“I pulled Caleb behind me,” she said. “I told him to stay away from you. I said men like that are trouble. I said it loud enough for you to hear.”
I hadn’t heard it. Or if I had, I’d heard it so many times in forty-some years of riding that it just ran off me like rain.
“Ma’am,” I said, “you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. Don’t spend a second of your life worrying on it.”
She shook her head. “Four hours later, you jumped in a lake for us.”
“Well,” I said, “you were in it.”
That got a little laugh out of her, the wet broken kind, and Caleb laughed too, without really knowing why. Then the ambulance came over the hill with its lights going, and everything turned into noise and hands and questions.
They took Margaret and both kids to the hospital in Bolivar. A deputy took our names. A paramedic took one look at my knee and told me I was going too, whether I liked it or not.
I didn’t like it. I went anyway.
So I was sitting in a hallway with an ice pack on my leg around eight o’clock that night, still in damp jeans, when a young woman came running around the corner with her husband right behind her. She still had her wedding clothes on. Her mascara was all the way down her face.
She stopped when she saw me, because Caleb had already told her what I looked like.
She didn’t say a word. She just walked over and put her arms around my neck and held on. She shook so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
Her husband stood behind her with his hand over his mouth. Then he reached out and shook my hand, and he didn’t let go of it for a long time either.
“The doctor said another minute,” the young woman said into my shoulder. “One more minute and Lily wouldn’t…”
“Thank Dutch,” I said. “He’s the one who brought her back. He’s down in the cafeteria trying to get somebody to make him a real cup of coffee.”
She did thank Dutch. She found every one of us that night. Tank, who’d cracked a rib going under. Rooster, who’d lost his wallet and his phone in the lake. Shorty, who never did get his flannel back and never asked for it. She hugged every one of them like they were family.
Lily stayed two nights for observation. The doctors said she was going to be fine. No lasting damage. She was pulling the monitor wires off her toes by the second morning.
Caleb asked to see me before I left the hospital.
His mother brought him down to the room where they had me. He walked in still wearing Shorty’s leather vest. The nurses had tried to take it, and he’d raised such a fuss they let him keep it on over his hospital gown.
He climbed up on the edge of my bed and looked at me real serious, the way little kids do when they’ve been chewing on a question all day.
“Did your brother get out of the pond?” he asked.
His mother started to shush him. I put my hand up.
“No, son,” I told him. “He didn’t. His name was Danny. He was four.”
Caleb thought about that for a long time.
“That’s why you learned to swim.”
“That’s why.”
“So you could get the next kid out.”
I hadn’t ever thought about it that way. Not once, in fifty-five years. I’d always thought of learning to swim as a punishment. Something I did because I’d failed. Every lap I swam in that cold YMCA pool when I was ten years old, I was swimming away from that pond.
But this little boy, with his wet hair sticking up and a dead man’s skull patch on his back, had just told me something different.
I’d been swimming toward this.
“Yeah, buddy,” I said, and my voice didn’t work right. “I guess I was.”
That was in October of last year.
In December, a Christmas card came to the address Margaret had gotten from the deputy. Inside was a picture of Lily, chubby and pink-cheeked, in a little Santa hat. And folded up behind it was a drawing in crayon.
Five motorcycles in a row, and five men with big beards, and a blue lake. And under the dock, a tiny stick figure with a big smile, holding onto a bigger one.
Across the top, in six-year-old letters, it said: THE BEST SWIMMER YOUR EVER GONNA MEET.
There was a note from Margaret too. It was short. She wrote that she’d told the story to her church group and her bridge club and anybody else who’d sit still long enough. She wrote that she’d been wrong about a lot of things in her life, but she’d never been as wrong as she was at that gas station in Hermitage.
And at the bottom, she wrote, I’d be honored if you’d let us buy you boys coffee next time you’re through.
We took her up on it in June. Met them at the same gas station. Margaret brought both kids and a box of homemade cinnamon rolls, and she stood out in that parking lot hugging five greasy old bikers while people pumping gas stared like they’d seen a dog walking on its hind legs.
Caleb’s seven now. He’s taking swimming lessons. His mother tells me he’s the fastest in his class.
I’ve got that crayon drawing tacked up on the wall of my garage, right next to the only picture I have of my brother Danny. He’s sitting on our daddy’s tractor in that one, grinning with no front teeth.
Some nights I still see that stroller wheel when I close my eyes. Spinning slow above the brown water, like somebody had just let go.
But I don’t see the pond anymore.
For fifty-five years, every time I looked at the water, I saw the kid I couldn’t reach.
Now I see the one I did.
