Page 34 of Breathing Under Water

“Stop it! Stop!” Rohan shouts at them. He turns toward the steps and starts climbing out of the pool.

“Wait, Rohan!” I call after him. “Where are you going? It’s still pool time!” I turn back toward the water. “Lindy, Johnny, you have to quiet down. Quiet down!”

The pandemonium is only growing, and I don’t know what to do. Just when I thought I had this whole teaching thing down pat, I’ve completely lost control. As I open my mouth to try another tack, I see Leo grab for his whistle again.

“Leo, no!” I call out from where I’m still standing beside the pool. The piercing noise will only aggravate Rohan, who is now out of the pool, pacing in a frantic circle while also rocking hisupper body back and forth. I want to hurry over to help him, but I still have other students in the pool. Even with the lifeguard watching from his perch, I can’t just leave them in the water.

Leo pays me no heed and blows his whistle again, holding the note this time to prolong the awful screech. In response, Rohan emits his own shriek of despair and then hurries to a spot between two chaise longues. He collapses into a crouch on the ground, and with his hands over his ears, he resumes rocking back and forth as though he’s retreating into himself to cope with the chaos around him.

“Okay, that’s it!” I shout at the others. “Everyone out. Right now!”

Johnny and Lindy suddenly quiet and look at me with what appears to be genuine surprise on their faces.

“What about the races?” Johnny asks.

“Not now. Out!” I command. “And, Leo!” I turn to where he’s still holding the whistle poised near his mouth. “No more whistle!” My tone may be too harsh, I realize, as Leo rushes away from the pool and hurries to his bag at the cubbies. After a moment of rummaging, he pulls out his noise-canceling headphones, places them on his ears, and drops down into the closest patio chair. It’s surprising that with his own noise sensitivity, Leo would have blown the whistle like that at all. But I can’t spend time trying to figure that out now, as I still have a situation on my hands.

“You four, let’s go,” I tell the others.

As the other children march out of the water, I grab a towel from the stack sitting on the closest chaise and hand it to Elias, who immediately brings it to his eyes. As soon as I have the children seated beside the pool, I hurry to the cluster of chairswhere Rohan is still huddled on the ground rocking. I lower myself down beside him.

In the gentlest tone I can muster, I tell him, “Everyone’s out of the pool now, Rohan. We’re all quieting down.” He doesn’t remove his hands from his ears, but he does stop rocking. I spin my head to make sure the other kids are still where I’ve left them, and thankfully they are. But I also notice Christine Thomaston and Ainsley Lowell standing at the opposite end of the pool deck with their other friends. They’ve clearly witnessed all the havoc we wreaked. Another blond woman in the group meets my eyes, then leans over to say something into Christine’s ear. They give each other a knowing look, and I feel myself bristle. Trying to ignore the sense of foreboding I get watching the exchange, I turn my attention back to Rohan and try to convince him to return to the group for dryland stroke practice.

By the time my shift ends, I’m completely wiped out. Even though I managed to get everyone relatively settled with land activities for the remainder of our group class, the disruptions took a lot out of all of us. I should have known better than to deviate from the schedule like that. When I hijacked the lesson plan, I yanked the rug out from under the kids. They’d been expecting one thing, and I gave them another. Of course they didn’t know how to react appropriately, and shame on me for not doing a better job taking care of them.

That’s what I’m thinking about as I head out to the parking lot—how to care for people in the way they need, like Glory. It’sbeen three full days since I’ve found time to visit her. I’ve spoken with her by phone each day, two of which she knew who I was. On one day, she didn’t say anything coherent. The nurse assured me this is normal with dementia, that Glory comes in and out, having good days and bad days, even good hours and bad hours. Despite the repeated assurances that everything’s fine, I feel the need to see her with my own eyes and figure out how we can help her have more of the good hours.

As I slide into the car, the leather of the seat is so hot that it burns my thighs, and I pop right back up. My mom used to put my damp towel beneath me as a buffer, but at this fancy club, I don’t need to bring my own towel. All I have is my wet bathing suit, so I take it from my bag and shimmy it under me.

The sensation of the damp suit with the baking leather beneath it takes me right back to being a little kid, spending all my days in soggy Speedos. All summer long, Mom would shuttle me around from one club team practice to another, somehow finding time in between to work a full day as an admin at a law firm. As I got older, the club teams and meets got farther and farther away. Mom never complained. To be fair, Glory and Grandpa Fred helped too, but I cling so tightly to those memories of Mom and me in the car because memories are all I have of her. My stomach clenches as I think about Glory and how soon she’ll slide into the same category. Then the only family I’ll have left is my swim team. Mom always said the greatest benefit I’d get from swimming would be free college, but the true gold-star-level treasure that swimming has brought me is my Meadowbrook teammates.

Before I put the car in drive, I check my phone and see I’ve missed a bunch of texts in our team group chat. It’s just theusual stuff, some banter about swim caps and hair removal. Anything we can do to reduce drag and sharpen our times. But below that, Beck has written back.

Saturday at four? Meet at the Whole Bean.

By the time I reach Juniper Groves, my running shorts have water marks from the swimsuit beneath me, and I’m a little twitchy from forcing myself not to write back to Beck immediately. I’m trying to keep it casual, I keep reminding myself.

As I walk inside, the redheaded receptionist named Rhonda greets me.

“Hiya, McKenna,” she calls out. “Your granny’s gonna be glad to see you today. She won a bocce match out back this morning, and she’s been showing off her little trophy to everyone who’ll give it a look.”

“That does sound just like her.” I laugh, glad to hear Glory’s having one of her good days.

As I approach, Glory calls out from a card table in the grand ballroom. “There she is!” She rises easily out of her chair to come toward me, and I marvel again that a person’s body can stay in better shape than their aging brain.

“Come,” she says, giving me a quick hug, then guiding me back toward her table. “Meet my friends.” I smile politely at the two women still seated, both of whom look significantly older than Glory. They have nearly identical hairstyles, feeble curls cut close to the head, but one woman’s hair is entirely white, and the other’s is dyed nearly burgundy.

“Meet Janie and Ruth. They’ve only agreed to sit with me because I proved my worth today in bocce.”

“Oh, knock it off, Gloria,” the darker-haired woman says good-naturedly. “Anyone in here who can remember the day of the week can sit at our table.”

“Oh.” I don’t like the sound of that, as lately Glory hasn’t been able to pull off even that much predictably—and she knows it too.

“Don’t look so down in the dumps.” Glory gives my arm a half-hearted shove. “They know I have my moments, but they seem to like me anyway.”

“When she knows who we are,” the other woman says impishly.

“Just you wait, Ruthie. I’m going to go tell Marv about your incontinence if you keep this up,” Glory laughs.