Vaguely Joe remembered a thing called CPR, where you pumped at the drowning victim’s chest and breathed into their mouth and hoped like hell they’d wake up. He didn’t know how to do it properly, had never taken a lesson in his life far as he could remember, and would’ve worried immensely about smashing the boy’s ribs to matchsticks even if he had known the trick. He decided to start with the mouth-breathing part, crouching down to place his lips against the child’s blue ones. He huffed into the eggshell delicacy of the boy. Nothing. Again, as the seconds ticked downhill like pebbles splashing into a stream. No change.
Joe placed his hands on the kid’s thin chest. He glanced at the mother, still rocking and crying and praying. A thought traveled down his arms and into his damp fingers as he leaned down to give the breathing method one last shot, garbled and nonsensical: God dammit, come outta there. You got no business being trapped in some little kid. The hell’s wrong with you?
(—water is free, he is free, he goes where he pleases flashing beneath the desert sun, minnows and crayfish dart in the bubbling green spaces between his scales and all is rush and slither and it’s a hundred years before the first full diaper, the first beer can bobbing, the first net of concrete laid to catch and control—)
There was a noise beneath his hands and lips like a drain clog letting go. Joe felt something pull, then pop!, then his own throat and lungs were full of water, so eager to get out of the kid and into him it spilled from his mouth as he pulled away. It tasted like chorine. Weirdly, it didn’t make him choke, despite the fact that there seemed to be a river’s worth of it. All the world’s coughing was saved for the boy, suddenly sputtering and gasping to life beneath him like a flooded engine coming back from the dead.
And Joe got a little more human, with that young mother sobbing her thanks at his elbow. He learned their names and evicted a tributary straight from Lucian’s lungs to save the kid’s life. Even with all the things that happened, he never regretted that part a damn bit.
She found him a few days later. Petite as her son, tiny, really, but blond where he was dark. Joe opened his front door and there she stood, a store-bought chocolate cake in her hands, eyes turned way up to find his a couple feet overhead. “Brought you something,” she said. “For saving his life. I know it’s not much, it’s really kinda silly, but—”
Joe had always done his best to have no truck with the neighbors. For years he had succeeded admirably at this, not that it was hard in a place like the Riverview, working the hours he did. All it took to bring that record crashing to earth, turned out, was a near-drowning, a pretty face, and free food. He found himself inviting her inside, pulling chipped plates the previous tenants had left from the cabinets and setting them on the tiny dining table he never used. When he tried to sit down at it across from his guest, his knees lifted the entire thing a half inch off the ground. Plastic takeout forks and chocolate cake skated dangerously across cheap maple, saved at the last minute by his neighbor’s quick hands.
Joe sat at an angle after that.
Her name was Rita. She worked as a maid at the Eaz-E-Rest out by the interstate. A teenage girl from next door was supposed to watch Luce while she picked up shifts, but sometimes the girl got distracted—by the phone, by the television, by her own reflection in the mirror—and he wandered off. He was a good kid, smart kid, knew better than to talk to strangers or go playing in traffic, but he was drawn to water like some kind of duck or something, couldn’t keep away from it. If there hadn’t been a high fence between the complex and the concrete bed of the river out back, she knew she would’ve found him ankle-deep in that nasty run-off ages ago, chasing minnows or frogs or whatever else managed to survive in the stream. Not that she hadn’t been the same way at his age. She had ruined a lot of shoes and gotten chewed out a lot for playing in that same river, back when twenty-three seemed like the kind of birthday they handed you black balloons decorated with cartoon vultures for.
Joe listened and ate his cake, happy to let her talk. It meant he didn’t have to, and that was his favorite kind of conversation. Too often Raymond wanted him to respond, or laugh, or most horrible of all, to share his own thoughts on a matter. This was fine. Occasionally he smiled, or nodded. She seemed satisfied with that, even when they made eye contact and she lost track of her words for a moment or two.
Rita didn’t think the boy would go near the pool even if the gate did somehow get left open again (Joe reassured her that wouldn’t happen, feeling plenty guilty), but she worried. She worried about a lot of things: rent, her job, health insurance, making sure Luce ate his veggies, the size of the water bugs in their apartment, you name it. She stared at the crumbs on her plate and tugged at a strand of her short hair as she reeled off this list. If he had known how to swim, none of this would’ve happened in the first place. She should’ve taught him, but the pool had been so nasty before and there was no time, there was never any time—
Somebody said, “I can give him lessons if you want.” For a second Joe wondered if he had left the police scanner in his bedroom on. By the time he realized it was him talking, his tongue was tripping over “free of charge” and “nah, no trouble,” and Rita was staring at him from across the table like he was Jesus, Buddha, and Bob Barker all rolled into one. No backing out after that. Yes, he meant it. He wasn’t quite sure how you taught someone else to swim, but the look in her eyes meant he’d give it a damn good try twice a week.
They ate the rest of their cake in shy silence, not looking at each other, like a couple of kids.
He thought of her smile as the Super Bee exploded around him like a cactus blossom unfurling. Her smile, and the way she had glanced at him over Lucian’s head from the passenger seat on their sunny weekend drives, eyes full of some emotion he didn’t dare interrogate. He thought maybe he had looked back at her the same way. God, he hoped he had. For those eyes and that expression he would’ve submerged entire cities and picked his teeth on their drowned memories.
There was no fireball. The car just came apart and fell back from the liquid length of him like a shed skin as he tore through the vinyl roof. Good-bye, Super Bee. Good-bye, human form. The moon was bright and cold. He flowed through the air in the direction of the city, toward Raymond’s clubhouse. His mane was the deep green of water weeds, his teeth jagged as flint. Late-night commuters glancing up at the sky thought he was the contrail from a commercial airliner, silver-white in the moonlight.
Teaching someone to swim, turned out, wasn’t as hard as it sounded. It didn’t hurt that Lucian was a fast learner. First the doggie paddle, then the scissor kick. On to a simple crawl, the boy’s tiny limbs knifing determinedly through the water like starlings diving for takeout wrappers.
Joe made him keep the pool floaties on way past the point where he probably needed them. Just in case.
Rita started inviting Joe over for dinner after lessons. Unless he had business, he usually accepted. He liked how their apartment was a warm mirror of his own, full where his was empty. He liked the toys scattered on the floor and how the TV chattered mindlessly in the background even when nobody was watching it. He liked helping Rita in the kitchen, as big and useless and in the way as he was in that tiny space. She never seemed to mind. Chop this, peel that. They would stand shoulder to shoulder (mostly it was his shoulders), working together in a comfortable silence that smelled of browning meat, frying onions, cumin, and garlic. Occasionally he caught whiffs of Rita herself: Cheap fruity shampoo, powdery deodorant, laundromat detergent. Cleaning solution from her job, soaked permanently into her hands. Lucian was bubblegum toothpaste, die-cast metal, and chlorine.