Lifeguard

by Deborah Blumenthal

  “He’s got a girlfriend, Mark, and I can’t stand it. I thought he liked me, but then I saw them together. They didn’t know I was there. Do you know how much that hurts?”

  “Oh, baby,” he says. He’s silent as he looks at the ground, thinking about what to say. “Did he tell you he doesn’t want to see you anymore?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then screw the girlfriend.”

  I want to laugh but start crying instead.

  “If he lets a beautiful babe like you get away, then he’s out of his gourd.”

  He hands me a tissue and I blow my nose. “You think so?”

  “Any sane guy would fall at your feet,” he says. “Don’t forget that.”

  “Mark?”

  “What?”

  “Do you miss your wife?”

  His face changes. “Sure, I do,” he says. “Sure. But you take the punches, and you go on. You can’t stand still, Sirena. And you can’t feel sorry for yourself, there’s just no point to it, you know? There’s a lot of good stuff out there and you have to move on, you have to find it. Life’s one big treasure hunt.”

  The screen door opens and Aunt Ellie pokes her head out. “Are you guys ever coming in for dessert?”

  “What are we having?” I ask.

  “Lobster ice cream,” Mark says.

  “Are you kidding?” I’m not crying anymore.

  “Had you going.”

  After dinner I go upstairs and take out paper and paints. I open the navy blue cylinder and turn it upside down. Antonio’s brush slides out of its hiding place. I’ll do a quick still life of my bed and the table next to it with the inky blue bowl of chalk-white seashells. I work quickly with the brush, each stroke clear and sure. My hand is expert with the paint. The brush glides smoothly over the paper as if it’s in tune with an internal rhythm. As if the brush is painting by itself.

  For the first time in as long as I can remember, everything in my head is traveling through my hand and coming out on the paper. Twelve o’clock, one, then two. I stay up longer than I expected, working with an intensity and purpose. At close to three in the morning I stop. I drop on the bed without washing up.

  The dreams start as soon as I close my eyes. There’s a dark curtain rising on another universe, some vast, unknown space like a strange, unexplored planet where no human has ever gone before. Antonio is there looking at me. His mahogany eyes are darker and more penetrating than I have ever seen them.

  “Sirena,” he intones, in his deep, full voice, like an off-stage narrator. He’s watching me, seeing me paint. Everything that I painted swirls around me, all the colors of the universe bleeding onto a giant canvas. But it is Antonio’s presence, his soul that fills the stage. He’s touching my hands, holding them. His skin is warm like Pilot’s, overheated. It’s a healing warmth, an energy. A golden, beneficent heat spreads over me as he infuses me with his strength and power. I see a vision of him holding the paintbrush, his fingerprints pressing it, leaving behind his DNA, his genetic prowess. He’s transferred all that to me along with the paintbrush.

  Our creative link.

  It’s the same feeling I got when Aunt Ellie gave me the easel, only more so. I’m the direct recipient of Antonio’s talents, his gifts, his vision, his worldliness, his confidence.

  It’s my destiny to paint, to create. The world around us is a giant canvas, and the sky is a palette smeared with swirls of every vivid color—magenta, citron, lavender, and acid green for me to play and experiment with. There’s a magnetic field around me and everything buzzes with electrified life, clarity and possibility. Every color is in its freshest, purest form. The bluest blue I have ever seen. The duskiest pinks, the most orange-red coral. Deep stormy grays and charcoal blacks. My senses have been flooded with the spectrum and the possibilities of where to put the colors. My hands are the instruments and I’m a giant puppet who will paint and keep painting until I’m too tired to hold the brush anymore. My eyelids flutter, my breathing is so intense that my heart quivers nervously in my chest like a captive butterfly. I wake up with a start—soaked with sweat. I sit up in bed and a flood of tears come.

  I know what happened. I understand the dream.

  Only I’m powerless to change it.

  thirty-five

  Pilot comes to the house to tell me. Aunt Ellie couldn’t bear to. He’s wearing a pressed white shirt and dark pants. He stands as tall and straight as a sailboard mast. He doesn’t have to utter a word. My heart sinks.

