Chris Powell was distracted. His partner had asked him twice if he wanted a stick of gum, and both times he’d said no without knowing what he’d been asked. It wasn’t like Chris to be distracted; he wasn’t what you’d call a thinker. The whole business was making him downright uncomfortable, if you want to know the truth.
“You feeling all right?” Jenny asked.
“No,” Chris said, without looking at her. “Yeah, I’m okay.”
It wasn’t that Chris didn’t feel like talking to Jenny, he just didn’t feel like talking. Something was trying to work its way up inside his brain to where he could grab hold of it, and until it got there he had to keep the pathways clear. The problem was, he didn’t have much experience with this sort of thing. With all these thoughts drifting in and out of his head like so much flotsam and jetsam, how was he supposed to know which was the one distracting him?
“Chris, wake up!” Jenny snapped. “Didn’t you hear me say I’m going in? I got a kid in trouble here. Come on, get with the program!”
He watched Jenny run down the beach to pull a winded toddler out of the surf. From the look of it, the kid had been caught in a backwash. Where the hell were the parents, anyway? He imagined the mother looking up from some trashy paperback she was probably reading and running to wrap herself around her bawling kid. My poor baby, are you all right? Mommy’s here now, don’t cry, don’t cry . . .
Don’t cry, shit. Lucky for you, lady . . .
Chris reminded himself to turn his attention back to the ocean. Why was he having so much trouble keeping his mind on the job today? Hey, it wasn’t just today. Lately, there had been times he found himself getting lost out there, when he could see himself, honest-to-God see himself, floating in the air out there, hovering over the ocean like one of those blimps advertising sunblock or some crazy thing. No, more like a pelican on the lookout for a tasty fish, gliding, drifting, riding the wind until it swooped down and nabbed that sucker up in its beak. Only, Chris didn’t swoop. He just floated, drifted, looking, not knowing what he was looking for.
And all the time that he was out there floating he never moved from his seat atop the lifeguard stand, elbows propped on knees, the cord of his whistle always in motion, twirling clockwise around the index finger of his left hand, then counterclockwise, then clockwise. Tick. Tock.
Jenny climbed back up the stand, the smell of the surf clinging to her wet skin.
“Nice save,” Chris said evenly.
“Tweren’t nothin’,” chirped Jenny, which Chris knew basically to be true. Lifeguards made this kind of save every day. As far as he was concerned, you could hardly even call it a save when all you did was pull somebody out of water you could stand in. Even in deeper water, a rescue wasn’t usually a matter of life and death, although he knew—because he’d heard it about a million times in training—any trouble in any water had the potential of being life or death.
Still, he’d never saved anybody from drowning— not the real life-or-death thing, anyway. Sometimes, when he was hanging out with the other guards, Chris would let on that he couldn’t wait for the chance to be a big hero. But the truth was—and nobody knew this, nobody—he was scared he’d blow it and instead of being a hero . . .
The movement of Jenny’s arm as she slicked her lips with gloss caught Chris’s eye. He moved his head a few degrees past her to see if he could get a glimpse of the girl on the steps.
He didn’t know how he knew she was watching only him and not them. He could just feel it. Every day, usually an hour or so after he came on duty, he’d sense that she was there. He never saw her arrive.
He’d just turn his head and there she’d be: sitting on the same top step, leaning her shoulder against the same two-by-four upright, holding him with her gaze as if it were a microscope and he a measly amoeba.
She was, what, twelve maybe. At first, Chris had been sure she was just another lifeguard groupie. They came with the job, and Chris wouldn’t say he minded, even if most of them weren’t ripe for the picking, so to speak, so the most you’d better play with were your eyes and keep your hands to your-self. But there were a couple of things wrong with this one. She never came over to the stand, for one thing, never approached him or said hi if he happened to pass within twenty feet. She never smiled. And she was always alone.
And, always, it seemed to Chris, watching him.
It was a few days after he’d first noticed her that he’d started feeling distracted. It was like being with somebody who drops some tiny object on the ground, a contact lens or an earring, and you spend an hour trying to help them find it, and pretty soon it becomes an obsession, you have to find it, you keep looking, maybe the person who lost it isn’t even there anymore, maybe you’ve even forgotten what it is you’re looking for, but you keep looking because you have to, because suddenly your whole life is about looking, and you realize that you’ve never really looked for anything before, not really.
Chris shook his head, half expecting it to rattle, wondering what the hell was making him think this kind of shit.
“Look,” he heard Jenny say.
He turned to his left. A girl (seven? eight? Chris had this need to guess kids’ ages. He wasn’t all that good at it, wasn’t even all that interested, just needed to do it for some reason) was being turned into a sand mermaid by an older boy (fourteen? fifteen?).
“I like how he did the scales,” Jenny said.
Chris lifted his mirrored sunglasses and squinted to get a better view. Grunting, he lowered the glasses as the boy said something and the girl laughed. He watched the boy run to fetch the parents who put down their books and came to see. They patted the boy on the shoulders. The father ran back to get a camera.
“Nice family,” Jenny commented.
Chris shrugged. “All families look nice on the beach,” he said.
“Gee, that wasn’t too cynical,” said Jenny. “What’s your family like? Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
He shrugged a second time. “I’m an only child.”
“Callie!” he heard the boy calling. “Come swim with me!”
He watched the boy pull the girl out of her mermaid cast, then grab a Boogie board and run to the water.
“Wait, Evan!” the girl called after him. “Wait for me!”
“What is it with her, anyway?” Chris asked.
“Her?” Jenny said. “She likes mermaids, I guess.”
“Not her,” said Chris. “The one back there on the steps. The one who watches me all the time.#8221;
Jenny glanced over her shoulder.
