Drown

I couldn’t hear him scream. I think that’s the worst part—the idea that his pleas for help went unnoticed by the world.

 I dip my toes in the water, the bitter cold turns them swollen and purple. Ugly. The waves are too gentle, they’re lapping over my feet and making their way up to my ankles, but I want them to knock me to the ground and drag me into my own watery grave. I want the wind to whip me out of existence, for thunder clouds to absorb me, for my body to dissolve into seafoam. I want to feel what he felt. I want to hurt.

I wonder what he saw in those last moments. I read hundreds of personal accounts of near-death experiences. I thought it might make me feel closer to him, to feel his pain when his soul was ripped from his body and his suffering went unnoticed. Some people spoke about that cliche white light—reaching towards it to feel the warmth it provided. One person said it was like being kissed all over—hot breath and slick saliva tickling his skin—making him feel loved for the first time in years. Other people claim they saw God. We both knew there wasn’t a God though, no man in the clouds who was supposed to save us from damnation. 

A few weeks before his death, as Kai and I hid beneath our father's pool table to watch movies on my laptop, fingers slick from butter and salt, Kai asked me if heaven was real. He held the number seven ball in his palm, imprinting the sleek red with sticky fingerprints. It was the ball I stole from the hotel across town when our’s went missing—the red a shade darker than it’s number fifteen counterpart. Our father jokingly called me a sinner when I pulled it out of my jacket pocket. “Talia, don’t tell me you're turning into a little thief! Keep that up and you’ll be turned away from heaven’s gates,” he had said with a chuckle before ruffling my hair. 

I pulled Kai into my lap, tucking his head beneath my chin. He was getting too big for me to cradle him like I used to—his limbs thin and lanky, dusted in freckles that he got from our mother. His neck crooned beneath me, chin pressing into his chest.

“Maybe, but I don’t think so,” I responded. I wanted to tell him that heaven’s just a place that people who are afraid of death created. That it's a false fantasy that makes the idea of dying less scary, but I knew my mother would have a fit if she found out. I stopped believing in heaven and an afterlife when I was twelve. That was the year I almost drowned in our pool and my grandmother told me that heaven almost gained another angel. I wish I told him it was real. He was only nine and rather than ensuring him that he had a place to go when his light dimmed, I made him fear his downfall. Maybe if I lied to him, he would have had some hope as his unheard screams filled his lungs with water. 

He sank further into my lap, his back arching over my thigh, “What about hell?” As I shook my head in disagreement, he nuzzled into my plump stomach, imprinting the features of his face against my skin.

It’s too bright now. The sun is blinding, it whites out my vision, leaves me squinting and searching for the exact rock where he hit his skull—the bloodstains washed away now. I want to see the ugliness. Ignore the children building sandcastles and digging moats, a first date sharing the last beer beneath an umbrella, the golden retriever diving in the water on the search for a stick. I focus on the seagull that picks at a crab carcass. Pulling the fleshy meat from the shell, emptying it of its being. The corpse bubbles with seawater. 

I shouldn’t have let him swim that day. It was mid-December and the sky was twisting dangerously. “The calm before the storm” as he would say, his hands reaching towards the sky as he waited for the first raindrops to fall against his skin. I was bundled in my heaviest jacket, he wore nothing but board shorts. He loved the water, loved splashing in the waves and finding hidden treasure buried in the sand—a box of bottle caps, broken glass, fishing hooks, and missing rings beneath his bed. 

Our mother never took him to the ocean, she had a fear of water. Aquaphobia. It started the day she found me sitting at the bottom of our backyard pool. My father taught me how to lay on the pool floor as if I were sleeping—how to release all the air within my body and just sink. I used to stare at the sky through the ripples of water until I couldn’t hold my breath anymore. My eyes would burn a bright red from the chlorine, but it was worth it to see the kaleidoscope of colors from beneath the surface. I wanted to beat my time limit, which was two minutes and twenty-seven seconds, so I wore cargo shorts and shoved them with the rocks from my mother's garden to help me sink—to resist the urge to float to the top and breathe. She first saw the timer on the patio table which read four minutes and thirteen seconds, and then saw me. She thought I was suicidal. She made our father drain the pool later that day. It became an empty hole in our lives that gathered leaves and rainwater.

She then finished nursing school when I was thirteen and Kai was four. Since she worked in a hospital so close to the beach, ocean inflicted injuries were common. Surfers rushed into the ER with a missing arm or an infected calf—puss oozing where the flesh was torn. Her association with water became death and pain. 

