it.
“When I stop blowing, pump.”
For several seconds the back of his head hid Stan’s face. I felt the narrow chest rise and fall but there was no elasticity to it, no willful drawing in or pushing out of air. His flesh, too, was dense beneath my palms, as though muscle and tissue had become somehow compacted.
I was moaning. I could hear the sound, but I couldn’t stop it.
“Pump! Pump!”
I hammered down on Stan’s chest.
People in the crowd started to bead together what they had seen into small strings of explanation.
“He was out by himself. I saw him go in-he looked okay.”
“We thought he was playing. We couldn’t tell he was in trouble.”
“Jared saw him go under.”
“Yeah, he was way out, but I knew something was wrong.”
The man kneeling opposite me touched my shoulder and I stopped pumping while he blew another series of breaths into Stan. When I started again he spoke in rapid sentences around his own gasps for air.
“He was under a long time. My kids saw it happen, but I couldn’t find him.”
I knew all of this without being told, of course. Without the blinding caul of my lust, that this would happen was just so fucking obvious. Don’t leave a child alone by water-a primal understanding. I should have been looking after him. I should have been with him. But being with Marla had been more important.
As I massaged Stan’s heart the utter clarity of my guilt, the knowledge that I alone was responsible for the stillness of his body, took from me part of myself, stole away that quality most humans assume to be the bedrock of who they are-the quality of believing oneself to be a good person.
After that day I would never think that about myself again.
When Stan choked and spluttered back to life, when his eyelids fluttered open and he gazed past me into the blue sky, I thought I would faint with relief. As he sucked in great sobbing lungfuls of air I held him close, shouting to the crowd, “He’s alive! He’s alive!” And as they clapped and cheered I promised myself that I had learned my lesson, that I would never again be careless with another human being. I had no idea, in those moments of jubilation, that my lessons were only just starting.
The paramedics arrived while I still had Stan in my arms. They had lumbered their vehicle up Lake Trail in response to a cell phone call from one of the crowd. There were two of them and they pried Stan away from me, strapped him to a backboard, and carried him across the sand to their truck. I trotted beside them, repeating to Stan that he was going to be all right. He’d been looking around him as though enraptured by what he saw. When his eyes came to rest on me, though, he stared blankly for a moment and I felt the tendrils of a new fear tighten around me.
“It’s Johnny. Are you okay, Stan? It’s Johnny.”
He smiled and closed his eyes. “Johnny…”
Then his head lolled sideways and we were climbing into the ambulance.
Before they closed the doors I saw Marla. She must have been following us but I had not noticed her, had not even thought of her. She was standing still, watching me, and as our eyes met we both knew that what we had started in the forest that day was going to stay buried there for a long, long time.
The paramedics took Stan fifty miles to the hospital in Burton on radioed instructions from Oakridge’s own emergency clinic. I remember the time as a strip-lit nightmare of recriminations from my father and my own worry for Stan. My father tried, I think, to keep his anger in check, but there were times when it was just too much for him.
Through the battering storm of doctors and tests and waiting rooms and not knowing, a word began to surface, a wicked piece of flotsam that weighted our lives forever after and tore from me any hope that Stan’s near-drowning might ever become forgivable.
Hypoxia. A brain starved of oxygen longer than three minutes begins to die. Like
A doctor, trying to give us something to hope for, said, “There is no certainty of interpretation in brain trauma. In the way the brain interprets it, I mean.”
He only wanted to help, but it was wasted on us. We could see for ourselves that Stan’s brain had interpreted its trauma pretty fucking severely.
There was a transition phase in the weeks and months that followed. There was rehab and therapy, rapid improvement in motor skills-a sloping graph against the axes of time and damage. After three months Stan had pretty much gotten as good as he was going to get.
The doctors said it could have been much worse. They neglected to mention that it could just as easily have been much better.
Stan was more than functional. He did not come out of it a slavering vegetable, he was not paralyzed down one side or deprived of the use of language. He suffered neither ataxia nor aphasia. But he was changed, there was no doubt about that. Gone was the diamond-bright focus he had directed at the world, gone was the goal- oriented overachiever, gone was the IQ that set him apart. He was Stan number two and he was never going to revert to what he’d been before, never going to heal beyond this particular threshold of resurrection.
And it was all my fault.
Now, twelve years later, standing on that beach again, I felt my guilt no less keenly. I’d left a kid who couldn’t swim alone near water and all the time that had passed since then, all my years of isolation in London, all my blind-eye-turning, had not made the slightest difference to what I thought of myself.
I walked across the sand to the parking lot and got into my pickup. It was not until I had begun the treacherous descent down Lake Trail that I realized Gareth must have known what my reaction to being at the lake again would be.
CHAPTER 4
When I got to the garden center Stan was waiting outside for me. He bounced into the pickup.
“Hey, Johnny, I thought of something today. I thought of an idea to have a business.”
“Lay it on me.”
“A man came in and bought a whole load of indoor plants-weeping figs and dracaenas and yuccas. He wanted them for his office. But he didn’t know how to look after them. He didn’t know anything about plants. And that’s when I got my idea. What about a business that rents out plants to offices and stores and places like that and then goes out and looks after them?”
“That’s a great idea, but people already do that. We used to have it where I worked in England.”
“Yeah, but nobody does it here in Oakridge. I asked Bill.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. And he’d know, he’s like king of this place.”
“Well, keep it in mind, then.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll keep it in mind ’cause, Johnny, I think it’d be good to be a businessman. It’d make me part of everyone again.”
I started the pickup and we headed into town. For a while I was able to stay quiet, but eventually my visit to the lake got the better of me.
“Do you go up to the lake much, Stan?”
“I can’t swim. I like the woods near our place better.”
“Are you scared to go up there?”
“You shouldn’t think about the lake, Johnny.”
“Don’t you?”
