by Jessi Kirby
“No. Thanks. I’ll walk.”
He looked concerned. “You sure you’re all right?”
I leveled my eyes at him and smiled. “I’m fine. Really. Tell Ashley I’m sorry and that I’ll call her.”
He faced forward and eyed the dirt road that was now a minefield of puddles, before turning back to me. “Then take the umbrella, at least. And get into dry clothes as soon as you get home.”
“I will.” I nodded. “Thank you.” I opened the door and then the umbrella, waved good-bye, and stepped out into the wind and rain like I didn’t feel a thing.
As soon as I rounded the corner, I collapsed the umbrella and let the rain fall hard onto my face. It pricked my cheeks, then ran down like tears I wouldn’t let fall. She had seen me, I knew. And then she had left me, alone, shivering cold, waiting for her to come back.
Now a burst of white water on sand reverberated against the cottages, and I watched as the ocean, wild and angry, lined up waves, one after another. I gave up waiting for her a long time ago, and that was fine until we got here. Until she came back, like everything in the ocean does.
Another wave thundered down, and this time I felt it in my chest. Up ahead I could make out the blurry outline of the shack, which stood, cold and empty, in the dim afternoon. I forced my eyes away from it and up to our front window, where light warmed the room. Maybe dad would be back from his rescue, stretched out on the couch in his sweats, reading a book. He’d look up, smile, and give me a hard time for being soaked. He’d tell me to hop into the shower to warm up. Then he’d ask me if I wanted hot chocolate, mainly because he’d want some too but would never make it just for himself.
He had made it for me that night. After I’d heard him yelling over the wind while I sat huddled against it. The wetness of the sand had soaked up through my pajama bottoms and chilled me so that my entire body shook and twitched. But I squeezed my hand tight around my moonglass, and I lifted my head when I heard him close by. He pulled his work jacket off and scooped me up, protecting me from the cold and the wind and the flashlights swinging around with voices behind them, now calling only my mother’s name. He warmed me under blankets, then made hot chocolate that stood untouched while he held on to me tight and asked, over and over, “Did you see where Mommy went, Anna? Did she go into the water?” When I finally nodded, he went silent and stayed that way until my grandma arrived to take over.
I stopped at the end of the road and stood in the rain between the shack and our lighted window. And I hated her. I hated her for leaving us, and I hated her for coming back.
I dropped the umbrella into the mud, then checked our window again before kicking off my shoes. The rocks were barely discernible beneath the high tide and chaotic surf, but I kept my eyes on them as I bent my head to undo the clasp of the necklace. Then I walked over pitted sand, pummeled by raindrops, straight out to the rocks. Calm, like she had been.
A gust of wind smacked me on the back, and rain pierced my clinging jersey, but I only felt the weight of the moonglass, squeezed tight in my hand. And now the weight of it wasn’t enough to keep me searching for another little glimmer. Finally I was finished with her, like she had been with me. She could have it back.
On the outer edge of the rocks, a wall of water stood up tall before it pitched forward and blasted them, sending spray high into the air, like rain falling upward. Frothy water churned and swirled around my ankles when I stepped onto the first rock, and I breathed in sharply, because of the cold. My feet found their way over craters in the rocks and the jagged edges of mussel shells, to a place that felt far enough out to leave her behind.
I uncurled my fingers. Looked at it one last time. Then resolve clenched my hand around the glass, and I chucked it, as hard as I could, into the oncoming wall of water. The force I threw it with shocked me. I saw the tiny glint of red disappear into the face of the wave at the same moment I realized what was about to happen.
I didn’t have time to be shocked when the wave hit me.
The thunder of waves, the pounding of the rain, all of it went quiet. It was replaced by a muffled rushing, angry and chaotic, that whipped me around. I wasn’t unfamiliar with the sensation, having been tossed by waves more times than I could remember. I held my breath, even when I felt my body land with a dull thud on the rocks, then bounce over them in the violent water, all limbs and odd angles, completely out of control. My toes scraped rock, and I kicked off hard and broke the surface, barely in time to get a breath before I felt the pull backward, back over the jagged edges of the tide pools. Then, the next onslaught. This one hit with the force of a wall tumbling down onto me, but it was instantly stilled by the muffled crack of my head, which sent sparks of light bursting in front of my eyes. I didn’t feel the edges of the rocks. I almost didn’t feel the sensation of moving at all.
Eighty-seven seconds.
Every spring, when I was little, I sat in the back of the lifeguard headquarters and listened to my dad read to a new batch of rookie guards a passage from The Perfect Storm about the stages of drowning. It said eighty-seven seconds is the break point. The urge not to breathe underwater is so strong that your body does it automatically, but only until the break point. After eighty-seven seconds the need for oxygen forces the body to take an involuntary breath, even if it’s a mouthful of water. I remembered this because each time I heard it, I wondered if she had lasted that long, if she’d had that long to change her mind.
I clenched my jaw tight and, with all the will in me, forced my eyes open in the churning, murky water. I saw no light to go by, nothing to give me any point of reference. There was nothing but gray, with blackness creeping in around the edges. I must have been moving, still tumbling, but I no longer felt it. Darkness closed in further, leaving only a tiny circle of gray in front of me. In my mind I screamed, fought, anything not to be like her. Dark closed in even faster. My lungs ached; my limbs tossed around me, deadened; and my body hung suspended while my mind fought every one of those eighty-seven seconds.
