JETTY SARA

GLEN HIRSHBERG

Safe and warm inside the Brother J diner, hands around coffee mugs or tomato juices and mouths full of crab scramble, we watch the rain chase Li down the street. It’s yipping at his heels, leaping on his back, and he’s shuddering like a sheep hound by the time he flings open the door and staggers inside.

“Shut that, shut that!” Lulubelle shouts from her corner table, for form’s sake since she’s around behind the fireplace, and not one drop of wet is reaching her this morning. Dutifully, the rest of us take up the cry, and Li swings his head toward us, which sets a wave of water plunging off his hood down his face. He gives the whole room his snarl. Then he slams the door.

But he’s Li, and by now he’s grinning through his personal downpour. “How about we open the windows, get some air in?”

He takes one of the last available seats. It’s too near the door, but most of us are already here as usual when the storms roll in, so it’s not likely he’ll suffer much. His crab scramble and honey-toast side have beat him to his spot. He flops into his chair, does his sheep hound shiver, but he doesn’t even get coffee in his mouth before Fresnel Tom snaps out of his slouch at the far end of the room as though someone has clicked him on. He stares back down the street the way Li came, toward all our tiny houses.

“Ah, shit,” he says. “She’s out.”

All around the Brother J, forks fill with crab scramble, fly up toward faces. Cram in. We know what’s coming.

“Who?” Li says, mid-chew. Again, for form’s sake. Also because he just got here, wants at least to get warm.

“God damn,” says Fresnel Tom.

“I thought she moved,” Brother J calls from behind the counter. But he’s coming out into the room, already heading toward the coat rack.

“Why would you think that?” Lulubelle snaps. “Only one way that chica’s leaving Swope City.”

“The wet one,” murmurs Old Ellis, and Lulubelle swats him hard as he stands.

“Shut up.”

“You shut up,” he snaps back. But he stands, too.

Then we’re all at the window. The rain’s crashing down so fat and hard, we don’t see her at first (except Fresnel Tom, obviously, he’s already seen her). It’s also pre-dawn dark at eleven in the morning, so mostly what we see is our own faces. Cluster of fishermen and ex-fishermen and fishermen’s widows and widowers, floating there in the glass as though underwater. That’s not a thought any of us likes, not around here, and then Fresnel Tom points, and Old Ellis (who isn’t older than the rest of us, just looks it) sighs.

“Shit. Yep.”

She’s so thin, even with that flappy black rain shell whipping around her, she looks like some sort of torn-loose sapling tumbling on the gusts. Except she’s tumbling into them. Her hair is still the same color as that jacket, oil-slick black only without any swirls of color where light catches. Her skin—what we can see of it between spits of rain, flying hair—isn’t exactly pallid, isn’t any color, really. The color of sidewalk. A surface you walk on.

“Pobre chica,” Lulubelle murmurs.

“Pathetic bitch,” says Li. Even though it’s his fault she’s out there. He’s the one who told her the story.

No one swats him. No one argues. Twelve years since the sea did this whole town a solid, sucked her John and his whole monstrous crew off our streets and out of our lives, but everyone here still has memories. Probably, everyone has some they haven’t even shared.

“Well, come on,” says Brother J, flipping up his hood.

“You come on,” says Old Ellis. Again, for form’s sake. He’s already zipping in. We all are.

We wait a few seconds longer, until she’s well past, halfway down the hill to the beach. Not that she’ll see us or care if she does. Pobre chica on a mission, that’s our Sara. Li’s coat is still dripping so hard, it’s like he’s got a personal rainstorm right on top of him. It makes Fresnel Tom and Lulubelle laugh.

“Hilarious,” says Li. He pulls the door open, and we’re out in it.

The downpour has actually slackened some, but the wind’s up, and it shoves against us as we trail along toward the water. Reminds us of those days—that one horrible year—when they were among us, John and his crew. The shoves when they passed us constant, casual, like we were doors to throw open, cats to kick. Not people at all. Sources, at best, of supplies they might need. Of sons they could hook on whatever cut product they’d scored and couldn’t offload in Eureka or Medford. Daughters to use.

