Even before the station wagon comes to a stop, I can hear the party in full swing. The jubilant screams of my classmates, the slap of wet feet against concrete, the rattle of the diving board and triumphant splash of cannonballs. The Wheelers’ driveway abuts their pool enclosure, the near side of which extends from the corner of the house in a chain-link fence and gate combo. The far sides are whitewashed wood slats. Through the chain-links I can see further evidence of the fun that, for as long as I linger in the car, I am missing.
Droplets of chlorinated water dance like jewels in the sunlight. They arc and descend in glistening parabolas that plunge back, seamless, into the pool or spatter on the concrete, patterning its bone-white canvas with short-lived grayscale Jackson Pollocks. Fading wet patches mark the passage of my peers’ stampeding feet around the perimeter of the pool. The water, alive with the kicks and strokes of a dozen splashing children, laps against and overlaps its earthen container. The pool liner is the color of lapis lazuli, a term I will not learn until I am well out of college.
Only the car door and that chain-link fence separate me from the most glorious afternoon of the summer: the season’s inaugural pool party. I wriggle in my seat, but mom isn’t ready to let me off the leash yet. Distractedly, she checks off her list. “Towel? Earplugs? Change of clothes? Sunscreen? Good. If you plan to be in the pool all afternoon, make sure you reapply every couple hours. It’s a scorcher today. Whenever you hear Ms. Arnette tell Tommy to put more on, you do too.”
“I will, mom.”
“Okay, hon. Remember, Tommy’s invited you to stay after the party while I drive your dad across the bridge.”
Of course I remember. It’s the cherry on top of the sundae. I’m so excited about the day ahead that for a moment the reason for their trip across the bridge slips my mind. Instead, I check for sprinkles. “Can I sleep over?”
“Maybe, baby. We’ll play it by ear, depending how daddy’s doctor’s appointment goes. If we’re in and out like last time, I’ll pick you up around seven-thirty. But in case this is the one and you do wind up sleeping over, I packed your toothbrush and toothpaste. Don’t worry about your sleeping bag—Miss Arnette has extras.”
The reminder that plans hinge on dad’s medical procedure puts a damper on things, but not enough to eclipse my excitement. The siren song of the pool party is too great. “Okay, mom. Can I go?”
“Hold on a sec. Isn’t there anything you want me to tell your father for you?”
“Like what?” My eyebrows stitch together in concern. “I’m going to see him tomorrow, right?”
“Of course, hon. But I’m sure he’ll miss you while we’re at the hospital, and I’m sure he’d like to know you’re thinking about him too.”
“Okay. Tell him I love him, and I’ll see him soon. Can I go now?”
Mom doesn’t say anything for a moment. She looks tired and distant. “Sure, hon. Just give me a kiss before you run off.” In answer to the face I make she says, “One! For me.”
I give her a peck on the cheek through the driver’s side window and make a break for freedom. Just then, the party’s hostess emerges from the gate next to the driveway.
“Hi, Miss Arnette!” I shout as I barrel past her.
“Hi, Pete,” says Ms. Arnette. “There’s juice-boxes and snacks on the picnic table, and Mister Doug’s going to fire up the grill in a couple hours, so I hope you brought your appetite. And slow down! The pool will still be there when you get there.”
I downshift out of respect for the lady of the house. Still, I’m going for a kinetic entrance, so I can only comply so far.
Behind me I hear Ms. Arnette say, “Hey Susanne, how are you holding up?”
Mom’s reply is lost amid my friends’ whoops and cheers as I burst through the gate. I toss my stuff onto a deck chair and make a beeline for the deep end. Mounting the diving board, I am inspired to debut a new move, one I workshopped in the car on the way here. An ode to the Star Wars prequels, which I consider the highest form of art. I pantomime a series of vicious lightsaber slashes and pirouette off the end of the springboard. For added flair I let my body go limp in the hangtime, as if I’ve been run through like Qui-Gon Jinn. My inert form hits the water with a satisfying smack. The splashdown is tremendous, and the move goes over swimmingly with my friends. What can I say? I know my audience.
When I surface, I see Ms. Arnette slip back inside the pool enclosure and latch the gate behind her. In the backdrop of the splashes and shouts, pulverized oyster shells grind and crunch as mom’s station wagon pulls out of the driveway.
The next few hours are glorious. We swim until we get thirsty, then wet our whistles with sugary juice-boxes shaped like barrels. We play sharks-and-minnows, Marco Polo, chicken-fight, keep-away with the pool torpedo. I playact a dozen heroic deaths from the diving board, each more dramatic than the last. Sunscreen is applied illiberally and irregularly.
When our energy ebbs and our skin reddens, Mr. Doug fires up the grill. Now the scents of charcoal and barbecue mingle with the chemical tangs of sunscreen and chlorinated water. Mr. Doug asks for orders, and hands shoot up for hamburgers, hotdogs, both. While they cook, the boys compete to see who can do the longest handstand in the shallow end. For a consolation prize, the losers are first to hear that the burgers and franks are done. They stampede from the pool while Tommy and I still have our heads underwater.
