A swell rolled beneath him, and he kicked himself out of the water again, thrusting himself into the air. He saw her then and started swimming hard again, glancing back over his shoulder toward the beach. The mother and sister stood on the sand watching, already a good distance north. Dave was nearly dead even with the smoke from the burning surfboard, so the rip was broad as hell, and the current seemed to be moving them hard to the south even as the rip was dragging them out.
He felt the hostility of the ocean then, the cold water, the chop that splashed him so constantly in the face that he could hardly get a breath. A wave hammered down over a sandbar ahead and to the right, a dark wall of cloud-shadowed ocean that broke in a roaring avalanche of windblown Whitewater. For the first time the thought came to him that he might be in trouble, and he felt a sudden hollow fear in his chest that he mentally backed away from. Panic could drown him, and it would certainly drown the girl, if she hadn’t already gone down. Ahead of him loomed another mountain of moving water, and he swam toward it, the wave passing beneath him, and as he rose over the swell he saw her again, surprisingly close, lying on her back, sculling with her arms and kicking her feet frantically.
He swam toward her, dog-paddling as much as swimming, angling around behind her and trying to stay out of sight. The last thing he needed was for her to go nuts when she saw him and try to climb up onto his head. Coming up behind her, he slipped his left hand across her shoulder and under her right arm, tightening his grip and levering his hip under her before she had a chance to move.
Instantly wild with surprise, she tried to heave herself upright, throwing both arms out and beating the water with her fists.
“It’s all right,” Dave shouted, hanging onto her and holding her steady. “You’re okay now.” She fought for another moment, out of a panicked excitement, and he treaded water hard, keeping them both well up out of the chop. The sound of the breaking waves seemed weirdly distant to him now, as if the backs of the swells blocked the noise of the breaking surf. The rip, which had slowed down in the deeper water, was dissipating, and Dave started sidestroking south. If he could get entirely free of the rip, he could haul her back inside the surf line, where the waves would push them into shore. The surf would kick the hell out of them, but what other choice did he have? They rose over a swell, and he scanned the beach for a lifeguard Jeep. There was nothing—just the smoke from the fire well to the north, dwindled down almost to nothing now. A couple of tiny dark figures, the mother and sister, kept pace with them on the beach.
Get help, he thought. There was a phone by the concession stands. The mother wasn’t thinking. It wasn’t her day to think. And she trusted him, too. She had faith in him.
“What’s your name?” he asked the girl. That was the longest sentence he could phrase right now. He didn’t have the breath for anything more.
She didn’t answer, but held up her wrist. He saw that she wore a bracelet of white beads with red letters on them, spelling out the name Elinor. There were two extra beads, a red diamond on one side, a red heart on the other.
“Where you from?” He continued with the sidestroke. They didn’t seem to be moving out to sea any longer, but it was hard to tell if the rip had dropped them or was still holding on. He didn’t seem to be making any progress, though, just swimming in place.
“Haddington,” she said after a moment, as if she had finally made the decision to speak to him.
“Haddington to Huntington,” he said. “That’s kind of funny.” He swallowed a mouthful of water and coughed it back out. “Where’s that?” he asked after he got his voice back. He changed course, stroking straight in toward shore now. He had to try to get in again, rip or no rip, before he wore out.
“Scotland.”
“Scotland?” His right arm felt like rubber, and he was suddenly aware that he was cold, really cold. He scissored his legs, pushing the two of them forward another couple of feet, and felt the muscle in his left calf tightening up. He couldn’t afford a cramp, not if he couldn’t use his arms to swim with. She didn’t have any kind of Scottish accent, and he had the notion that she was lying to him, although how she could find the energy to make up lies at a time like this …
He dropped her then. She slipped out of his grasp and went under, and he caught her under the arms as she fought to get her head out of the water. He threw his arm across her chest again, leaned back, and started swimming. “Sorry,” he gasped.