“Oh, her,” she said. “I wouldn’t get all paranoid, Chris. She’s probably just terminally shy. Besides, aren’t you used to being gawked at? I thought you hunky guys actually liked being sex objects.”
“She doesn’t look at me that way,” said Chris. “She looks at me like she wants something.”
“So why don’t you ask her what she wants?”
Chris snorted. “Right,” he said.
Turning his gaze back to the ocean, he began thinking about the previous summer when he’d been a guard on the other side of the island. He’d spent the whole time, practically, staring out over the bay at the sliver of New York in the distance, just wishing it could be a year later so he’d be finished with high school, working the beach side, and looking ahead to the rest of his life. Now here he was, and the rest of his life was as blank as the horizon.
Well, maybe not totally blank. He did have this plan. Right after Labor Day, he was going to start driving cross-country and not stop until he reached Malibu. He didn’t know why Malibu, exactly, except he’d heard the surf was awesome. And it was three thousand miles away, a major point in its favor.
Destiny. That was the word for his plan. “California is my destiny,” he liked to tell people. One time this girl said to him, “Don’t you mean it’s your destination?” That had really thrown him off, because destination made it all seem so small and unimportant. Hell, a destination was what you had when you went out for a six-pack or a pint of ice cream. But then he got destiny back in his head and his plan seemed big again.
After that, he was careful who he talked to about it. He knew the minute he’d met Jenny, who was in her third year at some fancy college majoring in psychology, of all things, that she was definitely not a likely candidate for this particular conversation, not if he didn’t want to have his head messed with. Problem was, he seemed to be doing a fine job messing with his own head these days, didn’t need Jenny or anybody else to do it for him.
One thing. He was glad to be away from home. No more having to listen to his mother getting on his case about not going to college or his old man saying, “Get off the kid’s back. He’s had his glory years. If I’ve told him once I’ve told him a hundred times, high school is as good as it gets.”
Chris didn’t like saying it, but his father was an asshole. Once, after they’d both knocked down a few brews (otherwise, he never would have had the guts), Chris asked his father, “What about Mom and me? Aren’t we as good as it gets?” The old man hadn’t answered, just muttered something Chris couldn’t hear, not that he expected it amounted to much. Later on, his father had put his arm around Chris’s shoulders and told him in this hot, slurry voice, “It’s not that I don’t love you and your mother.” After his father pulled his arm away, Chris had stood there, squeezing his eyes shut, trying to imprint the moment on his memory because he was pretty sure he’d come about as close as he would ever get to hearing his father tell him he loved him. It would never get any better than that.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like being an only child,” Chris heard Jenny say, “although sometimes I used to wish for it. I have two older sisters and a younger brother. Did you ever wish you had brothers or sisters?”
Chris shrugged. “Not really What’s the use of wishing?”
When Jenny didn’t say anything, Chris fell into the silence between them and got lost in it. In no time at all, he was out there over the ocean again, floating, drifting, remembering ...
Once there was a carpenter and this carpenter had a wife. They were only nineteen when they got married right out of high school, and it wasn’t a year before they had a baby. Little blue-eyed boy named Michael. Michael Junior. After his daddy.
The carpenter had a workshop in the garage that was attached to his house, so he was home a lot, and that meant he could spend more time with his son than most fathers could. He taught him his trade—as much as you could teach a boy of four— and he made up stories while they worked side by side. And whenever Michael the son put his hand in the way of danger, Michael the father pulled it away. Then one day a couple of weeks before the boy’s fifth birthday the father took him along on a job in a neighboring town.
“Now, Mikey,” he told the boy when they got to the house, “I’m going to be working up on the roof today.”
And Mikey said, “Let me go with you, Daddy. Please.”
Well, the carpenter laughed at that, of course, because the boy was too little to have any business crawling around on a steep roof. No, he would never put his son in danger like that. “You go on now and play,” he told Mikey. “There’s a nice swing set in the yard. Play on that, and I’ll be able to keep my eye on you.”
From the roof, the father watched his son pumping away with his strong little legs, telling himself stories the way he always did. He saw him jump down off the swing to pet a dog that had wandered into the yard and he smiled, thinking how much his son loved dogs. I’m going to get Mikey a dog for his birthday, he thought, that’s what I’m going to do.
Pleased with himself for coming up with such a clever idea, he went back to his work. Gotta concentrate, he told himself, or I’ll take one helluva spill and break my neck. Pretty soon, he was so busy he didn’t catch sight of the dog running off or little Mikey chasing after it. All he saw when he thought to check back and see how his son was doing was the motion of the empty swing.
The sharp cry of a seagull jarred Chris from his thoughts.
“What’s the use of wishing?” he said.
“Did you say something?” Jenny asked.
Chris lowered his head. He didn’t want to look out at the ocean anymore. He was tired of floating, tired of looking and not knowing what he was looking for.
“Chris?” Jenny said.
Chris raised his head and angled it slightly in Jenny’s direction. “Nice day for fishing. That’s all I said. Nice day for fishing. Unless, I guess, you’re a fish.”
Jenny laughed. Chris smiled at the sound of it. She was all right, Jenny was. She was the kind of person you could tell stuff to.
Maybe.
Maybe.
Angels burn with a heavenly fire. You must never touch them or get too close. Yet how the girl wished how the girl yearned for the angel to lift her up and carry her in his arms across the waters of the sea to
to?
a land where she would be free safe to another land.
But what was the good of yearning for something that could never be?
But then one day the girl discovered that the angel was not the only one on the island. There was an entire kingdom filled with happy and loving people.
Each day the king and the queen would come to the seashore, and with them were the prince and the princess.