Saturday, May 31, 2014  6:30 a.m.

I slowly became aware of birds chirping outside my bedroom window. I knew I was laying curled up on my left side, sheets wrapped tightly around me, but I wasn’t quite awake yet. My body was floating down from sleep and into the real world. I let my mind push back awareness of the birds and cotton sheets, just to drift a bit longer with the luxury of no alarm clock on a Saturday morning.

In that lucid state, an image of short, tumbled dark hair against faintly lit trees and a night sky drifted across my mind. A memory. I let my memory’s eye travel from hair to face. It was my sister, Meg, as I remembered her from our childhood in southern California in our Cass Avenue home. She was grinning at me.

The image pulled back, and I could see her on the diving board of our backyard pool. She was looking straight down at me, grinning, and poised as if ready to cannonball and splash water all over me. She was naked. The flood lights on the side of the house lit her up, making the floodlight in the water under the diving board almost unnecessary. I could see the trees behind her, and a bit of night sky, and the tops of the tall, wooden privacy fence.

From the angle of the memory, I knew I was in the water. I was on the side of the pool closest to the house, looking up at my sister on the diving board. It was night. I was there.

My eyes flew open. No, I wasn’t. I sat straight up in the grey dawn, burying my face in my hands. NO. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there.

My breathing stabilized and I dropped my hands. Of course I wasn’t there that night. My sisters and I skinny-dipped tons of times in that pool. The privacy fence, trees and shrubs made it impossible for anything but a helicopter to be able to see into that backyard, and no one lived there except four female children who swam like fish and one mother. We must have skinny-dipped tons of times. Didn’t we?

I pushed away the doubt and reached for my cell phone. 6:42. No reason for me to get up yet. I needed to unpack and do laundry, but I had all day. I decided to get some coffee and curl up with Netflix on my Kindle.