  Antonio.

  “God, Pilot…What will we do without him?”

  He shakes his head and touches my shoulders, gently pulling me toward him. He stares hard out the window, afraid to speak, I think. He takes in a deep breath and waits.

  “After the service we’ll spread his ashes over the water,” he says, haltingly. “He loved that beach more than any other place in the world so he’ll always be there, a part of it from now on. We’ll see him in the ocean. We’ll feel him there with us forever. We won’t lose him…We can’t.”

  His words hang in the air between us.

  My heart will break at the service. I can’t face it. But; go? I have to. My mind anchors me by stubbornly fixating on the smallest abstract details—the way the water darkens as the clouds shift, the slant of the sun, the soft feel of the sand shifting under my feet. Things in nature that change, but never leave.

  The clouds are low in the sky. In the distance there’s a rumbling of thunder. A storm is moving in. The end of the summer is closing in. Hurricane season is here and everything will change in the weeks to come.

  For me it already has.

  A big crowd gathers on the beach for the funeral. A dark gray cloud of mourners huddle together. There are so many faces I’ve never seen before. Aunt Ellie and I stand together, to the side. Antonio touched so many people in a personal way. He opened his heart to everyone he met, welcoming every new person and experience. At the very least, people knew him through his paintings, if not his reputation.

  Adriana stands close to Pilot, her head held high. She’s wearing a dark, flowing dress. Sunglasses shield her eyes. No outward attempt to look glamorous, only she can’t help it, her mane of golden hair blowing in the breeze over her tanned, lean shoulders. She has the aura of a celebrity, a regal bearing. Antonio probably had lots of special friends our age. I flash back to the sting of seeing her on the beach together with Pilot, so close they were almost breathing with one breath.

  A local priest, a friend of Antonio, leads the service. Edna is crouched at his side, her head down, her moist eyes fixed on the distance as if she’s wondering what she’s going to do for the rest of her life without him, her life’s companion. There’s something so stoic about her bearing that I stifle a deep cry in my throat.

  I stare out at the beach while I listen, numb with stabbing sadness, imagining him sitting there looking out, the delicate paintbrush in his oversized brown hand, his easel in front of him with swirls of brilliant colors, the brown cardboard box of chocolate chip cookies for energy and sweetness. His props are displayed there now. The thermos of water and lemon. A book of poems nearby for when he stopped painting and wanted inspiration from the written world. He was always so attentive to others. He’d be narrowing his eyes, listening while he painted. Pilot laughed one day and said, “Antonio can’t concentrate without a paintbrush in his hand.”

  If Antonio were here right now he’d wave aside all the praise and shrug his broad, heavy shoulders. He’d throw back his head of dark, thick hair and laugh his deep, throaty laugh because everyone was making such a ceremony of a man who died in his sleep as peacefully as he lived, during his early evening nap, Edna resting next to him, her snoring like soothing white noise.

  “Beloved?” he’d scoff. “I was a man, that’s all. A painter. Sometimes good, sometimes not.” I remember him holding his hands out to the side. “When it works, it’s wonderful,” he said. “And when it doesn’t…” He gestured helplessly, not finishing the senten
ce. He was accepting, able to handle what came his way.

  Did it take eighty years to become that way? Or was he just lucky?

  The temperature is dropping, the air growing thinner and cooler. I didn’t think to bring a sweater. I’m always shivering but now, to my surprise, even though I’m wearing a sleeveless dress, I’m not cold.

  Aunt Ellie and I stroll back to the house together after the service. “Such a touching remembrance,” she says, her voice trailing off.

  I nod, afraid to speak.

  “It’s so sad for Pilot and Adriana, too. He was their only family.”

  I stop and turn to her. “Their only family?”

  “Antonio took care of both of them. Pilot’s father died when he was small. I don’t know what happened to his mother. No one talks about her.

