This was the place, of course—under their special tree—but far enough from the biggest roots that the shovel could break through the earth.
“What if we forget where we buried it?” Ursula said.
“I don’t think that would happen, but just in case, we’ll draw a map on the wall of the woodshed,” Alison said.
They would not forget this or anything else about that afternoon. It was the last day of their old wonderful life.
39.
Pocket of Stones
Monday was the day herFamily Treenon-comic strip had to be delivered to the syndicate, and the heat wave hadn’t let up. Eleanor had gotten up even earlier than usual, hoping to get her work done before the brutal heat settled over them. Most of the time she had a dozen ideas for stories to write, but that morning her brain was empty. She wrote the word “Hot” on the top of the page. Then nothing.
From her drawing table off the kitchen, Eleanor could hear Ursula washing out the ice cube trays, singing the song that had been her favorite all last summer, “We Are the World,” in that high, thin, bright voice of hers. Alison was upstairs with a Japanese fan and a stack of oldNational Geographicmagazines. Sally just lay in the dirt panting.
Phyllis had taken the day off to go to the doctor, and Coco was off checking out a holistic healing school in Vermont that she was thinking of attending, as an alternative to college. A little grudgingly—because one of the guys from the Yellow Jackets had stopped by suggesting they go take a look at a truck he was thinking of buying—Cam had agreed to watch the children.
Early that morning he had turned the sprinkler on and set up the Slip ’N Slide, but nobody had much energy for running around. At one point Eleanor looked out the window to see Ursula and Cam stretched out on the grass while Toby squirted them with water from a spray bottle. Cam was reading out loud to them from a collection of Shel Silverstein poems. It was almost too hot to waste energy on laughing.
Eleanor turned back to the panel she was drawing, of a womanvaguely resembling herself—this was her continuing character in the strip, Maggie, the mother—sticking her head in the freezer.
After, Alison said she remembered Toby wandering off, but she hadn’t been worried because a minute later she heard him playing his violin back in the house. He had recently learned a couple more measures of the Wieniawski.
After, they would find his violin leaned up against the tub, as if he was planning to get back to practicing later. This was Toby for you: He could focus in like a laser beam. Or race off to something totally different with an explosion of energy like Super Mario. Maybe, in the middle of practicing, he’d heard Sally barking. Maybe it occurred to him that he needed to go say something to Alison in that secret language of theirs. Maybe he spotted a bug on the windowsill and decided to take it outside to find its mother. That would be Toby for you.
Maybe their web-footed boy just decided to take a swim.
Ultimately, all they ever knew was that at some point Toby had wandered off into the woods looking for rocks, another of his pastimes. They figured out that part from the rocks in his pockets when they found him.
Back on the grass, Cam had fallen asleep with Alison next to him and the Shel Silverstein book open on his chest. Ursula had gotten up to refill the spray bottle with water from the hose. That’s when she’d seen it: her brother’s small, sturdy body lying facedown in the pond, his long red curls fanned out around his head like a sea creature, his arms stretched out as though he were making snow angels, one flip-flop still on his foot, the other floating a few feet away among the lily pads.
Toby was not simply on top of the water but underneath it, deep enough that his face appeared to be touching the bottom of the pond. He wasn’t moving.
Ursula called out for her parents. They came running—Cam from the lawn, instantly awake, Eleanor from the kitchen. She was the one who reached their son first, wading into the pond and wrappingher arms around him, pulling his limp body from the water, screaming for help.
After, they understood what had dragged him under and kept him there. All those stones he’d been gathering in his pockets.
By the time Eleanor had laid Toby on the grass the rest of them had reached the spot. Alison ran in the house to call 911. Cam knelt over Toby, pumping his chest, trying to recall what he’d learned years ago in lifeguard training.
None of them had any sense of time as it was happening, but Cam probably kept pumping Toby’s chest for many minutes. Eleanor knelt on the ground beside their son, rubbing his cheeks, his feet, his hair. Alison, who’d returned to the spot after phoning for the ambulance, stood on the grass with an arm around her sister’s shoulders and her gaze locked on her brother’s face. Except when he was sleeping, they had never seen him so still.
It wasn’t only Toby who wasn’t breathing. It felt to Eleanor, at least, as though none of them was. Somewhere far away—though really, this was happening right next to her—she could hear the sound of Ursula weeping.
The shirt Toby was wearing that day featured a picture of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle on the front, Donatello. Cam, pumping on Toby’s chest, said something Eleanor could not make out. A prayer, maybe. Eleanor herself, kneeling on the grass, made a silent bargain. There was nothing she owned she wouldn’t give to see her son draw a breath of air into his lungs.
He lay unmoving. His face had taken on a bluish color. His hands—fingers callused from all those hours practicing the Wieniawski Polonaise—lay at his sides like two dead fish.
Let Toby wake.This was the prayer Eleanor made. Not out loud, but in her head. This farm could burn to ash, if their magical boy might only be restored to them. She chose, at that moment, to offer, in sacrifice, the thing most precious to her other than her children.
A minute passed. Possibly five. They could hear the siren down the road now—a sound they’d never heard outside of town. For a fraction of a second Eleanor thought,Toby will love this.Toby—lover of backhoes and excavators and fire trucks and anything that madea loud noise. A lover of flashing lights and men in uniforms and vehicles driving fast.
The truck was just pulling up under the ash tree when the miracle happened: Toby’s body, that had been totally limp, suddenly jerked up off the grass as if an electric current had passed through him. Then he was spitting water—water and mud. He didn’t cry, but his whole body was shaking.
By the time the EMTs reached Toby, Cam and Eleanor had him in their arms, and he was making more sputtering sounds—the glorious noises of a living, breathing boy. His skin was returning to pink. He had his arms around Eleanor now, and she was pressing her face in his hair, and he was staring at the sky and at Sally, who had raced over and was licking his feet. Those wonderful webbed toes.
You’re okay,they said. Over and over.You’re okay. We were so scared. We got you back. Nothing else matters. Just this.
But he was different. He was crying, but not in the way the old Toby cried, on the rare occasions when he cried at all—not wailing, or angry, or indignant.
