by Jim Lombardo
“You want to dig in?” she asked.
Monica opened the cooler and doled out their lunch. Brian wolfed a big bite of his sandwich and then held it up. “Now this is a tuna fish sandwich,” he proclaimed.
In the next instant, a seagull swooped down and brazenly scooped the sandwich from his hand. Brian sprung to his feet, “Hey! Get back here, you flying butthead!” He chased the gull towards the water, but it effortlessly gained a comfortable altitude and distance from him, carrying the sandwich all the while.
“Now that was a tuna fish sandwich,” Monica called out, as she and Hannah laughed uproariously.
Brian eventually gave up and just stood with his arms crossed on his chest, watching the bird meander around the sky with random bits and pieces of his lunch falling into the sea and sand. He returned to the blanket with a pout on his face, looking like a young boy who just had his favorite toy taken away.
“That’ll be funny tomorrow, I suppose,” he conceded.
“We actually think it’s kind of funny today, Daddy-o.”
After finishing up their lunch, Hannah was begging, “Can we all go in the water now?”
“One of us has to stay with the stuff,” Monica said. “You want to take her in first, Brian?”
“Sure. Let’s go, smartypants.”
Brian and Hannah made their way down to the water’s edge. The child was wearing a bright, pink one-piece with her golden wavy locks billowing in the sea breeze. Brian was sporting a pair of faded orange swim trunks that read GUARD on the side. These were from his younger days when he was a lifeguard at nearby Long Beach. The two held hands as they skipped forward through the water, which rose up to Hannah’s knees.
“Ohhh, it’s cold, Daddy!” she shrieked and pulled back on his hand.
“Just gotta get used to it.”
Monica peered up from her beach read for a moment to see Brian picking Hannah up and slogging through the water up to his waist. Although the surface looked choppy, with strange ripples running in different directions near the shore, the wave heights were only about two feet, and the surf was breaking well beyond the pair, so Monica wasn’t concerned and went back to her book.
Brian playfully lowered his daughter into the sea, which was always brisk there, even during the summer months. She yelped from the cold again, but then excitement eclipsed the initial shock of the cool water.
“Here comes a wave, Daddy!” she shouted gleefully. “Fluid dynamics in action. The Orr-Sommerfeld equation of 1957!” Hannah’s brain visualized complicated trigonometric equations relating to wave generation, as well as the relationship between the power, amplitude, and speed of a moving wave that explained what she was observing. She considered the incredible mechanics of motion converging around and through her. While she was watching the waves of the ocean, she could only see them because of the waves of light from the sun that were bouncing off the water and into her eyes. At the same time, she could only hear the roar of the surf because waves of sound in the air generated by the vibration of the water molecules were traveling into her ears. Amazingly, all of these waves were then being interpreted by the waves of electrical activity along the neural pathways of her brain.
Hannah was thrilled to frolic in the sea, but she was disappointed that by the time the waves reached them, the towers of water had already collapsed, leaving just a waning strip of whitewater, about a foot high.
“Can you take me out farther to the waves, Daddy?”
Brian was confident in the water, having spent so much of his life in the ocean, and he proceeded to wade outward while holding his girl up to his chest. He stopped at the point where he risked losing his footing if he went any deeper.
“Here comes another one, Daddy!” Hannah cried out.
The pair could see a monster swell forming in the distance that was swiftly moving toward them. Hannah knew from her study of ocean wave physics that as the mountain of water encountered the shallow upward slope of the ocean floor it would be forced to slow down. This would result in the length of the wave becoming shorter, in turn causing the height of the wave to build. In this case, to four feet above sea level.
“Oh, my gosh, it’s huge. Here it comes! Hang onto me, Daddy!” Hannah yelled.
At a critical point, the wave built to a maximum elevation called cresting, and then was essentially pushed over on top of itself from the energy behind it. Brian squeezed his daughter with both arms as the wave broke onto their heads with a mighty roar. Exhilarated, the pair emerged from the foaming wake, convulsed with laughter at the sight of each other with hair drenched and tossed about.
Just then Brian felt a tremendously powerful pulling sensation on his body, and his feet were swept off the sandy bottom. He reflexively began kicking, to thrust his body upward and keep their heads above the frothy water churning around them. While holding Hannah tightly to his chest with his left arm, he tread water with his right arm, trying to turn his body towards shore to get his bearings.
Brian was horrified to see that the beach was rapidly receding away from them. The two were caught in a severe riptide. A major portion of an underwater sandbar much further out had suddenly given way to the forces of the outgoing tide. This had created an incredibly strong channel of swiftly moving water, heading straight out towards the open ocean, and it was carrying Brian and Hannah right along with it.
Brian grimaced and began furiously pawing at the seawater with his free arm, trying to make forward progress towards the shoreline against the ferocious undertow that was propelling them farther and farther out to sea. Hannah squeezed Brian’s neck, and struggled to keep her mouth above the water. She turned her head to one side to see Salt Island whisking by them. It was achingly close, only about a hundred feet away, and impulsively she reached out for it like a life buoy. However, with its steep rocky banks, and at the speed they were moving, it was unreachable. Her eyes darted over to where her mother sat high up on the beach, catching only a glimpse of the tiny white circle that was the top of her mother’s broad-brimmed sun hat, as she sat immersed in her story. Looking down the shoreline, the other swimmers and sunbathers were merely colorful specks in the distance, completely unaware of their plight.
