Saturday around midnight
He wakes when she takes his hand to her lips, then presses it against her chest.
Her breathing is calm, but there is a hint of agitation like the one he sensed in high school just before that wild version of her, the one he called Midnight J’nelle, appeared with a wild idea, like spying on the Klan rally or skipping the last day of school. Once they made boilermakers with bourbon she stole from her parents’ liquor cabinet. It was the sickest he’d ever been.
She gives his fingers a soft squeeze.
“How would it be,” she says, “if we went out to the beach for a midnight swim?”
“Now?”
“Yes, now. The night is still young.”
“Midnight is not young.”
“It can be. It’s all in the mind.”
He waits in the fanciful hope that she is joking, then says, “It’s rough out there, J’nelle, even for an ex-swimming champ.”
“It should be OK if we stay close to shore.”
“And cold. The water has cooled over ten degrees in the last month.”
“Seth’s parents had a place on Nantucket. I’m used to it. Besides, I need to get into water, real natural water from the depths of the ocean, full of salt and flakes of kelp and darting, frightened fish. I need to feel it around me.”
“You really want to go out in this wind and do that?”
She raises his fingers to her lips. “I want to do that with you.”
He rises from the bed, finds the wall switch by the door, and flicks on the light.
“No,” she says, “leave it off. Please.”
They put on their underwear, and she waits in the dark hallway while he takes two large beach towels from the linen closet and pulls a sweatshirt from the drawer in his room. He hands the sweatshirt to her and waits while she puts it on. Then he wraps one of the towels about her, chin to toe, before she steps into the lamplit area in the main room.
He follows, wrapping his own towel about him. She pauses in the lamplight and turns.
“Could we have a sip of something first?
“Sure. I’ll open a new bottle. Red or white?”
“Have you got something more the color of brandy or Scotch?”
“Both, but that might not be a good idea before we take on this ocean. The wine either, for that matter.”
“I’ll take a finger of Scotch and save the brandy for later.”
He pours two one-finger glasses of Scotch. She stands with the towel clutched to her chin and one arm poking out to take the Scotch, then holds out her glass to his.
“Cheers!”
A light clink of the glasses.
“Cheers,” he says, and thinks but does not say, We who are about to die salute you.
Between the two swallows she takes to down her Scotch, she watches him sip his. On her slightly swollen lips, the hint of a smile.
“Why are you doing this?” he says.
“You mean what we did this evening or the entire visit or the midnight swim idea?”
“I meant the midnight swim idea, but maybe the question applies to all of it.”
“Let’s don’t try to answer those questions now. Maybe they will answer themselves.”
His glass still has a sip or two of Scotch in it. She takes it from him, sets it on the counter, then takes his hand.
“Maybe it will all come clear in the bosom of the deep blue sea.”
“It ain’t blue,” he says.
They descend the front porch steps to the yard. The wind blows over and around the maritime forest barrier to the east in heavy gusts and whips their towels so hard Ace and J’nelle drop each other’s hand and hug themselves to prevent the towels from blowing away. They weave their way across the yard and into the dunes, where he takes their towels and her sweatshirt and stuffs them under a craggy piece of driftwood. She watches with her arms hugged to her chest, then suddenly begins to strip off her panties and bra.
“Here,” she says. “I doubt they’ll make much difference, even if they stay on in those waves.”
He strips off his underwear, and takes her hand as they step from the dunes onto the beach. Out there in the darkness, the massive waves rise, throw off spume and boom upon the shore in an angry, brutal way. The wind comes even harder and he feels even more naked. Retreating waves rake the sand from beneath his feet. She staggers against him, tightens her grip on his hand, and kisses the top of his shoulder.
“Let’s go,” she says.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, but please don’t let go of me unless I say so.”
He wades in first, leading her. The water is cold and full of broken seaweed and bits of shells that sting his legs and feet. Rushing waves smack his shins, splash up to his crotch, pitch into his stomach. He feels her falter and tighten her grip.
He turns and yells over the wind.
“You want to go back?”
“No, I want it all over me.”
He thinks of rip currents and undertow, usually more of a problem up the beach where the shore is less protected, but this is not a usual time. The water rises to his chest and pulls even harder against him in its outward rush than it does when it rushes in. He lurches about, loses her hand, and has to turn and do a small dive to recover it. He has not been in the ocean in a couple of years, and he is weaker now in his legs and upper body, his balance all but gone. And what about the Pearlman Shake? Maybe cold salt water will help keep it at bay.
