The Exchange: Day 16

William learned to dive backwards the summer our French boy came to town. Camille taught him. I watched them working on it from across the pool, two boys at the end of twin boards, lightly bouncing, suspended in time, growing into their bodies, their friendship, the backflip at hand. They get into position, turn with their backs to the water. They bounce a little. They look across at each other. Bounce a little more. Knees give way. Then Camille, in a sure arc, leaps backwards up and out over the water, arms outstretched, executing several flips in the air before cutting the surface. Will, still bouncing at the end of his board, adopts an ‘I think I can’ posture, sort of miming the motions he will need before leaving the board. He turns to watch Camille’s graceful plunge and then smiles at the emerging boy, who comes up laughing and yelling something I can’t make out. Then it is Camille’s turn to watch from the side of the pool as Will looks down at his feet, toes curled around the end of the board, looks up, swings his arms, seizes his resolve and throws himself backwards into the air, all legs and limbs, making a full chaotic rotation before landing with an enormous splash. C’est fait!

They are water rats. Been at the pool more this summer than in the past two years. It’s a good place to cool off both from a hot day of play, and from some of the tension and simmering emotions that come out of that play. You start to realize gradually all that is brewing behind mandatory brotherhood. They did not choose each other. Nor have they had a lifetime to acclimate. They have three weeks to walk, talk, eat and sleep like besties, and maybe that works and maybe it doesn’t. When I check in halfway through a work morning at the library, Will is at his wit’s end at home. Can’t get French boy out of the bed or through the morning routine. “Mom!” His voice so exasperated, “Camille won’t get his chores done! He keeps going up to change and I know he’s not changing, he’s just sitting on his phone.” Huh. How about that, son. Our travelling to DC flushed it out as well, the cultural difference in managing time. Timing, dude. I travel with the gloves off. When I say we leave at 8, we leave at 8. Put away that cereal mid-mouth and get in the car!

The sloth is offset by a raw physicality that kicks in mid-morning and lasts all day: the slap fights, the pushing, shoving, brute force of being, the game of tag when one of them is trying to use the bathroom, or the pillow fight that just won’t quit though I am blocking the doorway between them. Never having had a brother and going off to school each day with strictest instruction to keep his hands to himself, I think Will is a little blown away his mom brought the locker room straight into his own home. All brawn, few brains, and lots of crashing about. How do you say “Everything all right up there?” in French? It occurs to me that I could be in the ER at some point with this little French wildman, no different from my own. On the one hand, I was not prepared for the surging testosterone in these two barely adolescent boys, and on the other hand I start to realize just how young they are when we are fighting for the front seat. Did I say “fighting”? A 12-year-old might “fight” you for the front seat, insisting on his turn. An 8-year-old just takes you by the arm and yanks you out.

Camille is well-versed in brotherly relations: at home he is a boy sandwich. I ask him, does he miss his brothers? The one in Texas with a local family, the other a shirtless 5-year-old (Facetime, eh?) named Jacques, who Camille assures me is the one doing the beating when they wrestle and not the other way around. Does he miss the older brother, the one who’s put those bruises on his leg? Camille does not have to think about his emphatic “Non! Pas du tout!” Does he miss his mother and father? “Non,” says he, a little more pensively. “Camille? Are you happy here?” There’s a delay while he considers the English. Supposed to speak English here, boy. “Oh yes!” says my little brown seal with the sun in his eyes. “Eye happy!”

Today, at the pool, other boys join them–little pack of water rats like magnets to each other. Their wet backs and sleek bodies glisten in the sun. They dive, splash, play water basketball and horseplay. Notch the lifeguards’ twitchiness up one degree. Okay, a couple degrees. Lots of strutting and posturing, on their way to be men. Here at the pool, however, they are not men. They are boys whose feet don’t touch the bottom in the deep end. In the pool their wildly variant physiques are not apparent. Under water, the scrawny and the sleek alike have equalized strength to lift, plunge, and fling each other about. They tussle, they wrestle and roll, boiling the water like a piranha surge. Over and over, they surface and lunge at each other. Sometimes when they break apart, not all are smiling. I watch for that. I watch for blows, for arms slung unmuted by the water, for a splash that was more than a splash, for a head held under the water too long. Don’t want the tide to turn on fun.

