He pulled the blankets back and she wasn't under them.
He looked around her room to see if maybe she had fallen asleep somewhere else. He went back into the hall and she wasn't in the kids' bathroom and she wasn't in the kitchen or the living room and then he knew where she was, he knew it was impossible but didn't she say she wished she could live underwater like a fish, live there all the time?
He was halfway down the hall when he realized that he'd need something to cut through the plastic. He ran to the kitchen, got the big, sharp carving knife, and ran back to the bedroom and started yanking the sheets off the bed.
"What you doing, baby?" said Sondra sleepily.
"Get up," said Curtis. "There's something inside the waterbed."
She got up, dragging the top sheet with her. "How can there be something inside there? You sleepwalking, baby?"
His only answer was to plunge the knife into the plastic—but near the edge, where he wouldn't run a risk of stabbing Tamika, if she was really under there, if he wasn't completely insane. The knife went in on the second try, and then he sawed and tugged at the plastic and the stinking water splashed into his face and now the opening was wide enough and he reached down in, reached with both hands, leaned so he could feel deep into the bed and there was an ankle and he grabbed it and pulled, and when he got the foot out of the bed Sondra screamed.
"Hold on to her," said Curtis, and he fumbled around and found Tamika's other leg and now they could pull her out, like she was being born feetfirst with a huge gush of water. They pulled her right over the edge of the waterbed frame and she flopped onto the floor like a fish.
She looked dead.
Curtis didn't waste a second except to say, "Call 911," and then he was pushing on Tamika's chest to get the water out and then breathing into her mouth, trying to remember if there was something different about CPR if it was from drowning instead of a heart attack or a seizure. When he pushed on her chest water splashed out of her mouth but did that mean he had to get all the water out before breathing into her lungs and was he still supposed to pump at her chest to get her heart started?
He did everything, sure that whatever he was doing had to be wrong but doing it anyway. And when the EMTs got there, they took over, and before they got her onto a cart she had a tube down her throat and they assured him that her heart was beating and she was getting air.
"How long was she underwater?" asked one of the guys.
"I don't know," said Curtis. "Took me a while to realize she was in there."
"You expect me to believe she cut through waterbed plastic herself, a little girl like that?" asked the guy.
"No, I cut it open to get her out," said Curtis.
"Come on!" demanded the other guy and they were out the door with Tamika, rushing her to the hospital. And Curtis and Sondra woke up Azalea Mason and she came over and stayed in the house so the boys wouldn't wake up to no grownups there, and then they went to the hospital to find out if the light of their lives had gone out on this terrible, impossible night.
Ura Lee poured coffee into Madeline Tucker's cup.
"I don't know why he even sticks with such a story," said Madeline.
"Sondra says that's how it happened," said Ura Lee Smitcher.
"Well she would, wouldn't she, seeing how she doesn't want her husband to go to jail."
"I'd want my husband to go to jail if he stuck my daughter inside a waterbed so long she was brain-damaged. That's if I didn't kill him with the knife he used to cut through the plastic."
"Well, that just shows you are not Sondra Brown. She is loyal to a fault."
"I suppose that's easier to believe than thinking Tamika could somehow magically appear inside a waterbed," said Ura Lee. "It's just a completely crazy thing. The Browns are good people."
"Those child abuser wackos always look like good people."
"My Mack plays there all the time with their boy Quon, he'd know if they were abused children.
Abusers live in secrecy, and their kids are shy and closed-off."
"Except the ones who don't and aren't," said Madeline.
"Well, I guess they better hope you aren't on the jury, since you already got that man convicted."
"Reasonable doubt, that's the law," said Madeline. "When he tells people she was inside the waterbed and there wasn't a break in it anywhere until he cut it open to get her out, then he better plead insanity because ain't no jury in this city, white or black, that would let him off. He ain't O. J.
and ain't nobody going to believe him if he starts talking about the LAPD framing him, not even if he got Johnnie Cochran and a choir of angels on his defense team."
"Johnnie Cochran ain't taking this case anyway," said Ura Lee, "cause the Browns don't have that kind of money and besides, Tamika isn't dead."
"Brain-damaged so she might as well be dead. Poor little girl."
Ura Lee looked over at the hallway and saw Mack standing there. "You need something, Mack?"
"Did Tamika go into the water last night?" he asked.
"It's not like we were talking soft," said Ura Lee. "Mack, don't you have homework?"
"I'm five."
"No reason to treat you like babies," said Ura Lee.
Mack and Madeline both looked at her like she was crazy.
"That's why I don't tell jokes," said Ura Lee. "Nobody ever laughs."
"Nobody thinks you're joking, that's why," said Madeline.
"Yes, Mack, the Browns' little swimmer almost drowned and she was without air for so long it hurt her brain."
"She isn't dead?"
"No, Mack, she's alive. But there's things she won't be able to do anymore. Doctors don't know how bad the damage is yet. She might get some of it back, she might not."
Mack had tears in his eyes. He was taking it harder than Ura Lee would have expected.
"Mack, this kind of thing happens sometimes. Accidents that hurt people. All you can do is pray that it doesn't happen to someone you love, and then pray for strength to deal with it if it does."
"I should have told her," said Mack.
"Told her what?"
"To stop wishing she could be a fish."
"Mack, honey, this doesn't have a thing to do with you."
But Madeline was intrigued now. "She told you she wanted to be a fish?"
Ura Lee didn't want Madeline to start making something out of this. "It wouldn't matter if she did."
"Well it would too, if it would show she had a motive for getting into that waterbed."
"Motive or not, she can't fit down the hose hole in a waterbed, and that was the only way she could have got in."
"If Mack knows something," said Madeline stubbornly, "then he's got to tell."
"He's five years old," said Ura Lee. "Nobody is going to accept his testimony, especially since there's no way Tamika could have got in that waterbed except through the gash Curtis Brown cut in it."
Ura Lee turned to Mack. "Mack, this is a grownup conversation. Tamika's going to be fine in the end, I'm sure of it. It's sweet of you to care what happens to your friend's big sister. But now you need to let us talk."
Mack turned around and went back up the hall. Madeline was about to talk again, but Ura Lee held up her hand till she heard the door close. Then she got up and walked to the hall and looked down to make sure Mack wasn't faking being out of earshot.
"Well?" asked Madeline, when Ura Lee returned to the living room.
"Well I did not go over there to spy on them. I think you want to talk to Miz Ophelia for that kind of thing."
"Oh, she wouldn't go in that room, she called it the death room and said it had some powerful curse on it."
"Well, if you're reduced to asking me for gossip, Madeline, you are at the bottom of the barrel, cause nobody tells me anything and I wouldn't remember it if they did."
In his bedroom, Mack was afraid to go to sleep. What if he dreamed again, and someone else had something terrible happen to them? So many cold dreams. A whole neighborhood full of them.