The boys torpedoed, jackknifed, belly flopped, summersaulted, cannonballed into the Holiday Inn pool. Football gear and Halloween costumes bobbed in the water: cleats, Dracula capes, sweaty tube socks, bloody foam axes, shoulder pads, and scream masks. Green face paint clouded the chlorine. The boys blew fart bubbles to rival the hot-tub jets. They made gunshots by popping the surface of the pool with empty bottles of Mountain Dew and trick-or-treat jack-o’-lantern buckets. They screamed “Devil’s night!” and their cries ricocheted off tile, concrete, glass, their glistening hard chests and pudge bellies, in a shrill forever loop.
“Don’t drown Ern!” the mothers yelled. “Give him some air.” They glanced up briefly from their Kroger sale bills and clicking iPhones, then drew back into their tight, mother circle. They sucked nicotine inhalers and munched chili cheese Fritos and the reject Halloween candy their boys would not eat but reminded them of girlhood: Dots, Sixlets, Now and Later.
“Listen,” said Ernie’s mother, scooting her chair deeper into the circle, “I got it out with Shout prewash. Nothing else will do. I tried Tide. I tried baking soda. Nothing. It’s Shout or it’s the blood stains.”
“Lemon,” Caroline said.
The mothers looked at her.
Caroline winced. By the time she had gotten her boys mostly out of their Halloween costumes and into swimming trunks and down to the pool, the other mothers had already taken all the chairs. She’d pulled up a long deck chair and sat on the end where her feet should have gone. It kept wanting to tip forward and bust her teeth out.
Caroline said, “I think I heard lemon will get rid of blood too.”
“Oh.” Ernie’s mother turned back to the mothers and shrugged. “Lemons, too, she says.”
The mothers unrolled root beer Tootsie Frooties.
Chance punched Caroline in the shoulder. “Can I have twenty dollars, Mom?”
“Twenty?” She reached for the diaper bag. “Why twenty?”
“The vending machine. I’m hungry.” Chance was the star of the team. Earlier that day, Caroline had sat in the bleachers and developed a heat rash on the tops of her breasts—it was unseasonably warm for the end of October—while he scored ruthless touchdown after touchdown so that it was excruciating to watch and they started the mercy clock for the other team. She shouldn’t have worn the tank top, even if it was blue and gold stripes, the team’s colors. Outside the port-a-potty, she’d overheard two boys saying “whale knockers” repeatedly. What two boys were doing in a single port-a-potty together, Caroline didn’t want to guess.
“Twenty dollars?” She rooted through the diaper bag. “You ate a whole pizza. How about five?” She dropped the bag and loose diapers fell out and floated in a chlorinated puddle. “I left my wallet in the room.” She put her hand over her face. “And the hotel key.”
Ernie’s mother produced a twenty-dollar bill like a magic trick. “I got it, Chancey. You must be hungry after all that winning today!”
Chance hugged her, pressed his whole wet body against hers. “You’re the best.” He snatched the twenty and ran, dripping, around the pool.
“What a boy,” Derek’s mom said.
The mothers watched Chance jump and try to smack the ceiling on his way to the hotel lobby. He missed. The door slammed behind him and half the team clambered out of the pool to follow.
“He’ll go pro,” Ernie’s mother shook her head at Caroline. “Lucky.”
Caroline laughed. She tugged together the cardigan she’d put over her tank top as soon as they got back to the hotel. It must have been ninety-five degrees in the glass-walled pool room, all that unseasonable October heat steaming the black-night windows. “You can take him.”
She meant this as a joke, but the mothers sucked their nicotine inhalers. They made eyes at each other.
Mica’s mother scratched her long, mauve-painted fingernails on the back of her wrist. Husk, husk, her fingernails said.
“My grocery bill is too high.” Caroline made a face in the direction her son had disappeared. “Ha, ha.”
The mothers laughed, politely, in an oh-those-crazy-sons-of-ours way.
“Caroline,” Mica’s mother said, sliding her gold bangle off her itchy wrist and setting it on the table. “You must be having a heat stroke. Take that sweater off.”
Caroline pulled down the pushed-up sleeves of her cardigan. “I’m freezing actually. Brr!” Sweat dripped between her eyelashes and stung her eye.
“You look hot.”
“They switched my thyroid medicine,” Caroline lied, and the mothers nodded and went back to cutting out fifty-five-cent coupons for Oscar Mayer bologna.
But the truth was, it wasn’t a joke. They could take Chance. Or at least who he was now, this strange thirteen-year-old man with square pectoral muscles, like flesh-colored armor. Every night he stood in front of the bathroom mirror and flexed each pec in turn, then together, then separately again. Caroline had never seen an actual man with square breasts, only Ken dolls. But Chance did not look like Ken: too much hair, black and jutting from every crevice. Caroline’s stomach queased when she thought of birthing him and all the little cells in his body, ready and waiting to send forth miles and miles of greased, coiled hair. How did this happen? she often thought, watching him stare at the back of the Captain Crunch box while he ate breakfast, his furry legs jiggling with impatient male energy.
