Roger’s Reality: The boys remembered in jasmine

By Roger Owens

I love the smell of jasmine. It’s blooming late this season. We have several types here at our Florida home. We have Star jasmine trees, Confederate jasmine, and not a few of the ubiquitous “night blooming” species that grace our yard, effortlessly shouldering the feathery weight of their melodious Latin appellation: cestrum nocturnum. Their myriad perfumes permeate our home, where we spend many hours each day and evening outside, under an overhang, enjoying the natural beauty of our life here. Sights, sounds, and, they say, particularly smells, can bring back memories very strongly.

Last year, the jasmine bloomed earlier in the season, some time in October. And thus it was that on a day much like this one, when Cindy ran into the house to tell me someone was screaming for help, the jasmine were casting their voluptuous odors all about. I too would normally have been outside, where I sit at this moment, but I was inside changing my clothes – I don’t remember why. I wore shorts and a tee shirt and had my boots in my left hand. I always wear low-top work boots; I have bad feet and they support my battered appendages far better than tennies or runners.
    I headed out the door but wasted time asking stupid questions: Who was screaming? What was wrong? Cindy had no idea. How could she? Outside, the jasmine nectar was almost overwhelming. It was a beautiful, sunny autumn day. Then I heard it myself. A man, screaming as if being crucified. Down the side street. In another life I was a first responder. This background gives me a working knowledge of first aid, anatomy, all that goopy stuff. And, the “goop” doesn’t bother me much. Much. Just, not for a living. Not me. It takes special people to do that, all day every day.
    The sensations are, as they say, burned into my brain. The warm pavement on my socked feet as I pounded down the road with Cindy hot on my heels, the autumnal breeze in the pines, the screaming man. One thing they teach you in rescue work is that to help your victim you must locate him, and quickly. And a victim who can respond is a victim who can be located. I began doing some shouting myself. “Who needs help? Where are you? Keep yelling!” The pleas for help were coming from the back of a house on the end of the next block, which faces the side street, Green Dolphin, and across to the canal. There are a few such lots in our neighborhood. They are considered desirable real estate.
    We knew the house, we walked our dogs by it nearly every day. These were the new kids. Young folks who seemed to have money, good jobs maybe, a great house with a pool and nice, new-ish vehicles. Other than what we saw strolling by we knew exactly nothing. The house has a pool. The pool is tightly surrounded by a black mesh safety fence, the kind that is fastened to poles inserted into holes in the pool deck by metal hook latches, which have a metal sleeve on a spring, to keep little fingers from unhooking them. The pool is also surrounded loosely by the fence that now confronted us. The gate we were facing was padlocked. From the gate I could see a man on the far deck of the pool, with two little forms laid out beside him.
    I remember vaulting more hurricane fences in my day than you can shake a stick at, in deeds both charitable and nefarious, but I quickly realized it had been a very long time since I had done so. I was also figuring out that it had been quite a few years since I had done the hundred-yard dash. It was, in fact, all I could do to get my big white butt over that fence, but I did, and tore my shorts doing it. Cut my thigh too, but I didn’t notice that till later.
    At the black safety fence near the man and the little forms, I balked; the unlatched opening in the safety fence was on the opposite side of the pool. Unwilling to waste another second running around, I just threw down my boots and yanked the flimsy metal posts down, and there they were. While the man worked on the smaller of what turned out to be two boys, both three years old, I went to work on the other.