Now she was breathing hard, again, quick and shallow with fear. “We’re all right,” he told her, but he knew they weren’t. “Haddington’s near the ocean?”
He felt her nod.
“Good beaches?”
She didn’t respond now.
“I’ve got to switch arms,” Dave said to her, treading water again. “You can just relax. I won’t let you go.” Without waiting for an answer, he rolled beneath her, sliding his right arm across her chest and loosening his left, getting his right hip under her and starting to swim again. His sidestroke was nearly worthless on his left side, but his right arm was done for, at least for a little while. In a minute he would switch back. He looked back over his shoulder toward the shore, watching the backs of the waves form in the distance and listening to the sound of their breaking, which was a continuous roar now. He thought about his wetsuit lying on the beach next to his surfboard, and about not wanting to give the twins’ mother any advice, even though he had known damned well he should have.
It was almost funny. He had been too gutless to say anything to their mother, and now he was out in the middle of the ocean trying to save her child, and both of them, he and the child, were going to drown.
If they were my kids …
“So that was your twin sister?”
“No.”
“No?”
“She’s not my sister.”
“She looks like your sister.”
It was work to talk. Too much work to play games, and the girl was obviously lying, which must have taken some effort, some thought. Her matter-of-fact voice was irritating. The tone struck him as weird, almost hateful, as if she was purposefully insulting him.
His stroke was sloppy, and he was kicking rubber-legged. He concentrated on evening it out, and at the same time he wondered if he should give it up and just tread water. He could tread water for another hour—although not with the girl hanging onto his back….
They would get a lifeguard boat out to them long before that.
“She’s my cousin,” the girl said after a moment. She had relaxed a little now, letting him carry her weight, and she stared at the sky, as if watching the moving clouds.
“She’s always wanted to look like me,” she said. “But she was burned. There was a fire. Her face is ugly, and her hair was burned off.”
“Her hair?”
“That’s a wig. She cries at night because she’s ugly. I lie there and listen to her cry. I was trying to drown her to make her stop.”
She said this almost cheerfully, talking to the sky, chatting away now, and Dave nearly dropped her in surprise. Her words sounded alien, as gray and cold as the ocean, as if she were talking about killing a bug. And now he was certain that she was telling the truth now, about wanting to drown her sister, and Dave remembered her trying to haul the other girl out into the ocean, into the rip. He felt the irrational urge to drop her just to wake her up—let her kick and thrash for a moment, until her attitude adjusted.
And if he dropped her now he could save himself….
He drew back from the picture in his mind.
He could feel the dull ache of the half-relaxed cramp in his calf, and he was careful not to straighten his ankle too far and bring it on, and yet the bent ankle took the power out of his kick. He watched the ocean now for signs of an approaching wave. They’d made some progress, and a big enough swell might pick them up.
The girl was silent now. He swam on silently, too. He smelled salt spray then, and saw that a wave was breaking to the north of them, well
in shore.
“Some day I’ll kill her. That’s why you have to save me.”
“Why don’t you just keep quiet?” he said, and he felt her giggle.
Suddenly he was swept with fatigue, and he quit swimming and started to tread water, holding onto her with one arm and sculling with the other. He was shivering with cold, and his arms and legs were so weak that he had to keep up a constant kicking to stay above the surface. A half hour of this was impossible. Ten minutes was impossible.
We aren’t going to make it….
He forced the thought away and said, “Here we go,” then started swimming again, letting his head rest on the surface of the ocean, as if he were swimming in a pool. Almost immediately he gasped in a throatful of salt water and jackknifed reflexively forward at the waist, coughing the water back out, holding on tight to the twin. He treaded water hard again, gasping in air. He kicked his feet harder, propelling them forward, trying to smooth things out, to get some glide, some forward momentum, but the power in his legs was gone, and he couldn’t keep it up. His muscles were on fire, and yet he was shivering with cold. He worked to keep his head up out of the chop, but it seemed as if he was settling deeper with each tired stroke, barely making any progress at all, simply kicking himself higher in the water, bobbing like some kind of dying thing, struggling just to stay above it now.
