Two If by Sea

For Marty

For Susan

Forever

S
O MANY THINGS
happen when people can't sleep.

It was always hot in Brisbane, but that night was pouty, unsettling. After getting Natalie and her family comfortable in their rooms at the inn, Frank couldn't rest. His leg plagued him. The toll of oppressive weather on that kind of old injury was no old farmer's myth. He rambled around, briefly joining Natalie's brother Brian in the bar on the beach, then painfully mounting the switchbacked decks of wooden stairs that led to a kind of viewing platform just adjacent to the car park, looking out over Bribie Island Beach. Up there, he hoped the signal would be good enough to call home, his home, if home is the place you started. For Frank, that would always be a ramshackle horse farm in south-central Wisconsin—now probably more ramshackle than when he last saw it, three years before. As the
brrrrr
on the other end began, his pulse quickened. He looked up at the sky and thought of all the calls darting through the sea of radio waves tonight, swift as swallows—dutiful, hopeful, wistful, sad.

“Frank?” His sister, Eden, answered, her voice holiday-bright and holiday-brittle, suddenly next to him across nine thousand miles. He was about to ask her to summon his mother to the phone so they could all talk together when he saw it. Without thinking, and without another word to Edie, he let his phone slip into his jeans pocket.

He could not figure out what it was.

He would never remember it as a wave.

Wave
was too mere a word.

Although there were hundreds of photos and pieces of film, some shot just at the moment, near this very spot, Frank could look at these and remain curiously unmoved. But should he close his eyes and let himself return, the sick sweats would sweep down his breastbone, a sluice of molten ice. He would hear again the single dog's one mournful howl, and feel the heavy apprehension, something like that moment from his days as a uniform cop when a routine traffic stop went completely to shit and a fist came flying in from nowhere, but monumentally worse. So much worse that it routed even imagination. Many years later, Frank would think, this was his first sight of the thing that would sweep away the center of his life in the minutes after midnight, and, by the time the sun rose, send surging into his arms the seed of his life to come.

Just like that. Like some mythical deity with blind eyes that took and gave unquestioned.

He saw the wave as a gleaming dam, built of stainless steel, standing upright in the misty moonlight, fifty feet tall and extending for half a mile in either direction. Then, as it collapsed in place, it was water, surging lustily forward and drowning every building on the beach, including the Murry Sand Castle Inn, where Frank's pregnant wife and her entire extended family lay asleep. For one breath, Frank saw the inn, its porch strung with merry lanterns, red and gold and green, and in the next breath, he saw everything disappear, every light go out, faster than it was possible to think the words that could describe it.

He shouted, “No!” and stumbled forward to make his way down the high tiers of wooden stairs he had only just ascended.

Hoarse, in the distance, another voice called, “No!” over a cascade of sound—the brittle pop of breaking glass, screams peppering the air like gunshot, and the throaty insistence of the water.

Even as Frank turned, the mud-colored tide was boiling up the stairs and leaping the boardwalk barricade. He plunged forward, trying to wade against it, to find the riser of the wooden steps, but there was nothing; his foot bounced against water; he was soaked to the thigh. Pulling himself up along the top rail of the fence, for he would certainly be able to see something of the inn from there, or at least hear something, he shouted, “Natalie!” There were no voices. No lights except the milky smear from the hotels and office towers far in the distance to his left, like a frill of fallen stars. No sound except the insistent gossip of the water, and he was wet now to his waist. Grateful that he was still at least relatively young and passably fit, Frank hauled himself over the fence. He skip-sprinted across the car park, to their little Morris Mini-Minor. Water was already frothing around the tires. Frank pulled open the door, throwing himself into the seat, fumbling for his keys, quickly gaining the highway.

He stopped again and got out.

He heard a man's voice cry, “Help! Who's there . . . ?” and then again the swallowing silence. Floodwater rocked at the verge of the road; now how many feet above sea level? Of the two of them, Natalie was, pound for pound, by far the stronger, fitter, even tougher. Of the two of them, she was also the more intrepid, the more likely to have found some way to outsmart and elude this cliff of tides. They would find each other, and he did her no service by stalling here, forsaking his own life for no purpose. Natalie would have hated him for that. He floored it, racing inland. Miles sloughed away and he felt rather than saw the dark shapes of other cars congealing around him.

At last, there was nowhere to move, and all the cars had to stop and Frank got out and walked.

Others walked, too.

