Prologue
So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Genesis, 1:27
June 12, 1986
When Marie read the weather forecast in the paper that morning, she knew it would be a perfect day to take care of the children once and for all. It was forecast to be an unseasonably warm day for central Ohio, with temperatures in the low 90’s in her area. Her oldest son, James, had been begging for weeks now to go in the pool with all of the stubborn consistency that was typical for a 2-year-old. The baby, Elias, was really too young to say much other than “NO” and crawl around into everything.
Marie hated being a mother. She hated it. She hated the endless demands, being shut in for what seemed like an eternity while her lazy husband went to his cushy day job doing accounting for the biggest bank downtown. When she took the kids out shopping, she was the
parent with the two screaming children. It was impossible to do anything; it was impossible to be anything. Richard already made it clear
that the kids were all HER responsibility. He was the breadwinner. Whatever that meant.
Fine. So she was expected to watch the two brats. Her whole existence boiled down to bologna and Pop Tarts and boogers and diapers
filled with shit.
She was lucky when the shit was IN the diaper. Yesterday one of them had liberated a fresh turd and inserted it right into the new VCR.
Now she couldn’t even watch Something Wild again. She wanted to be Melanie Griffith, the crazy unstable girl. When she watched that movie, it was a glimpse into her old life when she was the life of the party.
Richard had changed all of that. It was weird. He had liked her enough when she WAS wild and free to fuck her on the first night he
met her, the night they had met on campus at a party. Now she was supposed to be this perfect little Stepford Wife – or the small-time Ohio version of it, anyway.
He wasn’t even supposed to be a part of her life; for her, he was going to be a one-and-done – and then she had found out she was pregnant. She’d wished so many times that she’d never even told him. She’d wanted an abortion.
But no, she was an idiot. She thought she wanted the drama and the attention. She wanted to make a scene. She wanted to hurt him and
shock him for reasons she still couldn’t quite identify. Maybe it was because he thought he was so cool with his collar up on his Polo shirt.
Maybe it was because he reminded her a little of her dad. Maybe she was really just mad at herself for having a fat ugly day that had inspired her to get drunk enough to fuck a frat boy. She didn’t know, and she didn’t care.
He had called her afterward. She was the one who hadn’t returned the calls. She was getting ready to graduate with her Theater degree and was planning on saying goodbye to this shitty little backwoods state and her shitty parents’ house and everything that felt slow and
backward and redneck and confining. She was going to go to New York and crash on someone’s couch until she was discovered.
Marie’s default expectation was to get her way and have other people do all the hard work for her. She’d been the only child of two
mathematics professors from Denison, who never seemed to understand how to manage the cosmic irony that they had raised a popular,
beautiful cheerleader with a talent for drama.
She was beautiful, with long blonde hair and cornflower blue eyes, D cups, and a small firm ass. What she lacked in talent, she more than
made up for in ego and determination. She was going to be discovered. She was going to be famous. She was going to get the attention she’d deserved all her life but never quite found. She was going to BE somebody. And then the fucking straight line had turned into a fucking plus sign. Thanks, e.p.t. Thanks a whole fucking lot. He had insisted on marrying her, of course he had. Richard was a
proper Baptist boy from Heath. Her parents had sided with him, and the next thing she knew, she was having a full white wedding in the church where she’d been baptized 21 years prior… and had never set foot in again.
For a while, she was happy. She got to pick out dresses. She got to try different hairstyles. She got to direct all aspects of the fairytale spectacle that she knew everyone else knew was a lie. She didn’t care. She was in the spotlight.
And there was no such thing as negative publicity, right?
Then her figure began to change. She retained water. She couldn’t see her feet when she looked down. All the attention that came with
being pregnant; the coddling and touching and friendly inquiries from everyone when she went out to the store – that was nice. But naked…naked she looked like a whale. It was disgusting. She was disgusting.
This little THING inside of her squirmed and kicked. In the late stages of the pregnancy, it kicked her so hard sometimes that it made her pee a little. She had to wear pads near the end of it all, for Chrissakes. Disgusting.