We towel off and plant our sodden butts on the picnic table to eat. The food is cooked to perfection, the hamburgers with grill marks and the hotdogs with blistered casing and just the right amount of char. I slather mine in mustard and relish, load my plate with sides, and dig in. We gorge on the tastes of summer. Watermelon and sweetcorn. Macaroni salad, potato salad, those delicious misnomers. Even pretzel salad, that delectable descendant of ambrosia. For dessert, ice cream sandwiches.
As the afternoon stretches on, the partygoers dwindle, carted off sunbaked and exhausted by their parents. The girls first, who by this point in the day have segregated themselves, their games and counsel their own. They leave as they arrived, by carpool. Then the boys, in rough order of their parents’ loquaciousness and punctuality.
I feel special, knowing that I get to stay after the others have gone. And I feel a pang in my chest for my parents, far away across the bridge and likely even now speaking to a faceless doctor with clammy hands and a droning voice who with cold and alien intelligence will decide my father’s fate, and whether to save him and send him home to me or stamp an expiration date on him and let nature run its course. My fear is amorphous, naïve; it has barbed tentacles that ensnare my mind, bring tears to my stinging eyes. To dispel it I give a war cry, make a run for the pool, and hurl myself from the diving board again. And again.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
Tommy’s big brother David gets home a little after the last of the other guests leave. A friend drops him off in a car that chugs like a diesel locomotive and leaves behind a lingering odor of gasoline. This is exciting for me. I don’t have an older brother, so sometimes I have to borrow Tommy’s. Once, back in kindergarten, I asked dad why I don’t have a big brother. He giggled like he does when he takes his special medicine and said, “Maybe someday, kiddo.”
So, I take it where I can get it: in small snatches from my best friends’ siblings.
I give Dave about ten minutes to settle in before I go pester him in his room. I’m no barbarian, but the issue I’ve got to ask him about can’t wait. His bedroom door is cracked, inviting the intrusion. When I push it open, he looks up from perusing a magazine with mild annoyance and zero surprise.
“Can you help me beat Zelda, Dave? I’m stuck on this one level.”
Dave rolls his eyes and sets his magazine down on the bedside table. “The one with the lava? The same one I told you how to beat last time?”
I nod vigorously.
“Did you bring your Gameboy? Give it here and I’ll do it for you.”
I shake my head.
This earns another eyeroll. “Then how the heck am I supposed to help you beat it?”
“Can’t you tell me what to do?”
“What, like step-by-step? That’s what I did last time! You’ll never remember.”
“Please? I could write it down.”
Dave chews on his cheek like he’s weighing whether he can fit this request into his busy schedule—or cares to. In the hallway Ms. Arnette, who happens to be hovering outside her eldest son’s room at that moment, clears her throat.
“Ah, alright,” says Dave, not without regret. “Go grab me a sheet of paper and a pen.”
I hop away and then again when Dave waves me off while he jots down the instructions himself. “It’ll be easier that way. Now go play with Tommy until I’m done. And both of you, stay out of my room for the rest of the night!”
Pooped after a long day of swimming and socializing, Tommy and I can only summon the energy to fire up the GameCube and veg out. We play the official Lord of the Rings: Return of the King game for the next couple of hours in a well-earned fugue state brought on by chlorine and sun exposure. It is a welcome lull. Before I even think to notice, seven-thirty comes and goes. There is no sign of mom’s station wagon in the Wheelers’ driveway. No call either.
“Looks like you’re sleeping over,” says Tommy when his dad’s cuckoo clock chimes eight. He grins.
I grin back, but it doesn’t pass my lips. I try not to think about what this change of plans portends for dad’s trip to the special doctor across the bridge. I try not to imagine the hospital, with its sterile halls and white lights and machines that beep and whir and thud, its bedridden patients who wheeze and cough and moan. I try not to envision my father among them, hooked up to a tangle of tubes a person could easily get lost in, like the labyrinth of indistinguishable halls in that funhouse hospital where you could wander and wander, lost, until they send a nurse to look for you and find you sitting on the floor next to the snack machine, sobbing. That’s why I don’t go to dad’s doctor appointments anymore.
I tell myself this is just another sleepover, something I’d look forward to any other day. And I have been looking forward to it all day, until now.
I try not to think about it while I brush my teeth. Tommy’s mom buys him mint toothpaste, which I prefer to the bubblegum-y high-fluoride kind mom gets me. I’ve taken to using mom and dad’s mint paste at home, too, but for reasons I can’t explain I haven’t told mom to stop buying me the kids’ kind. Like it might hurt her feelings if I relinquished too many symbols of childhood too quickly.
We unroll our sleeping bags in the basement and sprawl out on them, but it’s a long time before we conk out. We talk at length about our schoolmates and Star Wars and whether Courtney Fischer like-likes me. As usual, I’m way more invested in the latter topic than Tommy, but tonight he’s a good sport about it. The conversation bestirs a second breeze. Since neither of us feel tired enough to fall asleep yet, we put on a movie to end the night. Options are limited to the VHS tapes on the TV stand; we pick Independence Day and feed it to the VCR.