“Yo-ho,” one of us, probably Old Ellis, murmurs, and the shudder whips through our whole group.

If it’s a pirate’s life for you, you better be goddamn sure you’re a pirate.

“Look at her,” says Li. He sounds regretful, apologetic, which is ridiculous. No one blames him. He was trying to help, same as we all have at one point or other. “Straight for the goddamn jetty.”

That’s where she’s headed, all right. Across the beach, feet catching in strands of washed-up kelp and trailing them behind her, which makes her look like some skeletal black fish wriggling free of a net. Her hair whips and flaps.

“Move it,” says Lulubelle, but we’re already picking up the pace. From the top of the hill at the edge of town, all you can see is harbor, but even that’s shuddering today, the boats tilting and turning on their tie-ropes, banging against their berths or the dock like bells being rung.

Of course, you can barely hear them over the ocean. Halfway down the hill we see the sea, and then we move even faster.

“Come back, Sara!” Li bellows abruptly, his voice boomeranging right around in his face. There’s no way she could hear him, not over all that roaring and smacking and splashing. Even if she could, there’s no way she would listen.

By the time we’ve hit the beach, she’s up on the jetty, head down, marching straight through that gauntlet of state-generated WARNING: TSUNAMI ZONE signs, then the homemade ones we put up, partly for tourists, mostly for her. The one with the stick figures tumbling into a heaving abyss over the words TSUNAMIS. SERIOUSLY. The one we had painted right onto metal of the wreckage of this harbor in January of ’64.

Surprisingly, just as we reach the edge of the water and take up post in the lee of our ridiculous Swope City Light, Sara half-turns our way. We get a good look at her sidewalk-skin face. With a jolt that hits us all together—a wave crashing in—we remember what she looked like, then. Right before John and his crew came. While they were there, too, if we’re honest. Just as thin. But majestic, somehow. Grown into herself, lean and wild.

She’s gone all beaky, now, like some wounded sea bird abandoned by the flock. Skimming the beach to scavenge leavings.

She isn’t looking at or responding to us, needless to say. She’s seen something in the water. Thinks she has. Stops a second, starts to crouch.

“Ah, fuck,” says Fresnel Tom.

Old Ellis shivers. Then we’re all doing it. We watch, shivering, until she straightens. For one magical second, she looks like she’s coming back this way. Then she glances up into the rain, raises both arms, and flips us the bird.

Birds.

Spinning away, she launches again down that spit of rock and pavement. Our imaginary divide between Swope City and open ocean, that we still catch ourselves imagining keeps us safe. Time after time, in spite of everything. Spray flies up around her with every step, as though she’s causing it. Like a little girl, puddle jumping. Pretty soon, from where we stand, it’s hard to see jetty at all. She looks like she’s walking on water. Hiking straight out to sea.

We’re not close enough, now, and we know it. If the worst comes— wave, sure, but more likely, her deciding just to go ahead and jump, fling herself into the arms of the man she seems utterly sure is waiting for her just below the surface—we’ll never reach her in time. We should go out there with her. At least a few of us are pretty clearly going to have to, today.

At least the rain has thinned. Even the wind is sputtering, spitting gusts but no longer hurling itself in our faces. The ocean’s still slamming around out there, but it’s gone a lighter gray, looks more like it does when it lets people near or on it. Frisky, like.

“I’ll go,” says Brother J.

“Me, too,” says Li. But neither of them moves yet. Sara’s stayed standing instead of kneeling out there on her jetty, and she’s not moving much. Again, there’s something birdlike about her. Like a hovering gull, holding its place in the currents of air.

“Oh, goddamn it,” says Fresnel Tom, but not about Sara, and he steps off the sand to the side of the jetty and splashes through the shore water toward the lighthouse.