An old man struggled under the weight of a gray-lipped girl. She was perhaps ten or eleven years old and her sweet, lifeless face had closed in a smile, her nose and eyes pouring saltwater tears. Frank saw a young woman wearing just one shoe. She clutched a bundle of wet clothes, among them a child's small jersey embroidered with cross-stitched Santas. A man Frank's own age sat sobbing near a great blooming evergreen frangipani. Frank avoided their eyes. He thought he might be able to get to a place where he could think, but he only walked farther. He met people hiking toward him, or saw them sitting in their cars, or standing still by the roadside, their hands like the pendulums of broken clocks. After some time, he came upon a large group gathered around a car whose young driver had removed his outsized speakers from the dash. A basso radio voice intoned, “Now you will hear that the tsunami happened because of climate change, friends. You will hear that it struck our coast because of a tropical storm deep in the Pacific. You will hear that this was a random event. But do you believe that? How can any man believe that it was coincidence that water swept into the Sodom of Brisbane on this very hallowed night? Intelligent people will say that we have failed to take care of our earth. But the Lord God Almighty does not care about the climate. He cares about the climate of our souls! As it says in Matthew, ‘Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.' And so it has come . . .”

Frank walked around a curve in the road, and the preacher's voice faded to a series of thumps, like the bass notes of a song from a car passing the open window of Frank's childhood bedroom on the farm. A pale vein of light lolled on the horizon.

It would soon be dawn, on Christmas morning.

D
ARKNESS GAVE WAY
to a dreary matte pearl, and Frank noticed that the park where he sat was a cemetery.

Outside of Brisbane, there was so much sheer breadth of land that every dear departed citizen could have had a square mile for a tomb, yet this was one of the streamlined modern kinds of mortuary parks, with flat brass markers, built for economy of space. There were a few benches for lingering, but altogether, it looked more like a game board than a place to greet majestic eternity.

How he'd chosen this small rise, he had no idea. All he knew was that he faced away from the city. Before he looked down, Frank wanted to think logically through the sequence of the night—the family party, the announcement of Natalie's new pregnancy and their sudden decision to move back to the United States, the toasts before hot meat pies and lamingtons, the four huge Donovan brothers socking and slapping him to the point of pain, which was what passed for congratulation in Natalie's big, physically big, and boisterous family. The distress was in stringing together those acutely joyous moments, which even as they happened Frank knew were as perishable as the African iris his mother grew in her little greenhouse, an exquisite buttery bloom that lived only a single day. They filled his head and whirled with the plaintive howl of the dog back there in the darkness, the howl that must have merged with the roar of water—he heard it now with some third ear, booming and sucking.

Natalie!

How could any sensible word or image press through sounds like that?

Someone must have survived.

Nothing down there had survived.

Nothing could have lived through that.

But if he had been craven to leave her to die, was he not more so to abandon all hope of her survival? He had to hope, at least, although it made him feel like the grannies at his mother's church who could stand at the bedside of an eighty-pound ruin barely visible in a tentacled web of ghostly sheets and murmur words of encouragement.

As marriage was a triumph of hope over logic, so must be a husband's belief. His own eyes told him one thing, but he did not have to put all his faith in that one thing. Eyes lied. When he was a rookie, he had learned the nature of eyewitnesses. Eyewitnesses, people with mortgages and diplomas, had seen cougars walking on their hind legs through Grant Park. Eyewitnesses swore that the man in line behind them, a professor from Jamaica with horn-rims and a British accent, had pulled the trigger, when, in fact, the shooter was a ringer for Johnny Cash.

The way back to where Frank had left his car was long, perhaps four miles. He hurried, his breath coming faster, in rhythm with the staccato xylophone hammering of his heart, in the hitching hop-jog that was his only gait faster than a walk. The sun barely up, it was already warm, nearly eighty degrees by the feel of it, the height of Queensland's epic hot season. The palms, restless and dry, rattled above him. Far off, sirens keened, whooped, blended, in a chorus that peaked and fell. He needed to get to his cell phone. Natalie had been an athlete all her life, and was a strong swimmer, with the reflexes of a teenage point guard. Her job had trained her to make instant decisions under enormous stress.

Natalie. As though he were paging through an album, he viewed a deck of her expressions—the gamine and entirely-on-purpose flirtatious glance from under lowered lashes, the opaque concentration in the face of a disastrous injury that verged on a glare, the mirth that opened her lips, passion that clamped them . . . it was not possible that the last time he had seen Natalie was the last time he would see Natalie. Frank remembered police training that taught rookies to stop a sneeze by slamming a fist into their thigh. He did this now, punching his bad leg ferociously to dodge the thrall of tears he had no time to indulge.

It worked.

Frank pictured his mind as a rubber truncheon he could grasp and twist. She could have survived.

Her brother was right; he'd once said Natalie was like an action figure.

He thought of her making bins of things to toss or donate in preparation for their move to the United States, nattering about how she would no longer have to be envious of Brian and Hugh, who'd spent their junior years abroad there and could both do a very passable Brooklyn accent. Like most Australians, Natalie conceived the United States as a series of landmarks arrayed close together: the Statue of Liberty right next to the Grand Canyon, with the Hollywood sign tucked between. She wanted to see everything, all during the first week, with a nursing infant in tow.

Frank almost smiled. She could be looking for him even now.

At that moment, as if in answered prayer, the cell phone rang.