In Hopes of the Resurrection

Seven years old and nearly naked, I’m standing there in the sand, fidgety. My bathing suit is still wet, my hair damp, but otherwise we’ve been standing around long enough to be dry. It’s hot. I’m uncomfortable. I’m bored. I’m a little scared; this is all so unusual. Five or six dozen others, of all ages, are milling around on the beach, feeling just the same as me. Some woman is quietly arguing with a policeman, and though he’s apologetic, he refuses to let her pass.

A boy has drowned. Well, he’s missing. I recognize his name. He’s not a friend, but I know him, or at least of him. He’s a year older than me, and at this age, that’s a huge and nearly unbridgeable gulf. I look out over the water of the tiny lake; my eyes are stabbed by the hot sun dancing on its surface, below which some boy lies at the bottom, where no boy is meant to be. People are gathered around his sobbing mother. Little boats move back and forth; policemen in wetsuits tip over the sides and come up, shaking their heads. The lake is at the edge of a rotary, where traffic has been slowed to a honking, snarling crawl even at midday, thanks the rubberneckers who always have to gawk at such tragedies, drawn around them like flies on a turd. We don’t have any choice in our world coming to a stop. They do.

I don’t know why the police won’t let us go. I suppose they need to maintain order. The last thing they need is for parents and kids to get separated and complicate things. And so we gather around, one to another, waiting to see what will come up out of the water.

After nearly an hour of this, it ends, abruptly, and not in the way anyone expected. A young girl comes bawling into the crowd, calling for the boy’s mother. She is a neighbour. The drowned boy is, in fact, waiting with her mother. Apparently he had gotten bored, went home without telling anyone, and was discovered asleep in the basement. And now in the midst of the frantic shrieks of motherly joy at answered prayers, there are sighs of relief, mutters about stupidity, nervous chuckles. The police cordon lifts. A few children plunge back into the water, but for most people, the bloom is seriously off the afternoon, and we drift home. That boy might not be dead, but I have a feeling shortly he’s going to wish he were.

A thousand miles and a decade and a half pass behind me, and the news comes of a high school buddy who had been struck in the head while sail boarding, and vanished unconscious beneath the waves. There was no comedy of errors this time to comfort a grieving mother. And though the two events had nothing to do with one another, they impressed upon me the fact that death is not cheated. Ever. You might cleverly dodge an appointment here and there, but not the bill.