A Short Move

by Katherine Hill

  “Thanks,” Mitch said to the man. “How about Queen’s Bath?”

  “Now that’s a sight. But it’s too risky in the winter. The waves come right over the edge.”

  “You don’t want to swim in it,” his wife added.

  “Some people say you don’t even want to get near it,” the man went on, excitedly. “Especially at high tide. The waves can get pretty powerful, sweep you right off the ledge. People have died.”

  “What’s that?” Caryn asked.

  “Queen’s Bath,” Mitch repeated. “I told you, remember?” She didn’t.

  “You’ve never seen anything like it. It’s this perfect tidal pool in the rocks,” the man went on, pointing, eager to share more information. “Just down the road in Princeville. In the summer it’s big and calm enough to swim in. You can even snorkel. But not this time of year. Low tide maybe. But even then.”

  “We’ll have to check it out.”

  “Mitch,” Caryn said. “I don’t want to die.”

  “Smart woman,” the man laughed.

  “You won’t die. If it’s too dangerous we won’t go in.”

  “But he said it was dangerous even to look at it. Is that true?” she asked the older man. “You can’t even get near it?”

  “Some people say that. I haven’t been in a while.” His voice dropped off. “You’d probably be okay at low tide.”

  “Mitch—” Caryn began, but she heard in the stillness that had taken hold of the group that their chit-chat had come to an end. The sun was pressing into the ridge of the coast as cameras flashed mutely all along the lanai. She looked at the older couple, who were still holding puffy hands, and wondered why she hadn’t moved her chair closer to Mitch’s so that they might do the same. It would break the mood now to stand and scoot over, even to reach for his sleeve. Of course he hadn’t moved his chair either, or reached his arm toward her, but that wasn’t how he thought. He’d thought to find their first Kauai sunset and share it; she was one who wanted to be touched. Her fault, then, as usual. As penance she sat very still in her chair. Inwardly, she turned away from the moment, as she often did when moments became too real, and waited for it to be over.

  “Well,” he said, once twilight had fallen. “Seven o’clock. What do you say we get something to eat?”

  Vacation Mitch was still an early riser, conditioned by a long season of early meetings, so the next morning, after allowing Alyssa to describe, on speaker, the cookies she was baking with Cindy back east, they drove into town for the first surfing lesson of the day, he in his aloha-patterned board shorts, she in the one bikini she had yet to debut on this trip: a block-striped rainbow set with white piping and strings, which seemed to her very surfer girl, and which she’d been saving, vaguely, for last. They signed waivers and received long-sleeved black shirts called rash guards and were given directions for finding their instructor at the pier.

  “You done this before?” the girl asked Mitch as she swiped his credit card.

  “Couple times.”

  Why he lied, she could not understand, or perhaps he was not lying; perhaps he had done it before with the publicity girl, or one of his bits in Miami, or, or, or. “First time for me,” Caryn blurted, banishing his lie with her truth, and feeling superior for it.

  “When did you surf?” she asked as they drove the few blocks to the pier.

  “When—? Oh, never. I just told her what she wanted to hear.”

  “I really don’t think she cared.”

  He shrugged. “Why does anybody do what they do?”

  The instructor met them at his black GMC truck as promised. His name was Kai, and he was a lean, deeply tanned native Hawaiian, with buoyant, hairless pecs. His brother Palani, who would be helping with the lesson, was just as cute. Finally, something for Caryn.

  “I can’t believe I’m finally doing this,” she told them. She was committed now to telling the truth. The whole truth. As much as anyone could stand.

  “Oh, you picked a great day,” Kai said. “Looks like we’re gonna get some pretty nice waves today.” His was not the tone of someone trying to manage her expectations, or sell her on something that would only benefit someone more powerful, which was the tone she’d grown accustomed to as a supernumerary in the NFL. Of course, he had sold her something, she’d already bought it, or Mitch had, but unlike all the other salespeople she’d encountered in recent years, Kai genuinely seemed to know what was good for her. It was the same thing that had been good for him—sun and sea and only a drizzle of clothing—and he was unselfish enough to share it. She felt her spirits lift with the air in his vowels.

