Alice Munros Best

past. He may have meant it kindly. I noticed that he had not turned the radio off, just down.
    Meg had not swallowed any water. She hadn’t even scared herself. Her hair was plastered to her head and her eyes were wide open, golden with amazement.
    “I was getting the comb,” she said. “I didn’t know it was deep.”
    Andrew said, “She was swimming! She was swimming by herself. I saw her bathing suit in the water and then I saw her swimming.”
    “She nearly drowned,” Cynthia said. “Didn’t she? Meg nearly drowned.”
    “I don’t know how it could have happened,” said the lifeguard. “One moment she was there, and the next she wasn’t.”
    What had happened was that Meg had climbed out of the water at the shallow end and run along the edge of the pool toward the deep end. She saw a comb that somebody had dropped lying on the bottom. She crouched down and reached in to pick it up, quite deceived about the depth of the water. She went over the edge and slipped into the pool, making such a light splash that nobody heard – not the lifeguard, who was kissing her boyfriend, or Cynthia, who was watching them. That must have been the moment under the trees when I thought, Where are the children? It must have been the same moment. At that moment, Meg was slipping, surprised, into the treacherously clear blue water.
    “It’s okay,” I said to the lifeguard, who was nearly crying. “She can move pretty fast.” (Though that wasn’t what we usually said about Meg at all. We said she thought everything over and took her time.)
    “You swam, Meg,” said Cynthia, in a congratulatory way. (She told us about the kissing later.)
    “I didn’t know it was deep,” Meg said. “I didn’t drown.”
    WE HAD LUNCH at a takeout place, eating hamburgers and fries at a picnic table not far from the highway. In my excitement, I forgot to get Meg a plain hamburger, and had to scrape off the relish and mustard with plastic spoons, then wipe the meat with a paper napkin, before she would eat it. I took advantage of the trash can there to clean out thecar. Then we resumed driving east, with the car windows open in front. Cynthia and Meg fell asleep in the back seat.
    Andrew and I talked quietly about what had happened. Suppose I hadn’t had the impulse just at that moment to check on the children? Suppose we had gone uptown to get drinks, as we had thought of doing? How had Andrew got over the fence? Did he jump or climb? (He couldn’t remember.) How had he reached Meg so quickly? And think of the lifeguard not watching. And Cynthia, taken up with the kissing. Not seeing anything else. Not seeing Meg drop over the edge.
    Disappeared.
    But she swam. She held her breath and came up swimming.
    What a chain of lucky links.
    That was all we spoke about – luck. But I was compelled to picture the opposite. At this moment, we could have been filling out forms. Meg removed from us, Meg’s body being prepared for shipment. To Vancouver – where we had never noticed such a thing as a graveyard – or to Ontario? The scribbled drawings she had made this morning would still be in the back seat of the car. How could this be borne all at once, how did people bear it? The plump, sweet shoulders and hands and feet, the fine brown hair, the rather satisfied, secretive expression – all exactly the same as when she had been alive. The most ordinary tragedy. A child drowned in a swimming pool at noon on a sunny day. Things tidied up quickly. The pool opens as usual at two o’clock. The lifeguard is a bit shaken up and gets the afternoon off. She drives away with her boyfriend in the Roto-Rooter truck. The body sealed away in some kind of shipping coffin. Sedatives, phone calls, arrangements. Such a sudden vacancy, a blind sinking and shifting. Waking up groggy from the pills, thinking for a moment it wasn’t true. Thinking if only we hadn’t stopped, if only we hadn’t taken this route, if only they hadn’t let us use the pool. Probably no one would ever have known about the comb.
    There’s something trashy about this kind of imagining, isn’t there? Something shameful. Laying your finger on the wire to get the safe shock, feeling a bit of what it’s like, then pulling back. I believed that Andrew was more scrupulous than I about such things, and that at this moment he was really trying to think about something else.
    When I stood apart from my parents at Steve Gauley’s funeral and watched them, and had this new,