Mum had to go out for shopping and stuff and I guess she thought I was better, because she left me alone, promising to be back soon. As soon as the car pulled out, I crutched outside, opened the gate, let myself into the pool area.
It was still pretty bad. I could kind of see the new plants in there, some with their leaves sticking out, some down low. Every now and then there was a little movement on the surface and ripples spread out. Those poor fish, I reckoned, trying to swim through the slime. But Mum promised it would be better in a few days.
I lowered myself onto one of the pool chairs and laid down the crutches beside me. It smelled mouldy but I ignored it. Sat in the pool area for the first time. I’d walked through here a few times when I had to, but never just sat and looked at where Toby had died.
The last time we’d swum together was the day before Toby drowned. Dad had come out of the studio kind of happy, saying the sculpture was going well and he could have a break. Mum and me were playing with Toby, helping him swim a few strokes between us. He could dog-paddle the short distance from one of us to the other. I guess I thought that meant he could swim.
Dad watched us from the deckchair, and I remember looking up at him and he had this big goofy grin on his face, like life was so fucking fantastic, and I guess it was, right then, though I didn’t know it.
It was his fault, he said. Dad’s invention left the gate open and Toby got through the gate. Mum left Toby alone for a minute. Dad had his back turned. Mum found Toby in the pool. Dad was arrested. I couldn’t make sense of any of it.
I shut my eyes. It was hot. My leg sweated under the plaster. I could smell my underarms and I thought I could smell the water, the green soup it had turned into. It was creepy. You couldn’t see into it. There could be a dead body down there and you wouldn’t know.
I still couldn’t picture what Toby looked like dead.
One of those moments hit. It was like a huge wave, coming out of nowhere and slamming into me. I held on to the chair with both hands and clenched my teeth together, and when that didn’t work I screwed my face up. A whimper came out of me. I was alive, and I guess I was glad, but it didn’t mean I’d ever get over Toby.
After a while I kind of got control again. I let go of the chair. Wiped my face on my T-shirt. Wished it wasn’t so hot.
I could never remember if I’d said goodbye to Toby on the morning he died. Maybe trying to remember it in a different place would help. I shut my eyes. I’d been about to go to school and Mum had told me to put on deodorant and I’d gone back to the bathroom. I tried to watch it like a movie in my head. I could see myself reading to Toby, flipping through the pages. I picked him up and put him into the highchair. Buckled the little belt that held him in there. Mum came in from her swim and asked me about how to make breakfast. I ate breakfast. Then there was a blank. Deodorant. Blank again, and then I was walking across the grass towards the shed to get my bike. As I wheeled it out Dad was pushing the bin to the gutter for the garbage collection, and he came back in the gate before I went out. Clapped me on the shoulder to say goodbye, and I remember hoping he wouldn’t kiss me, like he sometimes did in public, forgetting I was nearly sixteen. I pushed the bike through the gate and closed it.
Something nagged at me.
Again: I turned as I closed the gate behind me and saw Dad heading to the studio. Because he’d put the garbage out, he wasn’t near the pool gate. He was headed to the back door of the studio, the one he hardly ever used.
Walked through it again like it was a film set. Heard the parrots making a racket, remembered it was hot and sunny, just like now. Heard the click click click of the bike. I’d been thinking about those boys in the year above me, the ones from the pizza parlour, and working out how I was going to avoid them at school, and what I was going to do if I couldn’t avoid them, and thinking there was a good chance I’d be called Little Mummy all over school and that would be the end of my invisibility. That’s what I was thinking. And Dad was walking to the back door of the studio, and back in the house Mum was finishing breakfast with wet hair, and the gate clicked behind me and I put my foot on the pedal and pushed off, swinging my leg over the bike and leaving that world behind me forever.
I think maybe I got it, finally. What Dad was doing.