  On the overcast beach, Kai positioned Caryn and Mitch on their boards, facing each other. They found their centers. They bent their knees and kept their backs straight.

  “I teach yoga,” Caryn said. “Is that going to help?”

  “Oh, yeah!” Kai brightened even more, which she hadn’t thought possible. “Just remember Warrior Two.”

  They practiced lying on their bellies, their collarbones aligned with the centers of their boards, and pushing with their hands to all fours. “Cobra,” Caryn said. “Cat-Cow. Warrior Two.”

  “Exactly!” Kai exclaimed.

  “It’s so helpful. See, Mitch?”

  “Yeah, I got it.” She watched him press himself up, planting one Sasquatch foot at a time. He was normally so sure of his movements, diving to the turf, popping back up, but here he seemed unbalanced, as though afraid he would drown in the sand.

  “I bet it’ll be easier out there,” Caryn said. “More natural.”

  “Oh yeah,” Kai said. “No substitute for feeling a wave.”

  “I told myself I’ll be proud if I stand up once.”

  Kai looked at her. “Oh, you’ll do it,” he said, and she felt buoyed by his faith.

  With their boards Velcroed to their ankles, they paddled out as a group, and it seemed they went a long way, the first wave rocking her back a bit as she figured out how to maneuver herself over it, the second following just after, and then the third, a ceaseless cycle that was now her ether. Kai and Mitch were pulling ahead of her, as always seemed to happen on outings with Mitch. She had no idea where Palani was. “Wait up!” she wanted to shout, but she knew how weak it would sound. How soft. And if there was one thing Mitch valued, it was toughness.

  She approached them at last where they’d stopped to wait for the waves. They were talking and laughing like old friends, and she felt a pang when Kai gave her the signal to wait as he explained something seriously to Mitch. Just like that, in the short time it had taken her to catch them, they’d chosen each other over her. From her distance, she rocked on her board, surveying her liquid surroundings. There was the horizon, pumping forth fresh waves, which broke for the first time at the lip of the bay, where the real surfers had their fun. There was the hotel, cascading down the Princeville promontory, a spoiled only child on the cliff. She thought of Alyssa in Massachusetts, mashing chips into dough with Cindy, Alyssa who she desperately hoped would grow up to be independent and kind. There was the shore, largely empty at this hour save a few older couples out for their morning constitutionals, and there just in front of her was Kai giving Mitch a push and a shout. Mitch had started paddling in advance of an approaching wave that had somehow slipped underneath her, undetected, but would, she realized now, unfurl itself for him. He flung his arms one after the other, and as the surf crested over him she saw his ponytailed head rise and fall, his body crouched for an instant like a hiding giant before it tossed itself from the board. He hadn’t stood. Hadn’t even come close. She felt a twinge in her neck from looking so urgently, and along with it, a twinge of satisfaction that he’d failed, that this might not be so easy for Mitch.

  It was her turn now and Kai was beckoning, smiling at her in his breezy, tender way, his shoulders smooth and glistening. She paddled over to where he was standing—so far out, and still, he could stand—and it occurred to her for the first time that he was not just you
thful but also literally younger than them both.

  “I’m nervous,” she told him, sticking to her vow of honesty. Why it suddenly meant so much to her she couldn’t say, but it calmed her to think of herself unmasked, faking nothing, pure. She was twenty-four and she felt ancient.

  “Aw, don’t be nervous!” he cheered. “Just let the wave take you in.”

  “You’ve been doing this your whole life?” she asked, for additional reassurance.

  “Since I was a keiki. I grew up right over there.” He pointed at an improbably gorgeous curve of shore. “So I’m a natural. But you’ll be a natural, too.”

