Children flew down slides and splash landed. Parents stood watching, or walked babies through the water, or lay on deck chairs as though sunbathing beneath the corrugated roof. Two lifeguards in pointless sunglasses wandered around mid-shin in the water, clutching long foam rescue devices to their abdomens.

The boy started to run in.

“Walking feet!” called Ernest. “Careful, honey.” He turned to Bruno. “Was this a terrible idea?”

“This was your idea.”

“We should get him a life jacket.”

“It’s one foot of water.”

“You can drown in three inches.”

“I know all the ways you can drown,” said Bruno.

“Yes,” said Ernest, “I’m sorry.”

They looked back. The boy was already gone.

Dead, Bruno decided. He felt this any time he couldn’t locate Cody for more than a minute, even in games of hide-and-go-seek, when the boy wouldn’t answer his name: an absolute conviction that he was now looking for a corpse. This was something he had never told Ernest, who believed Bruno too laissez-faire to do any real parenting. Ernest was reasonable, logical, in his worry. He had a sense of proportion. For Bruno, there was nothing between uncertainty and catastrophe. That was his secret.

“Where is he,” he asked Ernest now.

“He’s somewhere—”

They ran sloshily through the water. Behind the pirate ship was a smaller slide shaped like a madcap gape-mouthed frog, and here they found the boy sliding down the frog’s great tongue. The goggles gave him the look of a scientist testing gravity.

They perched on the edge of the pool and watched the frog as it vomited toddlers. Toddlers, and Cody, who went up the steps along the frog’s spine and down its tongue as though practicing for later: that exactitude and joylessness. The air seemed made of screaming and flesh. Bruno was grateful for his swim shirt, which hid his gut. He had the urge to reach out with bent fingers and just brush the inside hem of Ernest’s swim trunks, imperceptibly, though it wouldn’t be imperceptible to Ernest, and Ernest wouldn’t approve.

He did it anyhow.

“Gravy,” said Ernest. But he hooked one pinky into Bruno’s Schlitterbahn bracelet and gave it a fond tug.

Then Cody was at their knees. “I want my river,” he said. “I want to tube on my river.”

“Of course,” said Bruno, and Cody smiled again. His teeth were even, loosely strung. Bruno had always been appalled by parents who lamented the passing of their children’s youth. If you could just keep them this age! And what would be the result? A child like a bound foot, a bonsai tree.

O Cody and his milk teeth: just a little longer, please.