Ariel's Crossing - Bradford Morrow [151]
While she would always value her time with Kip, always cherish the prodigal outcome of their intimacy—darling Ariel herself—Jess had made her peace with his disappearance from their lives. Now her daughter and husband played in the Atlantic, ranging farther out into it until, yes, she realized they were afloat, Ariel’s chin on Brice’s shoulder bobbing up with each fresh surge, the girl’s peals of laughter not quite swallowed by the rushing breakers.
She remembered settling back on the beach towel, sun warming her and specks of fine sand, kicked up by the shore breeze, dancing across her skin. Dear God, if you are and if you’re willing to help me out here, she thought, please never let me forget this perfect moment of peace and contentment. Thank you with all my heart.
And meditatively, arrhythmically, the waves continued to roll in, to fizzle and hiss where the sand restrained their progress, then to withdraw before another mouth of brine opened up, curled its long lip into a whitecap of pluming emeralds, and chewed its way down the shoreline. What a banquet! she dreamed, drifting away toward light sleep as a clutch of black-backed gulls squabbled over a rind of discarded grapefruit or some hapless mussel knocked loose from its bedrock mooring.
Maybe she did fall asleep for a fleet second, but no sooner did she reawaken than she knew her prayer had been answered in the most startling, unwanted way. She knew even before she sat up and cast her eyes frantically over the knotty face of the ocean that she would never forget her former contentment, if only because she lost every atom of it in this new indelible, ghastly moment.
The riptide had carried them out with dispatch. Jessica ran frantic along the edge of the water, shrieking their names, crying for help. People gathered, also shouting. The call went out along the shore, its own human wave of hysteria. Several surf fishermen dropped their long rods and raced over to where this young woman screamed that her husband and daughter were drowning.
—They were, they were just there, just a minute ago.
She must have said something to that effect, though it was more than possible nothing articulate came forth.
—Where?
She did hear them asking that question.
—Out there there there, out there.
Miles away, an oil tanker slowly traversed the low horizon. Nearer, a few fishing boats pitched, trawlers dragging for scallops or clams. Nearer yet, a dory crewed by one soul, a peapod making trap rounds. All too distant to ask for help. Bathers could be seen along the shore, not many for such a crisp clear day as this.
Then someone spotted them. —Over there! And others in the crowd began sprinting down the beach, Jessica merely among them now, for hers had become their collective fright.
Ariel and Brice’s heads were like one speck, a fused trifle in the silver expanse of water. From seemingly nowhere two rescuers had launched, one in a small canoe of sorts, the other paddling hard past the shoals out into the longer swells on a surfboard.
—They’re gonna be fine, a woman assured her, taking Jessica’s hand as they stood knee-deep in buffeting waves.
A quarter hour must have passed before they were brought back to shore in the canoe, the surfboarder clinging alongside. Some cheering, applause. Blankets. The two were cold and shaken but fine. Some minutes of weeping together in an embrace of joy and surfeit fear before Brice noticed Jessica’s hand was running with blood. The wing of flesh between her right thumb and index finger was gashed, and though her memory of tripping over one of the fishermen’s tackle boxes and coming down on an open chest of spoon lures was as faint as if it never transpired, the scar from her laceration lasted to this day.
Even now she recalled how preposterous it was that, having nearly lost her daughter and husband to a riptide, she