It was an emergency whistle.

Bright orange, cheap, faded now and scratched from six years of weather, but unmistakable.

I knew it the way you know your own child’s handwriting.

It was the cheap bright orange of a thing bought at a lake outfitters, scratched and sun-faded now, utterly ordinary, the kind of object that passes through a hundred hands and is never looked at twice.

But my son had chosen its color, arguing for ten minutes at a counter about whether orange showed up better than yellow in the water, and my husband had paid for it, and one of my boys had pressed it into the hand of a drowning stranger’s grandson and told him to keep it.