Two if by Sea

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

  Could Brian have lived?

  The thatched bar was no more than a couple hundred yards from the little roll of the water’s edge. The tsunami would have swallowed that distance. Frank thought of Brian, of his big, affable equine face and mane of sand-white hair, the dark blue Irish Donovan eyes.

  Of all of them, only Natalie had brown eyes.

  Brian had introduced him to Natalie.

  Brian usually hosted a swank event called Everyday Heroes—that year in the ballroom at the Brisbane Riverwalk—and was a friend of Frank’s crew chief on the squad of volunteer first responders. Frank had not wanted to go: he was annoyed that he had to buy a sport coat. The tall woman with the thick auburn hair in an unruly pixie cut seemed familiar to him even before the awards were given out, and, as it turned out, she was, at least her face was. At a local high school, Natalie had tripped and disarmed a boy who’d shot two of his classmates, then sat on him while treating one of his victims until teachers took him over. She’d probably saved the life of the girl who was worst hurt, the brachial artery in her shoulder nicked so that she would have bled out in a minute had the Harbor High graduate giving the Career Day speech that day not also been an ER doctor. Since school violence was rare in Australia, and the possession of firearms hardly ubiquitous, the incident was big news for weeks, with many images of a reluctant Natalie, dressed much as she was that night, in the same plain black suit, her only jewelry the fire-opal earrings she loved.

  The Natalie he met that night was on her fourth martini and insisted on feeding him three bleu-cheese-stuffed olives soaked in gin. (“I don’t like gin,” he protested. “I only like vodka martinis!” Natalie had held up a wavering finger. “Vodka? Vodka has nothing to do with a discussion about martinis!” she’d scolded him.) At Natalie’s insistence that night, they’d never left the hotel. Two months later, they were married.

  One Christmas, and then this one. Two anniversaries, one just past. A long trip and a short one. Hardly even the primary constituents of what could be called a marriage.

  Frank knew guys, plenty of guys, who, by his age, had been divorced, at least once, a few twice. That was how his disinclination to marry had hardened into a full-fledged position, though he thought of children in the way people think of a winning lottery ticket. Until they met, he had not understood that this was a position a man could maintain only if he were never awestruck by love. The pleasantness of women was leaven in life, but Frank had not ever been in love. Not even near misses. Did this one love matter more in the universe than the love of two teenagers rutting in a car? It didn’t, and yet he could not help but feel as though it must, somehow, have deserved a bye. People eaten alive with terminal illness had survived this storm, but not his only wife? He punched his thigh again.

  In his adult life, Frank had forced himself to face facts squarely, the better to get hard things underway. He thought suddenly of sitting with families who regaled him with false hopes at the sites of irretrievably ghastly car wrecks, the kind of wrecks in which it was impossible to tell which victim had originally inhabited which car. When he was young, he privately thought those people were foolish.

  He would be those people now. A granny. It’s not impossible. Just perhaps. There’s always a chance . . .

  Frank got into the car and drove in what he sensed vaguely was the direction of the horse farm just north of Brisbane where he’d worked . . . worked and lived, until he married. But he did not get far. He could not recall which side of the road to drive on, and he didn’t care. He would get himself killed; perhaps that was best. No, that was never best. He stopped, and ended up at the cemetery. After he sat for a while on a stone bench, he stood and filled his lungs, then tried to spool out the exhale in a hiss, as he had learned to do after the accident four years ago that had given him, at thirty-eight, his bad leg and his pension.

  At the wedding, Brian toasted Natalie and Frank. “Welcome to the family, Frank Mercy. God have mercy on you, because Natalie won’t. But she’ll give you the most loyal heart in Australia, in the southern hemisphere, and maybe in galaxies we don’t know about yet. My baby sister should be an action figure, to tell the truth. I mean, my brother Hugh here’s a florist, and Natalie sews people’s guts back into their tums after they try to blow them out with rifles. We, her older brothers, are deeply grateful to Nat for beating up on our enemies all our lives and we hope she’ll do the same for you and your own five kids. A thousand welcomes to you with your marriage kerchief. May you grow old with goodness and riches.” Bawling openly, Natalie two-fisted the heavy wedding bouquet that Hugh had made from white roses and camellias and hit Brian square in the chest. Her smile was incandescent; in memory, unbearable.