Their harmlessness is pretty readable, even from this distance. Will’s smile is all in his teeth, with a grin that takes over his face and a laugh that carries clear across the pool. With Camille, the smile is in his eyes; his braces glint in the sun. “He’s perfect!” I said last March when the international coordinator sent me one possible dossier to fill our request for a younger boy. You get a few words and a photo or two, and this is how you map a stranger into your summer life. I didn’t have to look any further, just had a feeling. He’s perfect. We’ll take him. En effet, this is the meaning of his name, Camille: “perfect and pure.”

What is it about this boy? He’s hardly perfect, and he’s not pure. Pas du tout! Even St. Camille, the 16th-century patron saint of the sick and intercessor for gamblers (!) had a time of it. Many saints did/do. We are seated in church on the 14th when Camille informs me of this feast day. Really? That is so cool. Cooler still that he knew. Later I look it up and receive confirmation on what I suspected: it is often the case that what makes us holy is what makes us human to begin with. So what is it? Is it because he is so cute? He is indeed, small for his age. Mignon. I knew when he came downstairs that first night after having a shower with no clean clothes to put on, I knew before he padded into the kitchen what he would be wearing: an oversized sweatshirt and little blue and white boxers. His skivvies. I know because the orientation packet told me, though I laughed out loud in disbelief at this random observation: “French boys like to walk around in their underwear.” What is that? I remember thinking. Sure enough, here is this little elf in his BVDs. They’re even striped! The next morning, a nose bleed. I all but lift him into my arms to carry him quick to the bathroom, sit him on the closed toilet lid and tend, his wide brown eyes on mine.

Is it that he comes from a far away place, skin so warm and smooth as beach glass? Is it the twinkle in his eye as he makes a joke or pretends not to understand when I ask him to put away his phone? Is it because he speaks a language from a long, long ago time for me, one I hadn’t considered for 30 years? Or comes from a place that I left in body only and am just now coming to realize it? I feel like I am coming awake after a long, long sleep. Is it that he speaks in the high, husky voice of a little boy, the innocence so alive and fresh it fairly pulses on his skin and dances in his eyes? If I didn’t know any better, I would check whether he’s lost his shadow, so I can sew it back on.

I look up the French term for “hot mess,” if there is one, as that is surely what this boy is. I’ve reminded him 11 days of the 10 he’s been here to make his bed. Faire ton lit. PLEASE!When he finally does do it, it seems to soak up an inordinate amount of time, time he could have used to pick up his clothes off the floor or hang a bath towel. He has honed ineptitude and polished helplessness to an appealing invitation I should not accept. But I do. We agree that I will do his laundry, as I do for the other children in the house, and he will fetch, fold and tote it. It is a child’s laundry, small in size and quantity (re-wears!)with lots of mismatched socks. First chore I ever had as a step-mom that threw me: all their tiny socks. When the white T-shirt with a chocolate ice cream stain comes through I certainly work at it like I would my own kids’ laundry. It’s chocolate, and it’s right on the front. When the second or third attempt fails I let it go. He’s a boy. It’s a T shirt. And that there is my passport stamp on his little being, carrying it home so that the other mother in his life, the real one, will look at it and say, Ahhh so that is where you have been.

Today, the coordinator sends a email with flight information for his departure. They leave in nine days. Noooooo! I watch him diving, over and over, into sunshine, tireless. A dive, a flip, another dive–he is more in the air than in the water, and I am aware that soon he will fly up and not come down. In my mind I climb onto that board, turn with my back to the tide of life, take a breath, and dive.

I know what it is. It is more than a middle-aged fling into what was good, so many years ago. When last I heard and spoke this language I was young. But it is more than this. It is equally romantic and insistent, but it is wholly about the present. I want to be where life is being lived. And nowhere is that more true than in this sea of boys.