by Guran, Paula
Frank put his hands on his hips and surveyed the water, checking out each of the dark heads he saw at the water’s surface. Junior wasn’t there. It was very strange. Where was Junior? Frank looked up toward the lifeguards. They were still chatting. One of them was rubbing the back of his neck with a white towel. Frank looked at the water again. There was no sign of Junior. He scanned the beach to his right and left, beyond the lifeguard stand. Of course Junior was not on the beach. Junior was in the water. But where? Frank surveyed the surface of the water again. He opened his mouth to shout. But to shout what? To whom? He walked down to the edge of the water, his eyes still surveying the surface. A glaring light came off the shifting surface and the rolling swells. There was no sign of Junior. I should do something, Frank thought. But what was there to do? He glanced sideways again at the lifeguards. They were talking and untroubled. He looked steadily out at the water. Junior had to be right out there. At any second, Junior’s head would pop out of the water and he would wave an arm. Frank half-raised his right arm to wave back. But there was nobody to wave to. Junior did not appear. Frank couldn’t understand what was going on. He scanned the water again, left and right.
Suddenly he was aware of rapid motion and activity around him. The two lifeguards streaked past him and dove into the incoming waves. People on the beach were running down to stand at the edge of the water. Frank stepped down to the water with them, stood in it, felt a dying wave swirl around his legs, then stepped back and stood with the other people higher up the beach. They were all pointing to the lifeguards. Frank saw the elderly woman there with her hand raised to her mouth. The young woman with the little girl carried her away quickly up the beach in the direction of the boardwalk.
Then everything happened very quickly. The two lifeguards reached still water and bobbed for a moment on the swells. One of them dove and came up with a body. The other quickly took hold of it and started toward the shore. The first lifeguard stayed nearby until they reached the point where the swells were rising into waves, then dove into a wave himself and rode it almost onto the sand. He ran at once to the lifeguard stand and grabbed the emergency phone and talked into it, then ran back to help his partner as he emerged from the water with the person he had rescued. It was Junior.
Together they carried Junior out of the water and laid him on his back on the sand. The anxious crowds of onlookers gathered around and one of the lifeguards told them to move back. Frank moved back with them. Speculations were whispered. He must have had a cramp. He had a fainting spell. The hot sun made him faint. Frank said nothing.
Then Junior coughed, gagged, spat out water, and sat up. He was breathing hard but he said, even short of breath, “I’m okay, I’m okay.” The lifeguards sat back on their heels. One of them asked Junior some questions. Frank could not hear the questions but he heard Junior say again, “I’m okay, I’m okay.” Then he heard the wailing siren of Seashore’s ambulance drawing near.
Now everything happened even more quickly. The ambulance drove onto the boardwalk and two attendants came running down the beach, one of them carrying a light stretcher. Junior struggled to his feet, tottered for a moment, and one of the lifeguards helped him to sit down again. The ambulance attendants, both of them volunteers wearing shorts and T-shirts, talked quickly with the lifeguards. Junior continued protesting that he was okay. They had to insist but they got him to lie down on the stretcher, then carried him quickly up the beach to the boardwalk, laid him on the collapsible gurney that stood waiting, and slid it briskly into the ambulance. In a moment the vehicle was driving away and the siren was starting up again.
And then Frank saw his father running down the beach toward where he still stood.
The little crowd had dispersed now, most of the people returning to their blankets, only a few going into the water. Frank stood alone in the glare of the sun.
He saw his father scanning the beach and the water as he hurried across the width of the sand. In a moment, breathing hard, he was in front of Frank, gripping both his arms at the elbows. His eyes looked straight into Frank’s and pleaded for mercy.
“It was Junior,” Frank told him.
Big Bill seemed to crumple inward. Then he turned and plodded heavily back up the beach, moving as quickly as he could across the sand. Frank saw him cross the boardwalk and then disappear in the direction of K Street. He remained standing where he was. A couple of minutes later, he heard the distant sound of tires screeching in the street.
The volunteer ambulance attendants, both well-meaning but inexperienced, reported later that Junior was a little shaken and out of breath, which seemed normal enough, but he seemed otherwise fine. He was talking and, like the lifeguards, they took him at his word that he was okay. And, like the lifeguards, they neglected to pump his chest. Junior, his lungs filled with water, drowned in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.
Frank and Big Bill never spoke about that day or about Junior again.
Three weeks later, Junior came back to haunt Frank. Or so Frank thought.
Frank had not been talking much with his parents about anything. They were easy to avoid. Big Bill was lost in a deep silence. Frank’s mother kept herself busier than ever with cooking and laundry and taking care of the house, but Frank could sometimes hear her crying in their bedroom and his father’s low voice talking to her. Dinner time, with only three of them at the table, was a terrible strain. Frank invented excuses to avoid it.
Even his father’s nickname bothered him. It had come into use only after Junior was born and now, with no “little” Bill on the scene, it made no sense, but it stuck. Every time Frank heard somebody refer to his father as Big Bill, he had to hide a shiver.