Even when the baby was born, when they brought little James to her to hold that first time, she didn’t well up with the joy that all the
other mothers had assured her that she would. She didn’t want it. She didn’t want him. She didn’t care that he was made up of parts of her and parts of Richard. She should have just gotten the damn abortion.
That had been her first thought.
She didn’t even like Richard. She certainly didn’t love him. She didn’t love his son. The only thing she loved was being the center of
whatever drama was in her life. She certainly didn’t want to share that stage with anyone else, let alone her own child.
The responsibilities of motherhood held no glory, recognition, or applause. Every day was the same drudgery of feeding, changing, burping, sleeping, and praying for two goddamn minutes to her goddamn self. She played the part she was expected to play – she was a classically trained actress, and this was a role she understood. She knew who Richard wanted her to be, who her parents and in-laws expected her to be, who this whole crappy little town expected her to be. She played the role.
Backstage, however, in her private moments, resentment burned in her chest. It ate away at her heart like acid.
When Richard got her pregnant again 6 months after giving birth to James, she wanted to cry. In fact, she had cried. But she’d used the tears that flowed and pretended she was weeping with joy and not despair. Even though she didn’t want Richard around, the fact that he was never home and always working drove her crazy. He got to go out to dinner with other adults. He got to go shopping. He got to travel. He got to LEAVE THE HOUSE. She hated him with a smile and a kiss and an “I love you,” every time he left for the day. She hated him with every casserole, every Sunday service, every sweep of the broom. She hated that damn rental condo and everything it contained. It stifled her.
When they’d moved into their new little house in March, Richard had strutted like a peacock because he’d been able to afford a three bedroom home with a pool. A pool. One more thing she was going to have to manage on her own. The house sat off a main highway, on two acres of the yard she was going to figure out how to landscape, with two other neighbors who had big farms on either side. Their yard had no trees, and she felt so exposed out here. Sad little attempts at privacy bushes around the pool were the only thing that could even be considered foliage.
Not that it mattered. She certainly didn’t want to come out here in her bathing suit. First of all, her body was so incredibly UGLY after
having kids, and even if she could get back in shape and be firm again...the neighbors were old. They were couples in their 50’s. They farmed. All their children were gone and had moved away. No one to look at her; no one to want her. She hated the pool and everything it stood for in Richard’s mind. Richard the Yuppie. They were Yuppies that lived between farmers. It was so funny that it made her want to cry. She was 23 and her life was for shit.
A few weekends back, Richard, his dad, and some of the guys from the church had come out to help clean it out and fill it up, adding the
chemicals and testing the water. While it wasn’t unheard of for the temperatures to get below freezing in Heath in April, it was pretty rare. Richard had decided to take a chance the first weekend that it was warm and sunny and get it ready for summer. James had been fascinated with the pool the whole time. Richard had sternly warned James to stay away from the pool. Marie herself had
been given a long lecture about making sure the boys stayed away from the pool until he could teach them to swim. She’d fought the entire time not to roll her eyes, and had just nodded silently throughout the whole thing. James was barely 2 years old and Elias stayed where you put him, really. How Richard thought they were going to make their way out of the house and into the pool without her noticing was something she couldn’t imagine.
He’d been lecturing her a lot lately. He wasn’t happy that both boys were always clad in nothing but diapers. She tried to explain that James the nudist was always instantly just taking his clothes off the moment they were on and then liberating his little brother from his clothing when she was in another room. Richard also didn’t like the fact that the boys were parked in front of the TV all the time. He didn’t like her spanking them. He didn’t like a lot about her parenting, actually. They fought a lot. She always let him win. It was easier that way. So the pool lecture wasn’t anything new. This time, instead of arguing back, she’d just nodded. She’d assured him that the safety of the children was the only thing in this world she really cared about. He’d given her a long look after that statement, something almost dark in that gaze, something she couldn’t comprehend.
A seed of a plan began to grow in her mind. Maybe this house would be hers again, after all.
She got herself a second cup of coffee and folded the paper. She peered out the window, watching her neighbors drive off to go somewhere.
