He didn't have the words for it.

Anyone raising a child like mine knows why swimming is not optional. They love water. They go toward it. That is exactly what makes it dangerous, and why learning to swim was never a hobby in our house.

It helps him in other ways too. Something about the water takes the tightness out of him.

He went happily for months. Then the coach changed, and he stopped wanting to go.

We could not get it out of him. Not once. He would say he didn't want to, and that was the end of it. Then it moved into his stomach: an hour before every lesson, his stomach hurt. It hurt for real, the way a stomach does when a body has decided something the child cannot explain.

We spoke to the new coach. He was perfectly kind about it. Nothing unusual, he said. Some children are simply afraid of the water.

Except mine hadn't been. Three months earlier he was getting into the car with his goggles already on.

In the end we stopped the lessons.

We tried again the next summer. He remembered. He still would not go.

And then it solved itself by accident, the way these things always seem to.

We were walking near the beach that August and passed a match on a field. A referee blew his whistle, hard, close to us. My son stopped dead. I didn't connect it to the sound — the whole street was loud — I just saw him standing there with an expression I knew too well.

I asked him what was wrong.

He said: "That whistle is scary. It's the same one as Coach Mike's, at swimming."

That was it. That was the whole year.

The new coach used a whistle, and used it constantly — line up, stop, go, everybody out. To my son, a sharp sound repeated like that is not an instruction. It is an alarm. Something is wrong, and wrong again, and wrong again, for forty-five minutes.

He had known this the entire time. He simply did not have the words for it, and no adult at that pool had any reason to guess.

I have gone over it more times than is good for me. If only I could have seen it coming. If only I could go back and tell that man one sentence.

I can't. That year is gone, and he is still not a swimmer.

What I can do is try again. And this time there will be a card in the swim bag.

That's why the card has a line about sudden, repeated sounds.