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Elvis is at the bottom of the pool. There’s still time to save him, but not much.
The lifeguard is a teenage girl who has gnawed ferocious teeth marks into her plastic whistle. It’s a pool party, a gig she scooped up on HappySwimmers.com, and it pays better than four shifts at the town rec center. It’s the hottest day of the year. The lifeguard is entering the first stages of sunstroke from her perch, and she’s trying to keep her mind active by counting the little bobbing heads of the six-year-old partygoers. She keeps losing track after twelve.
Elvis isn’t thinking much. The lifeguard’s view of him is obscured by the glare of sun. It’s fallen in just the wrong place.
The lifeguard was given a little bit of wine by the birthday girl’s mother. A glass and a half—pinot grigio, with ice. The birthday girl’s mother likes to give the impression of being free-spirited and easygoing, despite her large, lawyerly estate and large, lawyerly husband. The husband is not in attendance at the party. The birthday girl is not his daughter.
“You’re a real go-getter, aren’t you?” the mother says to the lifeguard. “You could be out at the mall with your friends right now, but you’re here working.”
The lifeguard doesn’t have friends and doesn’t like the mall. She accepts the wine because no one has ever offered her any, and watching all the kids splashing and laughing together makes her lonely. She’s glad the mother hasn’t seen the new Extreme Hoarders episode.
“I wanna be the mermaid with the pink tail,” declares Violet, the birthday girl. She’s paddling around the shallow end wearing arm floaties.
“We can both have a pink tail,” says one of her friends.
“You can have a purple tail,” negotiates Violet. She is a benevolent birthday girl and feels this is a generous offer. Her friend agrees, but since the tails are imaginary, she traitorously gives herself a pink one anyway.
A few feet off and a few feet below, Elvis watches the bubbles guzzling up from his nose and mouth. He wants to reach his hand up to pop them, but his arm doesn’t move when he tells it to. He was practicing holding his breath, and he can’t seem to stop.
~
Most of the parents dropped their children off and left, but a few of them are milling around the backyard patio, chatting pleasantly about everything but politics. One of them, a man who goes by Gibbons, is the lifeguard’s old swim coach and a former varsity champion. His dreams are haunted by the sound of goggles snapping. He gave the lifeguard a small nod of recognition when he saw her, but didn’t say hello. The lifeguard wishes he would leave. She hated swimming competitively, felt it defeated the entire purpose of swimming, seethed with fury when Gibbons made her do extra laps of butterfly drills while the rest of the team watched. It hadn’t been her fault she’d shown up to practice late. It never was.
“We’re not allowed to cut people,” Gibbons said to her at the end of the season. “But you might want to consider whether this environment is a good fit for you. It’s only gonna get harder.”
The next day, she shoved her crumpled team jacket—Go Stingrays!—into Gibbons’ mailbox. She made eye contact with his little spotted dog watching from the window, and when it blinked and looked away, she considered the matter closed.
Not everyone who’s good at swimming has to be a swimmer, she told herself. Sometimes you can just be good enough to make money.
~
Elvis is a small blond child and the product of $70,000 of IVF. His embryo was picked specifically by his father, who had no brothers and very badly wanted a son. The other two viable embryos were girls—currently frozen in a lab—and they might be thawed out later on if Elvis’ mother decides she likes parenthood enough to go back for more. As of right now, she’s still on the fence.
Elvis’ mother is forty-seven and his father is thirty-five. This was a significant hurdle to their union. Everyone insisted they were too old/too young for each other and would be better off with someone older/younger/anyone else. Enraptured by their shared passion for stockbroking, the renegade lovers made the leap anyway, and their wedding was officiated by a highly regarded Elvis impersonator who carried a guitar case full of doves. The couple gets along well enough and feels their happiness disproves the naysayers. Naturally, this doesn’t stop people from talking.
“I’ve heard of old sperm babies,” said Violet’s mother just a few weeks ago. “But old egg babies? Things are getting out of hand.”
“My mother had me when she was fifty,” said her friend defensively.
Violet’s mother felt this proved her point.
Regardless of his egg quality, Elvis is a good swimmer. He passed the lifeguard’s preliminary assessment at the start of the party and was one of four children permitted to forgo arm floaties. This will surprise his parents, because he has never been formally taught to do anything but backfloat. Some people just have a way of taking to the water. Sometimes the water wants to take them back.
~
“Do you think Violet will be my friend?” Violet’s mother asks the lifeguard. She’s feeling sentimental. “Girls aren’t always friends with their mothers when they get to be your age.”
The question catches the lifeguard by surprise, but she doesn’t show it. She is a girl accustomed to eccentricity. Her parents used to store their collection of porcelain Baby Jesus figurines in the dishwasher.