  Frank began to shiver in the watery sunlight. They called it acute stress disorder now, the revving of the heart, the flushing of the skin, and the narrowing of vision. The emotional sequels were various—detachment, denial, anxiety, the persistent urge to avoid the scene of the event. There. In describing it, he was already experiencing it. If he lay down on this stone bench, he might sleep for six months.

  Another car pulled up on the cracked shell road to the cemetery, a man and a woman. She was dressed in bits and pieces of things, a fancy ruffled shirt over sweatpants, a bright shawl and rubber boots. Like Frank, she didn’t bother to close the passenger door.

  “Man, where are you from?” the woman asked. For a moment, Frank thought of the radio evangelist.

  “Brisbane. I live at Carson Place.”

  “Were you out last night?”

  “I was at an inn at Bribie Island. At the beach.”

  “Have you seen our son?” she asked. She held out a snapshot of a boy around fifteen, astride a motorbike.

  Frank studied the photo carefully for a minute or more and finally said, “I’m sorry but I haven’t seen him. Where was he?”

  “Selling Magnum Mini Moments at a beach stand,” the father said. “He was coming home tennish.” Moments were gooey little ice cream treats, among them a selection named for the seven deadly sins, Greed, Envy, Lust, Sloth, and, Frank’s favorite, Gluttony. “We think he must have stayed for the fireworks.” Fireworks were a staple of Australian Christmas, and also of Australian anything else. Aussies used everything from American Thanksgiving to the International Day of the Child as an excuse to set fire to something, to festoon the sky with twinkly, perishing graffiti. “I know he would have beat the storm out, because that didn’t come until what? Long after midnight. One in the morning? He’s got himself stuck at some gymnasium. James has got a good head on his shoulders. He’ll turn up. You can make a good bit of tips holiday nights.”

  “He should not have worked on Christmas Eve,” the mother said. Her eyes roamed corner to corner. “He should have come up to church.”

  “Shut up,” said the man. “You shut up and go to hell while you’re after it. It’s nothing to do with it.”

  As the couple made their separate ways to the car, as if alone on parallel moving sidewalks in a terminal that went on forever, Frank pressed the speed dial to the home farm. Eden’s answering machine picked up, a minor blessing. Frank would be able to live for a while longer without hearing the reaction to what he had to say. It would be blameless joy. Not that his family didn’t care for Natalie. They did. They cared for Natalie, but they adored Frank. If they had to choose who would live and who would die, there would have been no choice.

  The message said, “This is Eden Mercy’s cell phone, and I’m sorry it’s not me in person. How about leaving a message?”

  “It’s Frank,” he said. “Sweetheart, I’ll call again. Obviously, I’m alive. Natalie . . . Natalie and her family . . . her brothers and their wives and daughters are missing. Edie, I’ll call back. I love you and tell Mom I love her.”

  Frank went to his car and opened it. There was bottled water in the boot of the car. As if seeing it for the first time, he recognized the first-aid kit and granola bars, all neatly packed in a box that Frank transferred to a horse va
n when he went to a jumps event, or to deliver or to pick up a horse for the owner of the place he’d worked. He didn’t recall ever using it, although he knew that he replenished it once in a while. Distances in Queensland were vast, often parched and heat-blasted, or washed unrecognizable in mud, and habitation was unpredictable. Standing in the road, Frank opened a bottle and downed it. He opened and drank two more, tore open a granola pack, and swallowed it without chewing or tasting.

  For a moment, the food centered him.

  He walked back to the stone bench and sat down again.