We call it a lighthouse. I guess it is. It’s still hard to believe it ever really worked. It’s tall enough, I suppose, a good twenty feet high, and it has withstood more than its share of weather. But the land it is slowly sinking into was never a raised point, is blocked from sight of most open water by the curve of the coast, and isn’t even accessible when the tide’s up and the water completely covers the narrow, sandy spit connecting it to the beach. Tom’s been working on it for years, scraping decades-deep coatings of bird shit off the sides and getting new glass made for the windows and seeing to the machinery. Even so, it looks mostly like a model lighthouse that washed up here from somewhere. Cracked concrete, a rusted metal door that Tom keeps boring new bolts into, and which the ocean keeps pushing open and rushing through. Leaning Tower of Lighthouse.

Reaching the door, Tom stares down at the water gushing over his feet and inside, laying on yet another layer of damp upon damp. He bangs the door with his fist, and it rings.

“Oh, hon,” says Lulubelle. Not about Tom, we know, and we all swing together, again, toward the jetty.

Sara’s still not kneeling. Not yet. But she’s all leaned over, staring down as the splash hurls itself up the stones, over her boots. She has her hands out straight, and her mouth has started moving. If you didn’t know better, had never stood near enough when she gets like this, you could mistake what she’s doing for conjuring. What she’s really up to is worse, of course. Breaks your heart, every time.

She’s cooing.

Brother J makes a clucking noise. Part sympathy, part disbelief. “It’s like she really believes it, you know?”

“It’s not like that at all,” murmurs Li. Then says it again, louder, because it’s hard to make him out over the whapping water, and he wants us to hear his regret. “She does.”

Right on cue, down she drops. Her hands, at least for now, are back in the pockets of her windbreaker, but they won’t stay there. She’s not leaning yet, anyway. Then she is.

There’s no way we can see her face. Too much spray flying around, like the world’s being painted into being—or chipped out of being— right in front of us. But every single one of us knows she’s smiling.

It’s our oldest city tale, the one we’ve all not just heard but told. Practically our motto. In high summer, on the right night, with the Brother J humming and the midnight crab-scrambles flying, some caught-up tourist or other will ask the right question of the right person, and just like that, we’ll be reciting. Faces in the waves. The way, in storms, the water sometimes gives you glimpses of people it has taken from you. Their visages so solid, so precisely as you best remember them, that you expect them to open their watery mouths and gurgle hello. This is what passes, when you live by the grace of the ocean, for mercy.

On the jetty, amid the rioting spray, our Sara stretches out her hands.

It’s not raining anymore. For whatever difference that makes. There’s so much wet flying around in the air, it’s a wonder we can breathe it. Another old Swope City tale. Half-gilled, we are.

“Like she’s begging him to take her,” Lulubelle murmurs, something very near a catch in her voice. Or else simple wind-borne wetness. We’re watching hard, now. When she leans forward even a little more—which she will, any second—we’re going to have to move. Make sure we’re closer.

“If it were really him,” says Old Ellis, “he fucking would. Not for love. For sheer meanness.”

“If it were him,” says Brother J, “he wouldn’t stop at her.”

For no reason we can see, Sara glances back in our direction. Stares hard. Seems to, anyway. We all feel it.

“Maybe she’s telling him to go ahead.”

It takes longer than usual, today. She’s got her hands out, and we’re pretty sure her mouth’s still moving. But she’s just crouched there, and the spray riots around her for so long that she almost melts into the landscape. Jetty, leaning lighthouse, ship-masts in the harbor, cloud mass, darker cloud mass. And our Sara. Beacon, buoy. Something on which to focus, so you can watch the world roll.

Every single one of us—Tom, too, from up in his beloved light—is watching. Looking right at her. Mesmerized, in the way looking at that ocean does that to you. A miraculous, cleansing sensation on the right day. Transcendental. A reason to stay.

And yet, somehow, not a single one of us sees. How is that possible?

