My brother Xavier and I were never very close. Not since childhood. There had been a six-year age difference, which might as well have been generations. I was always the black sheep of the family. Ironically, in my youth – it was thought that I would go on to be the most successful, but things in my life always took a weird sideroad into failure. I abhorred going to family get-togethers because the family would engage in lengthy conversation that seemed to revolve around expensive travel, buying RVs and topics concerning home-ownership. I was just doing my best to try to survive. I couldn’t even afford a mortgage of my own yet.
The family decided to throw a party to celebrate Mother’s Day weekend and we rented a house with a swimming pool near the coast. My parents came and so did my brother and sister with their families. The house was very boxy and modern in design with 2 stories. The lower floor met a patio out back inlaid with large smooth square pavers, encasing an inground swimming pool that was 18 feet by 36 feet. The shorter end ran parallel to the back of the house, with the longer end jutting out into the backyard. The patio along the longer side was wedged between the pool and the house which continued onward. Inside the house, this was the den area.
On the second story of the house there was a deck that overlooked the pool, it protruded out over the patio along the lengthier side, not quite meeting the end of the pool. It was on this second deck that a propane barbecue grill had been placed sort of midway along the side nearest the pool. When the family arrived, this deck became a lot busier with coolers and other outdoor items. A small cooler got left next to a chair, and my brother Xavier, who was quite the daredevil, decided that he would jump off the chair into the pool below. The pool was not directly beneath the deck, so he would have to jump out a distance of at least 6 feet to make it into the water. Xavier was 6’4” and around two hundred pounds. He landed in a cannonball, and water shot up in every direction. The children shrieked with amusement while everyone else just stood there assessing how damp they had gotten in the aftermath.
As the day went on, his two oldest children attempted the jump when no one was paying much attention, getting a running start and launching themselves first onto the small cooler then off the chair and over into the pool, splashing as they went. I cringed every single time, remembering a similar game I played with my sister when we were children where we jumped off our bunkbed onto our feather duvets and one time I missed, shattering the bone in my arm in several places. They were all fearless. What would happen if they accidentally hooked their foot on the way over or they didn’t quite make the six-foot gap? The ground below wasn’t exactly soft.
Around dinner time, they were pulling food off the barbecue as I walked out toward the deck. I wasn’t even acknowledged by his wife, who just floated past me without even meeting my eyes in the hallway as if I was the wind. There on the deck was their youngest child, who everyone in the family called Eight, because she was the eighth grandchild. She was just over two years old. I called her Eightball.
I had only seen my niece at one other family get-together before this one and my brother was very distant from the family otherwise, so I wasn’t very close with Eight, where I had some history with my other nieces and nephews.
She stood at the end of the deck. She still had very fine, short dark hair for a two-year-old and big round brown doll-like eyes. Her head was slightly too big for her body. She was light tan, except for her chubby sun-kissed cheeks.
Eight was wearing a dress the color of poppies. I could see her as I was walking past her mother out toward the deck, not quite outside. I turned around to see if anyone was coming because no one was out there with her. They had left her out there alone. And when I turned back, she was bolting toward the small cooler. She stepped onto the chair and swung over the railing of the deck. I couldn’t yet see if she had made the jump, as I wasn’t outside. I could only see her flying off the balcony in a strange trajectory. My heart sank beneath me, and all the blood rushed out of my face. I heard a small splash. I stepped outside onto the deck and looked into the pool. I could see her, swimming in a dive below the surface, and then she turned and stared directly at me. She had stopped swimming, and was just staring at me. It was then that I realized she wasn’t even holding her breath. The thought also occurred to me that if she had stopped then she didn’t yet know how to swim to the surface. She was just doing what she saw up to a point, and copying her siblings. She stared at me with her big round doll-like eyes in the water as she began to move her limbs around in an uncoordinated distressed motion.
I looked back into the house, but no one was there. I let out a scream, “Xavier!” but I heard no reply. The second floor was quiet. Oh God, I’m going to have to make the jump myself, I thought. I wasn’t sure about making the six-foot gap to the pool, or even making it safely over the railing, but if I didn’t jump it would take much longer to go through the house to the stairs and make it down to the pool. Every second seemed to matter. In my mind, I could already hear my skull cracking on the edge of the pool as I stepped up onto the chair and jumped. I fell into the air and attempted to steer my body into a landing over the water, which ended in a sloppy cannonball. It took a moment to orient myself. I hadn’t gone swimming in ages and I was never a very strong swimmer. The weight of my clothes as they became saturated with water only added to my problems. I thrashed around in a doggy paddle looking for the red dress that Eight was wearing, or anything. There was nothing except water all around me. I kept swimming and searching for her, checking below the surface. I was sure I had landed close to her, but my jump must have pushed her off somewhere.
Just then, her mother Hazel walked back out onto the second deck to retrieve her, and discovered me in the pool. She was shouting and pointing at the far end of the pool, but I could only hear her muffled voice under the water. I swam up to the surface.
“She’s over there in the corner!” she pointed at the deep end of the pool. I swam toward it as fast as I could, my heart banging like a drum. She had been underwater for some time now. I dove down and she was there, in her dress, laying at the bottom of the pool, her big doll eyes still open. Hazel had already called for 9-1-1 on her cell. I collected Eight in my arms and then kicked my way to the surface pulling her up through the water. I laid her gently on the pavers, then attempted to climb out of the pool, forcing myself up with my arms along the edge in my waterlogged clothes. Once I was out, I checked for her breathing but there wasn’t any sign of it, so I began performing CPR on her as the others came from the house. My brother pushed me out of the way to take over. Eventually paramedics arrived with an ambulance and took her away.
I stood there, drenched, by the pool for a while, just thinking about what had caused this and if I had done anything differently, would it be different. I couldn’t stop shaking at the thought. My whole body vibrated with unanswered disappointment. I glimpsed over at the glass window on the first floor that looked out onto the pool. The blinds were closed as the sun was beaming down on it, but in its reflection, I could see a girl with a poppy-colored dress and giant doll-like eyes staring at me from the yard beyond the pool, and then she ran out of the window’s view. I turned to look, but the yard was silent now. The water from where we had exited the pool was already evaporating off the pavers. I stood there watching the window until the sun dipped down, not sure what else I was hoping to see. I still can’t get the image of her out of my mind of her big doll eyes staring back up at me from below the surface of the pool. How did she know I was even there?