  He’d left Brian at the bar at twelve thirty, to stretch his legs after tucking Natalie in. Blissfully languorous, just beginning her fifth month, she’d been too drowsy even to open his gift, so he’d left it at her side, still in its silver wrappings. It came from a gallery in London and was hundreds of years old, a maternal primitive sculpted of thick dull gold with a coil of fire ruby at its center that would hang out of sight beneath Natalie’s scrubs, between her breasts. Perhaps she could not have worn it at work. She was too often called on to do minor surgery to wear any jewelry at all, even her earrings. Still, he thought of the primitive mother now floating curved in dark water, to be found in five hundred years and presented by another bemused fellow to another abundant bride, and of the man who had forged it once, to commemorate the majesty of the commonplace miracle.

  “I might like to maybe take some time off,” Natalie said one morning, after they’d been snorkeling, after they demolished enough Eggs Benedict to feed four and made love in a way that left nothing else to do except sleep.

  “Research?” he’d said.

  “Social research, Yank. Say you have a kid. You’d want him to have everything, right? Like a stay-home mommy for a year? Like dual citizenship?”

  Frank said, “Well, a theoretical kid? We haven’t ironed out the kid business. I’m not pushing you for kids. I am forty, after all.”

  “So am I. I need to get some of these genes passed on. So this kid, it will be theoretical, but only for about the next six months,” Natalie said, drawing out every word, preening, as a woman who’d made life had a right to do, as though she had been crowned a serene highness. Two weeks later, they saw the ultrasound picture, his son’s assertive penis and cunning alien leer. Picturing that moment, their astounded faces, how they gripped each other’s hands, Frank tumbled from the bench. He grasped his knees and puked in the mud beside the shell path.

  The cell phone rang.

  It was the chief of volunteer firefighters in his sector, outside the city, alerting him to a voice page from the State Emergency Service. He ignored it, pressing the button to power the phone off. Before he could, it rang again. Frank touched the speaker.

  “Goddamn it, Frank Mercy, if you aren’t answering this phone, you’d best be dead,” the woman said.

  His chief of volunteers was a hard woman, who had no idea where he was or what had happened. He also knew that she would have called him anyway and would find him somehow, as she had when he was two hours home from his honeymoon. Frank threw the phone to the ground near the car. It kept on ringing.

  Fifteen times.

  Twenty times.

  Thirty.

  THREE

  FIVE HOURS LATER, in sweltering heat before noon, his back and flanks sweat-soaked under his duffel coat, Frank stood in the back of a patrol boat with two college kids, raw rookies, a young woman and a young man so terrified and clumsy they were more likely to brain each other with the eight-foot blunt-end body hooks than they were to pull anyone to safety. Still, even a raw volunteer was better than nothing. Not much better. The floodwaters still rose. Helicopters crowded each other like fat-bodied dragonflies darting at the many stranded in places the cutters couldn’t go. As the Brisbane River burst its banks, whatever resembled a cogent plan of rescue was abandoned in favor of desperate duck and drag efforts on the part of every crew in every kind of conveyance, from cutter to rowboat.

  There was no time to search.

  A search would need to wait until they could pull out families they could see. There were plenty of people stranded on top of their cars or clinging to their gutters. So far, Frank and the crew in the patrol boat had hauled ten survivors up to waiting transport to Our Lady Help of Christians, where Natalie had been chief of emergency services. One family, a grandmother and two children, were floating on a hollow-core door. They brought each group to at least some dryish area nearby the hospital. Each time he glanced up, Frank could see small figures in blue drab, Country Guard, hastily erecting tents that they filled with cots and blankets and first-aid supplies. Most of the people they found were at least able to walk the last block to the hospital under their own steam—but a few were in shock, and others had serious lacerations or fractures. For them, Frank and one of the college kids unrolled the Easy Evac stretcher and hustled to the bottom of the hill where paramedic teams parked in lines exchanged their stretchers for Frank’s empty one. When one bus pulled away, it was replaced by another: Frank saw the names stenciled on the sides—Rockhampton, Cairns, Wollogong.

  The medics must have driven all night.