Eventually, after some interminable weeks, Labor Day came and the terrible summer was over. Frank went back to school. Everybody at school knew what had happened and some of his friends and a number of his teachers tried to talk with him about Junior. Frank couldn’t stand it. He nodded and mumbled something and then they left him alone. But he knew he was going to have to find a way to deal with Junior.
On the Thursday night of that first week of school, his parents went out to the supermarket and Frank was alone in the house. Get it over with, he told himself. He went up the stairs and stood for a long time in front of the closed door of Junior’s room. He didn’t think anybody had been in there since his mother had gone in to get clothes to dress Junior for burial. Frank took a deep breath and pulled the door open.
He didn’t really know if he had been expecting something weird to happen but nothing did, weird or otherwise. It was just Junior’s room and it looked pretty much the way it had always looked. His mother must have straightened up Junior’s desk, which was usually covered with sports and music magazines. Now it was clear and clean and almost empty, but that was the only real difference in the room. Apart from the tidiness, everything was normal. The bed was neatly made. Junior’s books stood neatly on their shelves. His plastic Mickey Mouse, a souvenir from Disney World, stood on top of the low bookcase. A blue windbreaker, a red flannel shirt, and a yellow slicker hung from the clothes tree in the corner. Frank looked at them for a long minute. Apparently his mother had not been able to make herself remove them or put them away.
Then he shook his shoulders, walked across the room, and sat down at the desk. Okay, he admitted to himself, it was kind of creepy being in here, with the way everything seemed so normal but so strangely still, as if Junior’s things themselves knew he was gone forever. He opened the top drawer of the desk. An open package of looseleaf refill, a wooden ruler, three blue Bic pens and one red, a dozen large paperclips, a key ring without keys, an empty Pez dispenser with the head of Spider-Man, a crisp ten-dollar bill that looked like it just came from the bank, a plastic Skippy peanut butter jar with the label still on it, half-filled with quarters.
He closed the drawer, shifted on the chair, and looked around. The old wardrobe from Englewood stood where it had stood since they moved in. The doors were cl
osed tight. It was filled with the rest of Junior’s stuff but Frank had no desire to open the wardrobe and look inside.
Then a strange thing happened. Frank’s eye caught some sort of movement where there could be no movement. He blinked and shook his head, hard, once. His eyes snapped sideways toward the wardrobe. Water was bobbing and sloshing against the inside of the mirrors on the wardrobe as if they were windows that looked into a swimming pool. Frank stared at it, then jumped and stood up.
The water swelled and rose against the inside of the glass and then subsided. Swelled and rose and subsided again. Frank stood frozen in the middle of the room. He knew it could not be so but suddenly he felt warm water moving all around him. His legs were light and only his toes were touching anything solid and he was floating and the water was holding him up. Then a swell came from behind him and caught him by surprise and his mouth and nose were filled with water and he was going under. Something was pulling at his legs and he tried to get his face out of the water to gulp air but he could not. For an instant he could see the line of the beach but the water pulled him downward. He needed help. He was afraid, for the first time in his life he was frightened, really frightened, in the water. He had to have help. Exerting all his strength and experience, he somehow raised himself in the water and got his nose and eyes above the surface for a moment. Junior! He could see Junior there on the beach, looking out toward the water, toward him. Couldn’t Junior see him? Couldn’t he see that he was in trouble?
Frank’s knees wobbled and he nearly collapsed. He lurched over to the chair at the desk and clung to it, then carefully lowered himself and sat on the edge of the seat. If Junior had come back to haunt him, he had done a good job of it. For a minute or two there, for as long as he had stood there looking into those mirrors on the old wardrobe, if that was what they were, he had felt and seen what Junior had felt and seen that day at the beach weeks before. Felt the water pulling at his legs and body and arms and rushing into his nose and mouth. Felt his lungs straining for air. Felt his heart hammering heavily in panic. And he had seen his brother, himself, standing there on the beach and looking right at him, right there where he was struggling for his life, and doing nothing, nothing at all.
Frank, of course, had never spoken of this strange experience to anyone and he never went into Junior’s room again and Junior never haunted him again.
But now, on this final Monday morning that he was going to spend in his childhood home, his father wanted to move that old wardrobe into his room.
Frank would be leaving on Thursday for the University of Iowa. After he applied and got a modest baseball scholarship and his parents had done the math and approved the decision, it occurred to Frank that, although it was not one of his reasons for applying to Iowa, Iowa was about as far as you could get in the United States of America from the ocean, any ocean. In fact, he thought, although he did not think about it a great deal, if he never saw the ocean again, he’d be just as happy. In high school he had read a novel called The Sea of Grass and he thought that a sea of grass or wheat or corn or whatever they had in Iowa would suit him just fine.
His imminent departure from the house did not seem to be troubling his parents a great deal. His mother was obviously worried about him and fussed about the clothes he was taking and the fierceness of winter weather in the Midwest. Big Bill was mostly silent with him, spoke briefly a couple of times about the cost of a college education these days and the importance of concentrating on studies instead of girls and beer, and let it go at that.