“Did they up it or down it?”
Caroline patted her damp forehead with her cardigan sleeve. “What?”
“The thyroid meds?” Ernie’s mother asked. In the pool, the linebackers were holding Ernie underwater to see how long it would take his lips to turn blue. He was a sickly child who read books like Hatchet on the bench. But his mother was persistent. She hosted barbeques, embroidered the boys’ names on jackets, and brought homemade lemonade to practice. She wore flouncy skirts and won the MVP award last year as a tribute to her efforts. Once, Caroline had seen her kiss Payton Basley on the lips after he tackled a kid on the other team and opened the field for Chance to make another touchdown. After that, Caroline stood between her and Chance anytime she could.
“Upped.”
Ernie’s mom sighed and shook her tiny head, her hollow cheeks. “You should just eat healthier. Detox. Those pills will kill you.”
The mothers murmured in agreement.
“I saw on the news,” Ernie’s mother said, “they turn your bones straight to mush.”
Caroline scooted back in the deck chair and sat on Harvey’s hand.
He yelped.
“Harv! I forgot you were there!” She scooped up her baby, the three-year-old, and kissed him.
The mothers gave quick, short smiles and turned back to click on their iPhones.
The little pop! pop! ding! as they texted, Caroline heard in her dreams at night. Why didn’t they silence the keyboards? Who were they texting anyway? Surely not the husbands! Did they text their husbands that much? Should Caroline text her husband that much? Did that make her a bad wife and therefore bad mother? Were they texting each other? Sitting next to each other? Did they have a conversation happening out loud and another secret conversation happening in pop!s and ding!s on their phones?
“Hat!” Harv declared and reached for his cowboy hat, which had fallen in the puddle next to the diapers. He jammed it on his head and readjusted the plastic cowboy whip at his side. He settled in Caroline’s lap and then remembered his bucket of treats. He crawled away from her and curled around the jack-o’-lantern.
“Sweet bootsie.” Caroline leaned over him. She chipped crusted pizza sauce from his cheek. His eyebrows were pale blond, nearly translucent. With him, too, she often thought, How did this happen? But in such an entirely different way. This was what I was made for, her heart would swell as she watched her baby sleeping.
Harv halfway opened one eye. “You have candy, Momma. Choc’late.”
“Oh, thank you.”
He laid the plastic whip on her sweaty thigh and patted it with his baby hand. “Watch.”
Chance burst back into the pool room with half the team following. Instead of the Snickers, Reese’s, and beef jerky Caroline expected him to have, he carried a brown paper sack, the kind she used to pack her lunch when she was a secretary at a law firm. When she was slimmer and taking night classes at the community college to start her law degree. When she did not have two boys or a husband who read the news on his laptop during dinner.
Chance squeezed the top of the bag together and held it at arm’s length. “Peee-ewwww!” he boomed. “Smells like Ernie.”
“Where’d you get that bag?” Caroline asked. It wasn’t so much a question of what was in the bag—because it must have held her favorite lunch from her secretary days, olive loaf and Kraft on Bunny Bread, a Tupperware of butterscotch pudding, and an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie—as where could he have gotten it?
They’ve come to make fun of me, she thought.
Whale knockers.
“No,” she murmured. She reached for Harvey.
But Chance did not open the brown bag and throw pudding at her. The boys did not sing “fatty, fatty, two by four” as they had three summers ago at Pizza Hut after a failed game, when the pizza was so long in coming and they were hopped up on Mountain Dew and misery.
Instead, the team went for Ernie.
Chance lifted him out of the pool by his hair. Ernie’s glasses—which had managed by some miracle so far to stay on his face—gave up and plunked in the water. The team chanted, “Devil’s night! Devil’s night! Devil’s night!”
“Yum yum.” Chance sat on Ernie’s stomach and ripped the paper bag down the side. “Hungry, shit face? Hungry for yum yum shit?”
Ernie struggled and screamed, but the team held down his arms and legs and Chance dug his knees into Ernie’s soft belly.
Ernie gave up and lay still on the wet concrete, like a child after making a snow angel.
Chance smeared the gooey brown contents of the bag across Ernie’s open lips. He stood up. “I tricked your treat, beotch.”
“Shit face!” The boys laughed. “Shit face!”
Ernie peeled the limp, sticky bag off his mouth. He wiped his hand on the concrete, and when the bag wouldn’t come off, on his Hawaiian-flowered shorts. He breathed. He cupped his hands and pushed the shit into his mouth. He licked his fingers.
Harvey slept.
The mothers, having run out of reject Halloween candy, discussed a trip to the vending machines. They clicked their iPhones.
Ernie’s mom stood up. “Starbursts?” She combed her bangs with her fingers. “How about I go across the street to that liquor store and get us those Daily’s frozen drink things? Lime?”
Chance was already back in the deep end, sitting on a wobbling boy’s shoulders, slapping Payton Basley who was on another wobbling boy’s shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” Caroline said. She did not know who she was talking to, the mothers or the boys. No one heard her. She stood up and took the cowboy whip with her. She walked to the edge of the pool.