When I finally fall asleep, I have a nightmare in which an extraterrestrial race of sentient cephalopods paralyze and vivisect me. There is no pain, but I watch as they remove my entrails and pass them around, taking careful notes in their alien tongue. At one point one of the aliens notices I’m conscious and says in English, Don’t worry. We always put things back the way we find them. After a while, true to their word, they reassemble my organs and stitch me back up, then send me on my way with the tentacular equivalent of a thumbs up.
I wake up sweaty and short of breath.
“I had a weird dream last night,” I tell Tommy in the morning.
“Prob’ly ‘cuz of all the chlorine,” Tommy says. “I heard chlorine can make you go cuckoo. Maybe you had, like, a chlorine fever dream.”
“If that was true, you’d be crazier than me. It’s your pool.”
“Maybe I am. Or maybe I’m immune to it.” Tommy grins, so I know he’s bullshitting. “Now c’mon. You smell that? My mom’s making pancakes.”
We bound upstairs for breakfast. We’re in luck. Ms. Arnette already has a batch of her special pancakes on the griddle. They are chocolate chip with shredded coconut, to this day the sole dish featuring the latter ingredient that I’ve loved. I’ve never seen anyone else make pancakes that way, and can never quite seem to recreate them. We tuck in, and don’t savor them nearly as much as we should.
When Dave emerges from his bedroom for breakfast, he has a gift for me. “Here, Pete,” he says, laying it on the table next to my plate.
I look at the piece of fine literature in front of me. It’s thick as a book, but bound in glossy magazine paper. I recognize it at once as the official Zelda game guide. “Really? I can take it home with me?”
“Sure. You’ll get more use out of it than me at this point.”
“Thanks! I promise to give it back the same way you gave it to me.”
Dave yawns and waves his hand in a magnanimous gesture. “Forget about it. You can have it. I beat that game ages ago, and I’ve got all the secrets memorized anyways.”
“Wow, thanks. I’ll take good care of it, I swear! Oh, and thanks for breakfast, Miss Arnette.”
“Of course, Peter. You know what to do with that plate.”
I take my breakfast plate to the sink and rinse it off.
“Your mom called about an hour ago,” says Ms. Arnette. “She’ll be here around lunchtime. You two are free to do whatever you want until then.”
Tommy and I look at each other. He shrugs, ceding the decision to me.
“Can we swim?” I ask.
“You can swim, sure.”
We swim, with relish. Up and down the pool, splashing until the world is obliviated by a screen of crystalline droplets. I swim so hard I get a stitch in my side, then I swim until it works itself out. When I hear the crunch of oyster shells in the driveway, my body flushes despite the cool water. A thrill of anxiety courses from my fingertips to my cramping toes. A moment later the front fender of mom’s station wagon appears behind the fence.
“See ya, Tommy,” I say.
“See ya, Pete.”
On a normal day, we could count on an extra fifteen minutes of play time while our moms chatted. There will be no dillydallying today. I swim to the side of the pool and hoist myself out. My towel is starchy from sitting out overnight. It scritches and scratches.
Tommy gets out of the pool to give me a quick hug, a rarity. Most times we’ve hugged in the past, it’s been a reconciliatory, usually mom-mandated, gesture in the wake of a scuffle. We don’t fight often, but we’ve been best friends since kindergarten. It happens. “Tell your dad I said get well soon.”
Everyone’s feeling huggy today, I guess, because mom grabs me and gives me a squeeze the moment she sees me in the driveway. Then she and Ms. Arnette share a hug when she comes out of the house.
“Thanks for having him, Arnette. It’s a huge help. What do you say, Petey?”
My ears redden. “Mom, I already was going to. Thanks for having me, Miss Arnette.”
Ms. Arnette smiles. “Anytime, Peter. You’re always such a good houseguest.” Her tone switches, and I recognize that my part in the conversation is through. “How’s Chuck doing, Susanne?”
Time for the adults to talk, that change of tone says. I take full advantage. I wave to Tommy through the fence, climb in the car, and shut myself in so I don’t have to hear them talking. I don’t want to find out this way.
Only when mom slides into the driver’s seat and starts the car do I say, “Where’s dad?”
“Your dad’s resting, sweetheart. He had his operation last night. You know that.”
I do, of course. Still, my stomach lurches. “Is he okay?”
Mom draws a shuddering breath. “He will be, kiddo. It’s a long road ahead, but we’re going to help him get better, aren’t we?”
“Yeah,” I say in a meek voice. I don’t like the way I sound, so I repeat it with greater force. “Yeah.”
Mom smiles. “Good. He’ll be so happy to see you.”
The station wagon reaches the end of the Wheelers’ oyster shell lane and turns onto the paved main road. Within moments my eyes grow heavy. The combination of chlorine water and the car’s smooth motion never fails to visit a soporific spell on me. As I drift off to sleep, tendrils of worry probe the surface of my pacific mind, find no purchase. Behind the curtain of my fluttering eyelids, mom sniffles and brushes away a tear.
Photo by Mayank Dhanawade on Unsplash