Thin, brittle arms dragged me from the water. They shook with the effort, and their owner grunted as my heels dug two wavy paths in the wet sand. Pain ripped around my head in a quick lap when I tried to look up. My eyes felt heavy again, and I struggled to focus on the rolling horizon that bumped and bounced in front of me.
The arms laid me down gently, and shaking hands moved around my neck, searching. They settled on a tender spot and waited, still. Then, I felt a cold hand on my head and the presence of someone close to my face, listening. I tried to form words, to say that I was here, and when I did, I was suddenly aware of the bitter salt water that pooled in the cavity between my nose and mouth. I coughed and sputtered, trying to spit it out, and the hands rolled me onto my side so that I could. Another wave of pain shot around my head, and I spat onto the sand.
“Go on. Get it out.” The voice was tired, out of breath.
I forced my eyes open, then blinked hard to focus on the objects that swung and clinked gently in front of me. Their owner didn’t move, and once they stilled, I saw what they were.
Crosses.
“Do you know what day it is?” He looked from my head to my eyes, back and forth.
This time I got the words out. Barely. “Sunday…. You’re here on Sundays.” Cautiously I lifted my eyes to his face, and I was surprised by what I saw. He wore a faded red bandana around a scalp that was buzzed close, showing only the faintest trace of silver stubble, which mirrored the unshaven skin of his face. His skin was tanned to a deep brown and worn, no doubt the result of hours of penance spent under the sun. It was his eyes, though, that pulled me out of my haze. They were piercing blue against the backdrop of so much gray. And so sad. He didn’t hold my gaze long before he looked down at the sand between us and finally started to catch his breath.
After a long moment he spoke, without looking at me. “You’ve hit your head. We should call help.”
I started to shake my head, but stopped abruptly because of the pai
n. “I’m all right. My dad’s right up there.” I motioned more with my eyes than anything else, but he got the point. Still, he didn’t say anything. He seemed lost in his thoughts for a minute, then he looked from me to our cottage and back again.
“I’ll take you there.” And he inched himself up, until he was hunched next to me. It seemed his natural posture, and so I was surprised, both at the motion and the strength involved in it, when he pulled me to my feet and slung my arm over his frail shoulders. And slowly, without speaking, we made our way up the beach through the mist.
Inside, muffled rain on the roof was the only sound. Our cottage was empty. Warm, but empty. The crawling man lowered me carefully into my green chair and covered me with a blanket. Then, almost against his will, he collapsed onto the couch. And we sat there and let it sink in. I had almost drowned right in front of my house. My dad would have come home and I would have been gone. History would have repeated itself.
But it was Sunday.
I looked directly at the crawling man, who now folded his arms over his chest and his crosses. He had been there. “You saved me.” It was somewhere between a question and a statement. Whatever it was, it brought his blue eyes to mine briefly before they scanned the water outside the window.
He nodded vaguely.
Again we were quiet, but my thoughts were not. How had he seen me? How had I not seen him? How in the world had this frail old man dragged me from the water? I had only ever seen him crawl. But he had saved me. I kept my eyes on the water because it seemed he would be more comfortable that way. Waves crashed down, surreal, over the rocks he had plucked me from, and I spoke without knowing really what I was going to say.
“Do you believe things happen for a reason? Or do you think everything is just coincidence—that out there you were just in the right place at the right time?”
More than a few beats passed, and I wondered if he had heard me. But then he inhaled deeply, dropped his head, and spoke into his lap. “I don’t know the answer to that.” Cautiously his eyes came up to meet mine. “I’ve been asking myself that question for the last twenty years.” An eternity to crawl the beach, trying to answer that question.
“And you?” He motioned gently with his head, toward the window. “Seems you were in the wrong place at the wrong time out there on those rocks. And that you know better.”
Now it was me who avoided his eyes. I felt the absence of weight around my bare neck and consciously fought the urge to bring my hand to where my moonglass had rested. Behind the realization of what I had done, the guilt and anger from the moment when I had unclasped the necklace lined up again like the sets of waves outside, ready to come crashing down. I shook my head and laughed, joyless.
“Or maybe I was meant to be out there. Maybe I’m just as selfish and thoughtless as my mother was.” It came out bitter, and he flinched, almost imperceptibly, before his forehead creased. I looked at her cottage. “Or maybe I’m why she was that way.”
We both sat quietly, and I could feel the crawling man considering what I had said. He sat hunched over, forearms propped on his thighs, hands knitted together. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his crosses dangling in front of him. There were three, of different sizes, and they twirled and twisted gently around each other. Guilt strung around his neck, for everyone to see. Mine was somewhere out in the water, but not gone from me. It would be mine for life.
“Nothing could be further from the truth, you know. About your mother.”
For a second I wondered if I had spoken my thoughts aloud. He was looking at me with his sad eyes, so clear and present for someone I had first suspected might be crazy, but I reacted before I had a chance to think about it.
