Lifeguard

by Deborah Blumenthal

  “Why didn’t he tell you before?”

  “That’s what I asked him. All he said was that it wasn’t the time.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “She was with Tonio, that’s why he was so tormented. He taught her all about the ocean. She was swimming from the age of three. She loved the water more than anything. It just happened so fast.” He stops, staring off. “He blamed himself all these years. He should have seen it, he thought. He should have prevented it.”

  “What about your father?”

  “He didn’t go with them that day. He never got over it…”

  “And my dream…I don’t understand…”

  “They lived in your house a long time ago,” he says. “The ghosts are the sounds of Antonio’s wife, my grandmother, crying out for her daughter.”

  “But why only when it storms?”

  “There was a terrible storm the day after it happened,” he says. “As if the earth were venting its fury.”

  “But now…the stingray…I thought they didn’t come here.”

  “They don’t,” he says. “But it followed him. Like evil always follows us.” He touches my face and leans close to me. “When you were attacked, we both thought the same thing was about to happen. Somehow, despite our powers to heal, we didn’t see it coming, we didn’t expect it. Evil was stronger than we were. We were terrified you would die.”

  “But I didn’t. You saved me, both of you.”

  “Yes, but the effort was too much for him. He was so depleted by then, he had given so much blood to you. He had already lost one child; he couldn’t bear the thought of losing you too.” He hesitates as though he’s holding back. “You reminded him so much of her.”

  I shake my head. It was all too much. I realize I didn’t understand anything. I look off, remembering all the things I said to Antonio.

  “Antonio saw into me. He saw everything.” My eyes fill with tears. “And he left me with so much of him,” I whisper. “His gift for painting. His…” I struggle to find the right word. “His soul.”

  “My mother was a painter too,” he says. “He kept the gift alive in you.”

  “I wish I could have his other gifts. The way he knows things and heals—the way you do too.”

  “How do you know you can’t?”

  “What?” I shake my head, not understanding.

  “It was in his blood,” he says. “Now it’s in yours.”

  The heat of the sun bakes down on us. I move closer into him and he puts his arms around me. There’s a sureness in me I’ve never felt before, a forcefulness that fills every cell, magnifying who I am, expanding my consciousness into a wider world outside of the physical reality of being on the beach, near the water. He presses his lips to the back of my neck and we fuse into one again. I turn to him, running my fingertips over his lips. They’re hot, as hot as a flame. And now, so are mine.

  thirty-eight

  I zip my suitcase then take one long, last view out the bay window at the glittering ocean panorama. I snap one picture with my camera, then another. Finally, I close the shutters and turn my back on my oceanic room and the ghosts of history that will forever haunt its walls.

  Will follows me down the stairs, his alert eyes taking in my every move. He knows this is a different day from the ones that came before. My doggy detective doesn’t miss anything. He understands the language of suitcases and change. I kneel down and kiss his open, alert ears. “I’ll be back,” I whisper. Aunt Ellie opens her arms to give me a hug.

  “Come visit next summer,” she says. I nod, afraid if I speak my voice will betray me. When I arrived she was almost a stranger. Two months later, she became my second mom.

  Nervously, I reach my hand into the pocket of my sweatshirt. I feel something that I think, at first, is a coin. But it isn’t.

  It’s the charm on the now-broken chain from Louisiana that Marissa gave me before I left. I look at it again.

  “Arrive the same, leave different,” it says.

  I walk outside to the car and Will darts out the door behind me. Pilot waits behind the wheel, tapping his hand against it. He stops when he sees me. Will leaps up and tries to jump through the open window. Pilot smiles and lifts him up. He gets out of the car and carries him back inside.

  The sky is dark and overcast. Poetic justice. In six hours Rhode Island will be far behind me, a distant planet.

  I press my head back against the seat as the plane goes faster and faster until it lifts off the ground. The ocean, so vast and glittering, gets farther and farther away until it’s hidden behind masses of white mist, like mosquito netting forming a protective web around us. I close my hand around the two figas on my neck. The first from Antonio. The second, as blue-green as the ocean, from Pilot.

  “Stay safe for me,” he said, placing it around my neck as he kissed me for the last time.

  Something from him to hold onto, to keep close to my heart. A lifeline between us until I saw him again.

  Can you hear the way my heart is pounding now, even when I’m miles away from you?

  We didn’t talk much on the way to the airport. I didn’t want to fill our last minutes together with white noise. Pilot looked over at me and smiled, then turned back to the road. I reached out and ran my fingers over the smooth, round curves of his hard shoulder, trying to make my fingers memorize the feel of his skin. Would I ever get over the need to steal glances at him, to drink him in? Would I ever feel I’d taken in enough of his face? His being? His touch?

