Carrie!” Greg was beside me in an instant. “Are you all right?”
I blinked at him. “I think so.” Except for the pointy rock sticking into my back. I put out a hand to push myself upright.
And found I wasn’t quite as all right as I’d thought. A shaft of pain shot up my right arm from my wrist. I yelped and pulled my arm to my chest, cradling it in my other hand. The pain dulled from a ten to a four and throbbed in time with my heart. I’d become one of the many that the Keep Off Jetty signs were written for.
“Your wrist?” Greg reached to take hold of it.
“Don’t touch!” I sounded like a two-year-old yelling, “Mine!”
He blinked and pulled his hands back. “I wouldn’t hurt you. I’ve had lots of emergency training.”
I nodded, feeling foolish at my overreaction. “I must have put my hand out to catch myself when I fell.” With care I extended my injured arm and studied it. Already the wrist was swelling.
“Can you move your legs?”
My legs. I tried to move, and while one leg cooperated, the other didn’t.
“I can’t move my left leg!”
We both looked and saw the problem at the same time. When I’d fallen, my foot had kicked forward and gotten wedged between two of the jetty’s boulders, toe down, heel up. Somehow when I’d landed, my leg, already caught, had been wrenched and twisted at an awkward angle. My knee was bent, and the inside of my leg lay flat on the jetty. All I could see of my foot was the thick heel of my athletic shoe.
“I can wiggle my toes without any pain, so I don’t think it’s broken. Just stuck.”
“Well, let’s get you unstuck and to the hospital to have that wrist looked at.” Greg slid his hands down to my ankle and began the process of releasing me from my rock trap.
“I can’t have a broken wrist!” The implications of losing the use of one hand, my right one no less, loomed large. “I’ve got to work! How can I wait tables with only one arm? O-o-ow! Stop! My foot doesn’t bend that way.” I felt it all the way up in my hip.
“Sorry.” He tried again.
“Pain! Stop! Let me try.” I shifted my weight, but my foot, sneaker sole caught beneath an uneven protrusion on the boulder, remained immobile. A wave washed over the rock I sat on, sliding inexorably toward me, wetting my legs and bottom. It was uncomfortably chilly, and my jeans sopped up the wet like a denim sponge. As the water receded, I realized my trapped foot was now submerged in its crevice, water gurgling around it. Time and tide were not going to wait for me to get free.
I started to get nervous. “How high will the water get where we are?”
“Uh.” Greg looked around in the fast-falling dusk. We were quite a ways out on the long jetty. “Three feet maybe?”
How far was it from my bottom to my nose? How deep was three feet? I looked to my right and left to see where the tide line normally was. I tried to picture how high the water would be where I sat when the waves washed higher than usual on the beach. I began to fear I was going to become one of those wild animals who chewed off their foot to get free from a trap.
“Before you panic, let’s just untie your shoe, and you can slide your foot out.” Greg, the ever practical.
“Right. Good. Wonderful idea.” Such a brilliant and easy solution.
But my foot was wedged upside down, and the laces were not only under water but unreachable.
A man I’d never seen ran out onto the jetty. “I saw you fall. I called 911 for you. I told them we needed an ambulance and a rescue squad.”
As I tried to smile my thanks, a piece of silver plastic riding on the water bumped against my leg. Greg picked it up.
“Looks like the cover on a slide phone,” the 911 guy said.
My cell phone was that color. With my good hand I reached for my belt clip. Empty. That wasn’t a rock in my back when I fell but my phone, and the fall shattered it. I should have gotten that extended warranty.
As I mourned the loss of my phone, I became aware of wet dripping down my neck. I reached back with my good arm, and my hand came away sticky. “My head’s bleeding!”
Greg whipped off his sweatshirt, then his T-shirt. He folded it up and slapped it gently against the back of my head. “Hold this.”
I held it as he pulled his sweatshirt back on. Then he moved my hand, lifted the compress, and examined my head. His hands moved through my hair, and I thought how I’d dreamed he’d do this but under slightly different circumstances and for slightly different reasons.
I could feel 911 Man peering over Greg’s shoulder as another wave washed over me. By now I was sitting in sea water, very chilly sea water. Stripers might like it cold, but I didn’t.
“How soon do you get hypothermia?” I asked.
Greg put the compress back in place and held it there. “I think you’re safe for a while,” he said with a smile in his voice.
I heard a rumbling noise, and a strobe light began playing across the water, turning the foam red and blue by turns.
