OCR Text |
Show clothes, my brother's diaper, his soaked hair, streaming in channels that pour through the boards of the deck, spattering the hard red clay, and spraying the white sides of the pool with red dots. She screams, something fierce and deep, a sound my mother has never made before, a sound that renders every other sound ever made a whisper. Oh god, she sobs, oh my god. To the sky she calls, lifting my brother like an offering, laying his tiny body on an altar of air, his blond hair pasted against her skin, the trees towering around us, holding the scene like a globe. My mother is a master SCUBA diver, trained in CPR, first aid, the specific strategies you employ to save someone whose lungs have filled with water, who cannot reach the surface. She knows the technologies needed to save a life. But she does not press his chest or clear his throat, does not put her mouth to his, perhaps because such intimacy would break her beyond what can be repaired. Confused, I stand by the pile of red dirt, caught in a world that no longer makes sense, where brothers drown and mothers wail and daughters forget to watch. The moment is broken, this moment when fate is turned over to the universe and we prepare for a life less one. She bends over my brother, still unable to put him down and resting him across her knees; she begins to press his chest. In between breaths she yells, Go to the Walters and call 911. I'll call dad, I say, heading to the house. No, go to the Walters, now, call 911. I am too young to call the ambulance on my own, yet I have let my brother 71 |