Treading Water

Kerby Caudill

Word Count 2240

One sweltering day during the summer between second and third grade, Mom, Dad, my big sister Oma, our Border Collie Jack, some of our fourteen cats (the ones allowed in the house), six or seven of Oma’s dolls and stuffed animals, and I were gathered on the couch near the swamp cooler. The phone rang but nobody made a move except Jack, who lifted his head towards the sound, his shaggy black bangs hanging over his dark brown eyes. After three rings, I left the only cool spot to answer. It was my new best friend, Marianne, who happened to live next door. Tall, blonde, and musical she was the Hall to my Oates. With her I could ride bikes, skate, and run as fast as I wanted or play games according to actual rules: things I couldn’t do with Oma. In 1974, when Oma was almost two years old, the treatment that eradicated her brain tumor and saved her life, did extreme, irreparable damage to her brain.

“Our swimming pool is finally ready,” Marianne said. 

“It’s not green and stenchy?” For as long as I’d known her, the pool sat unattended with a few inches of dark, mysterious liquid at the bottom of its light blue cement bowl, like a defective toilet. 

“No! It’s sparkling! Before my dad left for work, he said it was finally swimmable! Can you come over?”  

“I’ll ask!” I hung up the phone and returned to the suffocating living room.

The smoggy, dry heat of an Inland Empire summer could reach into my skin and steal every available morsel of moisture, leaving me nauseous with heatstroke or gasping for air. Sometimes Oma and I would soak in our one-foot-deep hard plastic baby pool, splashing water over our heads, sucking on apple flavored Jolly Ranchers or watermelon rinds. I’d hated “The Plunge,” our local public pool, since our first and only swimming lesson. That day was plagued with June gloom, grey skies and a cold breeze that made our hairy legs shiver under our towels. Oma took one look at the trembling children trying to keep their heads above water, folded her arms across her chest, stuck out her bottom lip, and dug her heels in so hard I was surprised there weren’t dents in the cement. Ever the obedient daughter, I jumped in. Pressed against the side of the pool, I sniffled until Mom pulled me out and we all went home.  Eventually, Grandma Pat taught me how not to drown in her apartment pool. Oma never learned to swim.

“Mom! Dad! Can I swim with Marianne?” 

I hoped, like usual, everyone was too preoccupied with their own interests and comfort to give my request much thought and let me go alone, no questions asked. 

“Sure.” Dad handed a lit joint back to Mom without looking away from the TV. 

I skipped to the phone to call Marianne back. A giddy weightlessness floated up from my belly. I pivoted on the linoleum floor, bare feet squeaking like race car wheels, then sprinted towards my room to get ready. 

Just before I reached my bedroom, I heard my mom yell from the couch, “Bring your sister!” My whole body sank with the weight of her instructions. 

Oma’s bare legs were draped across Dad’s, belly popped out from under her T-shirt, her few remaining hairs stuck across her sweaty forehead. When my eyes met hers, she shot me a look, thankful but slightly smug. With a long sigh, I told Oma to get in her bathing suit.

“I need help,” she said.  

In our bedroom, Oma undressed. I found her rainbow-striped one piece in the overstuffed top drawer full of individual, unmatched socks, and the few pairs of underwear we made last the whole week. Brain damage to her pituitary gland had caused lopsided development so it was never easy to find clothes that fit her but getting her into a bathing suit was a particularly epic undertaking. Like prepping a slingshot, I stretched that rubbery piece of nylon before placing it over her feet. Then I shimmied it up her chubby legs, to her privates—which were already sprouting hair, though she was only ten—and over her bloated belly and uneven breasts, until the suit was finally high enough for her to push her arms through. Sweaty from the undertaking, I peeled off my clothes and got into the red bathing suit I had almost outgrown. We went to the backyard to get Oma’s white Styrofoam inner tube. She lifted her arms up and I helped wedge it over her rolls, just above her belly. In terms of life-saving properties, this might not have been the best ratio of foam to flesh, but it was all we had.  After I put on Oma’s hat she never left the house without, we marched back into the house to say goodbye to our parents.

“Close the door quickly,” Mom said, as if the chilled swamp cooler air was more valuable than us.

I slammed the front door. With Oma’s lifesaving device snug around her waist, we set off in bathing suits and flip flops across the bone-dry field between our houses and entered through the side gate. We gathered around the cement deck and looked at the water. 

“Okay, Oma and Kerby,” Marianne said, “get ready to be cooled to your bones!”

“Hey, Marianne,” I said. “I can see your epidermis!” 

We kicked off our flip flops and stepped in. My body immediately tensed up, but after the shock wore off, my feet and shins welcomed the icy sting. I walked farther in and let cold layers creep up my body, darkening my bathing suit like stratified rock.

In her innertube, Oma started her favorite swimming pool activity: splashing water around the pool’s entire circumference. Marianne and I lingered in the shallow end, water nymphs spinning around in circles, making waves, and dunking our heads to have an underwater conversation.  Oma bobbed like a buoy around the pool. 

Not realizing just how far away Oma was drifting, we sang the theme song from Fame, the Big Mac commercial, and of course everything we knew by Hall and Oates. From the other side of the pool, Oma moaned along with us even though she didn’t know any of the words. Then she got quiet. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed her head tilt to one side. Soon after, a shriek—a mix between a copulating cat and a TV ghost—cracked through the still air. 

“Seizure!” I yelled. 