In the distance, she saw the tractor driving down the dusty dirt path that led to the backcountry of the other neighbor’s property. The
only sound was the television playing loudly in the next room. Richard had left early for work, as usual, and she’d parked James in front of the television to watch Sesame Street while Elias went down for his morning nap. It was time. Getting James near the pool had been easy. He’d been mesmerized by the lights in the water since the pool had been cleaned and prepped for summer. By 10 AM, the sun was beating down and the temps had already reached 80 outside. In her opinion, it was still a little chilly for the pool but that wasn’t going to stop her. The spring pollen left a light film of yellow in patches here and there on the surface.
They were both just wearing their diapers, a normal state of being for the two of them. She was naked. Normally, she hated being naked.
She hated seeing the stretch marks, the sag of her once-firm belly, the fact that her skin seemed now to fall in weird places. While the children had invaded almost every other aspect of her life, she’d refused to let them see her naked. It was one of her only rules. Shower time was Mommy’s time, and she locked them into their room and then locked herself in her bathroom to take a long, hot shower every morning.
But not this morning. They were going swimming. Marie was making a big production out of it. The kids weren’t sure what to focus
on more; the fact that they were finally going to get to go in the pool or the fact that Mommy was naked.
“We don’t want to get the pool dirty with our bathing suits, do we?” she giggled, making a frowny face immediately afterward, “Yuck!”
James was being particularly stubborn this morning about everything. Now that the promise of getting into the pool was actually before
him, James didn’t want to get in it anymore. “Mommy, I don’t want to,” he said hesitantly, “Wanna wait for Daddy.”
“Daddy’s not the only one who knows how to swim, big boy,” she cooed, still holding Elias in the crook of her arm. She snapped her head
so that her long hair whipped across the baby’s face on its way over her shoulder. “Won’t it be a fun surprise for Daddy when he learns you already know how to do it? He’ll be so PROUD of you!” She gushed.
“No, Mommy,” he answered, looking up at her with big sad eyes.
Normally he’d stomp off to do what he wanted to at this point, in any other situation. He was very firmly in his terrible twos and stomping
and tantrums were things she could almost always count on. The water, though, with the sunlight swirling on their faces in random
patterns had almost hypnotized him. He seemed stuck somehow, trapped at poolside with his strange naked mother and his little brother.
His little forehead was creased, making him look almost exactly like his father did when looking at the credit card statement and trying to
work out why something felt wrong.
Marie paused. She considered, very briefly, just grabbing him and forcing him into the pool. But there were the neighbors to consider.
One was still unaccounted for. She couldn’t have him struggling or calling out – or God forbid, screaming for help. She was going to have
to pull out the big guns and guilt him into the pool if enthusiasm wasn’t working. She tried to think about what would hurt James the most –and settled on his love for Richard.
“James, Daddy’s already really mad about what happened yesterday with the VCR, and he told me how he thinks you’re a bad person,” she said sadly, “I know you’re not a bad person. I just thought you could do something that would make him proud and love you again.” She stared at him intensely, putting as much unspoken emotion and concern into her gaze that she could. She let some tears form. James
burst into tears himself now, sitting down on the pavement, his little head in his hands and his shoulders shaking with each quiet sob of misery.
Everything he did was always wrong.
In her arms, the baby began to squirm. She knew that squirm. He was hungry. Soon, he’d start crying. She was running out of time.
“Come on, James,” she cooed again, “Do it for Daddy. We can all jump in together and I’ll hold your hand. That way you’ll know I’ve
got you the whole time,” she added.
James wiped his eyes and stood, walking over to Marie and placing his hand on her free arm, already defeated. At the age of two, he
couldn’t fight the feeling that his life was always going to be an uphill struggle. Marie’s heart began to pound and she felt almost dizzy for a moment.
Was she actually going to do this?
Was she finally going to be free? She squeezed James’ hand, a light, loving touch.
“One, two, three!” Marie squealed, leaping as far as she could towards the center of the pool, where the water was the deepest at 6.6
feet. Her momentum pulled James with her. She experienced a moment of elation as they went airborne, which immediately evaporated as the splash of the cold water hit them. Knowing there was no time to spare, she let go of Elias immediately. She felt the baby brush feebly at her legs and she lightly kicked it away.
