A Gesture Life

15

HOW SHIMMERS the Bedley Run pool in this flood of last August light, the groups of mostly mothers and children on this weekday crowded about the man-made shoreline where it curves in full beam of the sun. The whole town seems to be here. Thomas and I have set up our chairs on the sand down-shore, under the breezy shade of large maples, the part of the beach preferred by older folks and those concerned with overexposure to the rays, or others, like the handful of our town’s black families, who are enjoying their own lively, picnicking circle a few steps from us. Thomas has found them, or they have found him, and he plays with their children with a quiet, unflinching ease, something I have not seen in him until now, overexcitable as he often is. I have already given him the first lessons of flotation and breathing and treading, and as much as he was eager to try out the deeper water (with me at his side), he’s caught up now with his new friends, filling buckets of sand as they build a wall around their talkative mothers. I am happy for him, happy that I can sit close by and hover and let him do his child’s good business. I am pleased enough, too, that Sunny and I have so far remained on decent and civil terms, no matter if they are ones eternally provisional. They shouldn’t be, certainly not if we were real father and daughter, but maybe even those who share blood and love believe only their devotions are unconditional, to be sustained through every crucible.

I’m on the lookout for Renny Banerjee, actually, who called me earlier this morning to chat. He sensed my less-than-ebullient mood, and thus determined to take the afternoon off to visit me. I told him that I would be at the town pool, which he gleefully misread as a romantic meeting (for I had gone there only once, for a town event with Mary Burns), but when I told him I was watching a friend’s boy, he was curiously unprobing, as if he knew the legacies of my complications. But he also mentioned something he was supposed to tell me concerning a woman named Hickey.

“Mrs. Hickey?” I said to Renny, hardly able to speak aloud the words. “Is it that her boy…is it something about him?”

“The boy? Oh, no, Doc. It’s not the boy.”

“Thank goodness. He has a serious heart condition, you know, Renny. He’s in the PICU.”

“I recall that now. No, Doc, it’s about his mother. Apparently she was brought in last night to the emergency room. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. A nurse there told me you sort of knew her, and that I should probably tell you.”

“Yes.”

“She was in a car accident last night driving home from the hospital. I guess the other driver was drunk. She didn’t really have a chance, that’s how fast he was likely going.”

“I don’t understand.”

“She died soon after the paramedics brought her in. I’m awfully sorry, Doc. I don’t really know much more than that. Gee, Doc, was she a good friend?”

“No, not really. She was an associate,” I think I said.

“I’m very sorry.”

“That’s quite all right, Renny.”

“Listen, Doc, I’ll try to see you this afternoon. I have to go now. Will you be okay?”

“I’m fine,” I told him, and after some more chat we agreed to try to meet here at the pool. There was another thing he wanted to mention, but it wasn’t so important and could wait.

But later, as I drove on an errand before going to Sunny’s apartment in Ebbington to pick up Thomas, I began to find the information about Mrs. Hickey so profoundly untenable that for a few minutes I had to park along the side of the road with the engine shut off and the windows rolled up. The cars were steadily whizzing by me on the narrow two-way of Route 9, the muffled slingshot of their passing buffeted by the safety glass. I wondered which tight suburban road it was, if not this very one, that Anne Hickey should not have driven on late at night when everyone knows the saloon revelers would be speeding to the next place. I wondered why she hadn’t known to stay at home with her husband or in the intensive-care ward with her son, that good people like her should take the most extreme caution with themselves and practice wariness and avoidance for the sake of their beloved, and then, too, for the rest of us. And sitting at the wheel I became angry all at once, angry at her lack of care and circumspection, and if she had been in the passenger seat looking at me with her comely palish-pink face and sea-blue eyes, I would have scolded her as hotly as I wished to scold Sunny when she was a teen. But I found myself instead struggling for breath, the simple draw of it, my still weakened lungs smarting with each gasp, and whatever life-spirit I possessed at that moment I felt desperate to abdicate, if but for empathy and the wish for a penance that would likely never come.

There was still some time before I had to get to Sunny’s, and so I made a U-turn in the road and drove to Bedley Run, through town and then up the road past my house, and I kept going up the hill until the very end of the street, where there is a small Catholic cemetery, the pedestrian entrance to which is bowered by a delicate wrought-iron arch. It is pretty, and modest, like the well-tended plots inside the grounds. The elevation is high enough that from most every spot — at least on a clear day — you can almost make out the city skyline to the south, the high spires looming like the far parapets of a strange, empyreal country. And then, in the middle distance, when you view the dense overlay of towns and villages laid out in contiguous patches, the multiple strands of the interstates and the parkways running straight through the heart of some and bending deferentially around others, bounded and marked by the shimmering waterways and reservoirs and the gently sloped hills, you feel as though this place in which you stand is a most decent and comely kingdom, even as it is a solemn province of the dead.