  As soon as Frank and the rookies finished depositing a group, they ran back and threw themselves into the boat, the driver opening the throttle before they could sit down. The closer they came to the river, the more often they saw what appeared to be a shred of forfeit future. Impossibly, a Christmas tree, still lighted and fully decked out, beamed up at them from a depth of three meters. With the porch and front wall of their house ripped off, a family sat with their feet in the water, watching the television. A woman, hip-deep, was taking down her wash. A stiffened cow, a big black dog, and chickens. Frank had not thought of chickens drowning, for they could fly. And then there were the floaters, looking like duffels. The rookie girl—Frank thought her name was Cassie or Cathy—cried, each time, “I hope it isn’t someone!”

  Not once or twice but six times thus far, it was.

  When that happened, the pilot, a man Frank knew slightly, threw down a buoy, as dignity seemed to demand.

  Two of the dead were old men, one a woman Frank’s mother’s age; another was a teenage girl. They were wedged between bridge pillars, bobbing in cars like aquarium fish or hung up on the cornices of roofs. In the time it would take to dislodge and move them, others would die. The pilot turned up the boat’s radio. Emergency Services Medal Radio transmissions warned residents not to stop for food or petrol but to leave the city in an orderly and calm manner, despite every road being jammed with cars like pegs in holes. The south stadium and commuter railway station were filled to capacity with refugees from submerged streets. Every block or so, they had to slow to make their way around an inflatable or a rowboat, or the intact debris of a house ripped off its stump. Trees so large that a full-grown man could climb them tumbled past.

  All of them were drowsy with fatigue and hyperarousal.

  The sight of a young couple, perhaps twenty years old, wearing life jackets, open-eyed and livid, but still clasped together, snapped the teen volunteer like a matchstick.

  “How can they be dead?” she said. “They’re floating! They’ve got to be just unconscious.”

  “They’re dead, honey,” Frank said. “Try to take some deep breaths.” With the pole, Frank towed the pair of sweethearts to higher ground and got out to tuck a numbered blanket over them.

  As he scissored a single long step back over the boat’s side, the girl said, “Did you even check for a pulse? How did they die? What if they are alive?” Frank thought, but did not say, that the couple were upended long enough to breathe too much water. He could see the muddy smudges around their nostrils.

  “They’re not alive,” Frank said. “You’d know. You’re a first responder.”

  “This isn’t rescue,” she said, rubbing at her forehead with her hands, quivering between a tantrum and tears. “I came to rescue. We’re just dragging for the dead.”

  To allow her the privacy to calm down, Frank asked t
he boat pilot, “Where do you live?”

  “Down there,” the man told him. “A few kee from here. There’s no way to get to it.”

  “Tough.”

  “My wife and the boys are with her mother. Something to be said for divorce.” He shook his head and said, “But you lived on the river.”

  “We lived on the river,” Frank said.

  “Did Natalie have her night off? Was she at home?”

  “Not at home. But yes. She was at the beach. A Christmas party.”

  “I’m sincerely sorry for your loss, Frank.”

  “Thank you,” Frank said. Nothing ever meant so little that was meant to mean so much. Dozens of times, pierced by their inadequacy, Frank had said the same words. He never had enough stamina to explain. During his life, Frank met people who said “it was never talked about” (whatever “it” was). He found this kind of people unbearably precious, more self-important in their magnificent silence than the ones who repeated their experiences in endless and lugubrious detail. Now he identified with the silent ones. He might never speak this, his own unspeakable. He fully understood how those people spent their lives unable ever to speak of the war, the crash, the fire.

  “It doesn’t do to think about it,” the pilot said then.

  “No.”

  The girl volunteer turned to Frank and said, “His mother and father are missing.”

  “Look sharp,” the pilot called to them, as if to distract the others from considering a presumption of grief on his behalf. He nearly heeled the boat, rounding the corner of Queen Street and Myer: Frank saw the green-forked sign protruding a foot above foaming brown water and remembered stopping there on the way to pick Natalie up from work. Some kind of boxy microbus was hitched on its side, half buried in muck. “I saw movement in there. Purposeful movement.”

  At the same moment, the girl moaned, “There are kids in there. Oh please, please, please no.”