Frank knew that they were eager now to get on with their own lives. His departure from the house would make a complete break with the past. They had plans. They were already getting ready to go into the bed-and-breakfast business and they were excited about getting started.
The new business would only be opening at the Labor Day weekend, which was of course the official end of the summer vacation season, and a couple of their neighbors thought they were nuts and doomed to failure. But Big Bill and Frank’s mother were confident. Big Bill had already put up the new wall downstairs and converted the living room, resplendent now with a large table where breakfast would be served to guests, a small reception desk in the corner, and a new large-screen HD TV on the wall. On the reception desk sat a box with a thousand new business cards. The baseboard heating had all been checked and found in good condition. The porch had been painted and the screens replaced, and three more rocking chairs had been purchased. Waiting in the garage were new double beds and a huge supply of bedclothes and towels and little bars of soap. The one bathroom upstairs was definitely going to be a problem but Big Bill had already made plans for redoing the bedrooms and adding another bathroom just as soon as the money started coming in. They didn’t think it would be long. There was already a sign out on the gravel lawn announcing the place as “The Haven” and offering a/c in summer, heated rooms in winter, and breakfast every day and tea every afternoon. And the late start this year would actually be a good thing, they told themselves. They would almost certainly get some weekend business in September and maybe October too if the weather was good, maybe even some weekday business too for which The Haven would be pretty much the only game in town. And there were the added attractions of breakfast and afternoon tea, which were radical innovations at Seashore. Yes, it was going to be a great success.
Another week of final touch-ups on the paint, a few minor repairs, and moving the new furniture up from the garage, and they would be ready to welcome their first guests.
Big Bill only needed help with the old wardrobe because its size and weight made it hard to manage on the stairs and he was worried about snapping off the weak legs. It was going into Frank’s room, he said, because “the other room” was bigger and would get the newer furnishings and they could then charge more for it. They would replace the old wardrobe later when there was money coming in.
Frank said nothing and just sweated and grunted along with his father as they wrestled the old wardrobe up the stairs and into his room. Frank’s own wardrobe had already been moved into what had been the guest room and the clothes and things he was leaving at home were packed into cartons in a corner of the room.
That night Frank sat on the side of his bed and looked at the old wardrobe. It looked the same as it had always looked, the varnish still crackled and the mirrors still cloudy. Those mirrors, he thought, if that was what they really were. His heart thumped but he steadied his nerves and looked at them again. There was nothing unusual about them and what he had once seen in them seemed fantastic now. The wardrobe reminded him of Junior, of course, and he didn’t like to think about Junior, but that was two years ago and it was all behind him now.
He stood up and stepped closer to the wardrobe. There was nothing in any way unusual about it. Apparently his parents had cleaned it out and gotten rid of Junior’s things long ago because the wardrobe was obviously empty when he and Big Bill moved it. For a moment Frank thought he might open the doors and have a look inside. Maybe that would dispel once and for all that frightening vision of the ocean that still lingered at the edge of his memory.
He reached for the small wooden knob on the right-hand door, the one you had to pull open first. And almost instantly snatched his hand away. The knob was wet. But he was too late. His slight touch on the doorknob had released the catch on the doors that had seemed so firmly closed in place when he and his father had moved the wardrobe that morning. Now the two doors squealed and suddenly burst outward as if pushed by some mighty force from within. And from the quickly widening space between them welled a gushing cascade of sandy, salty water. Released now, the water, which seemed limitless, forced the doors back and a wall of it as tall as Frank himself, it seemed, and then taller still rushed out at him and covered the floor of the room, up to his ankles, almost instantly rising up to his knees, swirling around his waist, pulling at him, pulling him down into its currents and depths, cold against his throat, coming up to his mouth and his nose and making hi
m gasp for air, stinging his wide-open, surprised eyes with its salt. He lost his balance and went over, his head beneath the water, his lungs laboring for breath, his arms spread in a struggle for balance, his neck stretching to lift his face above the seething surface. For an instant he got his face out of the water. He tried desperately to suck in air but got only more water. As he thrashed to keep himself upright and afloat, his vision cleared for a moment and he could see—so far away—the beach and people moving on it, an elderly couple, a woman carrying a small child, and one other figure, a boy, standing there and looking toward the water, looking right at him, Junior, it was Junior, back to haunt him again, standing there in that way of standing he had, but just looking, doing nothing to help him. Frank knew that shape and posture, that angle of the head. But why wasn’t Junior coming to help him? Surely Junior could see that he was drowning, that any minute he would go under and not be able to come up again. It was Junior, wasn’t it? Frank tried to cry out but only swallowed more water. But no, it wasn’t Junior, it wasn’t Junior at all. It was the shape of Junior, it was the unmistakable form and stance and posture of Junior, but it was not Junior at all. Junior was dead and buried and this was not him at all. Frank tried to wrench his body free of the silent current that gripped tightly and tugged downward on his legs. For one last instant he managed to get his face out of the water and he could see, far away there on the beach, Big Bill, his father, just standing there very still and looking straight at him and doing nothing, nothing, nothing at all.