  They bobbed there for another minute or so watching for waves that wouldn’t come, and then before she knew it, he’d picked her one, and she was paddling, paddling, paddling for the shore. She heard him calling to her, and on his order she dragged herself to her knees, thinking, now stand, a simple thought that was far less simple an action. She was literally being rushed, the force coming from somewhere beneath and behind her too fast for her to grip. She seized up, saw her spa-painted fingernails, and between them one foot of painted toes, and before she could wonder about the other foot and how it would get here from wherever she had left it, the blue board under her hands shot free, and she was in the water.

  It was a soft landing, at least, the sandy bed of the bay like something padded safe for children, and as evidence there were now a few of them in the water around her, sleek as seals in their rash guards, tethered to boards of their own. How she hadn’t scattered them like duckpins she didn’t know. “Sorry,” she said to the nearest boy, who looked at her in that appraising way of children, forgetting she could see him, too.

  She hauled in her board and somehow made it to the outbound lane. As she made the turn she caught sight of Mitch toppling into a loose curl of foam, having clearly failed again. She dug harder with her hands, gripping the board with the tops of her toes. After an age, she reached Kai.

  “Well,” she gasped. “At least I’m over that fear.”

  “Huh!” He was smiling at the horizon, gauging future swells.

  “The first fall was nothing. Nothing left to fear.”

  He didn’t try to relate, having perhaps never known such a fear, just gave her a breath of encouragement and shoved her off again.

  This time she would stay in the moment—her first rule, so nearly forgotten. On his command, she rose to her knees, stepped to one foot, then the other, and felt herself become weightless. It was only an instant—less—but it was all the suggestion she needed.

  She made it back to Kai in no time, having wiped out close to the break. “I’m so close,” she told him. “I can feel it.”

  He chose her another wave and once again she was off, paddling, pressing up, stepping, and, in a little bit of unconscious magic, abruptly standing on her strong yogi feet. The big toe mounds, the little toe mounds, the inner and outer heels. The moment she found herself in was already long, and still she hadn’t wobbled. She was on her feet and her board was as sturdy as a boat and it seemed she could continue on like this forever if not for the suddenly terrible inconvenience that the ocean was about to end.

  She threw herself from the board and it was not graceful, knees knocking, arms torquing as if to avoid an invisible wall. But it was joyful. Her rules were working together now. Stay in the moment. Tell the truth. Tell the truth in the moment and in that way keep right on telling the truth every moment of your life.

  She bounced up pumping a fist. “Did you see that?” she shouted, looking around for the person she was addressing, which, she realized the moment she saw him, was Mitch.

  He was standing in the broken surf like a newborn gorilla, holding his board under one arm, clear out of the water, and she could tell by the pride on his face that he’d seen.

  “You did it!” he shouted. “You did it you did it you did it!”

  “I did it!” she whooped back, tossing foam with her fingertips.

  “Now I’m gonna do it!”

  “You’re gonna do it!” she affirmed.

  “I’m going back out!”

  “I’m gonna watch you! No, I’m coming with you!” She had to keep saying words even though none of the words she’d come up with thus far could convey any of what she felt, which was a convergence so natural and annihilating it seemed impossible it ever eluded her. Psychedelic was a surfer word. She understood that now. Though it, too, was inadequate. So was every word in the world.

  She chased after him, scooting over waves that were nothing now, no more challenging than air.

  “I’m watching!” she called. “I’m watching!”

  “You did it!” Palani was with her, having been working with Mitch before. “That was awesome! Is this your first time?”

  “Yes!” Her entire body spoke the word.

  “No wonder you’re so excited! Let’s get you back out there.”

  “I think Mitch is—” she said, but he’d already given her a push and was shouting at her to paddle, so she had no choice but to do as she was told. She stood, so easily she might’ve skipped a step, and in the calm above her wave she dared to look up for some glimpse of her husband. She’d been watching him for years in his anonymous armor and was by now hawk-like in her ability to pick him out in motion on the field, even when she couldn’t see his number, even when she’d somehow missed the snap. She knew his stance, his stride, the nano units of time it would take for him to reach a man and cut him down, and how the man would fall into the earth as if buried beneath the heavy stone of Mitch. She’d been there herself, in that grave, if not very often during the season.

