“We call ourselves the Florence Adler Swims Forever Society.”
It was hard for Stuart to extricate his hand from Gussie’s sweaty palm, but at a quarter to ten, he looked at his watch, made his apologies to Gussie and Anna and then Esther, promised to be in touch with Joseph as soon as he heard anything from Bill Burgess, and took off toward the Kentucky Avenue beach tent.
He’d made it half a block before he heard someone calling his name, and turned to find Anna running to catch up with him.
When she arrived in front of him, she was out of breath.
“I wanted to ask you something,” she said when her breathing had returned to normal. “A favor.”
“Sure.”
She straightened, fidgeting with the clasp on a small handbag that had been tucked under her arm but that she now held in front of her like a shield.
“I can’t swim,” she said, her voice so quiet he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly.
“Pardon?”
She cleared her throat. “I can’t swim.”
It wasn’t surprising, really. Plenty of girls couldn’t swim. In fact, most every girl he met couldn’t—not really.
“You didn’t swim in Berlin?”
She shook her head. “Never.”
A seagull cawed overhead, and they both watched as it dove over the head of a sand artist, hard at work on a life-sized portrait of Neptune, and headed out to sea. Stuart imagined that Atlantic City would be a terrifying place to live if the ocean was nothing more than a threat.
“Do you want to learn?”
“I was hoping you might teach me,” she said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“It’s no trouble. I’ll have you winning the Pageant Cup in no time.”
She let out a short laugh. “No gold medals necessary. I’d just like to be able to save my own life.”
“You’re late,” Robert said, as soon as Stuart staked his rescue can in the sand, tossed his things up to his partner, and hauled himself up and onto the lifeguard stand’s wide wooden bench seat.
“I know,” he said, pulling his whistle, which hung from a long string of lanyard, out of his pocket and putting it around his neck. “How are the waves?”
“They’re all right. I’m watching that rip current over there. I’ve already warned a half-dozen folks to steer clear of it.”
Stuart studied the break in the waves, counting the heads of the people who were swimming in its vicinity.
“Your father was looking for you.”
“He came down to the beach?”
“No,” Robert scoffed. They’d worked together for less than a month, but Robert already knew that was about as likely as fish flying. “He sent his lackey.”
“Wilson?”
“That’s the one.”
“What’d he say?”
“To come by your dad’s office, first break you get.”
“Goddammit. It’s bad enough he dragged me off the States Avenue stand. Now he thinks he can just summon me up to the hotel whenever he wants.”
“I mean, I like having you and all, but I’m surprised Chief Bryant let him get away with it.”
“I’m not,” said Stuart indignantly. “My father underwrites this entire section of the beach. Always has. The hotel’s also hosting the Lifeguards’ Ball this summer—gratis.”
“Still, you’re one of Bryant’s best guards, and he’s gotta know he’s making your life hell.”
“Two o’clock,” said Stuart. “You see what’s happening?”
By the time Robert could say anything, Stuart had already given his whistle three short blasts and hopped down from the stand onto the hot sand. Robert scrambled to catch up as the two men ran to the rescue boat, grabbed hold of its sides, and heaved it into the waves.
“He’s not struggling,” yelled Stuart. “I think he’s about to go under.”
Beachgoers expected swimmers who were in distress to wave their arms and call for help but Stuart had learned that they rarely did either of those things. The signs that someone was drowning were often subtle and hard to see from several dozen yards away in a lifeguard stand. Distressed swimmers stopped using their arms and legs, stopped making forward or backward progress in the water. Under the surface, their bodies went vertical, as if they were climbing an invisible ladder, but in the briny Atlantic, that posture wasn’t always easy to spot. Stuart had trained himself to watch for the way swimmers held their heads. A swimmer who was treading water could keep his chin above water but a struggling swimmer let his head sink so low that his mouth was barely above water level. With women and small children, their long hair often provided a clue: if their hair fell in front of their eyes, and they didn’t immediately push it out of the way, it indicated that they probably didn’t have the wherewithal to do so. But the biggest sign, which Stuart hadn’t been able to get out of his mind since Florence’s drowning, was that swimmers in distress almost always turned their bodies to face the shore.
In less than a minute, Robert and Stuart pulled alongside the man, whose head, save his mouth and nose, was entirely submerged. Stuart jumped into the water, his rescue can under his arm, and approached the man from behind, hooking his arms under the man’s armpits. He kicked his legs as hard as he could to propel the man’s head above the waterline and allow him to get one good breath of air. Then he pushed the man back under the water, and in one fluid move, pulled the rescue can under the waterline and in front of him. Once he had rolled the man onto the can, he watched as it buoyed him back to the surface. The man sputtered and gasped but he was breathing, which was all that mattered.
While Robert hoisted the man into the boat, Stuart treaded water and allowed himself to regain his own steady breathing patterns. He looked back at their lifeguard stand, which looked tiny in comparison to The Covington, rising out of the sand behind it. Did it