Now I see why she was so afraid. Why she’s more afraid now.

The beach was empty when I took him. Our father used to make fun of the people who tried to swim during the off-season. The waves were always too strong. He would pound his fist against his chest and cough to explain how the cold would stop “those idiots” lungs mid breath. Kai would fill his cheeks with water and spit it out onto the table as our dad would playfully give him the Heimlich. They would erupt with laughter as I picked up the rag and cleaned up the liquid before our mother walked in. 

I wish we listened. We never listened.

Our father painted the casket a deep blue, trimming it with white. He said he wanted to do it himself, that he didn’t want his son buried in something as generic as mahogany or a polished black. I sat in the garage and watched him paint it. He would play Kai’s favorite Beach Boys record and wear a purple bandana around his mouth and nose to catch the tears as they fell. I forgot that caskets could come in that size, an extra small. We bought it online because shopping for one in a funeral home would make it feel too real. Getting it in the mail felt more like a gift than a chore. It felt like Kai was receiving a package rather than being thrown into one. 

My mother screamed when she saw the finished product, she looked between my father's stained hands and the tiny coffin, hands trembling over her parted lips. He found the irony funny, his final father and son joke he’d ever be able to make. He painted light blue waves on the side, the ones that arch and roll. He thought Kai would have liked it. I knew that if he had survived, he would have become like our mother, inheriting the fear of water. He would have hated the coffin, but our father looked so proud when he finished his paint job. Mother packed a bag and left to stay with her sister that night, her body quivering as she stared at the painted coffin that reminded her of how her only son had died.

At the funeral, one week and six days after Kai’s death, my mother refused to sit next to my father and wore the darkest sunglasses she could find to mask the blue color. My father had a red imprint of her palm on his face from when he went to hug her and suggested throwing the afterparty at the beach where he died. He’s always been an insensitive man, one who uses morbid humor as a coping mechanism. He never learned how to handle the loss of a loved one. When his father died a few years prior from a heart attack, he began the tradition of clutching at his heart and gasping mid-way through eating a burger or drinking a Big Gulp. Then, he’d wave a finger in the air and holler out “Not today, Dad!” 

I sat between them at the funeral, my mother gripping my hand as the priest spoke about Kai’s life, my father rubbing my knee to reassure himself that at least he still had one kid around. I felt guilty when I was asked to speak. My mother’s speech was incoherent since she was too weak to utter anything besides choked-up sobs. She didn’t let my father speak, she didn’t want him to make more of a mockery out of the funeral than he already had. I wrote my speech down on my pink stationery about the future he could have had. It felt wrong to speak so kindly about a life I ended.

They never took his death out on me. They took it out on eachother. My father blamed my mother—he believed that if she had been more lenient when it came to Kai visiting the ocean, then we wouldn’t have snuck out during storm season. My mother blamed my father—insisted that he should have known better than to allow their teenage daughter to care for their naive child. They should have pointed the finger at me, should have punished me for not keeping their little boy safe. The death of a child almost always leads to divorce. Death brings grief, and grief reveals people's true emotions and resentment. They resented each other, while I resented myself. 

The first time I saw my father cry was three nights after the funeral. As I padded into the kitchen for a glass of water and melatonin, I saw the door to Kai’s room partially open. I peeked through the sliver, holding my breath. My father was curled up on Kai’s twin-sized bed, his knees pulled up to his chest. His back was turned to me, Kai’s baby blanket clutched in his arms and draped around his neck. The nightlight I had gotten him for his eighth birthday was switched on, casting multi-colored stars and swirls onto the ceiling. Streams of light danced across the dresser and closet door, illuminating the body on a mattress two-time too small for him. I wouldn’t have known he was crying if I hadn’t seen the way his body was trembling—convulsing in sorrow. Sometimes, I’d hear a soft sniffle or quick wailing silenced by a pillow. I’m not sure if that was the first time he cried over Kai, or just the first time I caught him doing it. 

My mother never stopped crying, or maybe at some point she did. She stopped coming to the house, stopped calling to check in on us. It was too difficult for her to be in the place where she raised her baby boy. Everything there reminded her of him, and she couldn’t face the fact that he was gone but everything he touched was still around. She also didn’t want to be around the man she blamed for his death. It was all too much for her.

Neither of them ever asked about me. I suppose they didn’t have to. I wish they did.

