Winter Tides (3 page)

The girl was silent now. He swam on silently, too. He smelled salt spray then, and saw that a wave was breaking to the north of them, well in shore.

“Some day I’ll kill her. That’s why you have to save me.”

“Why don’t you just keep quiet?” he said, and he felt her giggle.

Suddenly he was swept with fatigue, and he quit swimming and started to tread water, holding onto her with one arm and sculling with the other. He was shivering with cold, and his arms and legs were so weak that he had to keep up a constant kicking to stay above the surface. A half hour of this was impossible. Ten minutes was impossible.

We aren’t going to make it….

He forced the thought away and said, “Here we go,” then started swimming again, letting his head rest on the surface of the ocean, as if he were swimming in a pool. Almost immediately he gasped in a throatful of salt water and jackknifed reflexively forward at the waist, coughing the water back out, holding on tight to the twin. He treaded water hard again, gasping in air. He kicked his feet harder, propelling them forward, trying to smooth things out, to get some glide, some forward momentum, but the power in his legs was gone, and he couldn’t keep it up. His muscles were on fire, and yet he was shivering with cold. He worked to keep his head up out of the chop, but it seemed as if he was settling deeper with each tired stroke, barely making any progress at all, simply kicking himself higher in the water, bobbing like some kind of dying thing, struggling just to stay above it now.

Alone, I could make it.

The thought came to him out of nowhere, as if his mind as well as his body had decided to betray him. If he held onto the girl, they would both drown. It was as easy as that. They rose to the top of a swell. The nearly deserted beach was incredibly distant. The mother stood there, still watching. Probably she thought they were all right, that everything was under control. He kept up the tired stroke, getting nowhere now. Surely the girl knew it.

He envisioned simply letting go—the twin sinking away into the green depths, as easy as falling asleep, and he forced his mind to focus. He was treading water again with a weak scissors kick. His sidestroke was gone. They bobbed up and down, his kick quickening as it got weaker. The ocean was empty out in the vast distances, just the small shape of a ship standing still way off on the horizon. How far from shore were they? A hundred yards?

He was going to drop her. He knew now with utter certainty that soon, very soon, he wouldn’t be given a choice. When the time came, it wouldn’t be his to decide.

She stared into his eyes, as if reading his mind, her own face a mask of terror now, her brassy attitude swept away. She kicked her feet with a wild ineffectiveness, thrashing against his legs, gripping his arms, and making small noises in her throat.

Don’t do it
, he told himself, kicking his legs machinelike, marking time. He was shivering, his shoulders numb from cold and fatigue. As if she knew he was fading, she was suddenly energized by fear, and she let go with her right hand long enough to clutch at his neck, to try to pull herself higher out of the water. He fought to control her, pushing her away at arm’s length, the wild thought entering his head that she was stronger than he was by now, and that she would drag him under and drown him.
I might have to drown her to save myself.

Another immense swell rolled through, and he nearly sank beneath it. It was powerful, pulling off the ocean bottom, dragging them several useless feet toward shore. Feeling the energy in the wave, he kicked harder, edging them up out of the chop and over the top of the swell. He looked back down into the wave’s trough, surprised at the sheer size of the wave. Seconds later it broke, an avalanche of white water smashing skyward, twice the height of the wave itself, vertical ribbons of water shooting up and falling in long arcs. Farther out into the ocean another shadowy swell moved toward them, rising up out of deep water and obscuring the sky.

“Breathe,” he said. “Deep. Really deep.”

How many waves in the set? The approaching wave was big—bigger than the one that had just rolled through. If there were waves beyond it, they’d be immense. He steadied himself in the water, his fatigue momentarily gone, his heart racing with fear-fueled adrenaline. He could hear the girl gasping in lungfuls of air. With her hanging on, he’d never dive deep enough to get under it.

The first of the swells steepened, pushing skyward, blotting out any view of the ocean behind it. Fifty feet away from them it started to feather at the crest, the wind tearing at the wave as it rushed forward, the wave’s face nearly vertical now, defying gravity and inertia, a heavy tangle of kelp visible just beneath its green surface.