The monuments are mostly severe and plain, and even the few miniature mausoleums are unadorned, dignified structures, squarish blocks of polished black granite fitted with engine-turned doors of patinated brass. As I gloomily thought of Anne Hickey and her unsettling, instantaneous end, I remembered, too, with a start, that it was in one of these tombs that the Dr. Bradley Burnses resided.

Mary Burns didn’t altogether favor the tomb her husband had pre-built for them. She would have preferred a simple set of headstones over any free-standing structure, but of course she was always typically dutiful and made sure to keep up its appearance. One spring day I accompanied her to help her plant several evergreen shrubs on either side of the tomb’s door. I called the owner of the local nursery to deliver the plants to the cemetery entrance, and Mary Burns and I each rolled a wheelbarrow up Mountview Street to pick them up. We must have appeared quite a pair, dressed in our heavy canvas gardening trousers and work shirts beneath our wide-brimmed sun hats, clodding along in black rubber boots like an odd pair of itinerant landscapers. Though part of me was distracted by the idea that our neighbors might be peering out their windows at us, wondering what the exact nature of our relationship was, I was also, to be honest, almost discomfitingly flushed with a sensation I had not believed I would ever experience again. For even as we set about the work of sprucing up her late husband’s gravesite, with all the typically complicated specters and notions attending such a task, I was in fact nearly giddy, and I believe she was as well. We were happily basking, as one might say, in the warm glow of our passion, our union still in the early, intimate weeks when there is not yet talk of past or future days but only the too-swift dwindle of the hours.

That day we walked up to the cemetery we didn’t go directly in, as the nursery truck hadn’t yet arrived with the delivery of shrubs. I sat on a bench to wait, but Mary Burns suggested we leave the wheelbarrows inside the wrought-iron gates of the entrance and take a brief hike on an old bridle path, whose almost completely hidden trailhead was a block or so back down the hill. I thought we should wait for the delivery, in case the driver was unsure of what to do, but she tugged at my hand and cajoled and even pecked me on the cheek, and soon enough I agreed.

It was clear that the trail was hardly used anymore, if at all. Mary Burns said that many years ago there were a number of people in the neighborhood who kept horses, and that you could see them on the weekends strutting up Mountview, fathers and daughters in rustic dress setting out for a day-long ride. Over time the riders had fashioned a clear path, which went up over Bedley Hill and down the far side, where it meandered through several square miles of undeveloped county land. I was surprised to learn that Mary Burns often took solitary walks here for hours at a time, and that she hadn’t until now invited me along. I was also a bit concerned for her as it grew quite isolated the farther we went, the path narrowing steadily until it was no wider than a deer trail, with the ever-thickening underbrush tugging at our trouser cuffs. For even here in Bedley Run, something terrible could occur, in a place like this all cloistered and shady. A certain kind of man could happen upon her in her light cotton sweater and willowy walking shorts and think he was exempt from the prevailing laws, that everything in the domain was his to master.

After we’d hiked a quarter mile or so, I said, “You don’t find it a little dark back here?”

“Are you trying to scare me, Franklin?” she said lightly, her eyes archly narrowed. “Because you should know I don’t frighten easily.”

“I’m not trying anything of the kind,” I answered. “It just is very much removed here. Our street seems already to be miles away. There aren’t any sounds but ours.”

“That’s why I like it.”

“How far do you usually go?”

“I don’t know,” she said, continuing to lead us. I was following closely behind her, the faint scent of perfume trailing her in the damp, spring air. “I don’t keep track, I guess. But don’t worry, I know where we’re headed to.”

“I don’t mind, Mary. Wherever you take us…”

“I’m glad,” she said, suddenly turning about. She put her hands up to brace herself but I ran straight into her. She went down with a crash, instinctively grabbing a branch of a sapling that snapped and tore along the trunk as she fell. I felt awful, even as she was fitfully laughing, and I knelt to examine her. She had a trickling nosebleed, and her eyes were teary, and I had her lean against my shoulder, her head tipped back.

“My goodness, that was a surprise.”

“I’m so sorry, Mary. It’s my fault.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said, her hand around my knee. I could feel her letting all of her weight ease back into my chest. “Brainy me did the about-face. Will I be getting two black eyes now?”