The day he died, I was sitting in the sand texting my ex-boyfriend, Cole, reading his pleads for me to take him back, saying he loved me, then asking for a picture of my tits. The anger, embarrassment, and ice-shattering wind made my cheeks red—my fingers quickly tapping as my groans of irritation were silenced by the waves crashing against the shore. I would be lying if I said I didn't consider it. I contemplated seeking cover in a porta-potty or a shrubbery shelter just so I could lift my top and snap a quick photo. A bright flash that would expose my desperation and insecurities. 

I only tore my attention away from him for a limited amount of time, but when I finally looked up, my fingers itching at my jacket zipper, he was gone.

I thought he was playing a trick on me, I stood up and allowed my bare feet to sink into the sand, waddling to the shore with my skirt bunched in my fist. I called his name, kicking at the water and waiting to see his head pop up. He always did the same thing when I took him here, he’d wait until he thought I was worried, then thrust his body out of the water, hands in the air and a goofy smile on his face, “Got you!” he’d yell. Then he’d shake the water out of his hair and run towards me, laughing as I backed away and dodged his attempt to shove his soaking body into mine.

Then, a hand brushed against my ankle. Fingertips slack and pruned. His body was wet and a raw pink from the cold, lips a pale blue and eyes popped wide—dull and lacking their vibrancy. His board shorts were gone, he was bare and exposed. He looked in-human. The image of him tumbling through the water, somersaulting with each wave, head bashing into the rock he used to sunbathe on. His lungs filling with water with each scream, each painful howl for me, the only person who could have saved him. Then the warm kisses against his skin, the final silence before death, the light that lifted him away from his pain. If any of those online accounts of death were real, that is.

When he was seven and I first started taking him to the ocean, his favorite thing to do was float face down in the water. He wanted to scare me, to act like he was dead. The first few times I’d run into the water fully clothed, lifting his body up and watched as he’d burst out laughing. I would throw him back into the ocean, his limbs flailing and fingers quickly moving to plug his nose. He liked the attention he got when people thought he was dead. He liked the look of panic on their faces and the way they would coddle him and whisper prayers into his ear. It's why he’d hide underwater or float on top of it. I wanted to believe that he had just gotten really good at that game. That he had mastered the art of faking his death.

I suppose both of us were guilty of using the water as a way to gain attention, whether purposeful or not. We used it to shelter ourselves from the outside world for just a moment. While I sank to the bottom, he floated on top. Bubbles of air leaving our lips and drifting to the surface. Hands reaching out towards each other, fingertips brushing but never holding on.

I tried to say goodbye that day. I pulled him onto the sand and checked his pulse. My two fingers digging into his neck, begging for the subtle thump against my fingertips. I knew he was gone by the way his skull was staining the sand crimson. I was selfish. The idea of sirens and flashing lights tainted his innocence and diminishing mortality. I didn’t want to be questioned by the police or watch my brother be zipped up in a body bag or see yellow caution tape skewed around our spot. So I didn’t call the police. Maybe if I did, my father wouldn’t have had to paint a casket and my mother wouldn’t have left the house. I called my father instead, but I could barely hold the phone to my ear. I just let it ring, and when he answered, the only thing he could hear were my screams and a location.

I had pulled Kai into my lap like I used to, his body heavy and limp against my limbs. He looked so small in my arms, so innocent and pure. I pulled off my jacket and draped it over him, trying to keep him warm and protect his modesty. I ran my fingers through his matted hair, untangling the pieces that clumped with sand and clots. I counted the freckles that were scattered across his face. We used to play connect the dots with them on his arms with Sharpies, making new constellations against his skin.

 I was on freckle number seventy-eight when our father came running down the beach, wearing his flannel pajama pants and the “World’s #1 Dad” shirt we got him for Father's Day three years ago. When he saw Kai, he grabbed me by the shoulders and yanked me away from him. I watched as Kai's body fell into the sand with a thud. I couldn’t hear my father’s yelling over the waves, I could only see his lips moving in fast rhythms. He picked Kai up and I screamed as I saw the way his head lolled back and eyes rolled open. He ran with him in his arms towards the car, stumbling through the sand. He left me on the beach to cry, my phone vibrating with another text message from Cole.  

I step deeper into the water, my dress bubbling around me, exposing my legs and washing away his imprint on my stomach. I stop as the waves lap against my collar bone, my shirt morphing to my skin. 

I plug my nose and allow the water to engulf me, releasing all my air and sinking to the ocean floor. I stare at the sun through the subtle waves, a mosaic of yellow and blue hues. I can’t remember Kai’s face anymore. All I can remember is his hands wrapped around the pool ball, rolling it between his palms, and asking for salvation.

All I can do is scream.