Hannah glanced down at Brian who was now red-faced, gurgling and grunting as he desperately tried to swim sidestroke with his free hand. He was trying to cry out, “Help!” but it was muffled from the water he was swallowing. It was clear that he was panicked and exhausted, and that the pair were sinking. The child mustered a few piercing cries of help in the direction of her mother, but the sounds were easily drowned out by Monica’s boom box and the surf. Hannah could now feel the sensation of the cold, salty seawater rushing up her nostrils, and the vice-like grip of her father’s muscular arm. Heroically, he was trying to hoist his daughter’s head as high as possible, but his arms were trembling with weakness as his muscles became drained.
Despite the present predicament, Hannah’s thoughts drifted away from the intensely harrowing emotions of the moment. She began to turn inward, and a sudden calm came over her. Time seemed to slow to a crawl. The sound of the rushing liquid around her hushed as the auditory part of her brain switched off. She watched Brian shouting for help, but it was in slow motion, and completely silent. Other senses became heightened, such as her adoration and love for her father, for everything he had done for her. She examined his physical body, the scars on his skin, the freckles from all those long days at sea exposed to the sun. My daddy worked so hard to support our family, she thought. Once again she looked over at Salt Island. The wildflowers had never looked so gorgeous. Delicate pastel blue and yellow petals dotted the landscape like festive confetti, but now shrunken in size as the pair floated away. Maybe the party is over now?
Her head fell back on its own, and she gazed up into the wide-open firmament. Though obscured by a film of water as her face slowly submerged below the surface of the sea, sh
e viewed the mighty blazing sun showering light down onto her. It was a magnificent white circle of light, and she drew an incredible peace from it. Her eyes gradually began to close, darkening the sun’s appearance.
Then, as if in a dream, the circle of light brightened, and the image transformed itself into the top of her mother’s white sunhat. Its luminosity increased as she watched the hat turning upwards, revealing her mother’s dark brown eyes fixated deeply into her own. The intensity of the light suddenly flared like a lightning bolt, shaking Hannah from her stupor, and she willed her head above the surface. She forced a strong cough to expel the water in her lungs and sucked in a deep breath of oxygen. Her brain conducted a snap analysis of the situation. She deduced this was a riptide, and immediately determined how they needed to act. Hannah shouted firmly and resolutely to her father who was now flailing aimlessly with his free arm, trying to manage another stroke as his head bobbed in and out of the sea. “No, Daddy! No, Daddy!” she commanded. “It’s a riptide! A riptide! Relax, and then swim parallel to the shore! Parallel to the shore!”
With the word riptide, Brian’s summers of lifeguard training crystallized in his remaining consciousness. Although the two continued to be dragged out into deeper water, he abandoned the attempts to fight, and concentrated solely on floating. These precious moments were used to catch his wind and his wits. He then carefully shifted his grasp of Hannah to his right arm and began to swim sidestroke, parallel to the distant shoreline, in the direction of the more populated side of the beach, where Brian knew lifeguards would spot them. Within minutes they were out of the clutches of the deadly current, and were being shepherded towards the shoreline by a series of gently rolling swells. They were going to live.
Later that day, Brian hugged his little daughter in the warmth and safety of their home. They snuggled on the couch after Hannah had treated herself to tea and a hot bath with lavender.
“I didn’t know that you knew about riptides,” Brian said. “Is there anything you know nothing about?”
Hannah cocked her head, and her eyes veered up and to the right as she considered that query.
“Well, first of all, that’s an impossible question to answer, Daddy. Because if I knew nothing about something, then how would I know that I knew nothing about it?”
Brian did his best to work out that logic as his daughter continued. “In any case, the best answer is, I don’t know.”
“Wow,” said Brian, “I actually heard Hannah say ‘I don’t know.’ That may be a first.” He tickled her ribs, and the two shared a laugh infused with a renewed gratitude for each other.
Chapter Thirty-One
StarPros (4.70 years old)
“Maybe we can pay this one next month, because there won’t be a late fee,” Monica said to Brian, as she sat with a mound of bills piled on the desk in front of her in the dining room. “We have to pay the electric bill now, though, or they’re going to shut us off.”
“I thought we paid the electric one last month,” Brian answered from the living room sofa where he was playing Whales of Cash Casino Slots on his iPhone.
“Yeah, we paid their bill, but that was from two months ago. We can’t let this one slide.” Monica glanced over at her husband, annoyed by the retro electronic chip music of the game. “Could you please turn that down?”
Brian muted the game, but the blissful silence only amplified the issue at hand.
“Did you hear back about that kitchen renovation job? That would really help.”
“No, I think the lady backed out. But Richie told me he’d get me in on the next one.”
“And we have our auto excise tax bills on the cars this month,” Monica moaned. “Why do they need to send these in two separate envelopes?”
