Silent Alarm

You Better Go Check on the Kids

It was a mid-winter Sunday. The game was on. I don’t recall which game. Not a fan, really—just relaxing with a cold beverage. Jenny was in the kitchen. The house was quiet.

With three children, four, five, and seven years old, silence is rare. And during daylight hours it’s usually an indication something has gone wrong.

Jenny’s senses are tuned to pick up silence. Mine were focused on the television until she interrupted my pleasant trance. “It’s awfully quiet. You better go check on the kids.”

I heaved myself out of a comfortable chair and padded in socks down the hall toward the kids’ rooms.

Christopher, five—the middle child, came charging out of the bathroom. We narrowly avoided a collision. He glanced up over his shoulder at me adjusting his course slightly in the split second before he realized who or what he’d nearly collided with.

His head snapped back around, eyes wide, legs still churning, carried by their own momentum. “I didn’t do it, Dad! It was April’s idea!”

He was carrying a plastic pale brim full with water—one he’d likely gotten with a McDonald’s Happy Meal.

He entered April’s room with me on his heels where he finally came to a stop, his surprise turning to sober realization. His young mind hadn’t considered until that very moment the consequences of the good time he and his sister were having, but he’s a sharp kid, and the outcomes were lining up on the opposing side to fun.

April, shot me a huge smile. No fear, no surprise, just joy and a disarming smile. Even at four years old, she’d learned to manage me like a border collie herding sheep. Her main weapon, that gleeful smile.

She was sitting in the middle of her bed, inside the large bottom drawer of her dresser wearing a faded summer swimsuit. The water level reached mid-torso on her, nearly to the top edge of the dresser drawer. It was falling fast.

Water squished between my toes.

“We’re swimming, Dad!” April chortled. The smile faded from her face as the water poured through the seams.

“You better come down here!” I shouted over my shoulder.

Together Jenny and I wrestled a 300 pound, bed sized sponge out the back door and spent the next two hours stomping on towels and wringing them out in the bathtub. That mattress, leaning against the house on the back patio, drained water for three days and took another week to dry.

That was more than 25 years ago. The old dresser sits in the corner of our basement, now. I use it to store bike gear. Every time I pull the warped bottom drawer open I see the beaming smile of a little girl in a faded swimsuit and the surprised look on her young accomplice’s face. And I laugh until tears fill my eyes. Then it gets too quiet, again.