Wrecked

by E. R. Frank

  “Oh, Anna, I’m not going to remember to do that every time I pick up the phone.”

  I get Ellen to hold the cell to my ear while I lean down to clasp the anklet on. “Do I have any mail?” I ask. Which is a ridiculous question. What mail would I have?

  “No,” my mother says. “But your teacher Ms. Riffing called to say that she can work with you after school to catch you up after Thanksgiving.”

  I stand and take the phone back from Ellen. “Are we going to Buck and Jerry’s?” That’s my uncle and aunt. Jerry is a woman. They don’t have any kids, and we usually spend Thanksgiving with them.

  Jack’s holding a huge conch shell. The kind you blow into to make a sound like a horn.

  “We’ll see,” my mother says. It’s what we do every year.

  “What do you mean, ‘we’ll see’?” I ask her. Jack holds the conch to Ellen’s ear. She smiles. They get along pretty well. They went for a walk alone the other day. Well. A walk and a roll. “Rock and roll,” Ellen said later. I was napping, and when I woke up, they were gone. Not that Ellen can get so far. I felt left out and uneasy, which is stupid, I guess. But I couldn’t help it.

  “We’ll see if we’re all up to it,” my mother says. “Dad was suggesting we just stay home.”

  “I don’t want to stay home,” I say. Now Jack has the conch up to my ear. I can hear the ocean on one side and my mom’s faint breathing on the other. The idea of what she’s saying makes me nervous. Just the four of us, home together having dinner on Thanksgiving? Alone?

  Well, I’ll tell Dad that.”

  “Is he there?” I ask, moving away from Jack and the conch. I’m surprised I’ve asked, because I never talk to him on the phone when I’m away. She puts him on.

  “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Are you kids going to buy anything?” the saleslady goes. Which, if you ask me, is pretty rude behavior for a fancy hotel. We all ignore her.

  “See any porpoises?” my dad asks.

  “Not yet,” I say. “Can I go hang gliding?”

  “Absolutely not,” he says. “Are you using sunblock?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What number?”

  “Fifty,” I lie.

  “Put your brother on the phone.”

  I hand the phone to Jack. He hands me the conch.

  “Hi,” Jack says. He waits a second. “Yeah,” he looks at me. “We’re fine.”

  Ellen’s been napping a lot. A whole lot. But now, for some reason, she’s getting stir-crazy. When I walk out of our bathroom, she’s sitting in her wheelchair in front of my queen bed, holding up her dad’s car keys. Rental-car keys.

  “What are those?”

  “You know what they are,” Ellen goes. “Come on. Take me for a drive.”

  Jack’s in his room watching movies or maybe listening to music.

  “I’m not in the mood,” I tell Ellen. “Besides, your parents will kill us. How did you get those, anyway?”

  “They always leave them in the bottom of their pool bag,” Ellen says. “I fished them out this morning. Come on.” She jangles them at me.

  “Are you crazy?” I say. “If something happens, your dad could be liable for a ton of money.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen.” Ellen tosses the keys in my direction. I let them fall to the floor, while she winces.

  “Please?” Ellen goes a few seconds later. “I can’t swim or anything. I’m bored out of my mind.”

  “All right,” I say. “If we get Jack to drive.”

  Ellen gives me a long look.

  “What?” I say.

  “I want to go, just you and me.”

  “You don’t like Jack?”

  “You’d rather I didn’t like him, but that’s not it.”

  “What do you mean, I’d rather you didn’t?”

  “You wouldn’t want him and me to be friends. But that’s a different subject. You’re changing the subject. Anyway. It’s not that. I want you to drive.” She starts to wheel herself.

  “I’m not changing the subject,” I say. “You brought it up. And how come you want me to drive?”

  She pauses at the hotel dresser and grabs her white, floppy hat.

  “I just do,” she goes, adjusting the hat on her head, wincing with how it hurts when she raises her arms like that, and then gliding her chair across the room.

  “I don’t care if you and Jack are friends,” I tell her, even though now I’m not sure if that’s true.