“They’re trying to make the stack of bills higher,” said Brian facetiously. “But I don’t see how they get away with making us pay taxes on our cars. I mean, the money we earned to pay that tax has already been taxed in the first place, before we even get it. It’s a rip-off.”
Hannah looked up from her textbook about hyperbolic and symplectic geometry, which she had been rapidly skimming. She had studied both the state and federal tax form instructions the last couple of years when they had arrived in the mail.
“You’re referring to double taxation, Daddy, but it doesn’t apply here, because if you itemize your deductions rather than taking the standard deduction on your federal tax return, the IRS allows Massachusetts residents to deduct the auto excise tax you paid on Schedule A, Itemized Deductions, ‘Other Taxes,’ which was on Line 8 last year. So you get a break there.”
Hannah continued. “Basically you can deduct any state and local tax on personal property provided the tax is ad valorem, which means based on a percentage of the property, and if the tax is imposed annually. Both are true for the auto excise tax you have to pay. When you get your W-2’s, I can do your taxes again if you want. And I’ll get you the maximum refund, with no fee like the tax helpers. Well, a discounted fee,” she joked.
“Thanks, Hannah,” Brian said dejectedly, having lost his way near the start of the child’s logical explanation. He tossed the cell aside, chugged down the last of his can of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and grabbed the remote control.
Monica had zoned out of the conversation and was gawking at a bill, her mouth agape.
“Oh, wonderful. Our heating bill is $482 this month.”
“482 bucks to heat this stupid hobbit house?” said Brian.
“I told you to call for the balance billing installment plan,” Hannah complained to her mother. “It’d only be about $140 per month that way. You need to start listening to me.”
“And you need to stop being a helicopter daughter,” Monica shot back. “I’m sorry. I’ll call first thing Monday. I know you guys don’t want me to, but I really need to think about getting back to teaching full time.”
Hannah put her book down, walked over to her mother, and put a hand on her forearm. Monica was tearful, but managed a smile for her daughter’s sake. The child then glanced over at her father who was slouched back, holding the remote listlessly, and not even looking at the TV. “You know…it wouldn’t be the end of the world if we considered some of the offers I have.”
“Hannah, we’ve been through that already,” Brian said. “We’re not gonna start parading you around to turn a buck. Look what the column has done to us already. We can’t even go out for an ice-cream cone without a crush around us.”
“But if we were careful, and we chose the right opportunity, on our terms, we could make a lot of money. Maybe buy our own house, in a less busy area, with real privacy. You wouldn’t have to struggle with these bills anymore. In the summer, instead of being out on the boat all the time, you could be with Mommy and me.”
Hannah noticed that Brian wasn’t objecting anymore. “Hold on a minute,” she said.
The child ran into her bedroom and returned a minute later with a large envelope that was colored gold. She hopped up onto the sofa with Brian and presented the letter to him.
“Look, Daddy. I thought this was fan mail at first, but actually it’s an offer of $5,000 just for spending one hour meeting with the owner of a talent management agency named StarPros, which is in New York City. Just one hour. There’s even a check made out to you and Mommy, and ready to be cashed provided we meet the obligation.”
“Hannah, trust me. You haven’t been around long enough to know how these people work. They’ll get control over us, and use us. They’ll force you, your mom, and me to do things we don’t want to do. Money is great to have, but there’s a price to everything you have to do to make money. I…I just don’t know.”
Brian examined the front and back of the envelope. It appeared professional, with a font that resembled a Broadway marquee, and a logo that featured silhouettes of a man and woman singing into an old-fashioned microphone. On the back of the envelope
were testimonials from “famous” clients, none of whom Brian had ever heard of, but which professed their longstanding and successful business relationships with StarPros and the owner, Kip Becker. Brian opened the envelope to check out the contents.
Dear Miss Hannah Blake,
In the words of the immortal Humphrey Bogart at the end of Casablanca,
“I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!”
Please allow me to introduce myself. I am Kip Becker, the founder and CEO of a well-established talent management firm named StarPros, home-based in New York City.
I have been intrigued by your amazing brilliance since your secret was first made known to the world. I believe that I speak for the rest of us when I say, we wish we could see more of you!
My experience and skills are in the area of marketing and managing talent, seeking worthwhile business opportunities, where my clients are able to share their God-given talents with the world, while achieving commercial success.
My personal and professional code is to treat my clients with the utmost of respect, and work as true partners. I empower them to make their own decisions among the exciting options I am able to find and craft for them.
I am so convinced that you will want to work with me, that I am offering you (legally I have to make the check payable to your devoted parents) the sum of $5,000 for simply meeting with me for one hour to allow me to pitch our partnership. Yes, that is $5,000 for a single hour! I have enclosed a check, and it may be cashed at the end of the hour without any further obligation. But as I wrote above, in my mind this is only the beginning.
Come up and see me sometime!
Yours truly, Kip
StarPros, Inc.
Empire State Building, Flr. 51, Suite 101
350 5th Ave, New York, NY 10118
(212) 732-5199
When Brian finished reading, he looked at his daughter with ambivalence. Hannah took her cue, jumped down from the sofa and launched into a spirited, but rather screechy, rendition of Sinatra’s “New York, New York”.
