5

Nona had once told me that I was hoping to get caught in a riptide, hoping that I would have to fight for my life in the waves.

“You might be afraid of it, but you have to admit the truth,” she had said. “It’s what you want.”

Suicidal: she had used the word, and asked me to stop.

I took a quick cab ride to my home, and I punched the button on my answering machine, hoping to hear word from Nona. All I heard was the hearty voice of the contractor wondering when he could come by and resume work on my house.

When indeed, I thought.

I felt disloyal to Nona. I had not actually promised her that I would never go for another night swim, but I had not gone out into the surf for weeks. I stuffed the ample robe and the goose-down vest into my carry-all and grabbed my car keys.

I drove the last remaining car I owned, the Mercedes, down Ocean Avenue through the dark. The car had been armored during the days when my cousin was kidnapped in Europe. My father had taken the precaution to soothe my mother’s nerves. Now the car shifted gears with the solemn forward thrust of a rolling fortress. The interior was pleasant, the ride quiet, and I did have the dubious satisfaction of knowing that the ammunition of most firearms could penetrate neither the doors nor the windshield.

I found my way to the Great Highway and parked the car at Ocean Beach, at my favorite spot.

This was not a desire for death. Far from it. I could taste the ocean in the air. The wetsuit fit snuggly and felt delightfully peculiar as I zipped it up, and I made my way down the sandy steps in the darkness. The rubber textile moved with my body in a way that made me feel protected, insulated from all harm, but this was an illusion. Only my torso was protected, and in very cold water this would not be enough.

The scene was well lit by the glow reflected from the clouds, by the reflection of that light from the pale sand, and by the fragment of moon that kept slewing in and out of overcast. I tossed down my carry-all and the keys and sprinted toward the pale line of breakers.

I dived and surfaced, spitting water. This was what I loved, this struggle, this cold.

Sandy salt water filled my mouth. I had a flash of understanding: The horizon was a void, the sea was emptiness. And I was strong enough to survive it.

Anger was gone. I worked against the surge of water, my legs aching and the chill seeping through the rubberized fabric of my wetsuit top.

The beach was a scrawl of white suds, a dirty line of brown, a vague sprinkle of headlights. A bank of fog lofted over me, spilled over the view of the beach. The beach was gone, and I could see only the tossing water around me. The Pacific tasted of cities dissolved, aluminum and concrete and chrome stewed and then nearly frozen.

When I breathed I sucked in the cold fog. The muscles of my legs were growing slowly into stone. I was heavy, and sluggish. I dived deep, into the churning bottom. DeVere and Blake, and Peterson with his needful eyes, were far away now.

This was all that mattered. Brine burned my eyes, and I could sense the writhe of sand under my feet, the unsolid earth churning. How long had it been? Five seconds, then, as my feet plunged into the bottom sand into something nearly solid, ten.

Fifteen seconds. I felt myself laugh. It was an inward sound. I was so cold it hurt the bones of my limbs, my body aching with the cold, and I was laughing! This wasn’t a game, now, I told myself. This wasn’t play. People died like this.

Thirty seconds, and counting. The society columnists and the critics, the heiresses and the wealth-fatigued men of leisure would be surprised if they could see this: Stratton Fields at play. Drowning.

But it was sport, I told myself. It was fun, and nothing more. When my head broke the surface I could see nothing. The air was sweet. Sand needled me, and my lungs were shrinking into two leaden stones. My heart contracted into a smaller and tighter fist with each pulse. I blinked, and swam, sensing the direction of the shore.

I let the waves lift me, buoying me toward the beach. A wave tumbled itself, and my limbs along with it, but the danger and the greatest part of the pleasure was past. I body surfed, catching up with another wave that warped, angled me, and then the sand bit my knees and I erected myself panting, out of the foam.

A wedge of water nearly cut my legs out from under me. The risk, the salt on my lips. It was all was so delicious, so unlike the rest of my life.

Another wave tackled me, and I staggered and stalked my way from the sea slowly, as though reluctant to leave. I laughed at myself, gasping, dripping. Fun, I told myself, should not be so much work—or danger. I worked at the zipper of my wetsuit with stiff fingers.

The fog was streaky, rolling past me, and seemingly through me, like a second, diaphanous surf. My fingers stopped unzipping the suit. My breath caught.

I saw something.

I told myself that I must be mistaken. No one ever swam this surf—no one but me. It was too dangerous. But there could be no mistake. There was something out there.

I peered, striding into the wash of the waves. The fog and darkness obscured whatever it was, then blotted it entirely. But my instinct could not be denied: It was a human being.

There was someone out there.

I was in the water again, swimming hard as the fog closed in. I could see only a stroke or two ahead. I called out, but my voice was soaked in the hiss of the surf and the mat of the fog.

I plunged ahead, swimming steadily, until I reached the place where I was convinced I had seen—what? What had I seen? Surely not a person, I tried to convince myself. Surely it was a seal, or a bit of ship’s spar, or a life jacket fallen from a fishing boat. Perhaps it had been nothing, an illusion.

I called, wordlessly, my voice a universal: Are you there? Can you hear me?

Am I alone?

