My Swimming Pool Was Filled With Orbeez Until We Found What Was Hidden At The Bottom
The first thing I noticed was the color.
Bright blue, catching the morning light, rolling slowly across the patio tiles until it bumped against the toe of my slipper and stopped. I looked down at it without understanding what I was seeing. Then I looked up.
The pool was gone.
Not gone, exactly. The water was still there beneath it all. But the surface had disappeared completely under millions of tiny, shimmering beads in every color I could name and several I couldn’t, blue and green and yellow and red and orange, layered so densely that the pool looked like something between a painting and a dream, still and strangely beautiful in the early morning light.
I stood in the open doorway and forgot to breathe.
Then I saw the shape at the bottom.
Large. Rectangular. Too deliberate and too straight-edged to be debris, too large to have drifted there, too perfectly centered to be anything other than something someone had placed with intention.
I gripped the doorframe.
“Carmelo.”
My husband appeared from the kitchen hallway carrying two mugs of coffee, the same way he appeared every morning of our lives together, unhurried, still in his robe, his hair pressed flat on one side from sleep. He started to say something and then he saw my face.
One mug slipped from his hand and struck the counter. Coffee spread in a dark pool beneath the toaster. Neither of us moved to clean it up.
He stepped past me onto the patio.
The Orbeez shifted softly against the pool tiles, making a faint clicking sound like rainfall against a window. There were millions of them. I couldn’t begin to calculate how many. They moved in slow, lazy circles, and beneath them the rectangular shape rested silently at the bottom, waiting.
Carmelo stood very still.
“Was that there last night?”
“No,” I said.
“You’re sure?”
“I covered the pool at nine.”
He turned to look at the pool cover, neatly folded and stacked against the fence. We both stared at it for a moment.
Someone had come into our yard in the night and removed the cover. Carefully, without tearing it, without leaving it in a heap. They had folded it. That detail frightened me more than anything else I was looking at.
This was not a prank.
There are things you carry after a child disappears that no one prepares you for.
Not the grief, which people do prepare you for, in the broken, insufficient ways that people try. Not the unanswered questions, which you know will come. What no one tells you about is the specific and relentless weight of the ordinary. The way you still have to go to the grocery store and the pharmacy and the bank. The way the television still works and the mail still arrives and the neighbor’s dog still barks in the mornings as if the world has not fundamentally changed shape.
The way the pool still has to be covered each night at nine, because that is what you do, and doing it is the only structure you have left.
Mason had been gone for three years.
He disappeared on a Saturday afternoon in July, at the town’s summer festival, in a park surrounded by hundreds of people, in a moment so brief I still cannot fully account for it. He was holding my hand at the ring toss booth. Someone bumped my shoulder. I turned for less than five seconds.
When I turned back, he was not there.
For the first two minutes, I believed he had simply stepped behind me. For the next five, I believed he had wandered to the next booth and would appear any moment. For the rest of that afternoon and evening and all the days that followed, I understood that something had happened that I might never fully understand.
He was seven years old. He had brown hair and a gap between his front teeth that made him whistle slightly when he said words with s in them. He loved the pool. He loved Orbeez.
He loved Orbeez with the specific and serious devotion that seven-year-olds bring to their obsessions. He had a color system for them, which he had explained to me in great detail over several summers and which I had listened to with the patient half-attention of a mother managing seventeen other things at once. Blue ones were for people who felt lonely. Yellow ones were for birthdays. Red ones were for emergencies. Green ones were private, and when I asked what that meant he would look at me with the dignified expression of a child who knows an adult will not understand.
Three unopened boxes of Orbeez still sat on a shelf in our garage.
I had never thrown them away. I couldn’t explain why, exactly, except that throwing them away would have required me to make a decision about what they were, and I wasn’t ready to decide.
Carmelo understood this without being told. He glanced at me across the pool the way he had learned to glance at me over three years, carefully, gauging how close I was to the edge.
“Abby.”
“I know,” I said. Before he could say it.
“This doesn’t necessarily mean—”
“I know.”
I said it too fast. We both knew I didn’t know anything at all.
He walked to the pool net and reached for it.
“Don’t touch the sides,” I said, thinking of fingerprints, thinking of all the procedural things I had learned by accident over three years of cooperating with searches and investigations and periodic case reviews that always ended with some version of the same careful language: no new developments at this time.
Carmelo nodded and angled the net into the surface.
The Orbeez slid away in clusters and then rolled back into place like water filling a hole. He tried again, deeper this time, and came up with a net full of wet, shining beads that he emptied into a plastic storage bin near the fence. We worked without talking. I found flowerpots, a bucket from under the patio sink, an old cooler we hadn’t used in years. We filled them all and lined them up along the fence and went back for more.
The shape at the bottom grew slowly clearer.
Acrylic, I thought, when Carmelo had cleared enough for us to make out one corner. Thick and sealed, the kind of container designed to be watertight. Larger than a coffee table, weighted at the base, perfectly horizontal on the pool floor.
Then Carmelo stopped moving.
“What?” I said. “What is it?”
He didn’t answer. He was leaning over the edge, looking through the layers of water and shifting beads at something I couldn’t see from where I was standing.
“Carmelo.”
He reached into his pocket and took out his phone.
I moved around the pool until I was beside him.
He pointed.
At first I saw only pale shapes, indistinct through the water and the remaining beads. Then the Orbeez drifted in the current we’d created, and a gap opened up, and through it I saw a flash of yellow.
Small. Bright. A familiar, specific yellow.
A handle.
My fingers found the pool railing.
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