Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [86]
Air hit, and we gasped. But the next swell came, rough and hard, and we were under again. I watched as the paddle was lifted from my hand. I watched as my fingers let go of the wood. I wanted to breathe but reminded myself I couldn’t. My head was light, so light. I thought, This is it. This is how it ends. We are going to die together. This is what it means to drown.
But the sky broke through. In the air, the sound was deafening. My lungs hurt, and as we crested a steep wave, I coughed, spat water, and clung to the edge of the boat with my head down. I waited, fully expecting to be flung backward out of the boat, but we made it over. I looked back at him, amazed, and saw that he had never stopped. He’d never given up, and he was beginning to shepherd us over the waves, not under them. He had turned us out to sea, just as he’d promised, and we were coursing past the break to safety. Then I heard him yell.
“Bail!”
“What?”
“Bail. Find the bailer. Now!” he ordered.
I looked down. Water to my waist. No spray skirts; they were somewhere in a closet in New York. I rummaged frantically around the bottom of the boat. My crutch, like the paddle, was gone, and there was nothing to bail with. I started to cry, but I was furious.
“There is no bailer, John! How could you not pack a bailer?” I shouted. “We’re in the goddamn ocean!”
“Fuck, use anything, use your hands! We’re sinking.”
“The hell we are.”
Resolute, I scooped the water overboard with both hands, until he found a cotton baseball cap wedged under his thigh. And when the danger had finally passed, when we were far enough out so that there was barely a ripple in the surface of the sea, I remember thinking how beautiful the day was, how clear the sky. And that it was all so incongruous with what had nearly happened to us three times that day. A jeer almost.
We had gone into the open sea without consulting anyone who knew the waters, without spray skirts, life jackets, or a bailer. And here we were, surviving, on our way to Treasure Beach with a single paddle and a soggy baseball cap. Fate had smiled on us.
As we passed the high part of the cliff, I looked up. Hawks were circling. I remembered the woman who had jumped to join her lover, the water, and death, and I thought, No, that is not me. That will not be me. I repeated it to myself like a promise I would not betray. But I knew, in some small way, it was. That April morning, whether I admitted it or not, I had followed him every step of the way.
When we pulled into Great Pedro Bay an hour later, I was still shaken. John seemed fine, oblivious. As he pulled the kayak past the fishing skiffs to a fence near some old bikes, he whistled. Unlike me, he had left it all behind and was fully in the present—although he did make me promise not to tell his mother.
“But John, we could have died.”
I was angry and frightened, and I wanted him to know. I wanted him to hold me, to tell me that he was sorry, that it would never happen again, that he had been afraid, too. I wanted him to say something. Something to acknowledge that it was more than just a story or a jam we’d gotten out of. He was puttering around the boat, securing it for the night, and a group of children had gathered to watch. Setting down the rope, he glanced up at me for a moment before returning to his bowline knot.
“Yeah, Chief, but what a way to go.”
He gave me a card the first year we were together, a black-and-white drawing of lovers kissing, with the words “Girl’s Eye View/Boy’s Eye View” etched above their heads. The girl’s eyes are open, filled with doubt and excitement and the fevered anticipation of what comes next. In the tangle of her hair are a myriad of thoughts, wishes, and fears. The boy’s eyes are shut; he’s smack in the present. He has only one thought: “Who the hell knows?”
There were things he would say like mantras. They might have been passed