  “And Adriana? She’s always with them.” I can’t keep the annoyance out of my voice. “Pilot must be so in love with her.”

  “It’s not like that,” Aunt Ellie says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Antonio spent a long time with her mother. I’m kind of fuzzy on all this—I never felt it was my business to ask—but I think her mother was Antonio’s girlfriend after his wife died. Adriana was almost like a daughter.”

  “I always see her with Pilot. It’s obvious that he’s so close to her.”

  “I don’t know how it is between them,” Aunt Ellie says. “I guess you have to ask him.”

  Is it possible that I read it all wrong? I think about all my jealous feelings toward her. How I resent her. Could it be that she’s just…what…maybe like a sister to him? I have to ask him. I have to find out for sure. Only not yet. It’s the wrong time.

  But just the fact that I might have been wrong…changes everything.

  thirty-six

  Somewhere outside of my web of sleep I sense a faint rumbling. I open my eyes and turn toward the clock. Red digital numbers glow in the blackness: two AM. The sounds grow loud, coming closer, barreling through the wide silence of the night like an oncoming train. The roaring builds:

  One minute.

  Two minutes.

  Three minutes—then mysteriously stops.

  Dead silence.

  I sit up in bed, then walk toward the window. A single street lamp casts a gilded shadow on the dark street and there in the center of the pool of light is a motorcycle. The driver sits, legs spread wide, straddling it. Blond hair reaching his shoulders.

  Pilot.

  He sits completely still, like a messenger from some other galaxy carrying a secret I’m destined to intuit.

  No helmet, so unlike him. I run downstairs, but just before I get there, he guns the engine and quickly takes off as if he abruptly changed his mind.

  “Pilot! Pilot!” I call into the blackness, as my heart pounds faster and harder. There’s no way he could hear me, but I call him again and again, overcome with desperation. Then a window creaks opens in the house.

  “Sirena, are you okay?”

  Damn. Aunt Ellie. “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” I call back. She accepts that. I can’t imagine why.

  I creep to the edge of the lawn, out of the view from her window, and wait, hugging my knees like a six-year-old. I don’t know what’s happening or what it means, but my body has registered high alert and my heart won’t stop slamming in my chest.

  For no reason, I whisper his name, so softly it’s almost like praying.

  “Pilot, Pilot.”

  In the distance, the sound of his bike gets lower and lower until there’s nothing at all but a vast, encompassing silence. Still disoriented from being wrenched awake, I lean back in the grass and doze off, losing track of time. Finally, I get to my feet and head back to the house. I ease open the screen door to try to muffle its rusty whine. As it’s about to slam closed behind me, the rumbling begins to build again. I catch my breath and stand completely still. Very gently I ease the door back open and step outside, catching it before it slams behind me. Aunt Ellie has gone back to sleep, I’m sure.

  I walk out to the road and wait in the darkness like a solitary hitchhiker.

  One minute.

  Two minutes.

  Three minutes.

  Four minutes.

  The roar grows in intensity. I step back as the blinding beam of the headlight flashes on and off me as it follows the curves of the road and finally hits me directly. I raise my hand to shield my eyes as Pilot slows the bike and stops inches in front of me. The engine goes silent.

  His hair is wild and windblown, his eyes red and rimmed with sadness. The stoic, repressed tower of strength has been replaced with a grief-stricken Pilot who looks as though life has turned on him.

  There are no words to say. Nothing spoken that will change things, but his need for closeness is almost palpable.

  If only, if only. I don’t let myself think what might be, I only think of what is right now. I climb mutely behind him on the bike as if it’s my rightful place and cling to him, my legs pressed against his, two bodies joined as one. I think of being behind him on the surfboard. This time it’s less clear who’s saving whom.

  He steers the bike out to the road again and picks up speed, the power of flying down an empty road like a hallucinogenic drug. I rub my cheek back and forth against the softness of his shirt, over the hard muscles of his back and he leans into me.

