Page 10 of Absorbed

Stacey blew her whistle at him and yelled “Walk!”

Every thirty minutes the guards rotated. After he awoke from his food-coma, Mark took over Stacey’s post in the deep-end tower and Chad went inside.

Mark wore only his red trunks and large-brimmed hat with sunglasses. His belly hung over his waistband, but he didn’t seem self-conscious. Once Chad was inside, Stacey lowered her towel to around her waist.

“Check this out,” Mark said, as Stacey climbed down so he could take over her position. He pointed out a large, fully-clothed family walking over to the bleachers without towels or a bag. They started taking off their shoes. The dad removed his belt, took his wallet out of his pocket and hid it in his shoe, and everyone piled their items in a small heap under the bleachers. Then all six family members climbed into the pool with all their clothes on. They wore pants, T-shirts, even socks. Some had on multiple layers. And they attempted to swim.

While the majority of the family members stuck to the shallowest parts of the pool, two of the fully clothed kids got the wild idea that they were ready for more of a challenge. Holding onto the side, they inched their way around the edge and pulled themselves up the ladder, their heavy clothes weighing them down.

When the older kid—about nine years old—headed for the diving board, Mark hopped down, grabbed the shepherd’s crook from the wall and leaned it against his tower.

Back in February, the Red Cross instructor had shown Stacey’s class what to do with the giant metal hook, but she thought it would only be used as a last resort. She was surprised to see Mark using it her first day on the job.

Standing with his toes hanging off the end of the diving board, the kid held the waist of his pants up with one hand, then flopped down into the water. After resurfacing, he clearlystruggled to keep his face up as he doggy-paddled toward the side.

Stacey stood on her platform and let her towel fall, ready to jump in. She was afraid the boy would never make it to the ledge.

Mark blew his whistle. Yawning, he reached the pole down and told the kid to grab on, then swung the pole over to where the kid could grab the ladder. Once the kid climbed out, Mark motioned for the two boys to talk to him. Whatever he said, the boys seemed genuinely afraid to go off the diving board again.

Stacey was amazed. Mark actually seemed pretty good at lifeguarding.

“The city won’t let us make rules about what clothes people swim in,” Mark told her. “If someone’s fully dressed, I usually make them take a swim test. That weeds most of ‘em out. And don’t dive in to help them! I learned that the hard way my first summer rescuing a lady in a parka.”

“A parka?”

“Don’t ask.”

“When do you dive in?” Stacey asked.

“Almost never. Except to cool off. Someone needs to be on the bottom of the pool, not moving, before we get in the water with them. Otherwise, fish ‘em out with the pole.”

Stacey could see why Bob wasn’t lenient about the overalls. Even dealing with her towel wrapped too tightly would have gotten in the way if she’d had to quickly pull someone out of the water.

The rest of the afternoon, Stacey left her towel on the seat, and started demanding swim tests for any kid she suspected would be problematic. It put her mind at ease and also helped pass the time. If she said they weren’t ready to go off the board yet, the kids would mope away, only to return twenty minutes later begging to be retested.

What Stacey struggled most with was parents attempting to toss in their toddlers from the diving board. At seventeen, Stacey knew it wasn’t her place to advise those adults on their parenting strategy, but she was fairly certain they were doing irreversible psychological damage.

When one father walked to the end of the board and dropped his terrified little girl in, she screamed from the time he let go until her head sunk beneath the water, and both floaties popped off her arms. Fortunately, the child’s mother was already in the water and grabbed her quickly. But the toddler came up coughing and gasping for air. There was immense fear in the small child’s huge eyes and the way she gripped her mother’s arms until her fingers were white. Stacey wanted to scream at those parents on the little girl’s behalf: who could she ever trust if her parents would do that to her?

From then on, Stacey began barking out rules over the megaphone against more than one person on the diving board and anyone jumping off with floaties. She whistled and shouted and announced her rules to regulate the chaos across the pool all afternoon.

And each time she did, it gave her a little thrill.

If someone asked her that first day, Stacey would have said the diving board seemed like the most dangerous aspect of the job. Lifeguarding was about preventing accidents. The guards said “no running,” because kids slipped, skinned knees, stubbed toes—even fell on their faces and smacked their heads.

But the worst accidents were the ones no one would have predicted.

Chapter Six

On Monday morning, Stacey grabbed her mom’s emergency credit card from the dresser drawer and drove to Riverside. She knew she should have asked permission, but figured it was better to apologize later than be told no. She needed to be ready to buy something at the warehouse sale.

Three freeways and a maze of industrial parks later, she arrived at a nondescript large white building. There was a black glass door with the words “The Outlet” in white lettering. If there hadn’t been a rack of colorful swimsuits out front, she might have questioned whether she was in the right place.

Inside, the well-lit retail store had at least twenty round racks of swimsuits for men, women, and children, and glass displays full of aquatic accessories.

“Hi there,” a friendly woman’s voice called out from behind the register. She was a little older than Stacey’s mom, she guessed, with short curly brown hair and droopy cheeks. “How can I help you?” She had a twangy accent from somewhere in the south. It seemed too big for her small mouth.

“I need a swimsuit. For lifeguarding,” Stacey said.

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