Light Lifting

by Alexander Macleod

  Her mother saw an opening in that first patch of sunlight.

  “This is it,” she said. “Today we are going swimming. Come on. At least once before we go back. I want Stacey to feel what it’s like, the real ocean.”

  Her father tried to shut it down.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Look at it.”

  Across the road, the water steamed in steady and grey and metallic, like an assembly line churning through its rotations. Before they broke, the waves rose up three or four feet, not big, but jagged-looking and ugly. You could see chunks of debris and streaks of roiled-up seaweed in their faces like lines of graffiti scrawled on broken concrete walls.

  “I think we better leave it alone this time,” he said. “Nothing we can do.”

  He had a cold coming on. Stace could see red veins cracking in the corner of his eyes.

  “Maybe we can lay low today. Go for a walk, pick some shells, take some pictures. Get something good to eat. We’ll book real lessons when we get back.”

  “No,” her mother said, pushing it all the way through.

  “When are we going to get the chance again? A girl can’t go through life being afraid of a little cold water.”

  He didn’t have the strength.

  “Whatever you want,” he said and he held up both his hands so she could see all ten of his fingers.

  “But this one is all yours. I’m not going in.”

  THE BEACH MADE STACE think of a city park during a garbage strike. To find a spot for their towels, they stepped through a jumble of sharp rocks, faded blue bottles of fabric softener and shredded Styrofoam buoys. There were a couple of broken lobster traps with short brown nails sticking out through the lathe and some larger, irregular shaped logs, even whole trees, bleached a petrified white, like the leftover bones of a rotted sea monster. Long, unfollowable lines of yellow rope wove in and out of the boulders and there were dozens of smashed Alexander Keith’s beer bottles scattered around a firepit. At the far corner of the beach, at the base of the cliff, Stace found a kid’s inflatable raft with paddles and oar locks and everything. It was a faded pink and yellow colour and there was a picture of a surfing Barbie on the punctured plastic floor.

  WHEN STACE PUT HER FOOT in the ocean for the first time, the water came on hot, scorching hot and not cold at all. It seemed to pour itself into the space where her ankle met her shin and it felt like a metal crowbar had been jammed into her weakest soft spot and was trying to pry her open.

  Her father came to watch but he wore his jeans and a heavy sweatshirt as a sign of protest. He sat on an overturned milk crate and opened his book.

  “I am here as a witness,” he told them. “You wouldn’t catch me dead in there.”

  It was hopeless. Three minutes in needed twenty minutes out. Five minutes required half an hour. Between trips, they wrapped themselves in layers of summer-coloured towels, hopped on the spot and took turns drinking hot chocolate from a thermos. They never went in past their hips. Below the surface, the beach sloped away from the shore at a sharp angle and after five or six steps, dropped away completely.

  “You need to relax,” her mother repeated. She squeezed her hands too hard against Stace’s cheeks and spit instructions into her bluing ear.

  “Belly up,” she said.

  “Belly up. Lean all the way back. Look at the sky. Look at the sky.”

  There was no chance. The cold came all the way through, making it impossible to sense anything else and whenever Stace felt even the beginnings of a fragile balance, a new wave would barge through and wash out her best efforts. The terrible salt water went fiery up her nose, into her eyes and down her throat. When she rolled onto her front, she put her hands on her mother’s shoulders and tried to blow bubbles and kick.

  “Great, great,” her mother said.

  “That’s the way. You’re doing well.”

  It happened maybe a minute before they would have given up on their own. The big wave, the one that did it, seemed sent on purpose, an extra pulse of energy whipped into the sheet of water a hundred miles offshore and timed exactly for this task, triple the size of the ones immediately before and after. Her mother faced the shore and Stace was on her back again, looking up and hoping this would be the last time. The wall of water came into her vision, looming over her mother’s shoulder like an old-style gangster thug sifting out of the crowd in a grey trench coat with the brim of his fedora pulled down low. He was so thick and so wide, he blocked out the sky. He shoved her mother forward headfirst into the sand before grabbing the girl and carrying her off in the opposite direction.

  Stace felt each one of her mother’s fingers releasing from around her head before the water spun her sideways and drew her away. She tried to thrash against the current and get her head back to the surface, but in the gritty mess she lost all sense of direction and couldn’t tell if she was moving up or down. They called this an ‘undertow.’ That was the word to describe what was happening. People said to watch out for it and she’d seen the letters printed out on warning signs. Use Caution: Severe Undertow. Beware: Dangerous Undertow in this Area. She thought the name was exactly right: an explanation that must have come from someone who felt this once and was able to report back to other people. Undertow. Water, working like a rope, like a tangled line attached to a massive winch at the bottom. I am going down the drain, she thought. I am going down.

  The ocean was vast and empty and it could move in several different directions at the same time. It jostled her and she felt her neck snap back very hard while her hips and her legs went the other way. She reached out her arms, but there was nothing to hold onto and she felt like a person fumbling for the light switch in the middle of a dark room with a high ceiling and walls moving always farther apart. It could go on forever. She knew this. The ocean could go on forever.

