He stood with his phone held up, the preteen sneer fixed in place, and narrated. "Okay, so this is what suburban decay looks like," he said, filming Sarah's potted palms. He panned to the pool, where Ethan and Ruby had actually gone in, at Karen's direction, and were playing something with Ava, Derek's eight-year-old. "This is the deep end. This is where dreams come to die."
"Tyler!" Karen called from the grill, where she had now firmly established herself. "Don't be fresh."
"I'm documenting," Tyler said.
Sammy — six years old, sunburned nose, the most earnest kid Sarah had ever met — paddled over to the pool steps and said to Tyler, "Do you want to race me? I can hold my breath a long time."
Tyler lowered his phone slowly and looked at Sammy like Sammy was an insect that had learned to speak. "A long time?"
"Eleven seconds," Sammy said proudly.
"Wow." Tyler raised the phone again. "Eleven whole seconds. Everybody. This kid. Eleven seconds." He turned the camera on Sammy's face. "Say that again for the video. Say you're a baby."
Sammy's face did something complicated. Jess, who'd been talking to Adele Whitaker, turned fast. "Sammy," she said, "come help me with the chips, sweetheart."
"Mo-om," Sammy said, but he got out of the pool and came, walking stiffly, not looking at Tyler. Jess put an arm around him without breaking her conversation with Adele, and her eyes, when they flicked toward Karen, were cold.
Ava, Derek's daughter, watched all of this from the shallow end. She was eight going on eighty, all watchful eyes, and she edged closer to Ruby, who was treading water nearby. Ruby — nine, braids — had the look of someone trying to be invisible in a yard full of people. When Tyler panned the phone toward her, Ruby turned her back, deliberately, and said something to Ava that made Ava laugh — a real laugh, surprised out of her. The two of them stayed in the shallow end after that, heads close, in the alliance of kids who recognize in each other the same weather.
Mason was the testing one. Eleven years old, all elbows and knees, and he moved through Sarah's yard like it was an obstacle course he'd been hired to defeat. He climbed the fence and swung off it. He ran across the patio stones with wet feet. He picked up the pool net from its hook and used it as a sword until Khloe confiscated it with terrifying cheerfulness, then moved on to the potted palms, which he shook, watching the fronds wobble.
"Mason," Karen called, not turning from the grill. "Don't shake the plants. You don't know where they've been."
"I'm not hurting them," Mason said, and shook a palm harder, glancing at Tyler. It was clear who the performance was for. Tyler wasn't even looking — he'd found a beetle on the patio and was filming it — but Mason kept one eye on his big brother anyway, the way younger siblings do, checking for the applause that never quite comes.
Sarah stood at the food table and watched Mason's wet footprints dry on her stones. She'd laid those stones from a pallet, learning from online tutorials, her knees purple with bruising. Nobody at this party knew that. It didn't matter if they knew.
"Sarah." Melissa was beside her. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," Sarah said automatically. Then, because Melissa's look was too kind, too seeing: "She took over the grill."
"I saw."
"She went through my cabinets."
"I saw that too." Melissa picked up a cup, put it down. "Do you want me to say something? Because I will. I'll be the bad guy. I'm great at it — Derek says it's my best quality."
"Let me try first," Sarah said. "She's—"
"Overwhelmed, I know." Melissa's voice was gentle, which made it worse. "The thing about overwhelmed people, Sarah, is they don't always get to be overwhelmed at somebody else's house."
Sarah laughed, a short, surprised sound that hurt her throat. "When did you get wise?"
"I've been wise. You've just been busy building a pool."
And then Lily.
Sarah noticed her because Sarah had started, without quite deciding to, keeping a corner of her eye on the toddler all afternoon. Lily was two, with the sturdy bow-legged walk of a child who'd only recently committed to walking as a lifestyle, and she had a gift for drifting — away from the cluster of her siblings, away from the chairs, toward the parts of the yard that were bluest and most reflective. Twice Sarah saw her near the pool edge — once at the shallow steps, where the water was two feet deep, and once, worse, past the steps, along the side where the coping was wet and the water dropped off.
Both times Sarah moved, quick and quiet, and steered the toddler back toward the grass, toward Ruby, toward anybody. "Hey, little one," she'd said the second time, crouching. "Let's stay over here, okay? The pool's for the big kids right now."
Lily had blinked at her with enormous, unbothered eyes and said, "Wawa."
"That's right. Wawa." Sarah had smiled, and something in her chest had pulled, because the child was beautiful, this small unbothered person, and nobody — nobody — was watching her.
Karen, when Sarah mentioned it — gently, smiling, the way you'd mention anything at a party — waved a tong in the air.
"She's fine, she's a fish. She practically lived in the bathtub. Honestly, Sarah, you worry too much. You don't have kids, you can't know." Karen turned back to the grill. "Lily! Come here and get your hot dog!"
Lily went. Sarah stood at the pool's edge for a moment with her arms wrapped around herself, looking at the water — her water, the aquamarine she'd paid for with six months of saving and three rounds of negotiation — and she thought about how fast a toddler could slip. She thought about the wet coping. She didn't say anything else. The afternoon was already so loud, and Karen was already so certain, and Sarah —
Sarah went back to her guests. She topped off Adele Whitaker's tea. She asked Tom how his tomatoes were doing. She did the host things while Karen grilled her burgers and her jaw ached and somewhere, out of the corner of her eye, a two-year-old kept drifting toward the deep end like a leaf toward a drain.
The crash silenced the yard.
It happened so fast that afterward, trying to reconstruct it, Sarah could only get it in pieces: Mason, showing off — Tyler had finally looked up from his phone, had said something, some challenge, some dare-shaped thing — and Mason had gone for the low patio wall, the one Sarah had built to edge the flower bed, and vaulted it. His foot caught. He windmilled. He hit the ceramic planter with his hip.
The planter sat by the patio. Sarah had made it at a pottery class — the one she'd taken two winters ago, when she'd been working seventy-hour weeks and her therapist had suggested she find something to do with her hands that wasn't a keyboard. She'd been terrible at first. Her first pot had collapsed. Her second had a wobble. This one — this planter, the one that sat by her patio — had been her fourth try, and she'd glazed it a deep blue-green, the color of the pool, the color she'd been dreaming about before the pool existed. It was uneven. One side leaned. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever made with her hands, and she'd kept it by the patio so she'd see it every time she came outside, a reminder: you can learn anything. You can make anything.