Winter Tides (2 page)

It was time to go. He reached behind his back and grabbed the cord attached to his wetsuit zipper, yanking the suit open and moving his shoulders to loosen it up. The neck of his suit was full of dredged-up sand from when he had gotten worked on his last wave, and there was sand in his hair, too. The wave had pounded him all the way into shore before letting up on him. He peeled the wetsuit off, shivering in the wind, and brushed the sand off his neck and shoulders with the thin old towel that he’d been taking to the beach for the last three or four years. His jeans and a flannel shirt sat in the car, and he wished he had brought them down to the beach. His feet were thawing out, and burned now with an itching, prickly heat. The water was cold, fifty-six or fifty-eight degrees—not headache water, but cold enough to wear you out, to drain you of energy despite a wetsuit.

Winter storms had eroded the beach away steeply, and the swell was rising fast. Broken waves rushed up the beach, leaving parallel trails of sea foam near the dry edge of the sand, then rushed seaward again, driving down the incline and back out into the oncoming swells in a moving surge, the rip current chopping up the surface of the ocean all the way out into the outer break now.

Dave took another look at the twins, who apparently had lost interest in the seaweed and had waded out into shallow water again. They stood in the heavy, receding wave wash, their feet sinking ankle-deep into the soft sand, the water leaping around their legs and splashing them to the knees. One of the twins pushed the other one, trying to shove her over, and Dave could hear her laughter on the wind, followed by the other one’s angry shout as her sister tried to pull her out into deeper water. Their mother looked up from her card game, but the umbrella nearly hid the girls from her view. She leaned forward and waved at them, and the twin who was doing all the pushing and pulling saw her and waved back, and then the woman adjusted her hat lower over her face and returned to the game, letting the kids have fun. The second twin managed to yank herself loose and run up into shallower water while her sister threw a clot of wet sand into her hair, then bent down to scrape up more.

Tossing down his towel, Dave walked back down toward the waterline, watching six big pelicans swoop over the top of a swell, soaring above the waves in a dead-even line, rising and falling as the wave passed beneath them. The twin in the water threw more sand, into her sister’s face this time, oblivious to an incoming wave that threw itself forward in a collapsing wall, the white water leaping upward as the wave smashed into the girl’s back, knocking her down and washing up the steep beach. She stood up in knee-deep water, but the receding wave rushed back downward, piling up against her legs as she tried to high-step through it, the moving water dragging her backward and off balance. She stumbled sideways, fell, and was buried by another wave.

Dave sprinted along the edge of the surf as she floundered heavily to her feet, coughing water out of her throat. Another wave pushed up out of the deeper water of the inside channel and drove in over the sandbar, throwing itself over in an explosion of white water that seemed to swallow her. Her sister screamed from where she stood on the shore, and Dave ran out into the surf as the drowning girl was swept out into deeper water at high speed now, like a boat carried on a river. She was neck-deep and trying to swim, thrashing her arms desperately and raising her head above the chop as if she wanted to climb into the sky. Her sister waded out into the surf, and Dave yelled at her to stop, but already she was caught up in the rip herself and panicking, trying to make her way in again.

Not two of them
, he thought, and instantly he changed course. He would grab the close-in girl first, and then he’d swim after the other one. He couldn’t deal with two of them in deep water. He could hear the second girl screaming as he dove through the face of a wave, stood up, and launched himself forward again, diving under another wave that broke in front of him. He swam hard through the turbulence, trying not to lose ground, and when he surfaced a few yards from her he threw himself forward again and grabbed her arm, holding onto her as he tried to stand up. The force of the rip was incredible, and for a moment, before he got his feet set, he was helpless in it, and the weight of the girl nearly pulled him down. Fighting again just to stay where he was, he dragged her close to him and spun her around so that he could get an arm across her chest.

Like a gift from heaven, a wave formed across the inside bar thirty feet out, pitching skyward into a vertical, foam-laced wall of gray-green water. He turned to face the shore, holding onto the girl, and pitched himself forward right before the wave slammed into him. He kicked his feet hard, and the wave picked them up and somersaulted them, dragging Dave across the bottom on his back. He fought to get his feet under him and stand up as the wave receded, tearing at his knees again, trying to pull him back down. He stumbled forward a few steps, climbed the slope, and dumped the girl on the sand. She collapsed forward and gasped for breath, then broke into a fit of coughing and retching as she clambered farther up the beach on her hands and knees.

As Dave turned toward the ocean again, he saw that the woman on the beach was running toward her daughter. The wind snatched her hat off her head and threw it into the air, and she pointed out to sea with a hand full of playing cards. For a moment it looked as if she was going to wade out into the ocean herself. Dave ran straight out into the surf again, waving the woman toward shore and looking for the other twin, who was simply gone now. When he was waist-deep he kicked himself high over a breaking wave and spotted her—impossibly far out. Waves broke on either side of her, but the rip itself was a churning current through the surf, holding the waves off and throwing up its own backward-breaking chop.

Dave dove through the face of another wave and came up swimming, angling into the center of the rip. He rose over an unbroken swell and found her again. She was still thrashing around, holding her head above water and looking straight up into the sky, sucking in air. The sun had disappeared behind the clouds, and the wind chop slapped into his face. When he looked for her again, kicking hard to hold himself above the chop, he couldn’t find her, and for a moment he was certain she’d gone down. He swam forward hard, knowing that she was at least twenty yards farther out. If she
had
gone under, he might never locate her….

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.