My Swimming Pool Was Filled With Orbeez Until We Found What Was Hidden At The Bottom
Mason’s sand shovel had been yellow. He had carried it to the beach, to the park, to the festival. He carried it the way some children carry stuffed animals, as a talisman, as a comfort object, as the one familiar thing in an unfamiliar world. The police had included it in the list of items missing with him. Tiny yellow plastic shovel, approximately nine inches, crack near the grip.
Carmelo was already dialing.
The first police car arrived in seven minutes.
Then a second. Then Detective Rios, who had worked Mason’s case from the beginning and who still looked at me, three years later, with the particular careful expression of someone who has delivered bad news before and is always braced to do it again.
He crouched at the pool’s edge and looked through the water for a long moment without speaking.
“Can you confirm the shovel from here?” he asked Carmelo.
“Not completely.”
Rios called for the fire department’s water rescue team. While we waited, officers photographed the pool cover, the bins of Orbeez, the wet footprints we’d tracked across the patio. One found wheel marks in the soft ground near the side gate. Another found torn plastic packaging behind the hedge, the kind that comes with bulk Orbeez orders. Nothing bore a name. Nothing explained itself.
A neighbor had started recording from across the street. An officer crossed over and spoke to them quietly, and the phone went down.
The rescue team arrived at ten in the morning. Two divers entered the pool and cleared the remaining beads from the surface of the case while a third secured straps around the base. The object rose slowly, water streaming from its sides, and settled onto a blue tarp on the patio with a sound like a long exhale.
It was transparent.
Inside were drawings.
At first I thought I was counting wrong. But there were dozens of them, maybe more, folded and layered and stacked. Sheets of crayon drawings, notebook paper covered in careful child’s handwriting, pages torn from sketchbooks. Among them I could see folded letters, friendship bracelets knotted from embroidery thread, small toys, a stuffed dinosaur with one missing eye, a paper crown of the kind the festival face-painters handed out each year.
And resting across the top of all of it, tilted slightly, was the yellow shovel.
The crack near the handle was facing me.
My knees gave out.
Carmelo caught my arm and lowered me onto the step, and I sat there on the patio with my hands pressed flat against the warm concrete and the August sun on my face and the pool behind me full of colored beads, and I couldn’t speak.
Nobody spoke.
Not the officers. Not the firefighters standing near their truck at the curb. Not the neighbors who had gathered quietly beyond our fence.
The yard was so silent I could hear the Orbeez clicking softly against the pool tiles in the slight breeze.
They wouldn’t open the case.
Procedure, they explained. Everything had to be photographed before the seal was broken. Every item logged. Every surface of the case itself checked. I understood this. I had spent three years learning to understand procedural requirements as a way of staying functional, because doing otherwise meant sitting down in whatever room I happened to be in and not getting up.
I sat beside the pool and watched the remaining Orbeez drift into the corners of the shallow end like the remnants of a celebration no one had explained to me yet.
At eleven-fifteen, a small silver car pulled up to the curb.
A woman climbed out wearing mismatched shoes, a cardigan buttoned wrong, and the expression of someone who had driven over in a hurry and had not stopped to look in a mirror. I recognized her as Mrs. Lewis. She ran the town’s community center, had run it for as long as I could remember. She had been at the festival three years ago. She had been part of the volunteer search in the weeks that followed.
She saw the case on the tarp.
She stopped walking and covered her mouth with both hands.
“Oh no.”
Detective Rios met her at the gate.
“Do you know what this is?”
She nodded. Her eyes moved to me.
“I know what was inside it,” she said.
Rios heard the distinction as quickly as I did. “Inside it?”
She looked at the pool. At the Orbeez. At the transparent case with the drawings visible through its walls.
“I didn’t know anyone was going to bring it here,” she said.
Carmelo stepped forward. “Bring what?”
She pressed her fingers against her lips for a moment, and then she came and sat beside me on the step, and she looked at the case for a long time before she looked at me.
“The town has been keeping something from you,” she said. “For three years. And I am very sorry for that.”
In the weeks after Mason disappeared, the festival memorial had appeared naturally, the way these things do in small towns. Someone set a folding table near the fountain where the last photograph of him was taken. People began leaving things.
