Chapter 3
“The water lion is my favorite animal,” I tell her, removing my headphones. “And that was very accurate.”
“My favorite animals are dragons,” the girl says. “And alicorns. And raccoons.”
She submerges to perform another somersault.
“What’s an alicorn?” I ask when she surfaces again.
“A horse with a unicorn horn and wings.” The girl places her elbows on the edge of the pool. “Like a unicorn mixed with a…” She tilts her head to the side, water dripping from her hair. “I can’t remember what the horses with wings are.”
“Oh, they’re called…” This is my cue. My opening to provide an assist. I’m an adult; I should have this data at the ready in the storage area of my giant grown-up brain.
Fuck, what is a winged horse?
The term is on the tip of my tongue.
We’re both looking at each other, half sounding out words that begin with p under our breath.
Suddenly, it comes to me: “Pegasus!”
“No, that’s not it,” the little girl exclaims. She pushes herself up and climbs onto the pool deck. “Can I use your phone to look it up?”
“Uh…” Amazing segue. She takes her shot before I have time to question my command of English vocabulary.
“You can’t see my phone because I’m a government agent,” I say.
“There’s very sensitive material on here.
” This isn’t a lie; there are some nudes recklessly scattered throughout my camera roll that I should hide in a password-protected vault.
I’m not prepared for a scenario where a kid would be looking through my phone.
“Okay,” she says with a casual shrug. “Then pretend you’re the horse trainer and I’m a horse.”
“Me?” I glance around in case she’s addressing the potential horse trainer just behind me. “I’m the horse trainer?”
Kids stress me out. I think they can smell my fear.
“You have to stand in the pool because that’s the center of the ring—”
“Oh, I wasn’t planning on getting wet.”
“—and you give the horse commands for different tricks.”
There’s no graceful way to get up from this lounge chair, let alone plunge into the pool, but the girl is standing in front of me, waiting.
“You don’t have to do that,” her dad calls out. “I’ll be the horse trainer.”
“No, the horse trainer is a girl,” she says, looking at me pleadingly.
I’m not very susceptible to cuteness; this is something else. I guess it’s her…moxie? Spunk?
I take off my sunglasses, slip them into my tote bag, and haul myself up, letting my feet hit the hot concrete. “What are the tricks?”
“I’m a swimming horse,” she says, as I lower myself into the cold water. “I’ll swim around you and you tell me what to do.”
The thought of generating swimming horse commands out of thin air is daunting, but it turns out that she does whatever she wants no matter what I say. It’s obvious who’s in charge here, and it’s not the horse trainer.
“Tell me to do a flip,” she shouts. Her dad watches her from the other end of the pool.
“Do a flip!” I yell, waving my hand around in what I assume is a flip motion.
She dives under, feet splashing wildly as she tries to complete an aquatic somersault.
The freezing cold pool water splashes my face. “Ahhh!” I yell, as her head breaks the surface. “I’ve been hit by a rogue water horse.”
“I’m not a water horse, I’m a horse that swims!”
I’m properly chastened. “My mistake. I thought I saw fins.”
“Water horses don’t have fins,” she says, pushing her goggles up on her head. “What are you?”
11/10 question, kid. I wish I knew. “I thought I was the horse trainer.”
“It’s your turn to pick an animal so I can train you.” It all sounds so obvious when she says it. “What are you?”
“Hmmm. Guess.” Classic adult copout.
Her eyes narrow. “Orangutan.”
Shit. I can’t remember exactly what orangutans sound like, but I’m sure it’s a noise that would be humiliating to attempt in public. I glance toward her dad, wondering if he’ll volunteer in my place.
He does not. He’s just looking at the two of us, eyebrows slightly raised.
“Incorrect,” I say. “I’m a water orangutan.”
Her nose scrunches. “No you’re not!”
“And as a water orangutan, I can only perform underwater.”
“Nuh-uh. Orangutans don’t like swimming.”
Ignoring this insight, I sink below the surface of the water, doing my best to swim in a circle around her. In general, I avoid the pool when it’s full of little kids—I’m too paranoid about the amount of pee. But this seems like a clever way to play along with minimal embarrassment.
On the other hand, I miscalculated how challenging it is to swim in circles with my eyes closed. Apparently, my aquatic spatial perception sucks. I can feel how dangerously close I am to brushing other bodies with my fingertips.
I need to come up for air. Now.
As I give one strong kick to propel myself out of the water, my hand hits smooth skin that gives just a little bit. My mouth opens to gasp or yell or something as all my pool fears come true at once.
I break the surface coughing up pool water, arms flailing, slapping at a person in front of me who I can’t see because of the chlorine stinging my eyes and my nearsightedness.
A man’s voice asks if I’m okay. After blinking roughly thirty times to focus my vision, I see that the stranger I’ve been accidentally molesting is—of course, obviously, was there ever any doubt?—the girl’s dad.
“I told you,” she says from somewhere behind me. “Orangutans don’t like swimming.”
