From the opposite side of the pool, she watched as Bryte fed Christopher sections of apple, smiling like a woman who had the world by the tail. Through slitted eyes (she’d forgotten her sunglasses), Jencey studied her former friend, marveling anew at just how lovely she’d become. Gone was the awkward uncertainty that used to characterize Bryte. In its place was a glow that radiated from within, as if that inner beauty people used to talk about when referring to Bryte had finally, over time, worked its way out.
When they were friends, she used to tell Bryte she was pretty, reassure her that, even though her chest was flat and she had thick glasses, she still had a lot of good attributes. But she was mostly just trying to make Bryte feel better, and they both knew it. Bryte, Jencey had believed, would always be the sidekick. But something had changed. Bryte had gone from looking like Velma in Scooby-Doo to looking like Audrey Hepburn. Jencey’s reassuring little lies had come true: Bryte had come into her own.
Old friends or not, Jencey didn’t want to see more of Bryte and her idyllic existence than she had to. Not when her own life had turned to shit. She could be happy for her friend without having to witness the happiness. She had to come up with an excuse to get out of the evening, and fast. The little boy was crying and probably getting tired, ready for his nap. She would get Bryte’s phone number before she left, then take the chickenshit way out and text her regrets. It wasn’t a very grown-up way to handle things, but it would get the job done.
She stood up and hurried back over to catch Bryte before she disappeared and left Jencey with no other option but to show up at the address Bryte had enthusiastically rattled off. “It used to be the piano teacher’s house. Remember? You could always hear music when you walked by?”
Jencey nodded. She remembered the house well: a white two-story with black shutters and a front porch much like the other houses in the neighborhood—not big but not small, just right for the middle-class neighborhood they’d all called home.
“Seven!” Bryte had said. “See you then!” Then she’d scurried away, leaving Jencey to feel the regret whoosh through her veins.
At seven she was usually preparing for her nightly walk. At seven she was still promising herself she wouldn’t end up in the hideaway as darkness fell, playing remember when. Last night she’d heard twigs snap as if someone was walking around, someone who’d also come to those woods. She’d sat quietly until the sounds disappeared, then bolted out of the woods, running nearly all the way home, the bad memories nipping at her heels.
Now she moved almost as quickly to get to Bryte before she left, her eyes locked on her and not much else. Which is how she ran smack into the man she’d noticed earlier. He was handsome, in a dad sort of way, a way Arch had never succumbed to. She’d once been proud of this, the way Arch had remained distinctly “Arch,” without giving himself over to the domesticated look that seemed to seize most of the men she knew. And yet, in hindsight, maybe that hadn’t been for the best. Maybe a surrendered man was a trustworthy one.
“I’m so sorry!” she apologized as she steadied herself, using his forearms to stop the force of their impact from knocking them both to the ground.
He stepped back, gazing down at her with a look that was half amusement, half confusion. “It’s OK,” he said, looking embarrassed even though he’d done nothing except wander into her path.
“I’m so sorry,” she said again.
He laughed. “So you said.”
She glanced over at Bryte, who was obliviously gathering her things. She wasn’t gone yet. That was good. “I was rushing to speak to my friend.” She pointed in Bryte’s direction. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
“No worries,” he said. The little girl who’d been playing with her daughters for the past several weeks sauntered over to them.
“Dad,” she said, addressing the man, “I thought you were going to play with us.” She looked up at the two adults. A giddy look crossed her face. “Are you two talking about the sleepover?”
“What sleepover?” they both asked at the same time, with the same degree of alarm in their voices. Then they both laughed.
“We want to have a sleepover. All three of us.” The girl said it in a huff as if they, the adults, were just so slow.
“Well, uh, now might not be the best time,” the man said, shifting uncomfortably as he spoke. He looked over at Jencey with a pained expression. “I’m, um, a newly single dad and not really ready to host an, um, event for the kids.”
Jencey waved her hand, dismissing his apology. “Oh, gosh, sure. I don’t blame you. I get it.” She refrained from explaining just how much she got it.
She looked over. Bryte was on her way out. She was going to miss her. She needed to get away from him, yet her southern manners prevailed. Her friends in Connecticut used to tease her about her accent, her sense of decorum, her general southernness. Try as she might, she couldn’t shake it.
She spoke quickly. “We’re just in town visiting my parents for a bit this summer, so I can’t really, um, host guests, either.” She patted his daughter’s wet head. “You guys can see each other here at the pool, OK?”
The girl sighed deeply. “OK,” she said. Deflated, she slumped away with heavy, dramatic footsteps.
“Well, nice to meet you,” Jencey said, offering parting words.
He turned to her with that same amused/confused look on his face. “But we didn’t really meet, did we?”
She looked up at him and blinked, then glanced over at Bryte again. Thankfully, she had stopped to talk to someone. “Oh, I guess not.” Obliged, she thrust her hand out. “I’m Jencey.”
He shook her hand briefly, then squinted at her. She noticed that his eyes were exactly the same color as his hair. She liked the uniformity of it, how utterly congruent he was.
“Jencey?” he questioned. “That’s different.”
She rolled her eyes. The name was a relic of her childhood. In school she’d been one of several Jennifers. She was Jennifer C, or, as her second-grade teacher coined it, “Jen C.” There had also been “Jen L.” As second grade went on, the teacher ran the abbreviations together so fast that they came out as one word. So “Jen C” became Jencey, and “Jen L” became Jennelle. As far as Jencey knew, Jennelle also went by that name to this day.
“It’s an old nickname,” she explained hastily to him now. “My real name is Jennifer, but no one calls me that.”
“I like it,” he said, nodding as if he’d considered it and found it acceptable. “My name’s Lance, short for Lancelot.” He grinned. “My mom had a thing for Camelot.”
She laughed. “Seriously?”
He raised his eyebrows, held her gaze for a second, looking totally serious. But he couldn’t hold the look for long, as his smile broke through. “No, my name’s just Lance. But I had to come up with a story to keep up with yours.”
She laughed along with him, then noticed Bryte swinging her bag over her shoulder and sliding on her flip-flops as she wrapped up her conversation. She quickly clapped him on the shoulder. “Well, Lancelot, it was nice to meet you, but I’ve got to catch my friend over there.” She hitched her thumb in Bryte’s direction. “Good luck finding Camelot.”
She walked away, shaking her head. Good luck finding Camelot? She was clearly out of practice at this whole opposite-sex thing. She’d once been so good at it. But that was a long time ago, before the hearts had started arriving, before Arch had claimed her as his own.
She got to Bryte in the nick of time, reaching for her in order to stop her from walking away. Bryte turned around with a startled look. But her face immediately relaxed when she saw it was just Jencey. “Oh, Jencey! Hey!” she said, her face filling with a grin that lived up to her name. “Everything OK?” she asked. But then her smile faded and her eyes strayed to the pool as a whistle erupted and someone screamed and, all around them, people started running.
LANCE
He was standing there staring into the water, thinking about the beau
tiful 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.
The Things We Wish Were True Page 6