Children, mostly. Mason’s classmates, children from the neighborhood, children he had played with at birthday parties or soccer practice or the library reading program on Wednesday afternoons. They brought drawings and bracelets and notes written in the large, careful handwriting of kids who are learning to form letters. They left small toys. One child left a plastic dinosaur that had clearly been well-loved before it was given away. Another left a paper crown.
The community center stored everything when the memorial came down. There was no formal decision about it, Mrs. Lewis told us. No meeting, no vote. People simply found they couldn’t throw any of it away. So it went into a box, and then another box, and eventually into the case that someone had built or bought specifically to preserve it, and it went onto a shelf at the community center where it stayed for three years.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Carmelo asked.
Mrs. Lewis was quiet for a moment.
“At first everyone thought it would hurt you more to see it,” she said. “That it was too soon. Then more time passed, and more time, and nobody knew how to begin that conversation.” She looked at her hands. “People meant well. They didn’t know what the right thing was.”
“What happened this year?” Rios asked.
She exhaled. “The festival is next week. A few volunteers thought the memorial collection should be returned to you before it happened. Some of us wanted to ask your permission first, to call you and explain and let you decide whether you wanted it.” She looked at the pool. “Someone else thought that calling you first would be too hard. That leaving it quietly, with something Mason loved, would be kinder.”
Carmelo stared at the pool.
“They filled our yard with Orbeez.”
Mrs. Lewis made a sound that was almost a laugh and immediately wasn’t. “One volunteer remembered that Mason loved them. And apparently children had been leaving one Orbeez each in a glass bowl beside the memorial every summer at the festival.” She looked at me. “Three years of those were in the case.”
I thought about that.
Three summers. Three festivals. Children arriving at the memorial table and reaching into their pockets and leaving a single small bead in a glass bowl, one Orbeez per child, bright and particular and chosen. I thought about them deciding which color. I thought about yellow and blue and the ones Mason said were private.
“Who moved it to the pool?” Rios asked.
Mrs. Lewis shook her head. “I don’t know which one of them actually did it. I found out this morning when my phone started ringing.”
Rios nodded slowly. He looked at me. “The case appears to be clean. We’ll document everything, but this looks like misguided kindness rather than anything more than that.”
Misguided kindness.
I looked at the shape on the blue tarp, the transparent walls, the hundred or more drawings visible from where I sat, the pale colors of construction paper and notebook paper and some that looked torn from the backs of coloring books.
I didn’t have a word for what I was feeling.
The case was opened at noon.
Rios lifted the lid himself while an officer worked the camera methodically, photographing each layer before it was disturbed. The yellow shovel slid forward when the seal broke, and I caught it with both hands before I made the decision to reach for it.
I turned it over.
The crack near the handle was exactly where it had always been. Near the grip, slightly diagonal, something that had happened the summer he was five and dropped it on the concrete edge of the pool and we had discussed whether to throw it away and Mason had said absolutely not.
I held it in my hands and didn’t try to say anything.
The letters came next.
Rios lifted them out carefully and laid them on a clean section of the tarp, still bundled together with a piece of twine and a small paper label. I waited while the officer photographed them. Then Carmelo picked up the first one and unfolded it.
The handwriting was in thick purple marker, the letters large and slightly uneven, the kind of handwriting that is trying very hard.
Dear Mason, thank you for sharing your crayons with me when mine broke. You didn’t have to do that.
He set it down and picked up another.
You told me freckles were tiny stars. I still think about that.
Another.
You let me win the beanbag toss because I was crying. I don’t think anyone saw that but me.
I pressed the paper flat against my knee.
There were so many. The handwriting changed from letter to letter, some careful and some hurried, some in pencil and some in marker and some in the kind of glitter pen that seven and eight-year-olds favor. Some had drawings attached, pictures of Mason or pictures of the festival or pictures of the pool at what I assumed was our house, drawn from a child’s memory or imagination.
Most were signed with first names I didn’t recognize. A few I did.
One envelope was from an adult. Carmelo opened it and read it twice before he said anything.
“It’s from a volunteer firefighter,” he said. “He says Mason helped him pass out water bottles for twenty minutes during the festival and made a hard day feel lighter.”
He put the letter down and pressed one hand over his face and stood there for a moment.
“He was only there for twenty minutes,” he said.
I looked up at him.
“Apparently that was enough.”
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