Beneath the Waves

In the Summer of 2008, Friendship Connection, a public, out-of-school-time program, received a grant to take care of thirty kids from the Karen refugee community. Many had recently come to Minnesota’s First Baptist Church, just off 35 E as you enter downtown St. Paul.

“So they just showed up at a church? Don’t they need to be, like, processed or something?” my site leader asked me a few weeks before Summer orientation.
“Processed? No, the government thinks Myanmar is Communist. Red scare and all that. So they’re more than willing to take them in as fast as they can book their plane tickets,” I said.
“Sometimes I can’t tell if you’re joking,” she laughed.

***
My memories from that Summer still feel disjointed. For awhile after Jackie, this little Karen boy, drowned during our Sandy Lake field trip, it was like my brain hid everything I remembered about him. Now it comes back slowly, in pieces.

Did you know that Karen families are more forgiving than American families? After Jakie died, his parents left us this phone message thanking us for the kindness we’d shown their children, and letting us know we were in their prayers.

When I had to go back to work, and pretend like I didn't want to press my face in a corner and sob, I tried to hold on to their forgiveness. Tried to choke it down because I knew that to reject it, and let self-hatred fester, was to reject the most important gift I had ever received.

***
“Show me five!”

I moved my hand back and forth, making eye contact with each of the kids that continued to talk. After a few seconds the voices began to subside.

“You should be sitting applesauce style on your pockets, ears open, eyes up here,” I said.

The little bodies squirmed, adjusting themselves on the grubby, blue rug (obedient because I was a new authority).

“Welcome to Summer Friendship Connection! This is the Jungle Room, and you’re all here because you’re wild animals- monkeys and tigers and colorful birds. Is that right?”

“My friend Jackie is from the jungle!” a slight girl with wispy blonde hair points through the wall to the Karen classroom next door.

“That is really awesome,” I smile at her.

***
The day after the swimming accident, they sent counselors from program headquarters to roam the hallways, inviting us into vacant rooms to talk. I warned them to leave me alone. They wanted to check me off their list.

“Who’s going to make sure Henry sneak out of the cafeteria if I come talk to you? He needs me to sit next to him.”

***
In our classroom, the walls seemed to have been covered in thick white paper, and where little hands could reach, strips of it were missing. There were no windows, no lights except for the fluorescent bulbs that hang in the center of the room. I found a map of the world and a butterfly poster, and hung them in our reading corner. Our site leader said she’d order colorful lanterns to hang up. She thought the lack of color was the biggest problem with the room.

“It’s not a big deal. I’d rather just keep the kids outside for most of the day.”

“We can’t deviate from our schedule. It’d be too hard to track everyone,” she said.

***
At snack time we gave the kids milk, crackers, and fruit cups. Jackie would sometimes take two milks and ask me to open both of them at once. I would say, “I think one’s enough,” even though I felt sick for taking something from him. But even one was too much, and an hour later he would be vomiting in the bathroom. It took us two weeks to figure out that none of the Karen children couldn’t digest milk.

***
My site leader said I needed to break the news to my kids that Jackie had died. They knew it would be tough for little ones to understand, and we were each given a script with a statement for us to read and questions that might come up. I was a ventriloquist doll that morning.

“We will miss our friend Jackie,” I said, “We are very sad that he has died. Would anyone like to ask me a question?"

When you ask six year olds if they have questions about death, do you know what they do? They all raise their hands and tell you about their dead pets, and the time their grandma, who lives very far away, died, and they had to look at her waxy body in a coffin. They tell you about eggs that have fallen out of bird’s nests, skunks on the side of the highway, ghosts that aren’t real (but are in the movies), and bad-guy killers. I didn’t need the script for this.

But Gina was brighter than the others, and she understood what a question was.
“Where will he go now?” her eyes met mine."

I’m not spiritual, and when someone dies I imagine them painlessly blinking out of existence. I took a beat to consider how quickly her parents would get me fired if I answered her so nonchalantly, and looked at my teaching partner for help.

“That’s a really good question, Gina. That’s a good question to talk to you family about,” she said.

***
All of the Karen children wore these cheap, patriotic flip-flops from Old Navy or something like that. The straps were constantly popping off, and I became the authority on duct taping the tiny shoes back into functionality. This was how I first met Jackie. He didn’t say a word to me while I was helping him, but I talked at him anyway.

“How do you goofballs keep breaking your shoes? You run and run and run, but it doesn’t look like you’re playing tag. Is it an imaginary game? I bet you hate wearing shoes,” I said.

His little arches were flat.

***
I didn’t hear the whistle. I saw the lifeguard beckoning us out of the water with exaggerated motions. We padded onto the baking sand, and I was vaguely aware of a few pairs of children’s slippery arms wrapped around my legs. I stared at the empty water in front of me. Seconds ago it was teeming with bodies; mermaids exploring sunken ships, water warriors splashing any adult within sight, diving, dunking, and squirting. A wall of laughter and joyful shrieking that collided with nervous silence.

“Everyone over 18 in the water, link arms!”

I was in the water before anyone, a knee-jerk reaction. Others quickly joined me, but the energy was strange. Our adrenaline had us laughing nervously as we hooked our naked arms together and began moving through the shallows.

“If I feel something with my foot I’m going to completely freak out!” The woman with her arm looped through mine said this like the punch line of a joke, and I found myself hoping she’d be the one to find him.

One of the lifeguards diving further off shore surfaced with a tiny body, head lolling on over his enormous tan shoulder. Somehow I was on shore when he thundered past me. I felt my teeth clamp down on my tongue, warm blood dripping out of the corner of my mouth, when I saw Jackie’s sealed eyes leaking tears from the lake.

***
What does it feel like to be pulled under the water by the excited hands of your friends?  To be kicked down by their wiry legs, thrashing in rhythm with the waves? If Jackie's journey to a safer life ended with him watching his last bubble of oxygen float towards the surface from his parted lips under our watch, shouldn't we have been punished for it?

I let these questions resurface in my mind.