I was beyond the waves, the combers breaking behind me, somewhere beyond the fog wall. I felt the unease, the flickering anxiety that meant that the cold was even more dangerous than before. I was nearly spent.

But I couldn’t abandon someone out here to drown. I called again.

And this time there was an answering cry.

It was a brief, evanescent sound, almost not a sound at all. Someone was even farther out, through the fog. Someone was calling, and it seemed in my fear for the life of this stranger that this human voice was calling my name, if indeed it was a human call and not the song of a gull somewhere beyond the ceiling of gray.

I shuddered. My own fatigue clung to me. My own confusion drove me to wrestle upward, out of the water, in an attempt to see through the mist, and then fall back again.

There was indeed a voice calling. It was a human voice, and it sounded familiar.

Then I saw her.

Far off, indistinct with distance, there was a woman in the water. Her head and one shoulder were all I could see. She called out to me again, and I could not be certain any longer that what was happening was real.

When I kicked hard, fighting the water in her direction, she receded and grew farther away. I wanted to rescue this woman, but at the same time I was growing certain that I had suffered harm through lack of oxygen, or the cold. This woman did not exist.

And now I was very far from shore.

Too far, and my thoughts were becoming disconnected. She was a source of light. She beckoned me, a pale figure, and I swam until my sinews burned. My vision grew spotty. There, I told myself. This proves it. You are having hallucinations. It’s the sort of thing that happens to people when they freeze to death. You are leaving the real world, and as you depart you create one of your own.

Must save her, must not let her drown.

My hand struck something, and then I felt a hand close around mine. Close, and hang on.

I woke on the sand, my face buried in the wet stuff so that I spluttered and nearly choked as I inhaled sharply. I dragged myself to my feet.

WARNING, the sign announced. NO SWIMMING. SURF EXTREMELY DANGEROUS.

She was nowhere. I could not breathe. I tried to call out but I had no voice. I could feel her grip in my numb hands as though she still held my fingers.

No, I breathed. It isn’t possible.

My security man, Fern Samuels, poured more hot coffee from the thermos. I was enrobed, fortified, by layers of terrycloth and goose down. Fern did not say what he must have been thinking. He watched me drink hot coffee and then turned to see what I was seeing, the figures of policemen at the edge of the surf in what had become drizzle. There were flashlights, beams cutting into the mist, waves glittering.

“They’re not finding anything,” said Fern. He was tall and wide, a former Secret Service man, a man who took things in with a glance.

“There was someone there,” I said. I did not let him hear my teeth chattering.

“Then she’s gone,” he said. He meant: drowned.

Fern let me give him a long look.

He did not comment that my pastime was a foolish one. Fern understood danger. He understood the frustrations I had suffered in recent years, and I knew that Fern was a man who had taken his own frustrations into the firing range, or the gym, and exorcised them. He had worked for my father, and he understood me, and my family.

I had called him from my car, by instinct reaching out to the security of a familiar voice right after I called 911.

Now, when the police spoke to us, they consulted with Fern. Their attitude toward me was respectful, deferential, and they were happy to have Fern as a go-between. They nodded, muttering with him in the mist, while I tried to hide my shivering.

Fern stepped toward me across the sand, a few grains of it glittering on the black shine of his shoe. “No sign of her,” he said.

Perhaps Fern was waiting for me to describe the woman’s appearance. Perhaps he was waiting for me to say that I would never swim here again. There had always been an unspoken attitude: You hire me to protect you, and then you routinely nearly drown—for fun. I met his eyes and gave a shake to my head.

He sighed. “We have to go, Stratton. A body can wash up miles from here.”

“I’ll stay until they find her.”

He let his voice fall to a world-weary pitch. “I know how you feel. I don’t blame you. But it’s pointless.”

My voice was hoarse. “I should have done something different.”

He waved aside my words. He had seen men die.

“I came so close to saving her,” I said.

By now I was once again thinking that she had been a hallucination, a trick of the cold, the wind. What else could it have been? I was sure—and yet I was not sure.

“Maybe,” I breathed, afraid to say what I was thinking. “Maybe she wasn’t there at all. Maybe she wasn’t real.”

Fern put his hand on my shoulder. His grip was firm, well defined through my layers of cotton and goose down. “This is a dangerous place,” he said, meaning, I knew, not merely this San Francisco shoreline, but the ocean, the world.

Only at the last did I see it, a luminous slip in the glistening sand. It glowed, as the figure had, and I knelt. I reached forth my hand, and closed my fingers around it.

I waited until I was sure that no one was watching, and that my silhouette would block what I was doing. I closed my hand around this source of light, and immediately my hand jumped back.

It was a feather.

What was the matter with me? It was just a feather—nothing more remarkable than that.

I thrust it at once into the deep pocket of my robe. I did not allow myself to look at it. I told myself that it was nothing, just another curiosity washed up by the waves.

But another part of my mind knew. I had found something wonderful.

Fern stood in the dark, his car parked at an angle behind mine. The police doors were thudding shut, engines starting.

“Did you find something?” Fern asked.

Show him the feather, I thought. Go ahead.

“It was nothing,” I said.

And all the way home I wondered what had happened to me, why I had bothered to lie.