I remember one thing all too well: it was no good. The minute I put my hands on that child I was sure he was gone. You don’t stop, though; they teach you that. You didn’t, at least in my time, discontinue resuscitation unless relieved or a doctor pronounced death. Things may have changed, it’s been a long, long time. I remember hoping for a gush of water, a cough, a fluttering of the eyes, anything. The absolute best thing a rescue crew can hear from a young child in trouble is a scream. A cry. If they are responsive, they are alive. I turned the boy on his side, tried to clear his airway, pounded his back, tried to do the old “assisted breathing” part of CPR they don’t do much anymore. I don’t care; I’ve seen it work, and right then I would have done anything, anything, to see that baby move. I might as well have tried to blow into a concrete wall. I could tell the man also had some first-aid experience. He was doing all the right things too. Unfortunately, I could also tell he was getting no response either.
    I have seen drownings. I have seen child drownings; they are as common as mosquitoes in Florida, sometimes five hundred or more per year. A good childhood friend’s little sister drowned in their pool, right next to our junior high school. She was the same age as these boys. I remember that her family subsequently filled the pool in. I had never seen a double drowning. I had never seen two drowned children at once; nor two dead children at once, period. I have never had a day that bad in my life. And I didn’t even know these people. For them, I have no doubt it was their worst day ever, and made mine look like a walk in the park.
    At this point, a neighbor nearly as broke-down as me had managed to get through a side gate and I told him to call 911. The man whose children had gone into the pool had been sleeping, and when he found them he had jumped in immediately. His cell phone was in his pocket, so of course it was instantly ruined. That’s why we had heard him screaming instead of just hearing a siren nearby and wondering what was up.
    Of course, the first thing the dispatcher asked was the address. Despite having walked by their mailbox hundreds of times, over by the canal where we walk the dogs, I couldn’t remember the number. The man had lived there only a few weeks; he couldn’t remember it either. I told the neighbor with the cell phone to hold it up while I worked on the boy so I could talk to the dispatcher. I told her the cross streets and oriented on our local firehouse – another tactic I had learned riding ambulances back in the day.
    It couldn’t have been three more minutes until the first sheriff’s car arrived. It was a good thing. I was finished. It wasn’t just sprinting and jumping fences I wasn’t up to anymore. It had also been one hell of a long time since I had done CPR for twenty minutes, and I can tell you, it is exhausting. When it is unsuccessful, it is also heartbreaking. The young sheriff in his bulky bullet-proofs and twill shirt looked like a green porcupine, with all the stuff they carry sticking off him like spines. I remember his army-issue haircut, the smell of his hair oil, and the mole on the left side of his head that his sixteenth-inch of hair could not conceal. He was there to relieve me, and I was glad. I would have hated to have given up. The situation was bad enough without that.
    In heartbeats more, dozens of uniformed, competent young men and women joined the scene, and the still, little boys were being handed over the fence and bundled into an ambulance. No one was talking to me. I was good with that. To stay out of the way, I went around to the front of the house, through the gate that I saw was open from the back yard. It had one of those spring-loaded clips like on dog collars. I had to go down like a penitent and hug the ground, trying to breathe. I remember the smell of the dry ground, the caress of the leaves of grass on my face. Soft as it was, the earth hurt my old knees. A mockingbird trilled and chattered above me in the oaks. Somewhere, somehow, I had retrieved my boots. Once again they were in my hand – the right one this time. When I could breathe again, I put them on over my trashed socks.

The man’s name is Alex. He’d been sleeping, but tell me who wouldn’t have been. The dream of every young parent is the night their baby sleeps the night through, while they do what? Sleep, that’s what. Right off, people were talking him down, and apparently his own wife was one of them. These boys, one his, one hers, both three, had gotten out a locked front door, through a latched fence gate, and through the so-called safety fence around the pool itself. And drowned. No, they did not make it. Don’t trust those security fences; they clearly don’t work.
    We were excluded from most of what happened after, but we learned second-hand of a meeting with the families and counsellors at the hospital, where Alex said he owed me some great debt. That may be so, but the truth is the man could not stand the sight of me. Not once did he look me in the eye. The day of the funeral, which we were not invited to, I saw him on the side street and brought him over to our house. We talked for a few minutes, outside where Cindy and I hang out, and he told me, “You buy your dream home, to raise your family…,” and then he just looked into the distance, shaking his head. Then I walked him back to his house. To tell the truth I was uncomfortable around him as well. I had met him on my own worst day, and he only knew me from those hours when he was literally in Hell.
    I was asked to come in and talk to the mother, who hadn’t been home at the time. She had only two questions to ask me. “Did they look scared?” I told her, no, ma’am, they looked peaceful. She was less than half my age, but for obvious reasons a mother who has lost a child commands, at least in the mind of this Southern boy, a certain respect. Her second question threw me. “Which boy did you work on?” I realized I didn’t know. I not only didn’t know which boy was whose, I didn’t even know their names. I had to describe the boy for her to understand it was Alex’s son I was working on. The fact that Alex was working on her son seemed to make her feel better. I can’t fathom the depths of emotion involved in that situation.
    Sensations, sights, and sounds, and particularly smells, can trigger memories so strongly it’s as if we are experiencing the event all over again. This is often pleasant, but not always. A pleasant sensation can sometimes replay a memory we might prefer remain dormant. We don’t always have a choice. The smell of the river reminds me of my childhood when we grew up nearby one. The odor of salt water reminds me of years of boating and fishing. The perfume of jasmine, so pleasing, will always remind me of the deaths of two little boys, of the life they will never have, of the hustling efficiency of the sheriffs and ambulance crews. I can’t help thinking of the parents, who soon after moved back to Iowa. Are they still together? Like Alex and me, can they even look at each other? I understand many couples who lose a child, even when it is no one’s “fault,” often just can’t stand to be around each other any longer, the memories are too strong. Sort of like if the jasmine bloomed all year. I love the smell of jasmine.
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Roger was interviewed on CBS Channel 12 News, Fort Pierce, Florida: “Neighbor gives CPR to drowning victim, desperate for signs of life” [Erin MacPherson, October 17, 2017].

Copyright © 2018 by Roger Owens