James had a death grip on her hand, so she needed her other hand to pry his hand out of hers. The moment she freed herself from his terrified grip, she used her feet to propel herself quickly towards the side of the pool, away from both children. With the practiced grace of a swimmer, she pulled herself out of the pool with her arms and pivoted her lower body so she could sit and watch. In the movies or on television, there was always so much flailing and gasping in this situation. Marie found herself oddly disappointed that the children never even broke the surface of the water once. She saw James scoot along the bottom of the pool to the baby, but they must have started breathing water at that point because that was as far as he got. They both just seemed to be stuck where they were at the bottom
of the pool. She saw some air bubbles rising up, but that was about it.
They didn’t even move around that much, really.
She wasn’t sure how long to wait before she could be sure it was all over, so she unconsciously started singing Whitney Houston’s
“How Will I Know?” for a few minutes, looking up and around from time to time. The boys never had a chance. They hung immobile, under the surface, limbs outstretched like they were waiting for a hug that was never coming.
When nothing more happened, she waited a little longer just to be safe. Out in the distance, she could still hear the tractor going. There
wasn’t any traffic on their state route; it wasn’t one that got a lot of traffic, being more of a feeder to a main highway. This was her moment. She stood up and stretched.
Showtime.
The lazy summer silence was immediately broken by her abrupt screaming. She screamed as loud as she could and leaped back into the
pool. She grabbed both lifeless children, one under each arm and stood up so that her head and shoulders cleared the water.
“HELP!” she screamed into the lazy morning sun and began trudging as fast as she could to the side of the pool where the stairs led out.
Their bodies felt strangely heavy, as she pulled them onto the concrete and set them down. It was like the pool didn’t want to give them up. Both sets of eyes were open. She felt like they were staring as she felt in their necks for a pulse.
“NO!!!” she screamed again, putting her head first on the baby’s chest as if to listen for a heartbeat. She knew there wasn’t one. She then
moved her head to listen to James’ chest. There was also nothing. She felt a surge of elation but forced it down again quickly. Now was not the time.
She looked around wildly at the neighbors’ houses, just in case, but both were silent and still. She sprinted into the house and tore the
receiver from the cradle where it sat on the kitchen wall and dialed the police department on her rotary phone.
So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Genesis, 1:27
June 12, 1986
When Marie read the weather forecast in the paper that morning, she knew it would be a perfect day to take care of the children once and for all. It was forecast to be an unseasonably warm day for central Ohio, with temperatures in the low 90’s in her area. Her oldest son, James, had been begging for weeks now to go in the pool with all of the stubborn consistency that was typical for a 2-year-old. The baby, Elias, was really too young to say much other than “NO” and crawl around into everything.
Marie hated being a mother. She hated it. She hated the endless demands, being shut in for what seemed like an eternity while her lazy husband went to his cushy day job doing accounting for the biggest bank downtown. When she took the kids out shopping, she was the
parent with the two screaming children. It was impossible to do anything; it was impossible to be anything. Richard already made it clear
that the kids were all HER responsibility. He was the breadwinner. Whatever that meant.
Fine. So she was expected to watch the two brats. Her whole existence boiled down to bologna and Pop Tarts and boogers and diapers
filled with shit.
She was lucky when the shit was IN the diaper. Yesterday one of them had liberated a fresh turd and inserted it right into the new VCR.
Now she couldn’t even watch Something Wild again. She wanted to be Melanie Griffith, the crazy unstable girl. When she watched that movie, it was a glimpse into her old life when she was the life of the party.
Richard had changed all of that. It was weird. He had liked her enough when she WAS wild and free to fuck her on the first night he
met her, the night they had met on campus at a party. Now she was supposed to be this perfect little Stepford Wife – or the small-time Ohio version of it, anyway.
He wasn’t even supposed to be a part of her life; for her, he was going to be a one-and-done – and then she had found out she was pregnant. She’d wished so many times that she’d never even told him. She’d wanted an abortion.
But no, she was an idiot. She thought she wanted the drama and the attention. She wanted to make a scene. She wanted to hurt him and
shock him for reasons she still couldn’t quite identify. Maybe it was because he thought he was so cool with his collar up on his Polo shirt.
Maybe it was because he reminded her a little of her dad. Maybe she was really just mad at herself for having a fat ugly day that had inspired her to get drunk enough to fuck a frat boy. She didn’t know, and she didn’t care.
