A story

The drowning

On my first day of 9th grade at a new school, I was sitting in the late afternoon at a bench next to the swimming pool, waiting for my mom to pick me up after swim practice. One of my new teammates was keeping the lifeguard company while his younger brother - who was in 8th grade and not yet ready to join the team - did practice laps and tried to hold his breath against the clock in the empty pool. The boy hung on the side and asked me to time him, and I watched him sink down and kick to the surface while his brother and the middle-aged lifeguard played ukulele, sitting on metal folding chairs in the guard room. The enormous clock swept around in circles, I told the boy how long he had been down - 36 seconds, 38, 40, 36.

When he went back under again, I walked across the deck to look out at the parking lot for my mother. When I turned around, he was still under, and the clock was sweeping up past 50 seconds. I looked into the water, and saw him laying on the bottom, his posture not much different than the other times he had been under. He could have popped up while I had my back turned and gone back down. The clock swept past the minute mark, and he didn't move. I yelled, "Either he can hold his breath a REALLY LONG TIME, or HE'S IN TROUBLE." The lifeguard threw the ukulele and ran to dive in, which alarmed me. I watched him swim to the bottom, both ashamed that I had not already jumped in and embarrassed that I might have given a false alarm. Then the man grabbed him, and I saw the boy's head drift as he was yanked up. It took an agonizingly long time for them to reach the surface, I was kneeling at the edge of the pool, waiting for them to be close enough to grab. My teammate was running in tight circles, yelling, "MY BROTHER! OH, MY BROTHER!" The 'oh' stuck with me. Then the boy's head was up, and he was pushed up into my arms. I grabbed him around the armpits and pulled him up, shocked by how much he weighed and worried that I was scraping his skin on the edge of the pool. The lifeguard jumped out and grabbed his legs as I dragged him onto the deck, trying not to let my grip slip. I forgot to hold his head, and it bumped the concrete with a horrible sound. "CALL 911," the lifeguard screamed at his brother, who fumbled the phone and yelled, "Come to the pool, my brother drowned! Oh, my brother!" and I could hear the dispatcher squawking back at him while he rubbed his hair furiously and stared at his brother's body. The lifeguard was administering CPR, and I was still kneeling beside him, feeling useless and wishing I hadn't bumped his head. The clock had gone around again. 2 minutes. In movies, the drowning person jolts to life, hitches in a breath, and starts coughing, but that didn't happen. He was limp as rubber, then foam bubbled out of his mouth and spilled down the side of his face. The EMTs arrived and I moved out of the way. They worked on him and a jet of foam erupted into the air, impossibly high, and splattered down onto him. My teammate was quiet, moving back and forth nervously. My mom arrived in time to see them lift the boy up onto a gurney and rush past, his brother chasing behind. The lifeguard had a towel around his neck and looked exhausted but not upset, which I took to be a good sign. I asked something stupid, like, "What was that?" and he said, "He vomited water, that was the foam you saw. He was breathing when they took him." He watched the vehicles drive away and told me, "You saved his life." You did, I thought. I felt like I had almost killed him.

He was in the hospital for a while. His friends got in my face at school, demanding to know why I hadn't saved him. I said, "I did, I found him and helped pull him out," and kept walking to my next class. In retrospect, I probably could have had a better conversation with them about it. I was only 14.

His mother was a teacher at my mom's school, and she said he couldn't remember anything from that day. I was slightly crushed, because I thought we had been getting along pretty well beforehand, and I didn't have any friends yet. Our mothers joked that they would be in-laws some day, but we never spoke again. I kept an eye out for him for a few weeks, but he had a girlfriend who was in my class and I decided it would be weird if I tried to talk to him. If we crossed paths, he would give a polite nod or hold a door open for me while his friends stood aside looking uncomfortable.

All these many years later, I got a friend request on facebook. He grew into a good man, married his high school sweetheart, had children, and became a musician. Now his first album is in production.

I'm very relieved that he didn't turn out to be an evil dictator or international drug lord. My time machine to-do list is already out of hand.