was not completed. I could see some of the pool. I saw Cynthia, standing about waist-deep in the water, fluttering her hands on the surface and discreetly watching something at the end of the pool, which I could not see. I thought by her pose, her discretion, the look on her face, that she must be watching some byplay between the lifeguard and her boyfriend. I couldn’t see Meg. But I thought she must be playing in the shallow water — both the shallow and deep ends of the pool were out of my sight.
“Cynthia!” I had to call twice before she knew where my voice was coming from. “Cynthia! Where’s Meg?”
It always seems to me, when I recall this scene, that Cynthia turns very gracefully toward me, then turns all around in the water — making me think of a ballerina on pointe — and spreads her arms in a gesture of the stage. “Dis-ap-peared!”
Cynthia was naturally graceful, and she did take dancing lessons, so these movements may have been as I have described. She did say “Disappeared” after looking all around the pool, but the strangely artificial style of speech and gesture, the lack of urgency, is more likely my invention. The fear I felt instantly when I couldn’t see Meg — even while I was telling myself she must be in the shallower water — must have made Cynthia’s movements seem unbearably slow and inappropriate to me, and the tone in which she could say “Disappeared” before the implications struck her (or was she covering, at once, some ever-ready guilt?) was heard by me as quite exquisitely, monstrously self-possessed.
I cried out for Andrew, and the lifeguard came into view. She was pointing toward the deep end of the pool, saying, “What’s that?”
There, just within my view, a cluster of pink ruffles appeared, a bouquet, beneath the surface of the water. Why would a lifeguard stop and point, why would she ask what that was, why didn’t she just dive into the water and swim to it? She didn’t swim; she ran all the way around the edge of the pool. But by that time Andrew was over the fence. So many things seemed not quite plausible — Cynthia’s behavior, then the lifeguard’s — and now I had the impression that Andrew jumped with one bound over this fence, which seemed about seven feet high. He must have climbed it very quickly, getting a grip on the wire.
I could not jump or climb it, so I ran to the entrance, where there was a sort of lattice gate, locked. It was not very high, and I did pull myself over it. I ran through the cement corridors, through the disinfectant pool for your feet, and came out on the edge of the pool.
The drama was over.
Andrew had got to Meg first, and had pulled her out of the water. He just had to reach over and grab her, because she was swimming somehow, with her head underwater — she was moving toward the edge of the pool. He was carrying her now, and the lifeguard was trotting along behind. Cynthia had climbed out of the water and was running to meet them. The only person aloof from the situation was the boyfriend, who had stayed on the bench at the shallow end, drinking a milkshake. He smiled at me, and I thought that unfeeling of him, even though the danger was past. He may have meant it kindly. I noticed that he had not turned the radio off, just down.
Meg had not swallowed any water. She hadn’t even scared herself. Her hair was plastered to her head and her eyes were wide open, golden with amazement.
“I was getting the comb,” she said. “I didn’t know it was deep.”
Andrew said, “She was swimming! She was swimming by herself. I saw her bathing suit in the water and then I saw her swimming.”
“She nearly drowned,” Cynthia said. “Didn’t she? Meg nearly drowned.”
“I don’t know how it could have happened,” said the lifeguard. “One moment she was there, and the next she wasn’t.”
What had happened was that Meg had climbed out of the water at the shallow end and run along the edge of the pool toward the deep end. She saw a comb that somebody had dropped lying on the bottom. She crouched down and reached in to pick it up, quite deceived about the depth of the water. She went over the edge and slipped into the pool, making such a light splash that nobody heard — not the lifeguard, who was kissing her boyfriend, or Cynthia, who was watching them. That must have been the moment under the trees when I thought, Where are the children? It must have been the same moment. At that moment, Meg was slipping, surprised, into the treacherously clear blue water.
“It’s okay,” I said to the lifeguard, who was nearly crying. “She can move pretty fast.” (Though that wasn’t what we usually said about Meg at all. We said she thought everything over and took her time.)
“You swam, Meg,” said Cynthia, in a congratulatory way. (She told us about the kissing later.)
“I didn’t know it was deep,” Meg said. “I didn’t drown.”
WE HAD LUNCH at a takeout place, eating hamburgers and fries at a picnic table not far from the highway. In my excitement, I forgot to get Meg a plain hamburger, and had to scrape off the relish and mustard with plastic spoons, then wipe the meat with a paper napkin, before she would eat it. I took advantage of the trash can there to clean out the car. Then we resumed driving east, with the car windows open in front. Cynthia and Meg fell asleep in the back seat.
Andrew and I talked quietly about what had happened. Suppose I hadn’t had the impulse just at that moment to check on the children? Suppose we had gone uptown to get drinks, as we had thought of doing? How had Andrew got over the fence? Did he jump or climb? (He couldn’t remember.) How had he reached Meg so quickly? And think of the lifeguard not watching. And Cynthia, taken up with the kissing. Not seeing anything else. Not seeing Meg drop over the edge.
Disappeared.
But she swam. She held her breath and came up swimming.
What a chain of lucky links.
That was all we spoke about — luck. But I was compelled to picture the opposite. At this moment, we could have been filling out forms. Meg removed from us, Meg’s body being prepared for shipment. To Vancouver — where we had never noticed such a thing as a graveyard — or to Ontario? The scribbled drawings she had made this morning would still be in the back seat of the car. How could this be borne all at once, how did people bear it? The plump, sweet shoulders and hands and feet, the fine brown hair, the rather satisfied, secretive expression — all exactly the same as when she had been alive. The most ordinary tragedy. A child drowned in a swimming pool at noon on a sunny day. Things tidied up quickly. The pool opens as usual at two o’clock. The lifeguard is a bit shaken up and gets the afternoon off. She drives away with her boyfriend in the Roto-Rooter truck. The body sealed away in some kind of shipping coffin. Sedatives, phone calls, arrangements. Such a sudden vacancy, a blind sinking and shifting. Waking up groggy from the pills, thinking for a moment it wasn’t true. Thinking if only we hadn’t stopped, if only we hadn’t taken this route, if only they hadn’t let us use the pool. Probably no one would ever have known about the comb.
There’s something trashy about this kind of imagining, isn’t there? Something shameful. Laying your finger on the wire to get the safe shock, feeling a bit of what it’s like, then pulling back. I believed that Andrew was more scrupulous than I about such things, and that at this moment he was really trying to think about something else.
When I stood apart from my parents at Steve Gauley’s funeral and watched them, and had this new, unpleasant feeling about them, I thought that I was understanding something about them for the first time. It was a deadly serious thing. I was understanding that they were implicated. Their big, stiff, dressed-up bodies did not stand between me and sudden death, or any kind of death. They gave consent. So it seemed. They gave consent to the death of children and to my death not by anything they said or thought but by the very fact that they had made children — they had made me. They had made me, and for that reason my death — however grieved they were, however they carried on — would seem to them anything but impossible or unnatural. This was a fact, and even then I knew they were not to blame.
But I did blame them. I charged them with effrontery, hypocrisy. On Steve Gauley’s behalf, and on behalf of all children, who knew that by rights they should have sprung up free, to live a new, superior kind of life, not to be caught in the snares of vanquished grownups, with their sex and funerals.
Steve Gauley drowned, people said, because he was next thing to an orphan and was let run free. If he had been warned enough and given chores to do and kept in check, he wouldn’t have fallen from an untrustworthy tree branch into a spring pond, a full gravel pit near the river — he wouldn’t have drowned. He was neglected, he was free, so he drowned. And his father took it as an accident, such as might happen to a dog. He didn’t have a good