Marianne and I doggie-paddled towards Oma as fast as we could. We each took one side of the Styrofoam and held it steady before Oma’s head could tip into the blue depths. For several minutes we treaded water, holding Oma up, fighting the mess of slippery arms and legs outstretched and twitching, pushing against us. Those minutes felt like hours. Once I felt Oma’s muscles relax, I used my remaining strength to swim us back to the shallow end and hoisted her out of the pool.

Oma blinked at us. “Why are you holding me?” Water dripped from the edges of her hat into her eyes. She wiped them away like tears.

“You had a seizure.” 

“I’m tired,” she said.

“Me too,” I said. “Put your arms up.” Oma followed directions. I pried off the inner tube over her belly and chest by shimmying it back and forth, while pulling up incrementally.

The squeaks of Styrofoam against wet flesh were almost as loud as her screams had been. 

We had forgotten towels, so we stretched our bodies like starfish across the scalding concrete and tried to catch our breath. I could feel my motorboat heart beating through my thin bathing suit. Tears crept out of my eyes and evaporated immediately. In the deep end, I hadn’t had time to realize how scared I was. What just happened? How were two admittedly weak swimmers able to keep Oma’s head up? How had I lugged her back to safety? Why hadn’t my parents gotten her a better life-preserver? And the one thought I always tried to hold back: Why did Oma have to come along and ruin the fun?  

Each time I heard her seizure scream, a current ripped through my body, like when a dentist’s drill hits the one spot that isn’t numb. I hated the ever-looming threat of a seizure, knowing there was nothing I could do to stop it or its damaging effects on my day or my sister’s body. Of course, I never told anyone this. Who was I to make waves? And who would save me if I did?

Once we were dry enough, we peeled our bodies up from the concrete, fruit roll style. 

“I guess we better go home now,” I said. 

I took Oma’s hand, and we walked back across the crunchy grass. We made it into the house without seeing our parents. Inside, I helped her undress, and we got in the shower together. Under the spattering of lukewarm water, we realized towels weren’t the only thing we’d forgotten.  Each drop felt like lava against our sunburnt shoulders. Toweled off and dressed, we found Mom digging in her new garden. Dad had already left for a wedding gig with a polka band, so we knew we wouldn’t see him until the next day. 

“How was your day with Marianne?” Mom asked.

Oma said, “It was fun! The water was frosty. Like, Frosty the Snowman!” She laughed at her own joke, grabbed a rusty spade, and knelt with Mom to dig in the dirt. 

I knew if we told Mom the truth, we’d have to admit we’d been swimming with no adults there, forgot towels and sunblock, and Oma almost died. She’d never let us go there again. 

At bedtime that night we did our usual routine. 

“Goodnight, Mary Ellen,” I whispered to her.

“Goodnight, John Boy,” she whispered back.

I still loved The Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, The Brady Bunch, and Eight is Enough, shows with big “normal” families, with fixable problems: bad haircuts, stupid misunderstandings, and minor spats, even though at age eight, I knew our family problems were way worse than theirs and were never tied up at the end of an episode. Or ever.

Nerves fried from the day, I couldn’t get comfortable or get my heart to slow down enough to relax, let alone fall asleep. I climbed down the side of our bunkbed, careful not to take the squeaky ladder because doing so would wake up Oma for sure. My thin cotton nightie caught on a splinter sticking out of the bedpost and almost sent me tumbling to the ground right on top of Jack, who guarded Oma’s bed every night. He looked at me but didn’t get up from his post. Like a trained therapy dog, he had an uncanny way of detecting seizures and would run to my sister’s side before she fell. Jack normally left our room once she was asleep, but not tonight. Maybe he sensed another seizure, or maybe he was there for me. I caught my footing before making a big racket, and our beloved dreadlocked dog put his head back down as if to say, “You may proceed.” 

Avoiding the squeakiest places in the hardwood floor, I crept across the darkened house and into my parents’ room. Large swaths of the tin foil covering the window had peeled off in places, allowing silver shards of light to stream down on the king-sized box spring and mattress on the floor. Luckily sheets covered my parents, so I didn’t have to see if they were naked. I just needed a few minutes near them to try and get my heart to stop racing, then maybe I’d be able to get some sleep. 

I tiptoed to my mom’s side of the bed. Freed from its bun, her kinky black hair spread across the pillow like a maze. Smoker’s phlegm rattled in her lungs as she breathed, mouth wide open.  One thing I could always count on was never knowing what my parents’ mood would be. The potential to get yelled at for bothering them was worth the risk of lying awake all night, so I slid onto an empty moonlit sliver of mattress, making my body as narrow as I could by squeezing my hands across my chest, King Tut in a tight sarcophagus. With eyes closed, I traced five-point stars onto the back of my front teeth with my lower jaw. When I'd counted twenty stars, I got back up, crept out the way I came and, without disturbing Jack, got back into my own bed.

 “Where did you go?”  Oma was awake.

 “Nowhere. Go back to sleep,” I whispered. 

 “The pool was fun.” 

 “Yes, it was. Now go back to sleep.” I hoisted myself upright.

 “Goodnight, Pa.”

 “Goodnight, Ma.”

“I love you,” Oma whispered like a secret.

 “I love you more.”

 “I love you the most.”

 “I love you the most.”

 Clothes thrown on top of my dresser and floor looked like monsters in the dark, so I clenched my eyelids closed, but inside all I could see was Oma bobbing in the water. I crawled down to lay on the floor with Jack. My hand deep in his gnarled mane, I traced stars with my teeth over and over until waves of sleep came to my rescue.