“No,” she said. “Stay a few days. You’ll see. If it’s not him…”
“It won’t be.”
“Fine. If I’m wrong…I’ll marry you.”
“That’s the medication talking.”
“No, it’s not…when I was in the ER getting my stomach pumped, I realized that I should have married you the first time you asked. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble.”
She brushed back her hair, pushing the bangs away from her forehead, her feet pressing into the sand as her hand touched my shoulder for balance. I didn’t believe her—it was just chatter—but my mind cherished it anyway: I pictured Amy on a gurney with a tube shoved down her throat fighting back nausea and thinking of me.
“Maybe we shouldn’t be talking about this,” I said.
“Right—the California girl awaits. So what should we talk about, Duckster? Here we are at the beach, Amy and Donatello returning to the scene of the crime.” Her voice dropped as she gazed toward the water. “Should we talk about dead four-year-girls instead?”
I almost said, “Yes.” But I needed to be careful.
Amy’s body suddenly tensed, and she jumped to her feet.
“What is that?” she said, and started walking toward the ocean, pointing toward something dark bobbing in the water fifty yards from the shoreline.
I squinted but couldn’t see much, just a small dark patch on the surface which, from a distance, could have been anything. When we were kids half the state’s beaches had closed one year because of medical waste washing up on the shore, but nothing like that had happened in decades. Amy’s dark spot, from a distance, looked more like some trick of shadow and sun than anything real.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s a shadow, or a jellyfish. It’s nothing.”
“You’re blind. It’s not a jellyfish. You never see anything,” she said, and she took three steps into the surf.
“Amy, it’s nothing.”
She waded further, to her ankles, to her knees, her pants getting soaked as the water pooled around her. I followed her up to the shoreline and started calling her back. Amy had never been a strong swimmer; neither was I. The dark spot was at least twenty-five yards deeper than you were legally allowed.
“It’s not what you think,” I yelled, but she kept moving, her arms slapping the water as she pushed further out. A sudden wave lifted her, propelling her back, her hair drenched as the spray splashed over her face.
A second wave broke, and suddenly her head bobbed underwater.
At that moment I should have gone after her, but instead I just watched, as if, even wide awake, I was still sleeping. The wave subsided and Amy reappeared, her t-shirt soaked, her arms held high as she jumped back toward the surf, the next wave already upon her. Again she went under, emerging seconds later, hell-bent on forward progress, plunging into the surf in weak, struggling breast strokes.
A sick feeling surged in my gut.
She’s going to drown herself in front of me, I thought, her ultimate penance for Sarah’s death; this was retribution; this was a test, and I stood watching from the beach, immobile as a totem pole, knowing I was failing as another wave, and another, crashed up and over her slight frame.
Suddenly Kelly ran past me, diving into the ocean and swimming toward Amy. Jill hurried beside me, grabbing my arm.
“What’s happening? She never goes in the water,” Jill said.
Kelly, that strong California swimmer, quickly caught up and reached out for Amy, whose arms flailed and slapped at the water as she bobbed against the angry waves. I feared she might resist, might prefer drowning to being rescued by my new girlfriend, or even worse, try to take Kelly down with her, a murder-suicide, but Kelly, raised by a military father who made sure his daughter would always survive, handled Amy with ease, hooking her arm around Amy’s shoulder and leaning back, the water balancing their weight as they floated on the steady up and down of the tide.
The waves subsided, and Kelly slowly paddled the two of them back to the shoreline.
Jill rushed to greet them, and I stood transfixed as Kelly guided Amy back to the beach, their feet finally reaching sand, their street clothes soaked, me standing ghost-like as the two women I loved walked out of the sea.
-10-
According to Kelly, who’d worked as a lifeguard two summers during high school, pulling Amy out of the ocean had been no big deal, but I could tell the episode had shaken her—not the rescue part, but the plunge itself. Why had Amy, loaded on meds, rushed into the water when she wasn’t a good swimmer?
“It doesn’t make sense,” Kelly said. “I think she wanted your attention, and your sympathy, in case her ‘suicide attempt’ wasn’t enough.”
“That’s pretty cynical.”
“She’s manipulating you. All this drama …she’s playing you.”
“I’m not stupid,” I said, although when it came to Amy I probably was.
“We’ll see,” Kelly said. “But whatever’s going on, it’s messed up.”
While Amy slept and Kelly took Jill on a grocery run, I settled on the front porch to do some reading, barely finishing a page before Clyde arrived, the heavy tires of his cruiser scraping the curb as he pulled into the driveway. He killed the engine and opened the door, his big frame unfolding like a picnic umbrella reaching its full height. I watched him strut across the walkway, the local cop in full performance mode, shoulders pushed back, his hand cupping the knob of his nightstick, the dark sunglasses like a prop from some Seventies TV cop show, not the cool Seventies of The Rockford Files but the more fascist end like S.W.A.T. or CHIPS.
“Where’s your girlfriend?” he asked.
“At the grocery store with your daughter. If you mean Amy, she’s taking a nap.”
“Two women…nice little set-up you have here.”
He sat down in the other rocking chair and smirked.
“Is there a reason for this lovely visit?”
“My child support keeps the mortgage on this house paid,” he said. “I’m entitled.”
He grabbed the book