  “Good,” she says. “Don’t forget your sin-glasses.” She’s got the door open, only it’s one of those heavy ones that close on their own, and it looks like it’s about to smash her, so I have no choice. I scrape the keys up off the knobbly rug, snatch my shades off the bedside table, and grab the door from Ellen.

  “I feel kind of sick,” I say, following her out into the hallway.

  “You’ll feel better once we get outside,” she tells me. But I don’t. I feel worse in the elevator and way worse in the hotel lobby.

  “It might be heatstroke or something,” I worry as we pass by doormen, or porters, or whatever they are, and rock and roll outside.

  “Come on,” she says. So we keep going. In the parking lot Ellen eases herself into the backseat. I fold her chair, which takes me less than fifteen seconds now, lift it into the trunk, and then slide behind the wheel.

  “I feel really sick,” I tell Ellen. Maybe I’m going to throw up. My hands are jiggling on the steering wheel. I can’t drive. There’s no way I can drive. Ellen waits for more than a minute while I sit here shaking and sweating. Then she gives up.

  “I knew it,” she says, and I can see her face in the rearview mirror, completely disappointed.

  15

  THE SUN COMES OUT, AND IT’S LIKE IT NEVER EVEN RAINED, so we go to the beach. We always pick a spot far from the water and close to the path because it’s nearly impossible to roll a wheelchair on sand. I carry all our stuff.

  “I’m going to swim out to the trampoline,” I tell her when we finally settle.

  “Do you feel up to it?” she asks.

  “I’m fine now,” I say. And I am. “It must be something I ate.”

  “But that was just a few hours ago,” she points out. “If it was something you ate, wouldn’t you still be sick?”

  I swim out, wearing my sunglasses. It’s a long way, and I’m breathing hard by the time I reach the ladder. I hang on to it for a while before I even try to climb up. There’s nobody else here, even though it’s big enough to fit about ten adults comfortably. All along the rim is this rubber bumper, I guess so you only go over the edge when you really mean to. I can’t figure out how the thing is anchored so far out, so deep. But it is.

  For a minute I think about jumping, but I didn’t check out jumping with Dr. Pluto, so I wave at Ellen and then just lie flat and feel the sting of the sun on my face and belly.

  Then I hear giggles, and two little kids monkey up the ladder. A brother and a sister. About nine and ten. Nut-colored hair, eyes, and tan. I scoot over to the side bumper of the trampoline. They start jumping right away.

  “Higher!” the girl screams. “Higher!”

  “Watch this,” the boy goes, and he falls on his butt and bounces up to his feet.

  “Higher!” she screams again.

  “Look,” the boy goes. “You can make it spin!” and he starts running around the bumper edges, which makes the trampoline spin in place. She follows him. I sway to the side a little when they get near, and they do a little hop so they won’t run right into me.

  “Faster!” she yells. “Faster!” They’ve got us spinning in the water pretty fast. Then the boy stops.

  “I’m going to push you in,” he tells the girl.

  She shrieks. “No! Jeremy! No!” Before she can get in another no, he’s scampered right to her and shoved her over the edge. I can hear her shrieking a beat after she disappears. Then I hear a splash. Jeremy grins at me, holds his nose with one hand, and t
hen leaps off after his sister.

  Two minutes later Jack climbs on. “Did you see those kids?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Cute.”

  He doesn’t jump. He lies on his stomach, leaning up on his forearms so that he can stare out at the horizon. “Ellen said you got sick or something.”

  “Yeah.” The sun has me sort of dopey. “I feel better now.”

  I roll over onto my stomach. The plastic of the trampoline smells like seaweed. It’s warm and damp under my right cheek.

  Jack gazes out at the water.

  “See any riptides?” I ask him.

  “No,” he goes.

  “Good.”