  Timing blurred. It was impossible to keep track of the minutes and seconds. The first flash of panic gave way to a cloudy, sleepy feeling. Nothing came in or went out – no air and no water. She felt completely full, as if all the gaps and extra spaces in her body had been made solid. She went limp and for a moment she felt like a floating thing, like a person who really might be able to move easily, and for a long time, in tune with the up and down beat of the ocean. This, she thought, this was it. Swimming. Almost right.

  But then a series of sharp stinging pains came through her skull and she felt first the individual hairs, then whole clumps of her scalp being yanked out of her head. In a dizzy haze she thought she saw her father, but his glasses were gone and his sweatshirt seemed bloated and pulled strangely across his shoulders. His nose was scrunched up like something smelled very bad and he seemed angry, furious with somebody. She thought she heard her name.

  “Stay with me Stacey,” he said.

  “Stay here. I’ve got you. It’s going to be okay. We have you now. Stay with me.”

  When her face broke the surface, he let go of her hair, flipped her over and looped his elbow under her chin in a kind of reverse headlock that kept her mouth and nose above the water. The air felt thin and unsubstantial. He went under several times trying to side-stroke back to the shore, sometimes bounding off the bottom. When he could finally touch, he put her over his shoulder and carried her for the last few steps before dumping her back onto the beach like a leaking bag of garbage. He collapsed on his hands and knees and a thin mix of bloody snot and vomit poured out of him. She coughed up mouthful after mouthful of perfectly clear water, then rolled over and stuck out her tongue to taste the sand. It coated her face and the inside of her cheeks and she mashed the grit into her teeth.

  Her mother put towels around the two of them and rubbed the girl’s back, trying to get her to sit up.

  “Can you hear me Stacey?” she said. “Are you okay?”

  There was a raw trill in her voice and she placed her hands again on Stace’s cheeks, steadied the head and tried to look into her daughter’s eyes to see if there was anything there. She wasn’t sure if th
e girl was actually coming back, was even conscious, or could stay that way.

  “Are you all right, Stacey?” She was screaming it now, repeating.

  “Talk to me. Say something. Can you hear me?”

  Stace’s head lolled off to the side and her eyes rolled back and showed her mother only whiteness. A sandy drool seeped onto her shoulder and she couldn’t keep her mouth closed.

  Her mother thought of paralysis and oxygen deprivation and permanent brain damage. There was a thing called secondary drowning. She’d read about it. A person could look like they’d been saved but still end up lost. You could be pulled living from the water and die three hours later with your head on your pillow and your lungs full of fluid.

  “Stacey,” she yelled. “Can you hear me? Tell me you’re all right. Nod if you can hear my voice. Tell me you’re okay. Look at me. Are you okay?”

  The last thing the girl remembers is reaching out with her left hand and placing it over her mother’s mouth. Then she sucked in one more breath and used that air to say the word “No.”

  She sees the water coming and then she doesn’t. The river rolls in and out of her vision as she falls. She is halfway around, on her side, when she hits and the surface stings hot against her skin like an open-palmed slap extending from her cheek all the way down to her left pinkie toe. Spread out across the top, the impact knocks the wind out of her and for a second, while everything is distorted, she thinks maybe she has ruptured an ear drum and tastes a trace of blood spilling into her mouth. The fall is so awkward she barely sinks and instead burps back to the surface. She pulls in one clear gulp of air, and though she can’t feel anything, not the temperature of the water or the air, she knows she is nearly perfectly unhurt. She forces her mind all the way down her arms and legs and makes her fingers and toes wiggle on command. She concentrates and tries to look below, but the dark and the silt obscure everything beyond her knees. When she extends her big toe and tries to feel around with her feet, she registers only an emptiness that might continue all the way to the bottom or might end in a wall of metal six inches farther down. As far as she can tell, the only hardness is the water itself and there is nothing else, no trap, waiting underneath.

  She looks up at the hotel bedrooms, shakes her head, and wonders if any insomniac business travellers or romantic getaway couples caught a glimpse as she plummeted past their windows. The water really does taste like nothing and for a moment, as a warm exalted sense of relief washes all the way through her system, the current seems to be pushing her back to the side, back to the pilings and guiding her over to the good climbing out spot where there are two solid footholds and a bit of rope hanging down. Her ears are still foggy so she doesn’t hear and doesn’t respond to the worried calls from above. The mist casts a shadow over everything. They can’t see her and she can’t see them.

  She is almost all the way back, almost out, the rope nearly in her hand, when she looks up at the M-shaped string of white lights hanging on the Ambassador Bridge like understated Christmas decorations. There is a faded image of the old Boblo boat, the Mississippi Paddler, painted on the side of a warehouse and permanent fires burning on Zug Island. The smokestacks leak unnatural combinations of purple and grey and almost pink.