We see her, okay. Don’t process, but we all see. Her reared back, not leaning forward. Arms straight out in front, palms forward. Not defensive, but not reaching, either. Words fly from her mouth like whitewater. Hang in the air.

It should be terrifying. The fact that we can hear her.

We’ve had it wrong, we all think together, as one thought, one thing thinking, not a bunch of town nobodies living our separate grieving, peaceful, nobody lives.

Then Li says, “Oh.”

Even then, it takes us a second we do not have to understand. To make sense of the fact that we aren’t collectively imagining what our Sara is saying, but really hearing it. Because the wind hasn’t just dwindled; it has dropped off the face of the world. The sea hasn’t just ceased slapping and slamming but vanished. Literally is not there. The boats in the harbor clunk as they drop down on rocks and sand that moments ago were bottom. The jetty looms, suddenly towering, like the top of a just-risen island, brand new and streaming. There’s a moment of blissful silence like no one in Swope City has experienced, ever, during one second of our lives on this Earth.

Finally, one of us screams, “Run!” Not just at Sara but all of us. By this point, we’re already running. Obviously. As if running could make any possible difference now.

At some level, we really are one entity, at least in this instant. No one makes any decision. Certainly, no one calls out commands. But there we all are, lunging instinctively across the exposed sand toward the lighthouse. Tom is up top, watching us, not the sea—the not-sea, absence of sea—and screaming. We’re all screaming, just not words.

Except Sara. She’s screaming words.

The silence gets swallowed. That’s the best I can do to describe it. It doesn’t erupt or shatter. It’s simply subsumed. As we tumble, screaming, through the lighthouse door, swing together to paw and shove at it in a desperate attempt to get it shut (as if shutting that door is going to matter), Lulubelle stops just long enough to glance outward. To see.

“So many faces,” she whispers. Except she can’t possibly be whispering, because we couldn’t possibly hear her.

The rest of us never see. We just somehow sense it roaring in. Less trampling the world than rolling it up, sucking it into itself. It’s not a wave, that’s a ridiculous word for it. It’s not a wall, either. It’s the world folding over, slamming itself shut. Some of us are up the stairs with Tom, some of us still on the stairs when it hits.

After that, for who knows how long—probably not very long, not in time as we have charted it up until then, before realizing that time is as fragile and mutable and imaginary as everything else we have ever collectively decided equals living—there is no sound but roar. No thought, no sensation, not even panic. We are all tumbled together, twisted around each other, but we’re not even aware of our own bones and bodies, let alone anyone else’s. Not only are there no words, there’s no reason for words. Nothing to communicate.

Just nothing.

From outside, Old Ellis will say later, it must have looked almost funny. Miraculous, sure, but also ridiculous. Almost as absurd as being awake and alive at all.

Somehow, our lighthouse keels slowly, slowly, all the way over. Like a giant’s hand lowering us to the ground. Leaving us lying there twisted together, soaked and floating, banged and bruised. Barely really rumpled at all. It takes a while to figure out which way is up—meaning out— and then disentangle, crawl toward the gaping spaces where the lens windows had been and into the open air and reeking wet. Which is already receding.

The Swope City Miracle. None of us named it that in the moment. Somehow, that was already what this was. The biggest tsunami ever to hit this coast. Pouring all the way up our hill and out the other side of town. Flooding buildings, knocking down road signs.

Killing no one. Not one person.

Except Sara. Obviously.

Every single night we gather at the Brother J, since then—among tourists, all together, alone, whatever—we raise our tomato juices to her. We’re not exactly toasting. Not apologizing. Not even memorializing. Just acknowledging.

We’ve never talked about what we saw, what we heard. There’s no need. We’ve figured it out on our own. Sara on her knees on her jetty. Her hands outstretched like that. Not as though reaching for her lover. More soothing a big cat. Stroking its humped-up fur.

Telling it no. No, babe, no.

Let them go.