He can feel the next wave building out there in the darkness, a rolling, watery barrel muscled by the sea. The swell that precedes it lifts him off his feet. Once again, she slips away, and this time there is no finding her. He is up to his neck, fighting to get himself vertical and his feet planted before the wave hits. Then suddenly she is there next to him, finishing her last free style stroke in that smooth way he remembers. It always seemed so effortless for her, not challenging the water but slipping eel-like through it.
“We should go back,” he shouts. “This is too much.”
She throws her arm across his chest and grips his shoulder, then pulls him to her just as the wave breaks against them, smack into his chest, and she is gone and he is tossed end-over-end. His back and shoulders grind into the gritty bottom. He fights to push himself upright and find her before the counter rush comes. But there is no bottom, and he feels himself moving sideways and slightly seaward down the beach, then suddenly faster, away from shore, then much faster, a sensation of being sucked into the sea.
This is it, this is a rip current, and damn it all, he knew the danger and ignored it so that whatever started between them, back there in that confection of candlelight and music, could continue. And to where, for God’s sake? He should have stopped it. An old man, trying to prove what?
And where in the name of God is she?
The current hauls him away into the seething sea, choking him with mouthfuls of salty water faster than he can spit them out. Everything they did earlier is now fading. Everything else in his life is fading—kids, grandkids, old friends—drifting away into their own lives, and he is not there.
And those memories of Pam—if he dies, do they die with him?
A big swell washes over him as the current from the shore continues to push him out.
He cannot leave all of that behind; he cannot just let it go. And so, first you don’t panic—right? You go with the current, let it take you away from shore. And then somehow you turn and swim parallel to the shore—or is it at an angle away from the shore? And then you turn again in sort of a hook and swim toward the shore. But how far out do you go before you make that final turn and go for it? In this storm-driven water, how do you do all of that?
And J’nelle, does she know any of this? That green, yellow, and blue diagram, magneted to the door of his fridge, of how to escape a rip current, he should have showed it to her.
He should have thought for once; he should have said, “No! And no! And no!” And “Goddamnit no!”
The wind hits in great gusts that whip strings of salt water and snot from his face and hair. He gulps a breath before another swell hits.
There is a time factor, right? Or maybe more a timing factor, when you make your turn and go for it. But what if you don’t get that right? What happens then? What did the diagram on his fridge say about that? Not a thing. Not a Goddamn fucking thing.
And when he tries to swim, how far will he get before his heart gives out? Or the Pearlman Shake hits?
Rise and sink. Gulp and spit. That feeling of being heaved into the air, then dropped, arms straight out, fighting for buoyancy and stability. Another large swell upends him, head over heels, and he has to paddle and kick to get upright and breathe. How deep now? And if the tide took J’nelle out, wouldn’t she be somewhere nearby fighting to stay alive like he is, somewhere out there in the stormy dark?
A sharp ache gnaws at his ribs, but the water feels different. The sensation of bobbing up and down is now stronger than the outward pull of the sea, the current roils more than it sucks. For a moment, the wind slackens, and he can hear the faraway crash of waves on the beach. Maybe he’s out far enough. Maybe this is where he should swim for shore.
He executes a hard scissor kick to turn himself and begins to thrash his way westward down the beach. The distance to shore will be shorter and there will be less chance of drifting out to sea. He takes in a mouthful of water with every stroke, has to stop and tread water for a moment to vomit, then kicks himself back into motion and on course. And that is when the cramp hits. His left calf muscle jack-knifes upward against his hamstring, and both muscles lock in an ache that torques his entire body.
Jesus, this thing that’s got him. This Goddamn Pearlman thing. Is his body in that big a hurry to kill him?
He felt that kind of helplessness once in Vietnam when he was on patrol with the marines near Khe Sanh, packing the PRC-10 radio—a twenty-five pound box of hard plastic and steel they called the “Prick-ten”—to relieve his radioman, and a cramp hit. He fell on his hands and knees in a jungle mountain stream, the muscles in his leg tight as a jeep spring. The marine grunts in file behind him slogged right on by and started up the far bank that went straight up toward the sky and was choked in ten-foot elephant grass. The last man to pass was the marine gunny sergeant.
“Hurt, lieutenant?”
“Cramp.”
The gunny reached down, grabbed him by the radio’s shoulder straps, and jerked him to his feet.
“Walk it out. Pretend you’re a marine.”
He pushed Ace to the bank, where the cramp hit even harder, and Ace dropped to all fours. The gunny grabbed him again, this time by his web utility belt, and up the bank they went, scrambling together, dragging Ace’s jack-knifed leg. The gunny held his M-14 in one hand and yanked Ace by his middle while Ace grabbed at stalks of elephant grass to pull himself along. When they reached the top, the gunny got him to his feet and gave him a pat on the ass.