“I’m sure you won’t. Does this hurt?” I gently pressed my fingers against the bridge of her nose. She didn’t flinch. The blood was still coming, though in tiny rivulets, and as I had nothing to stanch it with I unbuttoned the cuff of my work shirt and she nodded that I go ahead. We stayed a minute or so that way, her face nestled into my forearm, and had someone come upon us in the narrow path, with the bright blood soaked into my sleeve, they might have thought I was attempting to snuff the life out of her. And the strange thing is that I kept having the thought that I was, or at least imagining the horror of it, for even as every cell of me was reaching toward her with utter tenderness and warmth and the drug of an amorous bloom, it seemed I could just as easily summon the harshest want in my hands, the tightness and pressure that might have no bound. And if some keenly sick man could have committed the act in a flash, for reason of mere possibility or nihilistic whim or curiosity, a man like me would have done so for the avoidance of a future day, whose complications — whether happy or not — might simply overwhelm.

But she tightly embraced me then, turning her face into my neck. She cupped my cheek and she kissed me, deeply, with an instant fervor. Her fingers ran through my hair, along the back of my head. Before this we had held hands and hugged each other after a dinner out or a movie at the village theater, and I’d only politely kissed her good night, despite her clear willingness to linger in the car or before her front door. She would invite me in but I always made the excuse of having to go home to Sunny, which was true enough, though not because I was needed there. In those first weeks with Mary Burns I was still hoping to provide my daughter with a complete family life, and while it was obvious how nearly perfect Mary would be as a mother, how well she could run a house (even mine), I began to wonder if I were up to the tasks of being a worthy partner and husband. I worried whether I knew what to do, like any pubescent boy might be concerned, for honestly it had been quite a long time, long enough that I was as fearful as I was anxious and expectant. But that afternoon, on the impromptu hike, she held me tight and wouldn’t let me go and at some point I began not just to relent but to kiss her back, and with a sudden, spurring ebullience that caught us both off guard.

“You’re such a surprise,” she said, when we finally ceased for a moment. “Come with me.”

She got up and started walking the path again, in the direction we had been hiking.

“Where are you going?”

“Where we were headed.”

“But what’s there?”

“You’ll see. Just come on.”

She was going more quickly than before, almost running, and soon enough we found ourselves in a silly bit of a chase, her slowing down until I could reach and touch her and then rushing forward again, the two of us acting a third or perhaps a tenth of our years. She disappeared around a turn and when I reached the spot, she was no longer ahead of me. I called out and she answered, and when I looked down I saw a small opening within a thicket.

“Come inside,” she said.

“Shouldn’t we go back? The nursery man must be there by now.”

“Please, Franklin. Don’t be a spoilsport.”

I got on my hands and knees and crawled in. It was a small place, open to the sky, a lair that must have been used by deer. Mary Burns sat on the tall, matted grass.

“I think high-school kids sometimes come here at night,” she said. “But don’t worry. I sit here all the time, and no one has ever come by during the afternoon. Today’s a school day, you know.”

Of course I did know. I’d decided, for the first time ever, to close the shop after a half day in order to be with her.

I said, “I’m not worried at all, Mary.”

“Then let’s sit next to each other again, just like before.”

And so we did. And we began to kiss, and eventually our hands were purposefully exploring each other, lingering and caressing and soon enough undoing buttons, clasps. It would have been scandalous in town had someone caught us. But it didn’t seem that we cared. We were only half-clothed in the open-air cloister, and if it hadn’t been so patently unshaded and bright we might have done something right there and then that was quite extreme, and perhaps even wonderful. For I am almost sure she wanted me to make love to her, this by the open, willing character of her body, and then by the strength of her limbs, the way she so tightly wound my legs with hers. It was as if a vast store of energy had been held inside her, bounding about in a terribly long, great waiting, such an abeyance really being the most lovely thing to me, and harrowing as well. For I did desperately want to make love to her; she was so wonderfully pretty lying there beneath me looking up, her silvery-streaked flaxen hair loosened from the headband and splayed against the grass like a fan of shimmering, threaded light. Beautiful, too, I thought, were the many fine creases and lines in her rosy face, the supreme paleness of her lips, and then the fresh smell of her, faintly sour-sweet like unripe plums. I felt awfully young, touching her, and the wanting I had wished never again to know was rushing back to me, a disturbing shiver in my fingers and in my mouth and in my eyes.