“What’s your name?” the girl asks me after she follows me back to my lounge chair, where I dry off and make a valiant attempt to recover my dignity by wiping off the smeared eye makeup that wound up everywhere but my eyelids.
I’m caught off guard. Isn’t the adult supposed to ask the child that question? And isn’t the child supposed to get suddenly shy?
“Sam,” I say while rummaging around my tote bag for the sunglasses so I can cover my raccoon eyes. I don’t feel them. “What’s yours?”
“Guess.”
This kid is a master of putting me on edge in very low-stakes ways.
“Hmmm.” I dig into my mental reserves of Old Timey Names That Probably Make Kids Laugh. “Is it Winifred?”
She scoffs. “No! Guess again.”
Out of the corner of my still-irritated eye, I see her dad approaching with a pair of towels in his hand.
“Is it…Petunia?”
Exasperated sigh. “Do a good guess.”
“I really thought I had it with Petunia.” I shake my head in mock defeat. “You’re gonna have to tell me.”
Her dad sits on the edge of the lounge chair next to me, but I try not to look at him.
I can’t see very well but I can make out a little grin on her face. “You give up?”
“I’m waving a tiny, invisible white flag,” I say, gesturing with one hand.
“Kira,” she says. “K-I-R-A.” I’m sure in a few years she will also offer a firm handshake. “Kira Ro Jensen-Martino.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “Wow. What a name.” I allow myself a quick glance at her dad. “Do you want to be in the circus when you grow up?”
“No,” she answers, like this should be obvious. “I’m gonna be a YouTuber.”
“Definitely not,” her dad says.
“YouTuber sounds like a pretty nice job,” I reply, because right now, any job sounds nice.
“What do you wanna do when you grow up?” Kira asks. I’m unsure if she simply can’t tell what age I am or has seen directly into my soul and pulled out the heart of my biggest insecurities.
I open my mouth to make something up (hair stylist, pilot, chiropractor) when her dad chimes in.
“She already told you—she’s a government agent.” I turn my head to look at him, but without my glasses, everything farther than a couple feet in front of me is blurry. “Do you need an extra towel?”
I shake my head and wipe under my eyes again. “Actually, the government agent bit was a lie. I’m a Juilliard-trained actor,” I tell him.
“Really?”
I can’t see his face properly. I stare at the area of his head where I imagine his slightly raised eyebrows might be.
“Yeah, I just hang around local pools hoping to practice my craft.”
“In that case, Kira’s a great scene partner because she likes to be the director, too.”
I’m squinting hard, trying to make out his features.
I’m basically conducting a conversation with one of those anonymized witnesses on Dateline.
“In addition to my impression of a water orangutan who can’t swim, I can pull off a super accurate ‘depressed twentysomething woman reading a book.’ I’m available for children’s birthday parties. ”
He laughs, and my eyes go straight to his hands, which seems more polite than looking at the other parts of him that I can sort of see.
Hands are my favorite part of the body. Eyes are the window into the soul, but hands contain a lot of information, too. And I don’t mean in the reflexology sense. We explore our immediate world with our hands. Sometimes we explore people with our hands.
His hands are, um, large.
“Da-ad, push me in!”
“Nope,” he says. “It’s time to go.” He tosses a towel at Kira. “Why don’t you dry off?”
“Five more minutes,” she declares, letting the towel drop to the concrete. Without waiting for permission, she jumps into the pool, leaving me alone with her dad.
“Your daughter taught me everything I know about water horses,” I say. “You must be very proud.”
“In her spare time, she breeds dragons,” he tells me. “On her tablet.”
“Imagine being this powerful, fearsome fantasy creature that can destroy cities but you’re still subject to the whims of a girl who wants you to have dragon babies with Sunwing because his orange underscales are pretty.”
“It’s very consensual,” he says. My eyes are starting to adjust and I can just make out his face. “Sunwing is into it.”
“I’m sure he is. But he’s not the one giving birth.”
Her dad laughs. I’ve made someone laugh multiple times? “I think they lay eggs, actually.” If I squint, I can almost see the outline of his nose now. It’s wide and has a bit of a bump like it got broken at some point and never healed correctly.
“Da-ad!” Kira pushes herself up out of the pool. “I’m hungry.”
“Okay, so grab your towel and dry off,” he says. Kira pulls at his arm and starts dragging him back to their lounge chairs. Her dad turns back to me, walking backward. “Do you live in this complex?”
I’m stumped for how to answer that. Yes, but it’s only temporary and only because of the pandemic and I’m trying my best but rent prices are through the roof and I can’t find a job in my field so I’m trying to get into another graduate program and—“My mom does.”
It’s still the truth, right?
He nods. I’m looking for evidence that he’s a tiny bit disappointed, but I can’t see detail well enough to discern that. “Well, thanks for playing with her.”
I’m tempted to clarify and correct my residency status because…how often in my daily existence do I make someone laugh? But he’s already turned around and gathering their stuff.