reach us. He lets me go, but keeps his arms out, ready to catch me. “You got her?”
I say I’m fine and wave Wren and Amelia away. But when I take a step forward, my knees buckle like Bambi learning to walk. Tyler grabs me. “A little help here,” he orders the girls, setting me between them. They feel like tiny pipe-cleaner people compared to Tyler. Like they would crumple if I put any weight on them. My arms around their skinny shoulders, I limp off the field.
The instant we are out of hearing range, Amelia loses it and squeals, “You had your head in Tyler Moldenhauer’s lap!”
“OK,” Wren blurts out, “that means that Amelia and I are now, officially, the only girls at Parkhaven who have not had their heads in Tyler Moldenhauer’s lap. Or their faces, at any rate.”
At that point, I am supposed to go, “Wren! You’re so bad!” and slap at her and get all giddy and hectic. But I can’t say anything. These two girls who I ate lunch with almost every day since freshman year, and sat with through endless band trips, and helped through endless crushes, seem like people I knew a long time ago. And never had that much in common with anyway except marching around in a really ridiculous hat.
THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2010
Since my otter happiness has drained away, I ditch the kickboard and flip over onto my back. The big cottonwood overhead makes a green lace against the blue sky. My arms windmill backward, grabbing for water handholds to propel me forward. I focus on lengthening the glide and finally fall into an easeful rhythm.
The tweet of a lifeguard’s whistle ruffles the serenity and I recognize Madison Chaffee at the other end of the whistle. “No running!” Madison orders, and two little girls, formless as baguettes in their fluorescent bikinis, giggle and slow down to a tippy-toed canter. The taller of the two has flyaway blond hair shot through with red and gold like Aubrey’s. The smaller one, a sturdy coppery redhead just like Twyla was, yells out, “Sowwy!”
Though the blonde looks like Aubrey at that age and the cute redhead reminds me of Twyla, Aubrey was the one who had the speech impediment; it took years of therapy before she could manage her Rs and Ws.
Madison swings down off the stand. She is a streak of long tan legs, sunglasses, a glint of silver from the whistle around her neck. Madison Chaffee used to be part of a playgroup that her mother, Joyce, organized when Madison and Aubrey were in the same mothers’-morning-out preschool program. Joyce decided that we would all bring our kids to the pool on Sunday afternoons when time stretched into a Sahara without the oasis of even a tumbling class.
All the moms traded off hanging out on a blanket in the shade of the cottonwood trees, a veritable grove that used to ring the pool, while one of us stayed in the water and played Marco Polo and tossed weighted rings for our polliwogs to retrieve. I quickly came to prefer Marco Polo over the other moms’ discussions of whether the Suzuki or Dalcroze method got better results with the three-year-old violinist. Mostly, though, they all just wanted to hang out with other moms who had quit their jobs and lived in a world where every social encounter their child ever had was arranged by an adult and involved getting in a car. They wanted what we all want: reassurance that they had made the right choices.
I don’t know why Joyce stopped inviting Aubrey and me to the pool sessions. Maybe because I was still shell-shocked from the divorce. Maybe because my ex had left me for a cult whose theology could be summed up in its founder’s wisdom: “What is, is. What ain’t, ain’t.” With the unspoken coda “Now give me all your money.” Maybe because I regularly dropped the F-bomb and didn’t shave my legs. Luckily, though, Dori and Twyla appeared not too long after the expulsion to rescue me from total pariahhood.
Another lifeguard, a boy I vaguely recognize from Aubrey’s senior class, also one of the popular kids, comes to relieve Madison. He stands at parade rest next to the guard tower, legs braced shoulder-width apart, hands folded, vigilantly watching the swimmers as Madison climbs down. Jayden? Brayden? Hayden? I imagine this boy as Aubrey’s sweetheart, both of them poring over college catalogs together, shopping for extra-long jersey sheets for their respective