Light Lifting (14 page)

Before any of this, the ocean came first. It was the original problem and if you had to look for beginnings the source for everything that came later. She was seven years old, travelling with her parents on a doomed vacation in Nova Scotia and it happened on a sharp, stony beach across the highway from a cluster of brown housekeeping cottages. Each little plywood house had a clever kitchenette, a folding table, two sets of bunk beds, green polyester comforters and a supply of thin, over-laundered towels. The cupboards held place settings for four and came equipped with nearly enough cutlery. A regular tourist place, nothing special, but it comes back to her all the time, like a crime scene photograph, barging uninvited into her mind with all its black and white details. Before she took hold, signed herself up and started to turn around, almost anything could trigger an attack.

There was – she remembers – a time a couple of years ago when a visiting license plate from ‘Canada's Ocean Playground' went into her brain the wrong way and her throat started to close up all on its own. Her neck felt like an arm squeezed inside a blood-pressure cuff. She started to cough and gagged and had to turn away from the street, sit down on a park bench, close her eyes, and put her head between her knees. She cupped her hands over her mouth and nose and concentrated hard on sucking back her own air until the sleeve loosened and the clenching hissed away.

It had become a biological fact in her life, like a severe allergy or a fundamental and unalterable weakness in her body. Bad news stamped out in her genetic code. Fear was an illness, a virus that forced its way in, compromised your immunity and damaged your defences in ways that couldn't be fixed. There was a force that lived inside of all deep water – she knew it intimately – a starving, swallowing power that pulled everything down into itself. It had chased her for years, back from Nova Scotia, away from the pool parties of her childhood and the reckless Spring Break opportunities of high school and university. Even long bridge crossings made her uncomfortable and she never liked it when the airplane stewardesses, with their bored and glassy expressions, pretended to pull the tabs that would inflate the lifejacket under your seat in the unlikely event of an emergency. And those trickling sounds – the recordings of breaking waves some people used for relaxation – they gave her a twisting feeling deep in her gut and bowels, as if someone were wringing out her intestines like a wet dishcloth.

She'd seen something like it only once before in another person, a woman in an elevator. There was no predicting it. The doors closed like they always do and the little room started its descent. But then the woman's eyes went erratic and she made a whimpering sound and involuntary muscle spasms rippled up through her back and shoulders and neck.

She said it quietly first, “I have to get out of here. I have to get out right now.” Then louder: “Let me out. Let me out. Open the door. I have to get out.”

She pounded on the red emergency button and her head swivelled around the top and bottom corners of the elevator, looking for a different exit. Then there was an exhausted groan, a full submission, and she went blank and fainted. Stace caught her by the waist as she went down and when the doors opened on the ground floor she was holding this stranger's body up. The lady's head rested on her shoulder like a sleeping toddler.

NOVA SCOTIA HAD BEEN wrong from the start and they should have turned back earlier. It rained for a week, seven solid days and nights. The wipers got stuck at their highest setting and even when the sun came out, they kept banging back and forth like a pair of deranged metronomes. Her father missed the turn at Rivière-du-Loup, couldn't ask for directions, and had to double back. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. The Bluenose Schooner from the dime was out on tour and a lazy-looking moose nearly killed them when it wandered out of the fog on the Cabot Trail. They swerved to avoid her and the guard rail left a long scar across their sliding door on the passenger side. Stace broke a tooth at the Fortress of Louisburg biting into an unbuttered chunk of old-fashioned, “historically accurate” bread that looked like a cannon ball baked in a dusty forge. They drank only Pepsi and ate nothing but blond, deep-fried morsels of indistinguishable seafood served in fake woven baskets with red and white checked wax paper and little plastic cups of pale green coleslaw served on the side. When the rain finally gave up, the air still felt damp and cold.

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 the 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.”