“Hold your breath!” he said, yanking the twin next to him and taking one last deep breath himself. He tried to surface dive, pushing her down beneath him. He kept his eyes open, kicking his feet hard, fighting for some depth. The water was full of a deafening roar as the wave pounded down, releasing whirling tornadoes of fine bubbles like columns in a watery cathedral. The girl’s hair swirled in front of his eyes, and he got a brief glimpse of her pale face, her eyes wide and staring as the churning water swept across them. With a suddenness that astonished him, he was pulled up and back like a piece of driftwood. Her wrist slipped through his hand, and his fingers closed over the bracelet, which he dragged from her wrist as the wave cartwheeled him around and then slammed him downward, pounding him off the ocean floor and tumbling him toward shore. The girl was simply gone from his grasp, vanished.

Something brushed his leg—the girl? Kelp? He flailed outward with his hand, touched something solid, but instantly it was gone, and the wave slammed him against the bottom a second time, dragging him across a sandbar on his back, then flipping him head over heels and rushing him forward again. He tried to force himself to relax, but his lungs felt as if they’d imploded, and in a sudden panic he clawed his way upward, deluged by swirling foam. His head broke the surface, and he threw it back and sucked in air, fighting his way clear of the churning white water until he could kick himself around again and look out to sea. The water was empty, the girl gone.

Let her go?
The unwelcome question settled in his mind.

She had slipped away so
easily
… He forced the thought away, slipped her bracelet over his own wrist, and dove beneath the surface, opening his eyes to see through the churning bubbles into the green darkness. But almost at once he was out of breath, and he kicked his way toward the sunlight again as the third wave in the set bore down on him, breaking hard forty feet farther out, an avalanche of moving white water. He hyperventilated, dove again, stroking for the bottom, and the wave blasted into him, pushing him toward shore. He let himself go limp, not struggling this time, and the wave dragged him like a rag doll, tumbling him over and over, letting up on him when it moved into the deeper water of a channel. He surfaced, treading water tiredly, looking futilely around for some sign of the girl again, watching another wave break far outside. Two lifeguard boats floated outside the breaking waves now, too late to do any good. He waited out the incoming wave, hyperventilating again, and then dove beneath it, finding the bottom and letting the wave pass above him.

When he surfaced he realized it was raining. The sky was solid with clouds, and the wind whipped the rain into his face and swept it across the surface of the ocean in flurries. Perhaps the girl had been swept in to shore. With any luck she had been. He had to believe she had been. Another wave rolled through, smaller than the others but still breaking outside of where he swam tiredly toward shore. He let the white water pick him up and carry him. When the wave dropped him he kept swimming, a tired, mechanical crawl stroke with no kick. He heard a voice and looked up to see a lifeguard reaching out with a red float. Dave grabbed it and hung onto it.

“Where’s the girl?” The lifeguard’s hurried question came to him from a vague distance, as if he were just waking up out of an anesthetic. A broken wave struck them, and he let go of the float, letting the wave churn past. He gestured tiredly toward the open ocean. “I’m okay,” he said, and started to swim again, letting the waves push him, surprised moments later when his toes dragged against the sandy bottom and he stumbled to his feet in shallow water. Up on the beach a yellow lifeguard Jeep was just pulling even with the crest of the sand. When he was up onto the beach, he sat down and looked out over the ocean, letting the rain hit him, shivering with the cold. There were hands under his arms, helping him up, and he was suddenly sick and faint, and he knew, without anyone having to tell him, that the girl was lost.

T
HE NIGHT WAS QUIET—HAUNTINGLY QUIET, AS IF THE
fog dampened the sound of her footsteps along with other nighttime noises. The bars and cafes along Main Street were closed, and there was little traffic. Anne could smell the fog on the air along with something else—dirty oil, she decided, although there weren’t too many wells still operating in the downtown neighborhoods, and the oil-soaked vacant lots that had once made up most of the acreage in the city were covered with apartments and condominiums now. The redeveloped downtown was a different place from the run-down beach city she remembered from her childhood visits, and although it was probably safer now—fewer bikers and bad alleys and bars—she wasn’t sure she liked the change. Probably it was just nostalgia. Up in Canada, when she had talked about moving south, people had warned her against walking at night in southern California, and now she couldn’t help but listen to the silences between her own footsteps, half expecting the slow tread of someone following, someone hidden by the night and the fog.