“See, lieutenant? Easy as fucking a bowlegged mule.”
Now, riding a huge swell, he treads water and massages his calf to loosen the cramp. Down he goes, digging at himself, as the pain screams into the muffled roar of sea. He fights his way back to the surface and digs some more. Finally a slight easing. He kicks, twists his body, and struggles to tread water. The cramp eases some more, then signals a threat to return. The cold water doesn’t help, but at least there’s no weight on the leg. He keeps at it, rolling about, spitting out water as fast as it comes in. At last the cramp relaxes enough that he can make the leg work again—at least so it’s not a hindrance.
Rolling waves start to hoist him higher. The power of the sea now seems to come from behind him, from out there in the limitless darkness. He allows himself a tiny hope of salvation; the waves are rising to make their rush to shore, a huge wind-up of energy to catapult him in.
He stops fighting and tries to ride the swell he is on, adopting it as his ticket home—if he can just hang on, stay slightly in front of it. When he feels it begin to crest, he executes a one-legged scissors kick and swims as hard as he can down the wave’s face as it curls tighter and tighter, folding him into its barrel until swimming becomes useless. He is in the air a split second, then flipped over and over and thinks, This is how I will die—not by drowning but by being beaten to death. He has an image of his limp and lifeless body, rolling in the surf, up and down the beach, and then all thought is lost in a mad whirling and tumbling until he feels the first scrape of his naked butt against the bottom. Then another flip, and his face grinds into it as well.
He fights to get to his feet, then falls backward in the outrush of the wave that brought him in. Then up again and knocked forward onto his hands and knees by the next incoming wave. He crawls, splashes, and claws his way forward until the retreating water washes past him and he is able to once again get himself upright and onto the soggy beach.
A peppery rain has begun to fall. He staggers forward, collapses at the base of a dune, and gags into the sand. His chest is heaving. A tremor, not from any ailment this time but from pure adrenaline, runs like a current from his chin to the tips of his toes. His arms, braced on the sand and bent like spider legs, begin to shake. His left hamstring and calf muscle twitch and threaten to jerk themselves back into the cramp.
Jesus, he’s lucky he could swim at all.
He glances quickly up and down the beach before his elbows give and he rolls onto his side in the sand in a fetal position, hands clasped between his knees.
“Damn it,” he says, spitting bile into the sand. “Where in the name of God is she?”
He sucks in air and calls, “J’nelle, J’nelle.” His voice is gargled and croaky and quickly lost in the crash of waves and buzz of the wind about his ears. His butt and elbows are skinned from where he ground into the sand. Water blows from the end of his nose and clings coldly to his skin. He starts to shake. He cannot allow this. Pretend you’re a marine, the gunny said—like Seth, J’nelle’s husband who leaped into the glacier’s black oblivion. He massages his leg some more, then pushes himself to his feet and stands spread-legged to keep his balance and rubs his arms and thighs and shanks to stave off the shivers. He has to find her.
He peers more carefully in each direction, up and down the beach. Nothing but darkness and the booming ocean. Lines of foam the color of a fish belly quiver with a vaguely luminescent glow. He has never been on this beach in this kind of weather. It could be a beach in any part of the world.
So, which way? She is a far better swimmer than he, so maybe farther down the beach. Or maybe she was able to fight the tide sooner and came ashore in the other direction. Or maybe… no not that, not that.
He starts down the beach, still headed west, calling with his croaky voice, alternately rubbing and hugging himself, sucking and blowing air. After a few yards, he stops. Why west? They entered the water farther east, and when they came out for their get-together stroll on Friday and she had her Mason Morrel confession moment, they had walked even farther eastward. He turns and picks up his pace, trying to make his voice work, calling into the wind like the squeak of a small animal. He is almost running now, forcing his calf and hamstring to stretch through the remnant ache of the cramp. The tightness in his chest is back. His heart pounds in his ears above the thud of the waves.
He has gone a hundred feet past the place where they went into the water when he sees her figure against the backdrop of the dunes. She is on her knees, sitting back on her heels with her head bowed, gripping her thighs. He croaks a yell, but she does not hear him, and he is almost to her before she looks up.
“Oh, Ace!”
She leaps up, throws herself against him, and holds him to her, digging her fingers into his back. It is like being grabbed by something feral, and it comes to him in a fuzzy sort of way that she is naked, that they are both naked, out here on this beach in the wind and rain of a gathering storm. He remembers a picture of Adam and Eve in the Bible his parents gave him as a kid, copied from a famous painter who portrayed the first two humans on earth, slinking away through a jungle darkened by the wrath of God. Against the angry sky and green-black foliage, Eve’s pale Renaissance body shown luminously white and beckoned Ace to join their flight. And suddenly in this moment, here with J’nelle, he feels he is finally out of that dark garden. He clings to her and they cling to each other as the night roils around them.
