The girl on the pontoon boat sits up. She says something to her brother that Michael can’t make out over the Jimmy Buffett din. She pokes at her phone a minute, then lowers the phone, lies down, and shuts her eyes.
From her raft, Diane won’t look at Michael.
For fifteen years, they were so happy. Happy enough. Content, at least, before Diane upended everything. People change, she said. Michael’s not so sure. Did Diane change, or did she trick him? Is this what she wanted all along?
Michael moves to his father’s chair at the helm and flips on the fish finder. The depth here measures sixty feet. At the fifty-foot mark, something big drifts gray across the screen, a catfish, maybe, or a tree branch settling into underwater rot.
His mother adjusts her broad-brimmed sun hat—the cancer hat, she calls it, an attempt at levity that, every time, makes Michael cringe. Probably, she’s telling the other mother about the skin cancer she beat. Again, Michael thinks, Florida? Seriously?
The bats cavort. Soon his hands will shake. He really, really, really needs a drink.
The boy perched on the motor flips him off again. The sister’s earbuds have popped out, and her mouth is slack with sleep.
The heron in the reeds gives up and lifts off, fishless. The boy watches, and Michael follows the boy’s eyes following the bird.
The boy smiles. He stands. Then he’s overboard.
His body tugs him under, and the water wings rocket from his arms like champagne corks. A hand breaks the surface, slaps, but the floats slither, amphibious, from his grasp. The hand does not break the surface a second time.
And only Michael’s seen—seen the boy stand, then fall, the seat of his swim trunks hitting the shell of the outboard motor, hard; seen him slip over the side; seen, in the eyes of the child, water below and sun above, a transmission, one word telegraphed from boy to man, and that word was: Please.
Michael rises, kicks off his shoes and sheds his shirt. He calls to the others, a cry he can’t be sure is heard over the music blasting from the boat. He dives. He swims. He turns his face to take a breath and calls for help again, but he cannot stop. He cannot break his stride.
No splashing ahead, no hands.
Three more strokes, and Michael’s close enough. He takes a breath and dives. He’s seeking silver swim trunks, teeth, anything that might catch light in the belly of a lake. But ten feet down the light is scarce, the water turned to murk.
He pinches his nose, pushes air from his ears to equalize the pressure.
Fifteen feet. Twenty. Blind, but grasping. Water in fistfuls, but no boy.
Come on.
He tunnels, pulls. How deep is he? How fast does a body sink?
The light is gone, and the water grows colder the deeper he goes. Whatever happens, he must not lose track of up and down.
In high school, he could hold his breath for a minute at a time, but high school was a long time ago. His ears throb. His lungs are lit coals. Wait too long, and he’ll take a breath reflexively. He can’t be underwater when that happens.
He has to surface. Surface or drown. Except. Except.
A whisper. The dance of something just out of reach. Swim trunks, fluttering. The pink of fingernails. Either the boy’s below or Michael’s dead and dreaming this.
Then he has the hand.
He can’t see it, can’t make out the boy’s hand in his own, but he has it. The hand is there, and it is good. It’s a hand he can swim with. He’ll rise and hold the hand and not let go.
Later, in the hospital, Michael will wonder. Say he’d had a drink that morning, just to calm him down. Say the shock of his parents’ revelation, the house for sale, hadn’t led him to drink so much the night before. He might have held on tighter, risen true.
But that isn’t what happens.
What happens is that Michael kicks the boy.
He doesn’t mean to, but a body underwater isn’t weightless, and swimming with one arm is hard to do. The boy’s body drags. It is kicked. And just like that, the hand is gone.
He exhales, but there’s no air left to leave his lungs.
He’s swimming the wrong way. The boy is below. Why, then, does Michael rise? He cannot rise without the child. He must turn back, but his body will not let him. Something in him has taken over, and the something in him wants to live.
He kicks, he claws, but there’s no light. Impossible to gauge direction without the compass of the sun.
Then, a vague illumination. An object passing overhead.
He’s heard stories. Catfish the size of zeppelins. Sturgeon armored like gators, ten feet long. Unless the thing he sees is his soul rising, leaving him behind.
No.
He is alive. He lives, and he is swimming. The fish or soul, it grows, and he swims toward it.
He’s lost all sense of distance, space, and time. All dimensions are water. Fireworks go off behind his eyes, and a siren screams for him to breathe.
Breathe, then, he thinks. Join the boy. Be done with this.
Except that Michael’s life is not his own. He is a father. His life is marked by that which is in bloom. This truth hits him with a force so great he hardly notices his head striking the bottom of the boat.
All is water. Then light. Then air.
He coughs, gasps, and throws up. He breathes.
Above him, the girl is screaming. Her brother is at the bottom of the lake. Surely, by now, he rests. Surely, he’s stopped fighting, stopped water-calling, now, his sister’s name.
Michael tastes salt. The salt is blood and the blood is his.
He cannot dive. He dives again, he’ll die.
He is a father.
His life is not his own.
Beyond the boat, others fling themselves from rafts and swim to him. And in the distance, wings, severed from their body, spin, orange and current-caught. They orbit each other, knowing. They tumble, ocular with water’s awful wink.
2.
Boats cross the bay, trolling for the boy. Through binoculars, Lisa Starling watches. She could have changed clothes. After swimming to shore, after dialing 911 and helping Michael into the ambulance, before grabbing her binoculars and returning to the water’s edge, she could have put on something dry. But it’s only just occurred to her that she’s in her swimsuit still. Anyway, she’s dry enough. The warm air has sipped the water from her skin.
This morning, when she woke, the sky was blue. Now the sky is gray, cloud-clotted. The color of carrion, she thinks, though she isn’t sure this thinking makes much sense. But a boy is at the bottom of a lake, therefore the world does not make sense.
Lisa believes in God, though God is no one she’d like to meet today.
All over the bay, neighbors stand on decks and sit on docks. They huddle on shorelines and along the point. Across the bay, a man emerges from his house with scuba gear, then enters the water, tank on back, fins on feet, a regulator bulb in his mouth.
A pair of police boats keep other vessels from entering the bay. The boats are white and blue, and from the top of each, lights flash beneath the leaden sky. Above, a helicopter breaks up clouds.
Lisa lowers her binoculars. They are Swarovski Swarovisions. They’re eights because she likes her birds bright. They’re small because she likes her bins lightweight. They’re among the best binoculars in the world. She knows. She helped rank them for last year’s Cornell Lab Review.
She raises the binoculars again. The Starlings’ boat is still out there, anchored alongside the other family’s pontoon. A third police boat bobs between. This is the boat from which, minutes ago, two divers leapt with flashlights big as megaphones.