August
Standing at the pool’s edge, my feet burning a bit against the concrete, I looked down into the water, clear and chlorinated—a perfect chemical light blue—and watched it gently ripple while I waited for my mother, who was sitting with my aunt under a pavilion close by.
While they talked, creating, from this distance, a high-pitched and incomprehensible song in the summer air, my cousin and I stood still beside the pool, staring at the surface of the water, then at each other, then at our chattering mothers with a kind of pleading expression they never glimpsed. As we waited, the sun beat down on us, reddening our faces and necks, drawing beads of sweat to the surface of our skin. I felt my legs grow stiff. My cousin frowned.
Because the women’s conversation was dragging on, and because it was only getting hotter outside the pool’s translucent depths, with the concrete becoming less tolerable, I began to look at the water, its inviting clarity, and then back at my mother, who was still distracted, with an idea forming in my head. This idea, though dangerous, propelled me forward so that I abandoned my spot on the burning concrete and, to my cousin’s surprise (I glimpsed his face for just a second), leaped into the deep end of the pool, limbs flailing.
As I sank down, I felt cool, light, peaceful in the depths, and I kept my eyes open. There was no struggle. In fact, I felt relieved. Above the surface, I could hear my cousin yelling my name. “Austin! Austin!” He yelled repeatedly, his voice filled with alarm, while I remained in my tranquil position below, at ease in the comfortable warmth of the water, away from the burning slab of concrete, the more direct rays of sunlight, and the chatter.
Moments later, this tranquility was interrupted when, the yelling having ceased, my mother jumped into the water and appeared in front of me with her arms outstretched, her eyes wide and face twisted. Grabbing me firmly, she swam to the surface and then guided me to the side of the pool where there was a metal ladder leading back to the concrete. Following her, I climbed slowly until she pulled me up, hugging me and draping a towel around me that my aunt had brought over.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so—”
Holding me close, she cried and expressed regret, while I remained still and my cousin and aunt stood awkwardly off to the side. As much as I could, I once again looked at the calm water rippling beneath the sun within that perfect rectangle framed by stones.
“I’m so glad that—”
The sun continued to beat down, giving the whole scene a harsh glow, and, in that moment of clarity, I saw everything so vividly—the solemn faces of my cousin and aunt, the contorted form of my sorrowful mother repenting of her perceived negligence, the rippling chemical water, the glinting stone surrounding the pool—that it felt as if that day in August, when I almost drowned at the age of four, must have been a dream.