.”

“I AM NOT A VORTEX. I AM A PERSON. AND YOU’RE THE ONE WHO CALLED ME.”

Had it really come to this? Could toddler-style squabbles actually lead to adult friend breakups?



* * *



Meanwhile, the conversation going on around me was picking up volume.

“I heard it was a while before anyone found them.”

“It must have happened instantly.”



* * *



I looked up, confused. “What?”

“Sarah’s dad,” another mom said, pointing at the herd of children in swimsuits huddled by the diving blocks for a motivational speech from their coaches. Sarah, the same age as my daughter, was not among them.

Someone explained that Sarah’s dad—not a guy I knew personally, a friend of a friend—had been killed the night before in a plane crash. The adults were trying to piece together what had happened from fragments of testimony offered by people who had heard some part of the horror: A woman had come running through the pool gate by the snack stand yelling about a news story; Sarah’s dad’s best friend had screamed; another friend had gone over to Sarah’s house to sit with Sarah’s mom, who was, as you would imagine, in shock. From what everyone could gather, it seemed that after finishing up a business trip, Sarah’s dad had accepted a colleague’s offer of a lift home in a private plane. The plane flew into a mountain in the dark. No one knew why.

I listened to one conversation and held another in my hands.