I stopped everything then, perhaps too abruptly, for Mary Burns had the impression that she had done something terribly offending or wrong, and I knew I could not convince her otherwise, at least for the moment. We quickly dressed and without speaking hiked back to the cemetery entrance, where the delivery man was waiting with two pairs of evergreen shrubs. He insisted on helping us wheelbarrow them inside, and doing some digging as well, and I was glad that he was there, and even Mary Burns seemed relieved. In fact we never spoke again of what had happened. And though in near time we did sleep together (with a genuinely pleasing, if sober, conviviality), I came to think of that first interlude with a somewhat sorrowful fondness, for I saw that our days together were perhaps sullied from the very beginning and all the way through, right up to the last.

* * *

NOW, MY GRANDSON THOMAS, overfilled with energy and pluck, runs up the short beach holding out his inflatable water wings and dumps them in my lap. He doesn’t need them anymore, he insists, this after a mere week of pool-going. Soon enough he’s practically performing for his newfound friends, as he holds high aloft a bucket of sand and with some ceremony dumps it on his face and neck and chest. I’m a bit alarmed, but the other children laugh at this, and Thomas repeats the action and I realize I’ve seen this from him before, how he often makes a buffoon of himself for others. At the roller rink last week, he spilled wickedly several times, falling flush on his back as he tried to whip around a group of children his age, each wipeout a bit more thunderous than the one before. They snickered, but then seemed more frightened by him than amused; soon after they were ushered off by their mothers. As I was watching from the stands I could only shout my warnings to him, but once they were gone he was perfectly fine as he skated, whipping past my spot with aplomb and cool abandon, his stout little figure apparently unaching, unhurt. Another time, in the toy store, a floor display of boxed firetrucks fell over on him, though I suspected at the time that he had meant to cause it, if not expected them to fall directly on him.

But now I’m deeply worried, having sensed the strangeness in the pattern, his obsessive, self-taunting behavior, and I get up from my folding chair and go over and hold him as I brush the sand from his hair, his thick eyebrows and lashes. He pulls hard away from me.

“What are you doing?” he says, jerking his arm away from me. There’s a flash in his eyes that perhaps only I as his mother’s father can recognize, a cold light of refusal.

“That’s not good for you,” I say, lamely. “The sand will get in your eyes. It could injure them.”

“I’m having fun,” he answers resolutely, filling up another bucket. For the first time in our two weeks of knowing each other I am not having so much fun, though still a great part of me wishes him to go on, to do whatever he wants no matter what I might say.

“Perhaps we should get back to the water. Why don’t we all go in? You and your friends can have a splashing contest.”

“Hey! We don’t just splash, mister, we swim just fine!” one of them shouts, a girl with hundreds of white plastic beads woven into her hair.

“That’s right, mister,” Thomas pipes in, though now sweetly again. “We’re all going in the water, aren’t we? We’re going to have a swimming contest.”

“You got that right!” the girl replies.

I begin to peel off my shirt but the girl in braids shoots me a stare and Thomas immediately cues on this, holding up his solid little hand. “Sorry, Franklin, but it’s just kids only.”

“Yes, Thomas, I understand. But I promise I will remain off to the side. Or I’ll swim in the deeper water, if you don’t mind, and watch from there.”

“Adults have to stay on the beach, Franklin,” he tells me, as though it’s out of his hands. And he points to my folding chair with a silencing finger and an almost wry smile, and it’s all I can do but sit down again as they stomp and leap their way into the water.

One of the mothers declares to me, “You don’t have to worry, Gramps, they’re all like little seals,” though this only serves to alarm me more, as I know exactly what Thomas can and cannot do. I tell him to go no farther out, and he nods. But he’s already chest deep, and one of the boys is behind him, pushing down on his shoulders in order to dunk him. I call out for them to stop, but against the din of play and constant reverberation along the shore my weak voice thins, and I lose sight of who’s who among this brace of kids roughhousing in the water.

“Hey, there!” I hear, and I turn to see Liv Crawford, wearing oversized cat-eye sunglasses, stunningly trim in a cream-white one-piece, a batik wrap smartly knotted about her waist. “You look really good, Doc. This convalescence is doing the job.” She quickly scans about. “Are we really sitting here?”

Renny comes up, carrying chairs and towels, and says, “Yes, darling, we are.”

“I prefer the sun,” she answers, casually looking over at the mothers of Thomas’s friends, who are passing around a plastic container of BLT sandwiches. “But if you two insist.”