Alone, I could make it.
The thought came to him out of nowhere, as if his mind as well as his body had decided to betray him. If he held onto the girl, they would both drown. It was as easy as that. They rose to the top of a swell. The nearly deserted beach was incredibly distant. The mother stood there, still watching. Probably she thought they were all right, that everything was under control. He kept up the tired stroke, getting nowhere now. Surely the girl knew it.
He envisioned simply letting go—the twin sinking away into the green depths, as easy as falling asleep, and he forced his mind to focus. He was treading water again with a weak scissors kick. His sidestroke was gone. They bobbed up and down, his kick quickening as it got weaker. The ocean was empty out in the vast distances, just the small shape of a ship standing still way off on the horizon. How far from shore were they? A hundred yards?
He was going to drop her. He knew now with utter certainty that soon, very soon, he wouldn’t be given a choice. When the time came, it wouldn’t be his to decide.
She stared into his eyes, as if reading his mind, her own face a mask of terror now, her brassy attitude swept away. She kicked her feet with a wild ineffectiveness, thrashing against his legs, gripping his arms, and making small noises in her throat.
Don’t do it, he told himself, kicking his legs machinelike, marking time. He was shivering, his shoulders numb from cold and fatigue. As if she knew he was fading, she was suddenly energized by fear, and she let go with her right hand long enough to clutch at his neck, to try to pull herself higher out of the water. He fought to control her, pushing her away at arm’s length, the wild thought entering his head that she was stronger than he was by now, and that she would drag him under and drown him. I might have to drown her to save myself.
Another immense swell rolled through, and he nearly sank beneath it. It was powerful, pulling off the ocean bottom, dragging them several useless feet toward shore. Feeling the energy in the wave, he kicked harder, edging them up out of the chop and over the top of the swell. He looked back down into the wave’s trough, surprised at the sheer size of the wave. Seconds later it broke, an avalanche of white water smashing skyward, twice the height of the wave itself, vertical ribbons of water shooting up and falling in long arcs. Farther out into the ocean another shadowy swell moved toward them, rising up out of deep water and obscuring the sky.
“Breathe,” he said. “Deep. Really deep.”
How many waves in the set? The approaching wave was big—bigger than the one that had just rolled through. If there were waves beyond it, they’d be immense. He steadied himself in the water, his fatigue momentarily gone, his heart racing with fear-fueled adrenaline. He could hear the girl gasping in lungfuls of air. With her hanging on, he’d never dive deep enough to get under it.
The first of the swells steepened, pushing skyward, blotting out any view of the ocean behind it. Fifty feet away from them it started to feather at the crest, the wind tearing at the wave as it rushed forward, the wave’s face nearly vertical now, defying gravity and inertia, a heavy tangle of kelp visible just beneath its green surface.
“Hold your breath!” he said, yanking the twin next to him and taking one last deep breath himself. He tried to surface dive, pushing her down beneath him. He kept his eyes open, kicking his feet hard, fighting for some depth. The water was full of a deafening roar as the wave pounded down, releasing whirling tornadoes of fine bubbles like columns in a watery cathedral. The girl’s hair swirled in front of his eyes, and he got a brief glimpse of her pale face, her eyes wide and staring as the churning water swept across them. With a suddenness that astonished him, he was pulled up and back like a piece of driftwood. Her wrist slipped through his hand, and his fingers closed over the bracelet, which he dragged from her wrist as the wave cartwheeled him around and then slammed him downward, pounding him off the ocean floor and tumbling him toward shore. The girl was simply gone from his grasp, vanished.
Something brushed his leg—the girl? Kelp? He flailed outward with his hand, touched something solid, but instantly it was gone, and the wave slammed him against the bottom a second time, dragging him across a sandbar on his back, then flipping him head over heels and rushing him forward again. He tried to force himself to relax, but his lungs felt as if they’d imploded, and in a sudden panic he clawed his way upward, deluged by swirling foam. His head broke the surface, and he threw it back and sucked in air, fighting his way clear of the churning white water until he could kick himself around again and look out to sea. The water was empty, the girl gone.