  My father was cursing and struggling to get the umbrella raised. I looked around for my mom. She was already on her raft, swimming out to brackish green infinity. On calm days she would even bring a book out there with her. She likes true stories about survival adventures. Mountain-climbing accidents and shipwrecks and campers lost. Sometimes she’d float so far out, the lifeguards would stand up on their white towers and start whistling and waving their arms at her. Then she’d have to paddle closer in. But today was too rough for books. My mom had her hands full just paddling out past the breakers.

  “Hey,” Jack said, squinting at the lifeguard tower to read the squiggled-chalk report on swimming conditions.

  “Don’t drop the chairs like that,” my dad said, finally clicking the umbrella’s canopy into place. “You’ll break them.”

  “Dad,” Jack said. “Mild riptides today. It says so on the board.” He pointed.

  The lifeguards sat up pretty high, white zinc on their noses, with dark sunglasses, orange swimsuits, and binoculars dangling around their necks. They were always blackly tan, with maybe some white peel spots on their shoulders or faces. They posted the water temperature and the time of high tide each day in white chalk on the board. And they wrote up warnings of small riptides. If the rips were really bad, the lifeguards spiked red flags up and down the shoreline. It was against the law to go into the water if there were red flags out.

  “I don’t want you throwing down our chairs,” my father said, ignoring Jack and letting his fall to the ground. He spotted my mom and waved his arm at her as he walked into the surf. She was facing land, so she probably saw, but she didn’t wave back. She paddled herself sideways and then around and headed straight out to sea.

  About an hour later Jack and I were in the breakers, trying to stop the ocean without much luck. Every now and then, when we drifted to the left, I could feel a mini riptide. They don’t let you make any progress when you try to swim or walk back to shore. Even if land is just a few feet away, the weight of the current keeps you from moving. When people drown, it’s because they get so tired fighting. They see the beach is only an arm’s length off, and they keep swimming straight in and getting nowhere. Then they exhaust themselves and that’s the end.

  But my dad had taught Jack and me what to do in a riptide. As soon as you realize you’re in it, you let it take you out to sea. It’s counterintuitive, my dad explained, meaning it doesn’t make sense to your gut. But if you let the tide pull you out to its triangle tip, even if you’re really far out, then all you have to do is swim parallel to shore until you’re beyond the rip’s boundaries. After that you can swim straight back in to land. It’s important not to panic, because panicking makes you tired. And it’s important to pace yourself That’s what my father always said.

  “Hey,” I called to Jack, only he wasn’t there. He’d timed things wrong on the last wave and was tumbling underneath the water somewhere. Dad looks weird, doesn’t he? That’s what I was going to say. Because he did look funny. Off somehow. He’s in a rip, I thought, and he was. Right in the middle of a small, dark triangle with ripples on the surface, like scales on a fish, going at an angle against the rest of the ocean. He was swimming and swimming and swimming and getting nowhere. There were surfers all around him, in every direction, but they were on their boards on the surface of the water, skimming above the current.

  “Dad!” I yelled. Only he was too far away. And Jack had wiped out all the way back to shore. I spotted him sitting on his butt in the undertow, getting his bearings. I looked back at my father. He was still trying to swim. He was working hard, shoulders straining.

  “Hey!” I tried to yell to one of the surfers. It was useless. “Dad!” I yelled again. I turned for the lifeguards up high on their platforms. I waved my arms in a crisscross over my head to get their attention.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Hey!” One was holding up the binoculars, but he was facing the other way.

  So I started swimming toward my father. If I could get close enough, I could remind him just to tread water and rest, or I could get a board from someone for him to hold on to. I was a good swimmer. We all were. But I couldn’t swim fast enough. I saw my father’s head go under and then pop back up, and he was spluttering. Why wasn’t he staying calm, like he’d told us to do? Why wasn’t he realizing he was in a riptide?

  “Dad!” I yelled. “Dad!” I stopped to rest and waved my arms in a crisscross again for the surfers, for the lifeguards. For anybody who would notice. Nobody did. I scanned the horizon for my mother on the raft, but I couldn’t even see where she was. I looked back at my dad. He was still trying to swim straight in. “Stop!” I yelled. He went under again, and I was furious. How could he be so stupid?