He had called her afterward. She was the one who hadn’t returned the calls. She was getting ready to graduate with her Theater degree and was planning on saying goodbye to this shitty little backwoods state and her shitty parents’ house and everything that felt slow and
backward and redneck and confining. She was going to go to New York and crash on someone’s couch until she was discovered.
Marie’s default expectation was to get her way and have other people do all the hard work for her. She’d been the only child of two
mathematics professors from Denison, who never seemed to understand how to manage the cosmic irony that they had raised a popular,
beautiful cheerleader with a talent for drama.
She was beautiful, with long blonde hair and cornflower blue eyes, D cups, and a small firm ass. What she lacked in talent, she more than
made up for in ego and determination. She was going to be discovered. She was going to be famous. She was going to get the attention she’d deserved all her life but never quite found. She was going to BE somebody. And then the fucking straight line had turned into a fucking plus sign. Thanks, e.p.t. Thanks a whole fucking lot. He had insisted on marrying her, of course he had. Richard was a
proper Baptist boy from Heath. Her parents had sided with him, and the next thing she knew, she was having a full white wedding in the church where she’d been baptized 21 years prior… and had never set foot in again.
For a while, she was happy. She got to pick out dresses. She got to try different hairstyles. She got to direct all aspects of the fairytale spectacle that she knew everyone else knew was a lie. She didn’t care. She was in the spotlight.
And there was no such thing as negative publicity, right?
Then her figure began to change. She retained water. She couldn’t see her feet when she looked down. All the attention that came with
being pregnant; the coddling and touching and friendly inquiries from everyone when she went out to the store – that was nice. But naked…naked she looked like a whale. It was disgusting. She was disgusting.
This little THING inside of her squirmed and kicked. In the late stages of the pregnancy, it kicked her so hard sometimes that it made her pee a little. She had to wear pads near the end of it all, for Chrissakes. Disgusting.
Even when the baby was born, when they brought little James to her to hold that first time, she didn’t well up with the joy that all the
other mothers had assured her that she would. She didn’t want it. She didn’t want him. She didn’t care that he was made up of parts of her and parts of Richard. She should have just gotten the damn abortion.
That had been her first thought.
She didn’t even like Richard. She certainly didn’t love him. She didn’t love his son. The only thing she loved was being the center of
whatever drama was in her life. She certainly didn’t want to share that stage with anyone else, let alone her own child.
The responsibilities of motherhood held no glory, recognition, or applause. Every day was the same drudgery of feeding, changing, burping, sleeping, and praying for two goddamn minutes to her goddamn self. She played the part she was expected to play – she was a classically trained actress, and this was a role she understood. She knew who Richard wanted her to be, who her parents and in-laws expected her to be, who this whole crappy little town expected her to be. She played the role.
Backstage, however, in her private moments, resentment burned in her chest. It ate away at her heart like acid.
When Richard got her pregnant again 6 months after giving birth to James, she wanted to cry. In fact, she had cried. But she’d used the tears that flowed and pretended she was weeping with joy and not despair. Even though she didn’t want Richard around, the fact that he was never home and always working drove her crazy. He got to go out to dinner with other adults. He got to go shopping. He got to travel. He got to LEAVE THE HOUSE. She hated him with a smile and a kiss and an “I love you,” every time he left for the day. She hated him with every casserole, every Sunday service, every sweep of the broom. She hated that damn rental condo and everything it contained. It stifled her.
When they’d moved into their new little house in March, Richard had strutted like a peacock because he’d been able to afford a three bedroom home with a pool. A pool. One more thing she was going to have to manage on her own. The house sat off a main highway, on two acres of the yard she was going to figure out how to landscape, with two other neighbors who had big farms on either side. Their yard had no trees, and she felt so exposed out here. Sad little attempts at privacy bushes around the pool were the only thing that could even be considered foliage.
Not that it mattered. She certainly didn’t want to come out here in her bathing suit. First of all, her body was so incredibly UGLY after
having kids, and even if she could get back in shape and be firm again...the neighbors were old. They were couples in their 50’s. They farmed. All their children were gone and had moved away. No one to look at her; no one to want her. She hated the pool and everything it stood for in Richard’s mind. Richard the Yuppie. They were Yuppies that lived between farmers. It was so funny that it made her want to cry. She was 23 and her life was for shit.