“The truth? I’ve always known the truth. I saw it. My mom walked out into the water one night when I was seven years old.” I spat the words out, hard and angry. “She drowned herself. And all my life since then, everyone has called it an accident.” I paused for a second, gathering my anger. “She left me on the beach that night, and it was no accident. She knew I was there, and you know what she did? She left me a piece of sea glass to find while she killed herself. That’s the truth.”
I looked down at my hands and drew in a shaky breath. The crawling man nodded, barely. Again, he seemed to be thinking.
“It was coming … long before you were around.”
I looked up at him and ceased to breathe. “You knew my mom?”
He shook his head. “Knew of her. I’ve been here on this beach for a long time, and I’ve watched life go on all around it. And your mother, she was full of light, and life.” He pursed his lips together and then spoke more carefully. “But she fought darkness too, some days. It was in her long before you came around. We all saw it.” He was thinking back, looking at something I couldn’t see.
“Did you live here? In one of the cottages?”
“Yes.” He smiled, but his eyes remained sad. “The best days of my life I lived here. On the north side.” We both glanced out the window. “That’s where I would see her on the bad days, walking the beach alone, without your dad, and I knew on those days that she was fighting something nobody else understood.”
I stared out at the water, remembering her good days and her bad ones, and he paused. Then he looked at me with purpose. “When you were born, you changed her. For the better. That’s what children do.”
My brain fired off questions in quick succession: How could he know? He had seen us? What else had changed?
He went on, and I listened so hard I forgot about the pain in my head and the ache in my limbs. “She would walk the beach with you, day and night, and a stranger could have seen how happy she was. It was like you were her whole world then, and that world must have become beautiful for her, because when I saw the two of you together, there was no trace of that darkness she’d had before.”
He trailed off, then looked at me, almost reluctantly. “But it must have come back.” The momentary lightness I had felt faded slowly at this, and I put my head down without speaking.
His voice was gentler now, and he spoke slowly, as if trying to ease me into what he was about to say. “Sometimes … a person is up against more than they can handle.” He paused, long enough for me to wonder if he expected me to say something. But then he continued, and when he did, his voice quavered a bit. “And sometimes a person loses, no matter what they’re fighting for.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. And I was frustrated. And tired. And now angry all over again. “Yeah?” I raised my eyebrows and my voice. “If I meant so much to her, she wouldn’t have lost. If you’re fighting for your whole world, how do you lose?”
The words hung heavy between us, and the crawling man didn’t move. He drew in a shaky breath and let it out slowly before he spoke.
“I lost. I fought for my whole world, and I lost.” He glanced down at the crosses, then back out at the water, and almost smiled. “I had a family once—a son, a daughter, and the love of my life.” He bit his lower lip and nodded slowly before speaking again. “And I lost ’em out there, right in front of me.”
My stomach went queasy. I flashed on the little boat. The kids’ proud faces as they stood in front of it and their father, who still had the same clear eyes, though years and life had weighed them down.
I blinked once, twice, as if that would help me think of something to say.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I said softly. He looked up at me, and my voice gained confidence. “It’s never been your fault. My dad has told that story to every lifeguard he’s ever trained, and he’s never once said it was your fault.”
The crawling man looked at me steadily, and I went on.
“There was nothing you could have possibly done, possibly seen…. It wasn’t your fault.” I wanted to grab him by his wiry shoulders and make him understand, so he could stop. Instead I watched him stare out at the water for a long moment before he spoke.
He shook his head, ever so slightly. “They trusted me, an
d I couldn’t save them.”
I remembered the cracking sound my head had made when it had hit the rocks. The pain was still there, but dulled. I was too afraid to raise my hand to my head and feel the spot. The rest of my body, battered from being dragged over the rocks, ached and burned. And yet I was here.
“But you saved me. Today. On the rocks, in pounding surf, when there was no one else around and you could have drowned. You came from nowhere … and you saved me.”
He looked up, and slowly it sunk in, enough to lighten his tired face just a bit.
“I guess … I guess I did.”
The back door startled us both. “Hullo?” my dad’s voice called. “Anna?” He was in the kitchen, setting down his gear, from the sound of it.
I cleared the emotion from my throat and brightened my voice as best I could. “In here.” The Crawler looked at me with wide eyes, unsure what to do. I gave him a look meant to keep him quiet, just as my dad walked in carrying a take-out bag.
“Hey, hon. I got us some—” He looked from me to the Crawler, taking in our wet clothes and ragged appearance. “What—Is everything okay? What happened?” The concern in his voice made me feel instantly selfish and stupid for putting myself out there on the rocks. The what-ifs and possibilities would kill him. I struggled for an explanation.
The Crawler cleared his throat and squinted up at my dad. “Joseph, is it?”
My dad flinched slightly at this but recovered quickly and stuck his hand out, still trying to figure out what was going on. I kept quiet. “Uh … yes?”
The Crawler grasped his extended hand. “John Carter.”
Recognition smacked my dad square in the face at the same time I saw in my mind the bunk beds and black-and-white pictures of a little boy and girl, tanned arms around each other’s shoulders. And I understood why it had all been left there, just as it was.