I dropped the plate I was washing and ran outside.
The boy was at the bottom of the deep end.
But he wasn’t drowning.
He sat there calmly, legs crossed, eyes wide open beneath the water as if he were waiting for someone. For one frozen second, I couldn’t move. Then instinct took over. I jumped in, grabbed him, and dragged him to the surface.
He coughed once and looked annoyed.
“You pulled me away,” he whispered.
Away from what?
Before he could answer, his mother stormed into my backyard. Instead of panicking, she looked furious.
“I told you not to interfere,” she snapped, gripping his arm tightly.
I stared at her. “Your son was underwater for almost three minutes!”
The boy looked between us nervously. Then, in a tiny voice, he said, “The lady wanted to show me something.”
Every hair on my arms stood up.
“What lady?” I asked.
He pointed toward the deep end. “The one in the blue dress.”
There was nobody there.
That night, unable to sleep, I searched the address online. An old newspaper article appeared from twenty years earlier. A young woman in a blue summer dress had drowned in the exact same pool after trying to save her little brother.
And when I looked closer at the faded photo, my stomach dropped.
The little brother was my neighbor.
