The Watching
How Oliver got into the back yard was impossible to know because the security camera’s angle didn’t show the sliding glass door or its small plastic latch that Elodie made a point to never leave unlocked. Just a grainy and highly saturated view of the side of the house where the kitchen window was and the stone walkway cut the dense ground cover, the bare and skeletal branches of a fig tree, and the pool, kidney-bean shaped and covered by a cardinal blue tarp. The video started just there. Elodie was watching it secretly in a dark room only later, after she told her husband that she wouldn’t. She hit play with her hand over her mouth and her heart beating sick in all the wrong places — ears, throat, stomach. At first nothing moved, and the only way Elodie even knew time was passing in the video was by watching the time stamp’s seconds roll from 3:42p toward 3:43p.
It held like this, the sound of wind in the backyard coming in faint and tinny through Elodie’s computer’s perforated speakers, her breath held even though she didn’t know it. Then Oliver came around into the frame from somewhere unknown in his diaper and little yellow shirt, bowlegged with the rigid sway of a two-year-old learning to use their own legs. He walked slowly, pointing at something in the flower bed that was mostly just dirt, then paused to crouch down and examine and touch the ground with unpracticed hands and fingernails so small they didn’t seem real. Elodie’s eyes burned and she bit her lip too hard. She reached slowly out to touch the screen where the image of her child held low at 3:45p, wishing she could somehow reach into the computer and pull the boy into her empty arms or stop him from getting up, which he did anyway, almost losing his balance as his bare feet moved over the uneven ground, and walked to the rounded concrete lip of the pool, looking off into space the camera couldn’t see.
Everything in Elodie’s whole body pounded with adrenaline, skin humming and flush with a tingling that overcame her hands and face, senseless to the wasted words of intercession that silently filled her mouth. Only to worsen when the baby boy took his first tiny step onto the tarp, and Elodie realized she could see herself there at the kitchen sink, unknowing behind the window’s screen that made her appear but a shadow. Then one little step and then another, and Oliver was all the way out on the pool’s bright blue surface standing still and floating there, his weight hardly enough to lower the tarp at all, as he looked off, still and relaxed and unconcerned, watching intently what Elodie tried to imagine but would never know, above the water like a saint.
This for the longest two and a half minutes of Elodie’s entire life, and that included the time one of her patients, a girl of six, had a seizure and thrashed and foamed and beat her pig-tailed head against the exam table while her father yelled at Elodie to be her doctor and help her for Chrissakes even after she had already turned the child on her side which was all she could do. His yelling was loud and desperate and full of a pain she had hoped to never know, and even though the girl was fine, it had always held as the worst day in her entire pediatric career. Now her own Oliver and after all the children she had made better there was nothing she could do but watch. That same desperation in her so deep and pure it froze her all over except her hands that shook in the room’s unlit air, reaching helplessly for a screen she could not transfix as the tarp finally started gathering under the boy with a terrible slowness, the water at his ankles while he stood there motionless and straight, not concerned that there was nothing solid beneath him.
3:46p to 3:47p in this slow-agony. Elodie’s eyes flashed between Oliver and her own shadow behind the kitchen window, faintly washing dishes at the sink, no more than fifteen quick steps from the backyard and the stone path and the fig tree and pool. She screamed at herself from the dark room into her past. First commanding and willing her outline, then breaking down to plead hysterically around the wet choke in her throat to do something, to go just please look up and go. Especially as the water got to Oliver’s chest. His arms, moving somehow gently and without panic, made echoed splashing sounds against the water’s tight surface that loudly filled the room Elodie was now in but were lost under the hot running water of the kitchen’s stainless steel sink. Wanting to turn away, especially when the water was at his neck, the tarp a sinking cone pulling toward the middle of the pool, and yet even though she promised she wouldn’t, Elodie made herself keep watching through a throbbing tunnel vision, holding fast the edges of the computer, needing to see and share the weight of the moment, to be there the only way she now could. Oliver tilted back in a brief pause of buoyancy, his face turned toward the sky and revealing to the camera a calm as if waiting for something with infinite patience, already apart and warm in the afterglow, spread well beyond the radiant image of himself at 3:48p, six minutes and seven seconds from the video’s start, the only sounds of splashing left in Elodie’s memory, as the water’s finish found itself again to show lines of rippled sun lifting from above.
In the hollow of what was left, Elodie could only retreat, searching farther back into her mind, until she was nineteen again and on a camping trip in Death Valley where she ate a Ritz cracker doused with liquid LSD and looked at the night and the many stars spilled across it like salt and felt profoundly for almost six hours that all space was never empty in the slightest, but in fact full always of the thing people attempted to describe when they used words like energy or love or God, and when she found herself again it wasn’t until much later, years having passed, the house sold and pool filled, and the memory came to suggest that which was impossible and true, herself a canvas stretched in every direction at once, everything somehow equally impermanent beneath a sky full of light.
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