He had the panicky, recurring feeling that he’d forgotten to remove his watch, but it was only the shackles of the waterpark around his wrists. Half the people in the artificial river were swimming it, a whirl of limbs, no vessels. Boys, mostly, of all ethnicities, pink and umber and tawny and brown and sienna. It seemed as though there’d been a shipment of boys, and their boat had crashed, and here were the survivors. The Raft of the Medusa at the Waterpark. There were a lot of them, shouting in petrifying pleasure at one another. The water got rougher. Bruno tightened his grip on the rings. “Are you all right?” No answer. He realized with alarm that this had been a rotten idea. Impossible to know how deep the water was. Deep enough to buffet them along. A baby seat? Who would take a baby on something like this? They ran over one of the swimming boys, who popped up choking, laughing.

Bruno knew all the ways you could drown because his mother had told him, and because of Eleanor, now ten years dead, his wife for fifteen years, Eleanor of the psychiatrists and misdiagnoses, Eleanor whom he loved as well as he’d ever imagined loving anyone, until he met Ernest, when he realized his essential trouble might also have been a question of extraordinary misdiagnosis, though he only had himself to blame.