No Harm Can Come to a Good Man. James Smythe
Securing it, actually working on it, that’s a way of making their future seem as if it’s going to happen. His phone rings, Amit’s name on the screen; the photo of his grinning face that was taken on their first meeting.
‘Where are you?’ Amit asks.
‘At the lake house.’ Laurence doesn’t let go of the wrench; he’s still forcing it, still trying to get the water to flow.
‘You shouldn’t have run off. There are people asking for you.’
‘Tell them it’s family time. Tell them this is the sort of candidate I’ll be: a man who gives a shit about stuff like that still.’
‘You done the questionnaire yet?’
‘No. Not even close.’
‘Larry.’
‘Amit.’
‘You need to, you know that.’
‘I know,’ Laurence says. He looks down, pulls the phone away from his ear. It’s wet with sweat and, as he wipes the screen of the phone on his shirt, the light dances across the muddy water at his feet. There are ripples and he feels the water lapping at his ankle, the energy that it carries coming through and tickling the hairs on his legs. The sound of it echoes in the space. He wonders if this is an effect of his effort, maybe the pipes shuddering as they try to let their water out. It picks up, suddenly more violent, tiny waves coming from the far wall. ‘I have to go,’ he tells Amit, and he hangs up the phone, shining the light again. The waves bounce the light around. He walks towards the wall that the ripples seem to be coming from. He crouches and presses his hand against it, feeling around. There’s a crack in the concrete; it’s only slight and he can’t tell if that’s the cause of this, but it feels like it is. A crack like this, there has to be repercussions. He wonders where this has come from.
The house is empty and quiet apart from the reverberations of the water in the cellar as it eases, as the waves die down. He thinks about washing his feet, which are the color of soot now, so he walks upstairs and through the kitchen, to the outside. The back door is already wide open. He pads along the dock and catches himself looking across the water again. He’s sure that he can see something in the distance, across the water, through the mist, a light, or the reflection of a light. He stares at it. It’s almost hypnotic, for that second.
It’s only so slight.
He sits and dangles his feet in the water, and they are wet, and he looks down at them to see if they’re clean yet and there is Sean, suspended underneath, the crown of his head jutting from the surface. Laurence stares for a second as he tries to parse what he’s just seen and then he hurls himself down from the dock and he pulls at his son’s head and shoulders, trying to yank him up, but the boy doesn’t move. Laurence heaves in air and then dives down, frantically pulling at his son’s limbs, using his body almost as a ladder to get lower, and then he finally feels the weeds that are wrapped around Sean’s foot and ankle, going between his toes and all around, and he wrenches but they won’t tear. The weeds are like thick rubber.
So he feels lower, to the root, thinking that might be easiest. He finds it up against concrete at the bottom of the house, the foundations at the base of the dock. This is where the weeds have grown, boring into the concrete and cracking it. The wall here leads to the cellar. This is what caused the flooding; and what Laurence felt around his own legs, his son’s frantic and desperate kicking before he stopped breathing.
Laurence pulls that part of the plant out somehow and thinks, in that second, of those moments where people find superhuman strength when in crisis, and Sean’s body drifts upwards. It’s free. He grabs it and he pushes his son’s head above water, then climbs out onto the dock, pulling Sean with him. He tries to give him mouth-to-mouth as he knows to do it. He pushes on Sean’s chest, worried about doing it with too much force. He doesn’t want to hurt him. He turns his head and he breathes into his boy’s lungs again.
‘Please,’ he says, ‘oh God, please,’ and he breathes again; and then so does Sean, coughing up water. He doesn’t open his eyes, and his breathing is shallow and labored, heaves that sound somehow less than human. Laurence runs for his phone and dials 911. He shouts about where they are but the address is hard to find. He describes it to them and they say that they’ll be minutes. Support him, they say. Keep him breathing. If he stops, breathe into him again. Keep repeating this.
He does. He hangs up and he waits for the ambulance and he watches his son’s face so closely that he hopes Sean can feel his hot breath on his skin, willing him to stay alive.
It’s only a minute before the Staunton Sheriff’s department arrives. They come tearing down the track and the deputy gets out and rushes to the boy, taking over. Laurence backs away and watches it all as if from a dream.
Deanna storms through the house, shouting Lane’s name. She goes to her room and throws the door open and her daughter is there, on her bed. There’s a boy with her; he’s not like Deanna imagined, being clean cut, wearing a bright rugby-style shirt; or, he was. Now, it’s on the floor at the foot of the bed. Deanna doesn’t even look at him; she stares instead into her eldest daughter’s eyes.
‘I’ve been calling you.’
‘I was busy,’ Lane says, but her voice is shaking and weak. She’s ashamed, whether she’ll admit it or not.
‘Get dressed,’ Deanna says, ‘you’re coming to the house with us.’
‘No,’ Lane replies, and Deanna is about to shout at her, and to shout at this boy, to tell him to get out of the room, when her own cellphone rings. It’s Laurence. She turns away from Lane’s room, hearing her daughter and the boy fumble for their clothes, and she answers. Dumbly, she listens to his slow, measured politician’s voice as he tells her what happened, or some version of it as best he understands it; that Sean is alive and being treated. He tells her about how he found him, and how he didn’t know. Deputy Robards came, and he held Sean’s tongue back, because their son began choking on his own tongue, and Sean nearly bit through the finger. Apparently that’s a good sign, Laurence says. He has bite marks, almost through to the knuckle; that detail, offered up. She didn’t need it but Laurence stresses: this is a good sign.
‘How long was he under the water?’ Deanna asks.
‘Minutes,’ Laurence tells her. ‘Six or seven minutes, maybe eight. I don’t know.’ He tells her to come to the hospital. She says that she will.
Lane stands in front of her mother. She can see it in Deanna’s face.
‘I need you to watch Alyx,’ Deanna says.
‘What’s happened?’ Lane asks. No antagonism, no challenge. She knows from the look she’s being given that this is serious.
‘Your brother fell into the lake,’ she says. ‘He’s alive.’ That seems enough; a thing to latch onto for all of them, and then she goes to the car and gets in and starts the engine. She doesn’t need anything else. She drives.
This is the first time that she’s had to go to hospital for one of the kids. They were lucky with Lane: ten years older than the twins, and Deanna and Laurence were ten years younger when they had her, ten years more stupid; but still they got through with her having nothing more major than a scrape or two. Nothing broken, nothing lost, no emergency trips to the hospital. Maybe, she thinks, they got complacent.
She thinks about the eight minutes that Sean was underwater. She wonders if eight minutes is a long time to not take a breath.
She doesn’t know the way to the hospital. She relies on the ClearVista app on her phone to tell her where to go. She listens to its voice and tries to let that be all that she can hear.
She parks in the short-stay – because, she thinks, that’s all this can be, because she’ll go in and they’ll be sending Sean home with some medicine or an inhaler or something, and a lesson learned about what to do and what to not and when to listen to your parents, because that’s the sort of injury that kids recover and learn from – and she