“Sure,” she says. “I think she’ll be your friend.”
The pinot grigio hums warm and dizzy down her limbs. The sun seems brighter than it was before, and she sits up a little and adjusts her visor. That’s when she sees Elvis.
The whistle doesn’t make any noise the first time she blows into it, but the second time, it shrills so sharp that everyone forgets who and where they are. The lifeguard knows the drill, has practiced it on faceless training dummies and fellow teenage classmates, has even executed it in real life on an old woman with a leg cramp. This feels different. The old woman’s head was still above water when the lifeguard reached her.
~
Elvis is starting to dream when the lifeguard descends. He sees her shadow fall over him like a bird of prey, and he’s folded in her wings, and she’s taking him to her nest on top of his treehouse. The elephant-foot pressure on his chest is so strong that he’s stopped feeling it altogether.
When Elvis was born, the song “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” was playing on his mother’s carefully curated labor CD. It consisted entirely of tracks by The King. Elvis doesn’t remember this, of course, but whenever he hears that song, he cries with the full force of his small body. His mother thinks this is a promising sign. She has read about children being reincarnated with memories from their past lives. She wonders if she has something special on her hands. His father is a bit more skeptical, but he knows how to pick his battles. He drives Elvis to guitar class every Tuesday and answers emails in the lobby, listening to the tuneless plinking of the A string from down the hall. Elvis neither likes nor dislikes playing guitar, but he loves the way music feels in his spine. How it reverberates, pinches, shivers.
“It’s a good thing to be sensitive,” his mother told him once. “Sometimes feelings are too big to fit inside you.”
~
He has a heartbeat, so there’s need for chest compressions. The lifeguard tips his head back and fixes the plastic ventilator mask over his mouth and nose. She puffs into it twice, sharp and insistent, and counts out fifteen seconds. It only takes one more round before Elvis’ body jerks and flails and hacks up what must be a gallon of chlorine. She rolls him onto his side so he doesn’t choke, pats his back, and Elvis is coughing like a madman, an asthmatic dog, and now the parents are swooping in, flocking around, deciding they can take it from here.
The lifeguard sits back on her heels and shakes so hard her teeth hurt. There’s vomit in her hair.
“Oh my god,” Violet’s mother is saying. “Oh my god.”
She’s standing with both hands pressed to her forehead, like she’s trying to check if she has a double fever. Violet the birthday girl clings mutely to her legs.
The lifeguard is colder than she remembers ever being. Her wet swimsuit bunches around her midriff.
“Breathe slow,” she says to one of the parents huddled around Elvis. “Make sure he’s—make him slow. Breathe deep.”
The lifeguard becomes aware of a frigid disapproval emanating from the adults, including Violet’s mother, whose eyes are everywhere but her. The lifeguard hopes desperately and a little selfishly that the boy will be alright. Her mind won’t let her explore any alternatives. She can’t reach anything but what’s in front of her. Could she ever?
Gibbons drapes a towel over the lifeguard’s shoulders.
“You have puke in your hair,” he says.
Gibbons hasn’t seen the new Extreme Hoarders episode, but he saw the five trucks that pulled away from the lifeguard’s house a few months ago, each one overflowing with junk. He saw the parents beaming on the front lawn, talking to the camera crew about new beginnings and minimalist serenity. He saw the lifeguard sitting on the doorstep with her hoodie pulled up over her face.
Life is a hell of a thing, he wants to tell her. He figures she already knows.
The lifeguard slides the towel from her shoulders and scrubs it through her hair. Vomit congeals in the synthetic cotton folds.
“Thanks,” she says to Gibbons. “You can go away now.”
~
Elvis stops coughing and starts to cry. Very soon, he’ll talk. He’ll have a lot to say. He’ll ask how long he was underwater, he’ll ask for his parents—they’re on the phone with Violet’s mother, rocketing to the house twenty miles over the speed limit—he’ll explain that he wanted to be like a fish, he’ll ask where the lady who saved him is, and someone will point to the lifeguard huddled on the ground with a runny nose and dark, chlorine-burned eyes.
“No,” he’ll say, “no, that’s not her. The girl who saved me was perfect.”
Sophie Höss is a New York writer who loves the ocean and is in bed by 9 pm every night. She has received a Pushcart Prize and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best Microfiction. She was a semifinalist for the American Short(er) Fiction Prize, and her words are scattered around in BOMB, The Baffler, The Los Angeles Review, The Southampton Review, Wigleaf, Split Lip, and elsewhere. Also, she has a small dog named Elmo who likes to wear little sweaters. You can read more of her work at sophiehosswriting.com.