Her face is slick with rain and tears, and she is shaking. Her wet hair clings to her skull and neck and makes her seem rinsed down into yet another version of herself, and he feels he is holding the truth of this new, older J’nelle for the first time.
“Oh, God,” she says. “Oh, Ace.”
He catches his breath for what feels like the first time since they waded into the water.
“It’s OK,” he says. “It’s OK.”
They hold on to each other a moment longer before their grips loosen.
“I looked all over,” she says.
“You swam east?”
“No, I just came out of the wave near where we dove in and you were gone. I’ve been frantic. I thought you’d hurt yourself somehow and couldn’t swim.”
“Rip current,” he says.
She hugs him again, keeps saying she is sorry for suggesting the swim in the first place, for leading him into it. She calls herself an idiot, a fool. It is the same voice he heard that morning when she blamed herself for failing to help Seth.
Ace starts to shiver. She rubs her hands briskly up and down his back and ribs, then squeezes him close again. They hold the embrace, then turn, hand in hand, and start down the beach to the path through the dunes to the house. The rain comes harder.
On the path, Ace retrieves their beach towels and clothing and holds her towel like a cloak for her to step into. “It’s wet,” he says, as he wraps it around her shoulders that seem thin under the weight of the towel. He gathers the sweatshirt and underwear and takes her hand. They start toward the house.
The tremor hits stronger than any he has felt. It yanks at his shoulder and runs through his biceps to his forearm, then torques the wrist of the hand she is holding. The hand itself starts to crimp. She tightens her grip, then steps quickly ahead of him, turns on tiptoe, and pulls him close. The kiss is open, insistent. It melts him completely. They go down together as she throws the beach towel out beneath her on the sand. He tries to brace himself and mumbles something about going back to the house, but it is muffled in the greedy opening and pressing of lips as she pulls him down on top of her. He tries again to brace himself, but the tremor returns, and he collapses completely onto his elbows that are planted on either side of her shoulders.
Beneath him her hips and rear end are pressed hard into the sand, but her movement does not stop, just as it did not when they tried it in high school on the grave. And he thinks he will fail once again, for the second time this night, and not because he does not have a condom or because he is an old man, but because he will just fail. She clasps him tight. Her thin, precise fingers find his penis and stroke it and stroke it as she guides him in. It is like being on the ocean again, with its own feeling of drowning, except the undulation is soft and smooth like the slow wash of waves, and the few shuddering seconds it takes for him to finish seem to last for hours.
His hope, his determination, to hold on for her to finish is the dream of a younger man.
After it is over, he lies beside her and lets the rain wash his face. Even in the watery, wind-whipped night, the smell of their just finished sex rises off them and clings in the air, while the storm, the night, and the ocean rage far away in the darkness beyond the dunes.
They rise slowly and walk back to the house, carrying the beach towels, now doubly heavy with both rainwater and sand. She suggests he go to an emergency room so someone can check him over, just to be safe. “Too far away,” he says. “I’m OK.”
“Stubborn,” she says.
When they step into the house, he takes her hand.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “that it happened so fast. I mean, that I couldn’t hold on. It’s been awhile.”
She goes to tiptoe and gives him a quick peck. “Don’t worry,” she says, “these days, it takes a while.”
She folds her arms and gives him a curious, questioning look.
“You know,” she says, “that this has gotten completely out of hand.”
“Yeah,” he says, “I know. And it started to do that when you walked in the door in what seems like at least a week ago.”
• • •
Before he can make it to the shower, a chill hits. He stumbles into the shower stall and holds to the grab bar until the hot water warms him up enough to stand on his own. He dries himself quickly, finds some iodine for his scrapes, and puts on his clothes. Another tremor threatens to hit; he cannot be sure if it is the Pearlman Shake or the beginning of another chill. He finds a moth-eaten quilt in the back of a closet, wraps it about himself, and goes to the liquor cabinet over the sink.
She glides toward him across the great room floor in a lightweight robe, takes the offered glass of brandy, rests back against the counter, and begins to sip. Her hair is fluffed but still wet and hangs to her shoulders in a springy mass that somehow makes her features even sharper, her eyes brighter, those twitches in her lips even more subtle and quick.
“Your hair looks good,” he says.
“I’ve already said ‘F you’ once today.”
“No, really,” he says, “it looks great both dry and wet.”
She glances up at him, the brandy glass halfway to her lips.“What did we learn from this?” she says.
He gives her a puzzled look.