“We do,” Renny says brightly, unfolding a chair on either side of me. He doesn’t wear a hat or sunglasses. He flicks at one of the seats with the towel and then spreads it out for her, holding her hand as she sits.

“So who is this young person you’re looking after today?” Liv asks me, taking my hand, too. “Renny wouldn’t say anything more.”

“He’s in the water,” I say, pointing to the group of them some fifteen yards from shore. Having already tested it, I know the water deepens very gradually, though past the line of buoys it drops off quickly, as if off a shelf. “Perhaps you can tell which one he is.”

“I’m not sure how.”

“Isn’t he your daughter’s son,” Renny says, “the one right there?”

“What? Where?” Liv says with a sort of pleased alarm, craning forward, her hand over her eyes. “Your daughter is back in town, Doc? You didn’t mention it to me. She must be staying with you at the house.”

“She lives over in Ebbington.”

“Ebbington? Oh goodness, but why?”

“She’s probably making a living and supporting herself, that’s why,” Renny scolds her. “Not everybody in the world, Liv, has to live in this over-blessed, over-prosperous duchy of a town.”

“I one hundred percent agree with you, dear, but for Doc Hata’s girl, who I must say I didn’t even know existed until last week? I won’t say for her to go live in your house because it’s against all my interests, but really, Doc, you ought to set her up in an apartment in the village. My office holds the few good listings, you know. Especially if she has a boy who goes to school. There’s nothing much going on in the Ebbington school system except gym and metal shop and prenatal classes.”

Renny groans and says, “You can be the most terrible snob.”

“I’m thinking of the welfare of the boy, Renny. Anyway, you’re the one insisting on my marrying you.”

I turn to Renny and he nods, half-grinning, half-grimacing, a difficult state of being which I know more and more finds its own measure of dignity, and joy. “I wanted to mention it on the phone, but then Liv wanted to see you in person to tell you, and I guess so did I.”

Liv says, “Renny and I realized that you were really the only person in town, Doc, who could extend his mature and wise blessing over us. You’re our private elder, you know, neither of us having parents still alive. Really, that’s only if you think it’s a good idea, for us two to get married.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” I say, dumb and glad that I am affirming both notions of Liv’s, especially because they immediately occur to me as somehow off, not at all wrong or terrible but perhaps improbable; and I feel, too, suddenly overwhelmed with the wide flows of information that have come to me today, the flash flood after the rains, and perhaps naturally I imagine good Anne Hickey again, though more clearly now, in her white turtleneck and leaf-colored sweater, greeting me on a wondrous autumn afternoon in front of the beveled glass door of my shop, her hair and eyes aglow in the lovely, burnishing light. The sight isn’t so romantic or sentimental, it’s merely a picture, caught in my memory, the nearest thing I have to something remotely real.

“You don’t seem convinced, my friend,” Renny murmurs sheepishly to me, his fingers raking the soft sand.

“No, Renny, I’m very happy for you both. I’m very happy and I think you ought to get married as soon as possible.”

“I’m not pregnant, Doc,” Liv croons.

“I know that but I would hope you two don’t let pass any more time. Why I should be the one to heed I don’t know. But it seems you two have a special love for each other, and despite some of your difficulties in the past and whatever ones that may arise again, I believe you ought to use this time for best advantage.”

“Who knew you were such a carpe diem sort of guy, Doc?” Liv asks.

“But I am not,” I tell her, practically arguing with her. “I am not at all. I’m simply excited for you both.” And though the implication is that I am the sort who is always careful and preparing, I think that’s not right, either; in fact I feel I have not really been living anywhere or anytime, not for the future and not in the past and not at all of-the-moment, but rather in the lonely dream of an oblivion, the nothing-of-nothing drift from one pulse beat to the next, which is really the most bloodless marking-out, automatic and involuntary.

Renny says, “I suppose Liv and I are relenting, which I hope is as good a reason as any.”

“It is, Renny, it perfectly is,” I listen to myself say. “Please understand me. There are those who would gladly give up all they have gained in the world to have relented just once when it mattered.”

He gazes at me curiously, and though he hasn’t a clue what I’m talking about (nor, in truth, do I, at least in a pointed way), he knows enough of me to note the brief fervor in my voice, and this quiets him for a moment. Liv is stretching out her long, thin legs and rubbing lotion on them from the ankles up, and if she doesn’t seem to be listening there’s no mistake she hasn’t missed a word. But she’s atypically reserving comment as well, and I think I must be sounding something unusual indeed, to quell Ms. Crawford and Mr. Banerjee, affable gabbers both. I want to engage them further, I want to tell them the first thing that comes to mind, whatever history of my days, when a commotion erupts next to us.