  I swam as hard as I could. “Hey,” I breathed, kicking my way to the first surfer who might hear me. “Hey! Help!” I pulled at his leg the second I was close enough.

  “What?” He was a teenager, and he looked annoyed.

  I pointed to my father, who was going under again. “He needs help,” I said. “He needs your board.”

  My father was flipping his head up and out of the water. His eyes were wide, mouth round, and you could see how hard it was for him to lift his arms.

  “Hurry!” I yelled to the teenager.

  He did. He paddled fast.

  By the time I caught up, my father was clinging to the board, just outside of the rip.

  “You scared me, dude,” the surfer was saying.

  My dad was breathing really heavy The vein in his forehead was pulsing.

  “Got a little rip going there, man,” the surfer went. “Listen, when you get in those, you want to relax, you know?”

  My father gulped in air and wiped his mouth. He didn’t even notice me there, treading water behind him. He didn’t notice me following as the surfer paddled and then pointed his board straight in to shore while my dad hung on. I was right behind them.

  I’m okay,” my dad breathed. “Thanks.”

  “You sure?” the teenager asked. ‘You seem kind of tired.” My father nodded and let go of the board. He started swimming. I swam after him. He was going slow. His arms looked heavy. We passed my brother.

  “What’s going on?” Jack asked me.

  “Dad almost drowned.”

  Jack followed me following my father. I watched my dad climb onto the beach, his dripping body bent, drooped. On the sand he wobbled, like he was drunk, and he kept wobbling all the way back to our blanket and umbrellas. Jack and I followed.

  “What happened?” my mom asked. She must have swum in without anybody noticing her.

  My father flapped his hand back toward the water and didn’t answer. He was still breathing really heavy.

  “You look ill,” my mom went. “What happened?”

  “He almost drowned,” Jack told her.

  “I did not almost drown.” My father sank down hard onto his chair, making a smacking sound, and rubbed a towel over his head and face.

  “Yes, you did,” I insisted. Why was he lying?

  “I’m fine,” my father told me.

  “I saw you.” I remembered his face. The way it had kept going under. The way his eyes and mouth had been so round. I started to cry.

  “Harvey?” my mom said. Jack was looking back and forth at my father and at me, all worried. I couldn’t stop
crying, and I was waiting for my dad to yell at me for it, which made me more mad and more scared.

  “He did,” I sobbed. “I saw it with my own eyes. He almost drowned.”

  My dad didn’t yell. He pulled me to him and onto his wet lap.

  “It’s okay,” he said, real gentle. “I’m all right.”

  “You’re remembering Dad, right?” Jack asks me now.

  “Yup,” I say.

  “Was he really drowning?”

  “Yeah.” I sit up and look out toward the brownish horizon. There’s a ship way off in the distance. And a hang glider above us. “It was so weird, with all those people around.” The hang glider is bright yellow and orange. It’s peaceful to watch it.

  “You saved his life,” Jack tells me.

  “Not according to him,” I answer.

  Now Jack sits up. “Isn’t it interesting how you and I deal with what a pain in the ass he is?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I get so into my music and movies. You know? I get so into it, he could be yelling or being a jerk right in the same room, and I’d barely hear him.”

  “Aren’t you just that way naturally?” I ask.

  “And you,” Jack goes on, ignoring me and standing up on the trampoline. “You get so uptight you skim the surface of everything.”

  “What do you mean, I skim the surface?”

  “You get nervous so quick you forget to stop and breathe.”

  “Breathe?” I snort. “That definitely came from Cameron.” Then I smack my hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  Jack starts jumping. “That’s okay,” he tells me. And half of his face smiles while the other half cries. “It did come from Cameron.”

  He jumps lightly, the bottoms of his feet just barely leaving the rubber on each ascent. Really it’s more of a bounce.

  “I’m not nervous,” I say cautiously.

  “Not nervous exactly.” Jack bounces. His face readjusts back to normal. “Just … not relaxed.”

  “That’s not true.”