Talk Talk (a close call)

So we're at a friend's new house for a birthday feast.

They have a hot tub, so we bring our swim suits. I won't let Mo get in until she at least pretends to eat dinner, which she finally does.

I'm sitting six, eight feet from the tub and watching her. As much as anything, they have an unfenced back yard and I don't feel up to chasing her through the wilderness or explaining to the Independence constabulary a bizarre home invasion.

I'm telling Derek about Talk Talk, a T.C. Boyle novel I recently enjoyed and when I look back at the hot tub, I think Mo is on the near side so I can't see here head. I stand up to get a better look and realize her feet are to the near side, and she's totally submerged.

This is where 'Talk Talk' gives way to 'Map of the World,' except I didn't know it at the time. I just knew Mo was dead and it was my fault.

I hauled her out with Melissa's help, and I could see she was seizing. Her jaw was working, and her eyes were open but turning to the side. I wasn't convinced she was breathing, and I was thinking, how long had I looked away?



Secondary echos: I'd had two bottles of Foster's (Australian for Budweiser), and could I have prevented this if I hadn't, even though I felt sober enough to drive a school bus? And maybe if I'd had more time to be convinced of the worst, maybe I'd have pictured my answers to a grand jury that cared nothing for my grief.

Mel called 9-11, and Mo spit out some mucousy stuff, which I didn't know from where, lungs or guts. The seizure lasted maybe two minutes, which is to say about ten years.

I've never been so glad to see a kid pick her nose, but when she reached a finger up to rout out her nostril, I thought she might be fine.

By the time the fire trucks and ambulance were there, she'd proved herself to be breathing normally and walked to a couch to stubbornly sleep the sleep of the postichtal.

She sung the whole way home in the car, no idea she'd just had a near life experience.

I didn't think of my heart attack, I thought of the time me and my brother were fishing with Dad in Baldwin, and heaving rocks into the lake, Bro 'threw' a rock without throwing it. Which is to say he went in still attached to a rock he could barely lift. Dad turned just in time to see a foot vanish, and reached in to retrieve his son.

Such a thin line, between the funny anecdote and the sworn deposition, between telling your friends and telling it to a deputy sheriff. Between the sympathy of your friends over a close call and the sympathy of a funeral director who gets a pay day from your misery.

Maybe it just goes with the Daddy gig. Our host almost lost his son to a skateboarding accident, and my Mom had to perform CPR on me when I tried mowing her lawn with a blockage in my LAD. Does every parent have to be convinced, at least for a moment, their kid is dead and that it's somehow their fault?