  She thinks about that man, the guy who jumped off the bridge several years ago in a failed suicide attempt. It was in the papers for weeks but it took a long time before the real story, the scandal, came out. They say he tried to kill himself but accidentally survived. That was the official version. Other people believed it was faked from the beginning. Even though dozens of witnesses had seen him jump, they still thought there had to be a trick behind it, some David Copperfield illusion.

  Before tonight, Stace had never given one second of her time to this guy or his story. He was less than a fragment, a particle floating in her memory, one of the million unconnected facts you hear about and can’t forget. Before tonight, she didn’t know what to believe. Now, though, everything seems different and there is no confusion. She knows the fall could not have been planned or staged. Not from the bridge. Look at it. Not from that height. You couldn’t try to survive something like that; you just lived through it. A fluke occurrence.

  It must have been strange. He’d have been hurt for sure, broken bones and internal bleeding and the rest, but it must have been shocking to be awake and completely aware of what was happening. The guy on the bridge, he wanted everything to stop when he reached the river. He was hoping to hit on a real ending, but then – surprise, surprise – all these new choices, the nasty ones, showed up only after he found himself floating on his back and he could still breathe and still see out through his eyes.

  That’s probably when it came to him, she thinks, while he was moving in the current and looking at the sky.

  Police on both sides of the border looked for his body for weeks. They dredged the river and sent dogs sniffing along the shore. When nothing turned up, the family believed he was lost for good. There was a funeral and a little insurance money. They went on and lived without him for years, building up entirely new versions of themselves. The kids moved away and the wife met somebody else.

  Then the postcards started to arrive from some messed-up version of heaven. Miami, maybe, or The Magic Kingdom. The handwriting was unmistakable and the postmarks were recent. He wrote about how he missed them and loved them very much. He said he didn’t want them to worry anymore.

  STACE BRINGS HER ARM out of the water, circles it through the air, and cuts back in. It feels almost like the beginning and she is surprised by the relaxed, instinctive slice of her hand moving through. Her body can do something it couldn’t do before. She looks at her fingers, barely visible beneath the surface and has to remind herself of what is happening. She is swimming at night by herself in the Detroit River. On the other side, the windows and elevators of the Renaissance Center shine like a downtown lighthouse only a mile away. In the pure terms of distance, it is not that far. One mile. In the pool, the whole expanse would be cut into 64 equal lengths and she does that almost every other day. If she really wanted to, Stace could swim to America, all the way to Hart Plaza. She could pull herself out, climb over the little fence, walk into the middle of the city and stand there in her dripping bathing suit, right in front of the statue of Joe Louis’s big hanging fist.

  She thinks about the decisions people make about themselves, the man on the bridge, gains and losses. It has been almost a year, but it still feels strange, sometimes even disturbing and wrong. Water cannot hold her anymore. She enters and leaves as she pleases. Climbs out and dives back in. When she moves through the river, she sculpts it around her body, makes it go exactly where she wants. The sting is fading and she is almost back to the side, getting ready to pull herself out, when she sees it: the pale outline of a human body streaking out of the sky like a hero from Greek myth. Like an actual guardian, a protector of life. He is a lightning bolt fired from the top of a building and he is purposely aimed, she can see it in the way he flies, aimed for her rescue.

  “This is how it is supposed to be. Don’t you feel it? We’ve been on our way to this since the very beginning. Like a collision.”

  They were on the floor at Vertigo, dancing in the strobe light, flashing in and out, a series of still photographs.

  “I know,” she said.

  “You remember the first day? When you were tossed in there with everybody else? I didn’t know what to do. Couldn’t figure you out.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember it. Of course I do. But it was different for me. You wouldn’t understand. You couldn’t.”

  THE FIRST CLASS was the second Tuesday after Labour Day. He checked her name off his clipboard list and she felt the way his eyes slid up and then down over the tight black contours of her new suit. It had been there from the beginning.

  “You sure you’re in the right place?” he asked.

  She wanted to keep it light. That had always been the plan. Treat it like nothing and get throu
gh.

  “Think so,” she said. “I mean this is the first level, right? Adult Beginner I?”

  She showed him the receipt.

  “See? Seven-thirty to eight-fifteen. The Rec-Guide says this is the place to start. The place for people who don’t swim at all. The first class. For people who don’t go in over their heads.”

  His eyes wavered and he shook his hand like he needed her to stop talking.

  “My fault,” he said. “Sorry. My fault. Adult Beginner I. Yes. Right place. Totally fine. No problem. My mistake.”

  He told her later, weeks afterward, when everything was different, that she didn’t look right. Not like one of his normal students. The others in the class were older ladies, senior citizens taking advantage of their discounts. Some were regulars, back for their fourth or fifth session with Brad.

  “He’s the absolute best.” A lady with a thick blue bathing cap embossed with flowers told her that early on.

  “So patient and so kind and so nice. He tries to make it fun for us.”