A few weekends back, Richard, his dad, and some of the guys from the church had come out to help clean it out and fill it up, adding the
chemicals and testing the water. While it wasn’t unheard of for the temperatures to get below freezing in Heath in April, it was pretty rare. Richard had decided to take a chance the first weekend that it was warm and sunny and get it ready for summer. James had been fascinated with the pool the whole time. Richard had sternly warned James to stay away from the pool. Marie herself had
been given a long lecture about making sure the boys stayed away from the pool until he could teach them to swim. She’d fought the entire time not to roll her eyes, and had just nodded silently throughout the whole thing. James was barely 2 years old and Elias stayed where you put him, really. How Richard thought they were going to make their way out of the house and into the pool without her noticing was something she couldn’t imagine.
He’d been lecturing her a lot lately. He wasn’t happy that both boys were always clad in nothing but diapers. She tried to explain that James the nudist was always instantly just taking his clothes off the moment they were on and then liberating his little brother from his clothing when she was in another room. Richard also didn’t like the fact that the boys were parked in front of the TV all the time. He didn’t like her spanking them. He didn’t like a lot about her parenting, actually. They fought a lot. She always let him win. It was easier that way. So the pool lecture wasn’t anything new. This time, instead of arguing back, she’d just nodded. She’d assured him that the safety of the children was the only thing in this world she really cared about. He’d given her a long look after that statement, something almost dark in that gaze, something she couldn’t comprehend.
A seed of a plan began to grow in her mind. Maybe this house would be hers again, after all.
She got herself a second cup of coffee and folded the paper. She peered out the window, watching her neighbors drive off to go somewhere.
In the distance, she saw the tractor driving down the dusty dirt path that led to the backcountry of the other neighbor’s property. The
only sound was the television playing loudly in the next room. Richard had left early for work, as usual, and she’d parked James in front of the television to watch Sesame Street while Elias went down for his morning nap. It was time. Getting James near the pool had been easy. He’d been mesmerized by the lights in the water since the pool had been cleaned and prepped for summer. By 10 AM, the sun was beating down and the temps had already reached 80 outside. In her opinion, it was still a little chilly for the pool but that wasn’t going to stop her. The spring pollen left a light film of yellow in patches here and there on the surface.
They were both just wearing their diapers, a normal state of being for the two of them. She was naked. Normally, she hated being naked.
She hated seeing the stretch marks, the sag of her once-firm belly, the fact that her skin seemed now to fall in weird places. While the children had invaded almost every other aspect of her life, she’d refused to let them see her naked. It was one of her only rules. Shower time was Mommy’s time, and she locked them into their room and then locked herself in her bathroom to take a long, hot shower every morning.
But not this morning. They were going swimming. Marie was making a big production out of it. The kids weren’t sure what to focus
on more; the fact that they were finally going to get to go in the pool or the fact that Mommy was naked.
“We don’t want to get the pool dirty with our bathing suits, do we?” she giggled, making a frowny face immediately afterward, “Yuck!”
James was being particularly stubborn this morning about everything. Now that the promise of getting into the pool was actually before
him, James didn’t want to get in it anymore. “Mommy, I don’t want to,” he said hesitantly, “Wanna wait for Daddy.”
“Daddy’s not the only one who knows how to swim, big boy,” she cooed, still holding Elias in the crook of her arm. She snapped her head
so that her long hair whipped across the baby’s face on its way over her shoulder. “Won’t it be a fun surprise for Daddy when he learns you already know how to do it? He’ll be so PROUD of you!” She gushed.
“No, Mommy,” he answered, looking up at her with big sad eyes.
Normally he’d stomp off to do what he wanted to at this point, in any other situation. He was very firmly in his terrible twos and stomping
and tantrums were things she could almost always count on. The water, though, with the sunlight swirling on their faces in random
patterns had almost hypnotized him. He seemed stuck somehow, trapped at poolside with his strange naked mother and his little brother.
