The Note

by Hunt, Angela

  She swims a little farther and treads water, then lifts her arms and lowers a tentative toe. She can touch the sandy bottom only until a swell pushes in, then she’s picked up and set back down as gently as you please. The ocean is quiet today; due to the heat, more people are shopping than swimming.

  To the east, the white fleck of a sailboat streams against a vibrant blue sky, while to the west, a sleepy line of gulls squabble over a ripple on the sea—probably a fish, maybe an entire school of fish.

  A glimmer on the water grabs Sarah’s attention. Beyond the slanting line of the glassy waves, a shiny object rises and falls.

  Sarah stretches out and swims. The object is a plastic container, a two-liter bottle that once held Coke or Sprite. No—Sprite comes in green bottles, and this one is transparent. The cap is missing, though, and in its place is a wad of some unidentifiable material.

  Sarah closes the gap with one stroke, then grasps her prize. The container is nothing special; the wad is dried grass and something black—tar, maybe, or gum? A few pages of densely printed paper curl inside the mostly waterproof ride. One edge is ripped, so these must be pages torn out of a book.

  She turns the bottle. She’s not much of a reader, having been forced to read too many classics over the summer while her friends were touring Europe, but a handwritten message in the margin catches her eye. The brown ink is blurred, but one word is legible: Sarah.

  “Hey!” Sarah waves to catch the straw hat’s attention. “Hey, look!”

  The woman is too engrossed in her book. Either that or she can’t hear above the steady crash of the surf.

  Sarah’s mouth twists. Good thing I’m not drowning.

  But she is a good swimmer, and umbrella woman knows it. Sarah tucks the bottle under her arm and sidestrokes toward the shore, then catches a wave and rides it until she reaches shallow water. She tugs her wet bathing suit back into place as she approaches the umbrella, then drops to her knees in the powder-soft sand.

  “Look at this.” She holds the bottle horizontally between her hands. “I found it in the water, and guess what? Someone wrote my name on these pages.”

  The book falls. “What—oh, gross! That’s trash, Sarah; throw it away.”

  “But it’s got—”

  “You don’t know what it has. Some nasty drunk probably pitched it off a sailboat.”

  Sarah points to the message. “But that’s my name, see? Can you read the rest of what it says?”

  A pair of perfectly arched brows furrow for a moment. “Ugh! That looks like dried blood.”

  “But—”

  “Drop it, and don’t touch it again. You don’t know where that’s been or who’s handled it. They could have HIV or AIDS, or something even worse.”

  Sarah drops the bottle and wipes her hands on her bathing suit while the pale face warily regards the sun. “Look at how late it’s getting. We’d better go. When we get back I think we ought to write a letter to let someone know this beach is becoming unfit for swimming. I know they can’t stop riffraff from boating here, but there has to be a law against tossing trash into public waterways . . .”

  Accompanied by an inexplicable sense of guilt, Sarah picks up her towel, shakes out the sand, and wraps it around her. Before following the bobbing straw hat to the house, she gives the odd bottle one last look.

  The Heavenly Daze Series

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