Let her go? The unwelcome question settled in his mind.
She had slipped away so easily … He forced the thought away, slipped her bracelet over his own wrist, and dove beneath the surface, opening his eyes to see through the churning bubbles into the green darkness. But almost at once he was out of breath, and he kicked his way toward the sunlight again as the third wave in the set bore down on him, breaking hard forty feet farther out, an avalanche of moving white water. He hyperventilated, dove again, stroking for the bottom, and the wave blasted into him, pushing him toward shore. He let himself go limp, not struggling this time, and the wave dragged him like a rag doll, tumbling him over and over, letting up on him when it moved into the deeper water of a channel. He surfaced, treading water tiredly, looking futilely around for some sign of the girl again, watching another wave break far outside. Two lifeguard boats floated outside the breaking waves now, too late to do any good. He waited out the incoming wave, hyperventilating again, and then dove beneath it, finding the bottom and letting the wave pass above him.
When he surfaced he realized it was raining. The sky was solid with clouds, and the wind whipped the rain into his face and swept it across the surface of the ocean in flurries. Perhaps the girl had been swept in to shore. With any luck she had been. He had to believe she had been. Another wave rolled through, smaller than the others but still breaking outside of where he swam tiredly toward shore. He let the white water pick him up and carry him. When the wave dropped him he kept swimming, a tired, mechanical crawl stroke with no kick. He heard a voice and looked up to see a lifeguard reaching out with a red float. Dave grabbed it and hung onto it.
“Where’s the girl?” The lifeguard’s hurried question came to him from a vague distance, as if he were just waking up out of an anesthetic. A broken wave struck them, and he let go of the float, letting the wave churn past. He gestured tiredly toward the open ocean. “I’m okay,” he said, and started to swim again, letting the waves push him, surprised moments later when his toes dragged against the sandy bottom and he stumbled to his feet in shallow water.
Up on the beach a yellow lifeguard Jeep was just pulling even with the crest of the sand. When he was up onto the beach, he sat down and looked out over the ocean, letting the rain hit him, shivering with the cold. There were hands under his arms, helping him up, and he was suddenly sick and faint, and he knew, without anyone having to tell him, that the girl was lost.
2
THE NIGHT WAS QUIET—HAUNTINGLY QUIET, AS IF THE fog dampened the sound of her footsteps along with other nighttime noises. The bars and cafes along Main Street were closed, and there was little traffic. Anne could smell the fog on the air along with something else—dirty oil, she decided, although there weren’t too many wells still operating in the downtown neighborhoods, and the oil-soaked vacant lots that had once made up most of the acreage in the city were covered with apartments and condominiums now. The redeveloped downtown was a different place from the run-down beach city she remembered from her childhood visits, and although it was probably safer now—fewer bikers and bad alleys and bars—she wasn’t sure she liked the change. Probably it was just nostalgia. Up in Canada, when she had talked about moving south, people had warned her against walking at night in southern California, and now she couldn’t help but listen to the silences between her own footsteps, half expecting the slow tread of someone following, someone hidden by the night and the fog.
She had been in town only a few days, and she was entirely friendless. It was a perfectly loony place for her to have moved to, especially because she didn’t meet people easily. She stopped now at the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway and waited for the signal to change, trying to see through the fog to the foot of the pier and the stairs to the beach. The headlights of a northbound car appeared, and the car braked at the yellow light. She heard music from inside the closed-up car, and it took her a moment to recognize the tune—a pepped-up version of “Pearl on the Half Shell” that sounded strangely at odds with the foggy, motionless night. The “Walk” sign blinked on, and she stepped off the curb, reaching the other side just as the light changed again. The ghostly car accelerated slowly away, the sound of the jittery music disappearing along with the car’s taillights.
Winter Tides Page 2