Curtis lay there on the bed, wondering if he really had to pee so bad he couldn't just go back to sleep, cause if he got up then when he got back to bed the sheets would be cold and clammy unless he stayed up long enough for them to get dry and then...

Something bumped him.

Bumped him from underneath.

He was out of that bed in a second, standing beside it, looking down. It was still undulating from his getting up. But Sondra lay there peaceful as could be, snoring just a little the way she did, even as she rocked slightly from the bed's movement.

I'm going crazy, thought Curtis as he stumbled to the bathroom. Either that or the chemicals in the bed ain't doing their job and the algae gone and growed into the Blob. Now that's the kind of nightmare would have kept him awake all night, back when he was a kid. Except they didn't even have waterbeds then. No, wait, yes they did. There was that 1970s movie where the cop—Eastwood? Some white cop, anyway—busts into some black pimp's room where he's lying with some girl on his waterbed, and when he's done asking questions the white cop shoots the bed for no reason at all, just to be mean and make it leak all over.

When he was done he didn't wash his hands, because he was tired and he hadn't got any on himself and besides, urine was mostly uric acid so it was cleaner than soap, or that's what that guy said at that spaghetti dinner at the Masons' house on Memorial Day, so it didn't matter if you washed your hands after you peed, you could eat a banana with your bare hands and be perfectly safe. It was wiping yourself that made it so you needed to wash, that's where diseases came from. Little-known facts, Curtis said to himself. That's all I got in my head, is little-known completely useless facts.

He padded down the hall to look at the kids' rooms. The boys had kicked their covers off and Quon, as usual, was asleep with his hands inside his underpants, what were they going to do with that boy, couldn't stop playing with it like he thought it was made of Legos or something. Tamika, though, her covers were all piled up on top of her. How could she sleep like that? Too hot for that, she was going to sweat to death, if the pile of blankets didn't smother her.

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?"