“Tess!” one of the mothers cries sharply. “Where’s your little brother? Where is he!”

“I don’t know! I’ve been looking for him….”

“What do you mean! I asked you to stick by him every second! I told you to keep a hold on him.”

“I know! I know!”

Her mother frantically scans the water but the kids are splashing wildly, so much so that it’s impossible to tell who or how many there are. Then she see a lone yellow float that attaches to the arms.

“Bobby! Oh my God, Bobby!”

Renny immediately leaps up from his beach chair and goes to the woman, asking what has happened, and then he runs into the water, his knees high and dragging, shouting out the boy’s name. The woman starts yelling for the lifeguards, most of whom are stationed where the people are crowded in the sun. The playing in front of us has stopped for the moment, the kids frozen as though there were something lethal in the water. I see right away that Thomas is nowhere apparent, being neither among the group of them nor farther out near the buoys nor anywhere along the shore. I check again and again. Renny is searching in the water, ducking his head under and then coming up. I take off my hat, my sandals, my eyes offering only slow-motion vision, and I take the deepest breath I can and dive in among the bodies standing about.

The water is clear and silent and surprisingly refreshing. I see the green-tinted legs and feet and resting hands up at the surface, the child limbs rooted on the bottom like an otherworldly forest. I go past them and deeper and I’m terrified of what I might see, a limp figure floating in the mid-level, the mouth agape, eyes unfixed and cold. But my chest is burning and though I want to stay under I have to rise. And it’s now that confusion and unrest ripple over the water. Young lifeguards are swarming about, and I cry to them that there’s another child in trouble — another who is mine — and they order me to go ashore and leave the water clear. But who can? The mother and her friends are knee-deep in the water, Renny is somewhere I can’t see, and even Liv has waded in to her waist, her silken wrap ruined, her hands waving spastically in a way that frightens me; I think I have never seen her like this, anything but perfectly poised and comported. And I hear what must be Renny, the tenor bell of his voice, letting out a small cry of pain. I’m the closest to him, and I watch as he begins to slip beneath the surface, where the water is not even over his head: He is having, I murmur to myself, a heart attack. But at the same time the lifeguards are diving and rising near the line of buoys, searching for Thomas and the other boy, not aware of Renny’s distress. I can’t tell if he sees me. He’s grimacing, and his hand comes up weakly as if to say, I’m here, I’m here.

Everything is happening instantly and simultaneously; his hand seems to be a sign not only from Renny but Thomas, too, and the long knives of panic pierce my chest and belly. I want to have faith in the lifeguards but they’re so young, and not turning back to check Renny, I swim as fast as I can out to the line of red-and-white floats. It’s deep out here and I realize that this is where Thomas would be, this is where he would put himself, and when I dive I am absolutely sure I’ll see him. And I do: a stocky little figure, crouched as if sitting, his shape hardly discernible. I kick and swoop under him and then lift us upward. When we surface, two lifeguards take him and swim him quickly to shore. I let them because I think I wish to have faith, because there is really nothing but that for someone like me, and because of Renny, because I can’t stand yet another abandonment in my life, even if it’s for a brief moment.

Just as I reach him, Renny’s mouth dips beneath the water. I brace him and he coughs weakly. His rich brown skin is muddy, grayish about the neck and face and hands; his breathing is labored. His eyes are glassy. On the beach Liv is bleating something in a tiny voice, shuffling back in half-steps. It is in fact a natural reaction, one of the many that people can have. Against my back I can almost feel the thrum of Renny’s heart racing, then arresting, then racing again. I shout ahead to an onlooker to call for an ambulance. Some steps away the lifeguards are working on Thomas, and I hear his gasp and hack and he instinctively sits up and looks about. I nod, and he begins to cry. The presumed missing boy is walking up the shoreline with a hot dog in his hand; he’s not been in the water for some time. But Renny spasms then, as if he’s hugged me, a broad, low electric shudder, and somehow I carry his big frame right up onto the shore.

“Oh my God, he’s dying,” Liv says, collapsing to her knees. “He’s dying.”

I do not answer, not from fear that she is right but that I am so certain she is wrong, for there will be no dying for him today, I think, I cannot allow it — in the way a doctor, perhaps once or twice in his career, might not simply abide — and if I have to reach inside his chest I shall, reach inside and roughly clasp his heart and will it back alive.