His little forehead was creased, making him look almost exactly like his father did when looking at the credit card statement and trying to
work out why something felt wrong.
Marie paused. She considered, very briefly, just grabbing him and forcing him into the pool. But there were the neighbors to consider.
One was still unaccounted for. She couldn’t have him struggling or calling out – or God forbid, screaming for help. She was going to have
to pull out the big guns and guilt him into the pool if enthusiasm wasn’t working. She tried to think about what would hurt James the most –and settled on his love for Richard.
“James, Daddy’s already really mad about what happened yesterday with the VCR, and he told me how he thinks you’re a bad person,” she said sadly, “I know you’re not a bad person. I just thought you could do something that would make him proud and love you again.” She stared at him intensely, putting as much unspoken emotion and concern into her gaze that she could. She let some tears form. James
burst into tears himself now, sitting down on the pavement, his little head in his hands and his shoulders shaking with each quiet sob of misery.
Everything he did was always wrong.
In her arms, the baby began to squirm. She knew that squirm. He was hungry. Soon, he’d start crying. She was running out of time.
“Come on, James,” she cooed again, “Do it for Daddy. We can all jump in together and I’ll hold your hand. That way you’ll know I’ve
got you the whole time,” she added.
James wiped his eyes and stood, walking over to Marie and placing his hand on her free arm, already defeated. At the age of two, he
couldn’t fight the feeling that his life was always going to be an uphill struggle. Marie’s heart began to pound and she felt almost dizzy for a moment.
Was she actually going to do this?
Was she finally going to be free? She squeezed James’ hand, a light, loving touch.
“One, two, three!” Marie squealed, leaping as far as she could towards the center of the pool, where the water was the deepest at 6.6
feet. Her momentum pulled James with her. She experienced a moment of elation as they went airborne, which immediately evaporated as the splash of the cold water hit them. Knowing there was no time to spare, she let go of Elias immediately. She felt the baby brush feebly at her legs and she lightly kicked it away.
James had a death grip on her hand, so she needed her other hand to pry his hand out of hers. The moment she freed herself from his terrified grip, she used her feet to propel herself quickly towards the side of the pool, away from both children. With the practiced grace of a swimmer, she pulled herself out of the pool with her arms and pivoted her lower body so she could sit and watch. In the movies or on television, there was always so much flailing and gasping in this situation. Marie found herself oddly disappointed that the children never even broke the surface of the water once. She saw James scoot along the bottom of the pool to the baby, but they must have started breathing water at that point because that was as far as he got. They both just seemed to be stuck where they were at the bottom
of the pool. She saw some air bubbles rising up, but that was about it.
They didn’t even move around that much, really.
She wasn’t sure how long to wait before she could be sure it was all over, so she unconsciously started singing Whitney Houston’s
“How Will I Know?” for a few minutes, looking up and around from time to time. The boys never had a chance. They hung immobile, under the surface, limbs outstretched like they were waiting for a hug that was never coming.
When nothing more happened, she waited a little longer just to be safe. Out in the distance, she could still hear the tractor going. There
wasn’t any traffic on their state route; it wasn’t one that got a lot of traffic, being more of a feeder to a main highway. This was her moment. She stood up and stretched.
Showtime.
The lazy summer silence was immediately broken by her abrupt screaming. She screamed as loud as she could and leaped back into the
pool. She grabbed both lifeless children, one under each arm and stood up so that her head and shoulders cleared the water.
“HELP!” she screamed into the lazy morning sun and began trudging as fast as she could to the side of the pool where the stairs led out.
Their bodies felt strangely heavy, as she pulled them onto the concrete and set them down. It was like the pool didn’t want to give them up. Both sets of eyes were open. She felt like they were staring as she felt in their necks for a pulse.
“NO!!!” she screamed again, putting her head first on the baby’s chest as if to listen for a heartbeat. She knew there wasn’t one. She then
moved her head to listen to James’ chest. There was also nothing. She felt a surge of elation but forced it down again quickly. Now was not the time.
She looked around wildly at the neighbors’ houses, just in case, but both were silent and still. She sprinted into the house and tore the
receiver from the cradle where it sat on the kitchen wall and dialed the police department on her rotary phone.