  But the season was over now, and with it that televised distance. Virtually the same moment she realized she couldn’t see him was the moment she felt him at her back, on the very same wave she rode. She saw him now over her shoulder, his back to her back, because she was a lefty and therefore “goofy-footed” as Kai had teased her all those centuries ago that morning when they’d practiced together on the sand. Mitch was beside her and he was standing. Her giant.

  “Yes!” she cried, bailing to meet him in the water, and what a honeymoon moment it was: a high-five and a chest bump, and Mitch lifting her up and making her feel tiny, their boards clapping like hands near the shore.

  She was giddy the rest of the morning, though the skin on her hands and the tops of her thighs and feet was rubbed raw from the countless Cobras. On the porch of the café where they collapsed for lunch she held her Mai Tai in her lap, soothing her victorious burn.

  “You were better than me,” Mitch said. He was straddling the table, outer leg jiggling. He was giddy, too.

  “I’m just better conditioned.”

  “A natural.”

  “Aren’t you the one who’s always saying there’s no such thing?”

  “Yeah, but I don’t believe it. We’re naturals, you and me.”

  “Shh,” she whispered, “someone might hear you.”

  He whispered back, “I think we’re safe.”

  “Mm. Maybe I’m the Mitch Wilkins of surfing.”

  He hooted. “I’d like to see you shoot the curl in Cohasset.”

  “It’s wicked hahd,” she offered in her best Boston brogue. “It’s hahd ahnless yah from Bahston.”

  “That’s good!” he exclaimed.

  “It’s just hahd. You gotta say hahd a lot.”

  “Hod,” he tried. “Hod.”

  “Hahd.”

  “Hod.” He looked hungry for her.

  Then their food came.

  “We get along, you and me,” she said, as he brought his unwieldy pork sandwich to his mouth.

  He paused before taking a bite. “Course we do.”

  “But I mean, I like being with you better than any other person. Like last week for instance? Vicki drove me crazy. My best friend. But she gets so mental on vacation. I just wanted to get out of her way.”

  “Mm.”

  “Did I tell you the other day I brought all these snacks to th
e beach for Alyssa? Carrot sticks and grapes and stuff like that. Vicki’s got no snacks. But of course Brittany and Mason get hungry. So guess who ends up eating Alyssa’s snacks?”

  “Alyssa didn’t get any?”

  “She got some. She was fine. But the point is, like, get your own, you know? Don’t count on me to carry you.”

  “Sounds like it worked out okay.” He was arguing with her a little, which was a thing he did, which was fine. Actually, she sort of liked it, because it meant that he was with her.

  “I mean, of course I’m happy to share with them,” she went on excitedly. She loved talking to Mitch. She loved to have him there, listening. “But Vicki never shares. It just doesn’t occur to her. She thinks she’s working so hard just to take care of her own, and then she forgets when other people bail her out.”

  “She’s never bailed you out? What about when we first showed up in New England—didn’t she take you around?”

  “And I’m grateful! But I’m talking since then. I can’t spend the rest of my life repaying her for that one big kindness. At some point it’s got to stop.”

  “Well, I’d rather be the one to bail someone out.”

  “Even if they’re always taking advantage of you?”

  Mitch blinked. “No one takes advantage of me.”

  She sat back again with her Mai Tai, and held it against her leg. “I know, you always win, don’t you?”

  “So do you. You just have to look at it right.”

  She held her hand up to her forehead. “I’m looking. I don’t know why, but I still don’t see my new car.”

  He heaved one of his lung-emptying sighs. “Next year, babe.”

  She felt silly. “I was kidding. I don’t care about the car. This is enough. I mean it, babe. It’s enough.”

  After lunch they drove back to Princeville but instead of heading straight down the boulevard to the hotel, he turned into a residential neighborhood.

  “We’re just about at low tide,” he said. “Let’s check it out.”

  Before them was the sign for Queen’s Bath. Instantly, she felt old again, and trapped. “Oh no, Mitch. Are you sure?”