  I have no idea where we’re going—somewhere, anywhere, nowhere—it doesn’t matter.

  He slows finally at a beach and we park. The water is strangely still. Pilot puts an arm around my waist and pulls me close to him. We walk one mile, then another as a stream of tears runs down his perfect face.

  We stop at the water’s edge and he stares out, lost in thought. I want to say something, anything, to try to make him feel better. “You lost the closest person in the world…He was a miraculous man.”

  Pilot looks at me directly and nods his head. He drops to the sand, pulling me down next to him. “He was exactly that,” he says. “Do you know what a shaman is?”

  “Antonio told me, he told me about his father.”

  “Well he was one too,” Pilot says, “even though he would never really admit it.”

  We sit in silence. Pilot raises his head. It’s almost as though he’s listening to Antonio in his head.

  “What?” I ask for no reason. “What are you thinking?”

  “About how he saved people,” he says.

  “Who did he save?”

  He shrugs, running a hand through his hair.

  “Tell me, please.”

  “People here who were sick…and once…”

  “What?”

  He looks at me directly. “A girl on the beach,” he says, almost like a confession. “She was drowning. He swam out and saved her.”

  “And?” I don’t know why, but I know there’s more. I look at his face and see something about it that pains him. “Where were you?”

  He shakes his head back and forth slowly.

  “It’s something I never told anyone,” he says. “It happened a long time ago.You asked me a while ago if I had ever not saved someone…” He bites the corner of his lip. “I didn’t tell you the truth…There was this girl…three years ago.” He stops again, reliving it. “She was…obsessed with me in some kind of sick way.”

  “What happened?”

  “She was crazy…I don’t know. She tried to get me to like her, to pay attention to her…”

  I hold my breath, a knot in my gut.

  “She swam out too far one day and pretended she was drowning. I pulled her out even though I knew it was a ploy.”

  “So?”

  “I didn’t say anything, but then just a few days later she did it a second time. I told her I knew she was faking it. I said if it happened again, I would ignore her. I told her she was putting other people’s lives at risk.”

  I wait for him to go on.

  “Except she did it one last time. Only this time I think she really was trying to kill herself. She did i
t just as I was walking off the beach at the end of my shift.”

  He stands there, staring out at the water, as if he’s frozen.

  “What happened, Pilot?”

  “I heard her scream, Sirena. I was back at the parking lot. Too far to hear her, but I did. I heard her and I ignored it. I thought she was faking, I didn’t think she needed help. I didn’t want to play that game. Only I was wrong.”

  “Did she drown?”

  “She would have, but Tonio saved her. He was leaving the beach too and he heard her. He heard the voice in his head and he ran back and swam out to her. She was far out by then, way beyond where the waves broke. She never would have made it back, and I can’t ever forget what I did and what could have happened. If it wasn’t for Tonio…”

  I reach out and take his hand. I can’t stand the suffering in his face.

  “I didn’t do my job, Sirena…and then when you almost drowned—”

  “You came as soon as you heard me…”

  “But I couldn’t get there in time and you were in such terrible shape—I began to relive something I had tried to put out of my mind, something that haunted me. I thought it was some kind of divine punishment. And now there’s no Tonio anymore,” Pilot says, “no one to intervene. No one with that higher consciousness, or whatever you want to call it.”

  “You can’t think that way. You have to make peace with yourself and go on.”

  “I know,” Pilot says.

  “And he left us so much.”

  He rises to his feet and pulls me up with him. “More than you know,” he whispers.

  thirty-seven

  I wait for one week, then a second. He has to grieve, to go over everything in his mind. I need to give him time, but I also need to see him. And there’s still one thing that troubles me and I can’t keep it inside me any longer.

  We agree to meet at the beach one morning before he’s on duty. The sky is overcast, and not many people are out.

  Pilot can’t seem to stand still. He’s busy doing some kind of inventory of things around him, then going through the first-aid kit, checking supplies and finally waxing the surfboard with a strange surge of energy. I expect him to start vacuuming the sand next.