“I mean the ocean thing,” she says. “The midnight swim.”
“I don’t know,” he says. “What did you learn?”
“That the impulsive demon that has screwed up my life is still here.”
She takes a large sip of brandy.
Midnight J’nelle, he thinks. There was no reason to anticipate that, after high school, that side of her would simply vanish. He tries to imagine her in college after she left him, pregnant and scared, setting up her abortion, probably from a payphone somewhere off campus.
“I went willingly,” he says. “Once we got started, I wanted to do it as much as you did.”
She rubs the wet rim of her glass over her lips, stares once again at the floor, and sighs.
“Ace, I’m totally at sea here, no pun intended. I mean really disoriented in so many ways. I need to pull back a bit and catch my breath.” She draws a long intake of air and lets it out slowly. “I guess what I’m saying is, I need to go to bed and think.”
She takes another sip, lowering her mouth to the glass rather than raising the glass to her lips. He thinks again of a bird drinking water.
“Or maybe best to not think,” she says. Her eyes stay on him as she drinks the last of her brandy.
A tiredness descends that seeps through to his bones. “It wouldn’t hurt me to be alone awhile myself.”
“Thanks,” she says. “I’d give you a goodnight peck like last night, but given our recent history, I’m afraid I’ll start something. So I’ll just say goodnight.”
He raises his glass to her with a slight wobble. “Goodnight.”
He watches her fade into the shadowy hallway. When her door shuts, he turns the TV on to the weather channel. Category 3, dead on course, could build to Category 4 or 5 before it makes landfall after midnight tomorrow.
Shit.
He sinks into the couch, bathed in the flickering light from the TV. He could fall asleep right here—it’s a long walk, at least forty feet to his bedroom. His mind fades in and out, mumbling to itself. He could have died out there. And yes, he was scared—he might as well admit it—but it was not of death so much, it was of defeat, an end to that desperate illusion that he could escape a reckoning with the great unknown.
Around him, windows rattle. Gusts of wind whistle about the eaves, throw rain onto the porch roof, and send it tapping against the side of the house. From above, there is a thud and scrape as one of the hammock chairs, blown over by the wind, skitters across the deck floor. This is not a groaning house, but he fancies it groans at him all the same.
It will get worse all through the day tomorrow.
And what will he do—just shut the place up and drive away, leave it to its fate, a hundred-year-old family home? If the house goes, what will become of the family ghosts? You owe us, they might say. The house was left to you. You owe it to everyone to take care of it. They are probably hovering about right now, watching him. But the ancient ones, out there in the thicket guarding their graves, maybe they’ll be glad to see the house go. Maybe glad to see him go as well.
The ocean will claim even their land someday, and we will all be ancient ones.
But not yet. He is still here. He proved that tonight when he fought his way out of that ocean.
And so what is his duty, his obligation? And to whom? Himself, the ghosts, the house itself?
After the storm there could be looting, just like Faye-Marie said. Island druggies—friends of the young mother he surrendered his water to in the supermarket—waiting for a chance to rush in and take whatever they can carry off and sell for a bag, a bottle of pills, a needle, a hit. In the closet of his bedroom, there’s a twelve-gauge pump shotgun left by his father. Ace used it a couple of years ago to shoot down a drone some asshole kept flying over his house. Bam! right off the upper deck. The guy who owned it came to Ace’s house in a rage. “Sue me,” Ace said. He has no idea where the shells for the gun are now, and he probably wouldn’t have the nerve to use it against anyone if he did.
Pam would have approved of that shot off the deck, even admired his aim. She might have shot the drone herself; she was as good a shot as he is.
And J’nelle? That impulsive demon in her might applaud, but the former high school scholar and class president? He’s not so sure she exists anymore.
But this thing that’s happening between them, whatever it is, does exist. And what is he going to do about it—pack up and leave, follow her off the island and on to the Raleigh airport, walk with her to the security checkpoint, say goodbye and watch as she passes through the X-ray machine and walks off into her old life of schedules and daily routines and a pending medical report and leaves him flopping like a fish on the creaky deck of his life? And then what? Back to occasional emails, so that the last two days will have been just an old-timers’ weekend fling, albeit a fling he managed to consummate against all the odds.
Albeit on the second try.
He at least has that to be proud of—just a little. And for a moment, as they lay together out there among the rain-drenched dunes, it felt like he had finally caught up with her.
He heaves a great sigh and inhales deeply in what feels like a grab for the oxygen he was unable to get earlier when he pulled himself from the sea, then feels about on the couch next to him for the remote and switches to the sports channel to check on the Sox. Another win, 14 to 2. Amazing—anything can happen.