Caroline stepped over Ernie. She squeezed the plastic handle of the whip. It felt like the handle from a jump rope she’d had years ago. She steadied herself, waited for Chance to notice her. When he didn’t, she called out, “That wasn’t very nice!”
Chance stopped slapping Payton and turned to her. His thick eyebrows pinched with annoyance. “Whatever, Mom.” He punched Payton, and Payton flipped off backwards in the water.
The team cheered.
Caroline dropped her arms and the tip of the whip touched the concrete floor. That morning in the hotel room, while she was dressing Harvey in his cowboy costume, Chance had sat on the king bed wearing only his underwear. To embarrass her. He was too old for that and he knew it. “Hey, Mom! Hey, Mom! Look!” He had flicked the braided plastic whip with a tiny movement of his wrist, and the whip cracked and whistled. The tip had burned a red mark on her shoulder.
“Chance!” She felt like a heaving giant, towering over these beautiful, healthy boys.
“It was chocolate from the vending machine!” Chance shouted at her.
The boy holding Chance buckled and they both tumbled into the water. The team swarmed him, trying to hold down the unsinkable Chance, but he emerged, panting and grinning, water gleaming on his square pectorals.
Ernie wheezed.
Caroline looked down at him.
Ernie licked his shitty fingers. “Yum yum.” He giggled. His cheeks smudged with caramel, his eyes too small without glasses.
Caroline flicked her wrist.
The long tongue of the whip struck out and touched the delicate pale skin over Ernie’s heart.
So fast, one of the moms was watching but did not see.
“Huh,” Ernie said. He lay on the concrete and closed his eyes.
Caroline coiled the whip in her hand and walked back to the deck chair.
Harvey was still sleeping, and Ernie’s mother had gone for the Daily’s.
“What’s that on your lip, dear?” Mica’s mother asked.
Caroline touched the bristle of hair she’d plucked a week ago. It had grown back infected. “Oh, I don’t know. Mosquito bite?”
“Looks like a pimple,” Mica’s mother said. She crossed her legs. “Or a cold sore,” she added ominously.
The mothers looked at each other.
Caroline laughed. “You’re always talking about cold sores, Katie. You seem to know a lot about them.” She turned from the mothers and nestled the plastic whip in Harvey’s arms. Like a hen, she stretched her body over the top of Harvey’s little body and tucked him underneath her. She put her face in his hair and breathed in the baby-boy pee smell of him. He needed a diaper change. He was three and she couldn’t bring herself to potty train him, to encourage him to grow up.
“Momma,” he mumbled, shrugging her off. “Hot.”
Caroline sat up. Harvey let her hold his hand. She watched the boys beat each other up in the pool and squeezed his tiny sweaty fingers. She kept the deck chair from tipping forward and busting her teeth out.
When Ernie’s mother returned with the Daily’s, she stood over Ernie with her giant brown-paper bag, like she’d gone to the Macy’s of liquor stores, like she also had a bag of shit to smear on Caroline’s face.
“Ern,” she said. She wore red peep-toe heels, and she nudged his blue flabby arm with her toe. Her toes were painted red to match the little cherries on her skirt. “Ernie. Hey. Are you OK?”
• •
In the waiting room, the boys looked at their cleated feet, chewed Juicy Fruit, rubbed snot from their noses. They held their mothers’ hands.
The emergency room cardiologist, bouncing on his toes and running his hand up and down his face, said it was an extremely rare accident for enough pressure—exact and sharp—to slice the thin membrane of the heart, but not the skin. Leak all of Ernie’s blood into his diaphragm. He had bled out in less than three minutes.
“It could have been anyone,” he repeated to the mothers. “It was an accident. They were roughhousing is all.” He turned to the boys, a firing squad of frightened children. “It’s nobody’s fault.”
They went back to the hotel—what else was there to do but go back to the Holiday Inn? The drive home was too long and they were all too shaky. No one suggested going to the pool. The mothers, minus Ernie’s mother, convened in the lobby and drank the Daily’s. The team, minus Ernie, huddled in Payton’s hotel room watching Shark Tank, episode after episode, gorging themselves on more Papa John’s pizza and Halloween candy and Mountain Dew until they threw up and could eat more.
• •
Caroline put her sons to bed on either side of her, turned off the lamp, and waited in the cool dark. Alert with the novelty of the plushy mattress and the deep, down pillows. Listening to her babies breathe.
The air conditioner whirred on.
In the hallway, a man’s low voice and a woman’s high laugh.
Chance tossed and beat the pillow.
Chance sighed.
Chance untucked the sheets and threw back the comforter.
The baby snored softly.
Caroline waited.
Finally, when the room turned gray with the terrible morning sun, Chance broke. He sobbed. His body curled and shuddered.
The baby cried, startled awake, washed in the panic of his brother.
With a sweep of her arms, Caroline scooped her boys to her sunburned breasts and held them tightly, until it was possible they might shrink and shrink and she could love them again.
“Mom,” Chance wailed. “I sat on him. I killed Ern!”
“Baby,” she said. “I know.”