“Oh, good,” 911 Man said. “The cops.”
I looked over my shoulder. The cop car had driven right up on the boardwalk. Close on its heels came an ambulance, lights flashing.
I didn’t rate a siren from either.
People poured out of both vehicles, and the jetty became crowded. Now 911 Man had his smartphone in hand and was texting away. He was very unhappy when he was sent back to the boardwalk to watch the action from afar.
“But I called it in,” he protested, as if that gave him the right to take up precious space on the jetty.
“And we appreciate it,” Maureen Trevelyan said. “You can help us, sir, by keeping everyone away from the area.”
Slightly mollified, he left, doubtless to regale the small crowd gathering with what was going on when he wasn’t texting the Twitter world.
I crooked a finger at Greg, and he bent to me. “Are they all Twittering about me back there?”
“Probably. Does it bother you?”
I shrugged. “Twice in one week. I’ll be famous. Though come to think of it, they don’t know it’s me. Ouch!”
I glared at Maureen, who had tried to free my foot.
“How did it get wedged?” she asked, as if people caught in a jetty were all in a day’s work—which they undoubtedly were.
“I slipped and fell, and it was stuck.”
“I think she’s broken her wrist,” Greg said. “And she has a cut on the back of her head, but I don’t think it’s serious. More an abrasion than a laceration.”
Maureen moved behind me and shined her flashlight on my head. Greg removed the compress he’d been holding in place.
“I don’t think it’s even bleeding anymore,” Maureen said.
One of the EMTs dropped to his knees beside me. “Hi, Carrie. I’m Ryan and that’s my partner, Amy.” He pointed behind me, and I craned my neck to see who he was pointing to. Amy and I smiled at each other, well-mannered even in catastrophe. “Can you tell me if you hit your head hard?”
“I didn’t. I don’t remember hitting it at all. It’s my wrist.” I held out my arm and winced at the sight. Instead of being indented at the base of my hand, my wrist was the size of an Easter ham and just as pink in the flashlight beams.
“Let’s make sure the rest of you is okay,” Ryan said. “Then we’ll get you to the ambulance.”
“The rest of me’s great. Except for my foot.”
He put his hand on my knee and followed my leg to the foot. He felt around down there, his hands submerged, while I made little yips as he tried to turn it.
He frowned. “You are caught, aren’t you?” He looked at the wave that rolled over us, soaking me to the waist and him partway up his thighs. He looked up at Maureen. “We need heavy rescue and fast.”
“What?” I turned to Greg, on his knees across from the EMT, also soaked well up his thighs.
“Just a precaution,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
I might have felt better if he didn’t look so distressed.
Maureen, in water above her ankles, stepped away and spoke into her shoulder mike. I couldn’t hear her, but I knew what she was saying.
More rumbles, more lights, more crackling radios, and the heavy-rescue truck pulled up beside the ambulance, followed by a fire truck.
“Why a fire truck?” I asked Greg as I tried not to shiver.
“Part of the first responders. It’s better to send them home unneeded than to get them to an emergency too late.”
A fleece blanket fell around my shoulders. Ryan’s partner smiled down at me. “Let’s keep you as warm as we can.”
Greg tucked it close, and I smiled my appreciation.
Suddenly the jetty was bathed in bright light as the rescue team kicked into action. The light revealed the wave that was barreling toward me. It hit and I was lifted from my rock by the force of the water, floating for a few seconds. Greg and Ryan were both shifted by the surge and scrambled for balance. I put my hands out to keep from falling backward into the water and yelped as my bad wrist took some weight.
It always amazed me the small amount of water that was needed to create a dangerous situation, especially moving water. It was people who didn’t comprehend this fact who stayed to ride out hurricanes and who often died. Right now I was at the waves’ mercy. First came the slap and the push, then the suck and the pull.
As the wave receded, I settled back on the boulder, my free foot pressing against the same rock that held me captive, trying to keep me steady. It took me a moment to realize that my left leg wasn’t bent at that unwieldy angle anymore. I reached forward. I still couldn’t feel the laces on my shoe, but I could feel its side.
“My foot’s shifted! Cut it off!”
The last was lost in the gurgle as I turned my head to escape a wave full in the face. I floated again, then settled, spitting out salt water. I held my breath as I reached down into the swirling foam. What if my foot had been turned back with only the heavy sole showing again?
“Cut it off! Cut it off! Quick!”