My Swimming Pool Was Filled With Orbeez Until We Found What Was Hidden At The Bottom
Mrs. Lewis reached into the bottom of the case and brought out a photograph.
It had been printed on regular paper, slightly faded at the edges from three years in storage. She looked at it for a moment before she turned it over.
“This was taken a few minutes before,” she said quietly, and held it out to me.
Mason was standing near the festival fountain.
He was laughing at something outside the frame, his head tipped back, the gap between his teeth showing, the yellow shovel in one hand and his other hand extended toward a blue plastic tub filled with Orbeez while two children I didn’t recognize crowded in beside him.
Someone had written on the back in careful adult handwriting.
He made sure every child found the brightest one.
I had seven years of photographs of my son. I knew his face in sleep and in tantrum and in the specific transcendent joy of a child who has just figured something out. I had memorized him in the way mothers do, unconsciously and completely, so that every small detail of him lived somewhere in me like a second skeleton.
But for three years, every memory I had of that day ended at the ring toss booth, ended with an empty hand and the beginning of everything that followed.
This photograph ended somewhere else.
It ended with Mason laughing, Mason counting out the brightest Orbeez for the children beside him, Mason making sure everyone had something good before anything went wrong.
I had known him as my son.
I had known him as the person in our house who put his shoes on the wrong feet and argued about bedtime and ate cereal for dinner when he could get away with it and still believed, at seven years old, that different colored Orbeez had different jobs in the world.
The town had known him as the boy who noticed when someone was crying and let them win.
I closed my eyes.
I pressed the photograph against my chest.
For a long time I didn’t move.
By late afternoon, the officers had finished documenting everything. The volunteers who had moved the case would be interviewed and would pay for any damage to the pool, though Rios said the word charge with the tone of someone describing a formality rather than a consequence. It had been misguided and frightening and had required an entire morning of emergency response, but the intention underneath it was visible.
It took hours to clear the Orbeez from the pool. Carmelo and two neighbors who had come over without being asked worked through the afternoon with nets and buckets while I sat at the patio table with the letters and the photograph and Mason’s shovel.
I read every letter.
Some I read twice.
By evening, the water was clear again. The late sun turned it the specific shade of blue it always turned at that hour, the blue I associated with summer evenings and Mason shouting watch me before every jump, even when I was already watching.
Carmelo carried the case inside and set it on the dining room table.
I stayed by the pool.
One Orbeez remained caught in the shallow end, bright blue, spinning slowly in a small current near the drain. I reached for the skimmer.
Then I put it down.
I crouched at the pool’s edge and reached in and picked up the bead with my fingers. Held it for a moment in my palm, small and smooth and a little cooler than I expected.
Blue ones are for people who feel lonely.
I placed it carefully in the curve of the yellow shovel, in the crack near the handle, and watched it settle there.
Then I carried both inside.
Mason’s photograph was on the mantel, the one from his second-grade school picture where he is grinning sideways and slightly blurry at the edges because he started moving before the shutter closed. I had looked at that photograph every day for three years. Some days it was the hardest thing in the house. Some days it was the only thing that helped.
I set the shovel beside it.
Carmelo came and stood next to me. We looked at the photograph and the shovel and the blue bead resting in the crack near the handle, and we didn’t say anything, because we had run through the things you can say with language and arrived somewhere on the other side of them.
After a while, he put his arm around me.
The house was quiet.
Outside, the pool was clear and still and blue in the evening light.
Inside, a whole town’s worth of love was stacked in careful layers on our dining room table, waiting to be read.
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