“You guys, you’re going to hate me for this, but I’m just too tired,” she said. I stopped running in place. My brother stood on the couch with his shirt off.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“There’s nothing to understand. We need a new weatherwoman.” My brother jumped down. “It was only supposed to get up to seventy,” our mother said. She held the phone by its cord now. The receiver banged the floor. “And I have to work tonight.”
I took my towel off and sulked out of the kitchen. I moped past my brother and fell face-first into the couch.
“I’m sorry,” my mother said, “I’m just too tired.”
I held my breath and pretended I was doing a dead man’s float.
“I can take him,” my brother said, “if that’s what this is all about.” I pushed my face deeper into the crack between the couch cushions. My eyes were open but everything was black.
“You don’t have to come,” my brother said.
There was a pause. “Hmm,” my mother said. In the blackness I could almost hear her think. “How old are you?” she asked my brother.
“Almost eleven.”
“That’s right. And you’re going into what grade?”
“Fifth.”
“Just fifth?”
“But I’m old for my grade. Plus I’m smarter than the other kids at school. When the teacher has to leave the room, I’m the one put in charge.”
“I don’t care about those kids,” my mother said. “This is you and my baby boy we’re talking about. Will you keep your eye on him?”
“Yes,” my brother said. “He’s my brother.” This statement made me smile. I lifted my face out of the cushions. My mother looked like she wanted to give in.
“Fine,” she finally said. “But in for dinner before it gets dark.” We nodded. I could hear the phone’s dead dial tone, beeping at us like a quiet alarm. Our mother picked up the receiver and pointed it at us. “You guys watch out for each other, OK?”
My brother put his arm around me.
“Strangers,” my mother said.
* * *
It was just us at the pool. This was not a rare thing, though when we first moved to the complex late last spring, our mother had promised we would make new friends. She said there was a field behind our building, a nice open space good for any game. But the day we arrived, all we saw were hints of kids. A turned-over tricycle, flat-tired in the grass. A frayed jump rope, hung from an unreachable branch. All signs of potential, long-gone friends. When we asked our mother, she said they must have moved to the new complex that opened up the town over. When we asked why we couldn’t stay in our old house, she told us to figure out a way to afford it. Plus, she said, sure that place was nice, but there was no pool.
As soon as we were through the gate I ran and jumped into the water like a crazy person. My brother took his time. He walked to the diving board and pulled out a list of aerial moves brainstormed over spring. They had names like the Jellybean (a balled-up boy rolled headfirst off the edge), the Secret Serviceman (a bullet-stopping sideways dive), and the Elántra (to be determined). The water was not warm, so the first half hour we spent getting our bodies used to it. The second we played monkey see, monkey do. My brother did moves he knew I could safely do in the shallow end of the pool.
“I like this,” I said.
“Yes,” my brother said, “me too.” He was on the diving board, deciding what move to do next. The sky behind him was blue, the same as the pool, and my brother smirked as an idea dawned. But when he was ready to jump, a siren sounded.
We looked up at the clear sky. Our city had only one siren, with only one sound, which it used for all its warnings.
“Is it a tornado?” I asked.
“Or a prison bust,” my brother said.
“A test?”
“I don’t think we should worry. I’ve heard it louder before.” I said OK and watched him cannonball off. I crossed my legs Indian style and went underwater, sinking myself to the bottom. There I pretended I was having tea with a stranger. I opened my eyes and saw my brother blurred underwater, still grasping his knees into a cannonball. When we popped up the siren was no longer sounding.
Regular pool activities resumed. My brother asked if I wanted to race. Most races began in the shallow end and required the racer to do something like hold one leg and hop to the border of the deep end and back. The loser received a playful dunk as reward. The winner got to gloat. My brother was doing a victory underwater handstand when a cop ran by.
“A policeman ran by,” I said to him when he popped up. He pinched his nose and shot out the water.
“When?”
“Just now. When you were underwater.”
“Was it Tony?” Tony was the cop who would sometimes drive by our apartment, give us knockoff baseball cards. I liked to think that my dad sent him, to check on us when he couldn’t.
“I couldn’t tell,” I said. “He was moving too fast. What does it mean?”
My brother spun in the pool, looking around, but there was nothing to see. It was like nothing had happened. “I guess it means we’re safe.”
We were having so much fun that I wanted to believe him. For caution, we agreed that we would go in ten minutes early. This would make our mother proud. She would realize that my brother and I were responsible, that we were capable of good judgment. We could take ourselves to the pool every day if we wanted, not have to tag along with her to work. We could spend our summer like this.
We went back to racing. I lost a bunch and took in a lot of water when dunked. I had to get out and pee.
“Don’t go inside,” my brother said.
“I won’t.” We both knew if we went inside our mother might see us shivering in our soaked trunks and change her mind.
“Go behind the shed,” my brother said.
“OK.”
The shed was far from the pool, next to the woods. Our complex was at the edge of the city and was bordered by woods on three sides. I always thought of the woods as the deep end of the nonpool world and avoided going into them. My brother was the one who retrieved an overthrown ball, a misbehaving boomerang.
I stepped to the trees and pulled down the front of my trunks. My pee was the clear color of our mother’s homemade lemonade.
I tiptoed my way back to the sidewalk to avoid the grass. I had to watch my feet to do this. When I looked up, I saw a man talking to my brother at the pool. At first I thought it was Rick, an ex-con my mother worked with at the golf course on post. Rick was the meanest person I knew. He always made fun of my brother and me, and when he took us on long rides in his special golf cart, whose engine he had messed with to make the cart go faster, Rick would do this thing where he would pinch our entire thigh with his thumb and pointer finger. We called it the Rick Pinch. We never knew when it was coming and could never be at ease.
But the man was not Rick. This man had a smoother, whiter face. He probably didn’t smell of gasoline and grass like Rick always did. The man sat on the edge of the shallow end with his jeans rolled up. His legs were hairy and his toes skimmed the water’s surface like mosquitoes. I didn’t want to walk very fast to this man and my brother, but the cement was hot. I sat by my brother and cooled my feet in the pool.
“This is Chris,” my brother said.
“Hey, what’s up, little man?” Chris said.
“Hi,” I said. I kept my head down, focused on my feet. I wished my brother would tell this man to go to the deep end. Sorry, he could say, we’re using this end for racing. Just us two.
“Man,” Chris said, “this sure is the place to be. You guys have it made, don’t you think?” My brother agreed, and Chris started talking about how much he missed the pool. How it was good to be back and why did he ever leave this in the first place? My brother smiled and said he didn’t know. It was pretty great. I didn’t want to deal with this, so I went underwater. When I opened my eyes I saw my brother’s legs next to Chris’s legs. Chris had a tattoo on his left ankle. Some symbol or shape. I couldn’t tell what it was. My lungs started to burn, so I floated to the top.