She had been in town only a few days, and she was entirely friendless. It was a perfectly loony place for her to have moved to, especially because she didn’t meet people easily. She stopped now at the edge of the Pacific Coast Highway and waited for the signal to change, trying to see through the fog to the foot of the pier and the stairs to the beach. The headlights of a northbound car appeared, and the car braked at the yellow light. She heard music from inside the closed-up car, and it took her a moment to recognize the tune—a pepped-up version of “Pearl on the Half Shell” that sounded strangely at odds with the foggy, motionless night. The “Walk” sign blinked on, and she stepped off the curb, reaching the other side just as the light changed again. The ghostly car accelerated slowly away, the sound of the jittery music disappearing along with the car’s taillights.

It was nearly midnight, and the pier was closed, barricaded by a high metal gate. That was disappointing. Anne hadn’t thought that the pier would be closed. She looked around her at the foggy darkness, and a rash idea entered her head. Suddenly she felt a little like a criminal, which, it occurred to her now, she was very nearly about to become—and not for the first time, either. Once, when she was about eight, she and her sister had climbed over the fence at the agricultural college and fed apples to the cows, despite written warnings to stay out. No one had caught them, and a week later they had risked another cow feeding, the success of which had clearly set her on a criminal path that had, these many years later, led her to the foot of this closed-up pier. What next? Tearing the tags off mattresses? Jaywalking? Murder?

She swung her leg over the top bar of the waist-high railing and climbed out onto the edge of the pier, where she sidestepped down past the gate. She looked below, down at the nearly invisible beach and the descending concrete stairs, then climbed back over the railing again, walking farther out onto the deserted pier in order to distance herself from the gate. She stopped at the railing when she knew she was invisible from the street, and peered down into the gloom. She had a picture in her mind of the ocean late at night: the moonlight on pier pilings, the ghostly waves rushing up out of the darkness, the empty beach, the shimmer of lights on the water up the curving coast.

She could hear the ocean sighing on the wet sand below the pier. And there was the sound of waves breaking somewhere out in the fog, which swirled around her now, the mists opening and closing like windows and doors. For a moment she got a glimpse of the beach below—the closed-up concession stands, a lonely towel left on the damp sand, a couple of oil drum trash cans. Then the fog closed in again, and she heard the heavy boom of a breaking wave as the pier shuddered from the impact.

She walked slowly through the mists, past the darkened lifeguard tower. The pier lamps glowed like moons overhead, but their light was mostly consumed by the fog, and very little of it reached the ground. At the end of the pier, the fog was dense enough so that she didn’t see the railing ahead of her until she was almost upon it. She put her hands on the cold metal, which was beaded with moisture, and looked down into the gray darkness. She imagined the ocean below, the shifting of the dark currents, the waves rolling in, the terror of falling over the railing, of finding herself in the cold ocean on a lightless night, the entire coast shrouded in fog….

There was a sound like something moving behind her—like the scrape of feet on concrete—but almost as soon as she heard it, it stopped. She looked hard into the mists around her, at the dark stationary shapes of a trash can, a low bench, a lamppost. Nothing moved. She listened, holding her breath, but couldn’t hear anything now, just the muted crashing of waves from farther in toward shore. The relative silence seemed to suggest something purposeful—someone hiding, perhaps, just out of sight in the fog.

And as if suddenly clairvoyant, she was aware of a presence in the night air around her, an unsettling change in the atmosphere, as if the very fog was stained with distilled emotion, with the long-ago fearful ghost of resentful loneliness and hateful despair conjured by the fog and the ocean and the sound of breaking waves.

It was time to go. She moved away from the railing, keeping to the middle of the pier, looking around her as she walked. She could see no one, but as soon as her own shoe soles scraped on the concrete pier, she was abruptly certain that someone was keeping pace with her, matching their own footfalls to her own. She stopped, and the sound stopped. Then she stepped forward again and was struck by this same illusion—probably a trick of the fog, an echo. She walked faster, the mist closing in around her so that she was completely enshrouded now. Dim objects loomed up along the edges of the pier—two ghostly telescopes on metal swivels, a tiny wooden building, a long sink for cleaning fish.