My son, Charlie, wears a pair of red tortoise shell eyeglass frames to the town pool. They're big and heavy, even though I popped out the lenses, and keep falling off as we cross the dewy lawn.
To date Charlie has jumped into three feet from a phone book, four feet from an Oxford dictionary, and five feet from a plywood block. Every weekend a little deeper, a little higher. Sometimes in the wake of his jumps, a halo of bubbles where the water takes him, swimmers in the shallow end will sing out and bob in their water wings.
But it's not the esteem of shallow-enders that drives him to the diving board. This day, Sunday, would have been Sharon's birthday, her big thirty-five. The jump into the deep end is Charlie's present to her.
We pass through the gate and he walks it quartercircle back, a decisive bell tone as he sets the latch. Our sandals clap together on the combed cement, Charlie with a SpongeBob towel stuffed cape-fashion into his T-shirt. It's nine-thirty, and under the blue morning sky webs of fog lift off the heated pool. Holding the chrome rail at the shallow end, Charlie taps the water with his toe until circles enlarge like cartoon radar.
A blue nylon rope halves the pool, its Styrofoam footballs riding wavelets of a lone swimmer. A man of seventy or more, he laps sidelong, touching the five foot marks as if they were stop clocks in a chess game. The crown of white hair hugs his skull, follows its nodes and depressions. He stops only to pull sheets of water down his face, his long-fingered hand the color of a paper bag. He notices neither my son nor me.
Charlie pushes the glasses up into his hair. After this jump, after Charlie has overcome his last challenge at the pool, I'll bargain with him, buy him proper-fitting sunglasses, less extravagant ones that might spare him some teasing.
Charlie finds three lounge chairs huddled away from the others at the far end of the pool. On the center chair, he sits and crosses a leg to remove his sandal heel-first the way he's seen me take off cap-toe oxfords a hundred times. He peeks behind his waistband where the shoelace bow still holds, and as we lie back under a small, storybook sky, a morning breeze lifts his sandy hair against my chin, and I smell them both.
At Walgreen's a month ago, Charlie came back from the shampoo aisle holding a denim blue bottle of Finesse.
"That's not what you want. Grab some Pert. You like Pert."
"This one!" he yelled, "only this one," drawing looks from two women in cosmetics. I could have gotten angry, though I'd promised myself never again, a reasonable promise.
Charlie dropped the bottle into my cart and kept shopping.
"We're pretty tired," Charlie says, and a coating in back of my throat begins to melt. He searches the morning sky, where high cirrus clouds pass through one another like misguided angels.
Sharon and I explored religions with Charlie. The three of us attended a weekend retreat in upstate New York, where we chanted before a Buddha statue the size of a phone booth. Sikh friends shared their faith over onion chutney. We thought we'd open all doors for him, but when he needed answers all I could offer was by-the-numbers Christianity. Charlie imagines angels reclining on cartoon clouds, watching over us.
Mark the lifeguard is a family friend, paperboy, autumn leaf-raker. He came to my door that afternoon, without his ubiquitous Trailblazers cap, one hand clamped on the other's wrist in a show of condolence as generic as his opening sentence: "If there's anything I can do, Mr. Pierce." He's not too young to mean what he says, so in the winter I sent him to Star Auto Wrecking with the signed title to Sharon's Celica. He brought me the receipt and a shoebox full of her CDs, a corkscrew from our wine tour in British Columbia, her driving glasses, that, minus the lenses, are Charlie's now.
Mark's favor today was coming in early to run the pool heater.
I move out to the center of the pool as Charlie, a few feet over me on the board, the glasses back in his hair, stops before the gritty ledge. The board ticks with the small weight of him. Underneath, two coil springs are powdered with chlorine and rust, cottony spider nests choking the corners. His legs bump at the knees.
"The first time is the hardest," I say.
Charlie looks at his feet, his one hand clenching a white fist.
"Trust me," I say, and my treading breaks, a stitch of chlorine in the eyes. Charlie laughs, and the sound of it unclenches something in me as I lie back in the womb-like water. Layers peel away, the daily routines I'm either doing or psyching myself to do: cooking. Shopping. Facing her family. Facing mine. Suddenly I feel the way you do looking into a canyon, when everything clears from your mind except the impulse to jump.
"Marco," Charlie says.
"Polo."
He draws his breath and is truly a brave second from jumping when the one low cloud pushes over the sun. Bright outlines darken off. Charlie's chest falls, gooseflesh rising on his thighs. "It's cold, now," he says.
The old man passes another lap and Charlie watches. His eyes narrow as if he might call out, interrupt the endless swim, and ask him what? Something Charlie doesn't trust me to answer. But then he looks at me again and stomps his foot. "I hate this. I hate it now." Even as the sun lets go of the cloud, he frowns.
"We'll come back another day," I tell him.
"I just wish..." he says, urgent grownup tears running down. It's like seeing him cry for the first time, when you wonder how someone so new to life can be so outraged. The glasses slip off, catch on his chin, and in a fit he pitches into the water.
They wobble and dodge when I grab at them, quiver away like a butterfly as I miss and miss. Suddenly everything depends on catching these glasses. I howl under water, a puny thing to hear, and then I'm out of air and too far down. I don't know how to swim. Above me the frothy white sky pulls away. My sight goes black and to snow before the leather hand of God-I-Don't-Believe-In pulls me back to the pool ledge. My lungs burst with air, burning life rushing back in, and I sag between the chrome rails of the ladder, belching up water in strings. The old man's voice is airy and rusted. "You're okay," he says. Mark is there, too, gripping my shoulder as to keep me from slipping back. "I thought you guys were goofing around. Jesus."
The old man's spongy hand on my lower back holds me there. The coughing subsides, everything slobber and snot, and the old man keeps his hand where it is. I drop my forehead, and in the dark of my piled forearms I don't want to be let go of.
Charlie's open little hand is there with the old man's, rubbing, patting me. Under an arm I can see the shivering red fleck of the glasses at the bottom of the pool. "You almost drownded," Charlie says, and all I manage is, "I know." And then the quaking. My knees scrape the side. "You don't have to get out," he says.
And I nod. I'll stay right here.