  His existence was my oxygen. I needed it to stay alive.

  But right then I was inhaling hard, short breaths, trying to satisfy my burning, aching lungs. How could I bear the hurt? Like a sensitive barometer, he turned to me, narrowing his eyes.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded. “Fine.” And then the tears came.

  “I’ll visit you at Christmas,” he said. “Seeing you will be my present.”

  I promised to fly up to the University of Rhode Island at Easter. He has two more years before starting their graduate school of oceanography. So fitting that he’ll devote his life to studying the ocean, a high priest in his temple.

  For now I try to live in the moment. I focus on what’s imminent. I’m going home to two new places to live. You don’t ever get comfortable with the idea of your parents splitting apart, but it’s been two months now and some of the sting is gone.

  “You’re your own person,” Pilot said to me, the night of the storm. “You have to make your own way in the world.”

  “But my parents—”

  “You have two of them,” he says, resolutely.

  I stop and catch myself.

  “You’re a survivor,” he says. “Hold your head up and don’t forget that.”

  So I draw strength from Pilot and from Antonio, my guardian angels. I turn inward and tap into the power I have to heal myself and make the most of my life. I still have two parents, even if they’re not together. I try not to blame them anymore. There’s no point to that.

  “Our marriage didn’t fail,” my mom says. “But it’s like a living thing and it’s changeable and unpredictable.”

  “But Dad—”

  “Things happen for a reason,” she says, and stops. I don’t need to know everything. What I do know is that relationships aren’t simple. And not always the way they appear.

  “Both of us will try harder than before to be there for you,” she says. “You’ve lost a house, but you haven’t lost me—or your dad.”

  I’ll miss the house where I grew up, and especially the big oak tree outside. For as long as I can remember, the old tree with its strong, gnarled arms spread wide open has been standing sentry in our front yard. But one day while I was away, there was a bad storm, my mom said. She heard a deafening boom outside and she ran to the window.

  “The tree was struck by lightning,” she said.

  I look at the black burn mark now, a painful scar all across its trunk. It hurts me to look at it.


  “Let’s watch it, give it time,” the arborist said. “We’ll see if it makes it.”

  I can’t think that it might not.

  Weeks after we move out of the house, I drive by just to see it again. I stop just short of the driveway. There are different bushes outside now and new flowers. The old oak tree is still there though, and the black burn mark still scars its thick trunk. Only now there are bright green shoots coming out of the sides of the trunk.

  Something else unexpected turned out for me after I returned to Texas, something I never counted on at all or could have imagined.

  The phone rang one night when my mom and I were in the middle of dinner. I jumped up and grabbed it.

  “Will is so sad without you,” Aunt Ellie said. “He still sleeps in your bed, and he mopes around the house like a lost soul.” She puts the phone to his ear and I speak to him.

  “His face lit up,” she shouts, laughing. She asks to speak to my mom and I watch her face as she talks to Aunt Ellie.

  “I don’t know,” she says warily. She listens some more and nods, almost to herself. A few “uh huhs,” and then silence. Then she holds the phone away and turns to me.

  “Ellie said the house is getting filled up because while Pilot and Adriana are in school, she’s taking care of Edna, so she’d be willing to drive Will down here…and if he’s happy here and you want him, she said you could keep him.”

  “Are you kidding? YES,” I scream into the phone. “YES!”

  So Will and I will have two homes and he’ll have a bed and dog dishes in each one of them. He won’t have the beach anymore, but he’ll have two backyards instead of one. He may be confused at first. He may miss losing the first home he had, but in the long run, learning to cope with change can make you stronger.

  “Children have energy, strong spirits, great resources,” Antonio said. “Nature wants them to survive.”

  He might have been thinking about Will too.

  And also about me.

  I’m up in my room in my mom’s new house when the phone rings one night.

  Pilot.

  I know his phone number by heart.

  “Sirena,” he says. Just my name. But in a microsecond, the sound of his soft, easy voice is all it takes to bring me back to one special moment when we were together. I had just come out of the ocean and was standing on my blanket on the beach in the hot sun. I turned to face him, to take him in, while he stared nakedly at me through his binoculars and the outside world seemed to fall away, leaving just the two of us in the universe. He’s two thousand miles away now, but I can see his face as clearly and feel his presence around me.

  “There’s a full moon tonight,” he says. “I can’t stop thinking about you.”

  I go to the window and stare out at it. “I can see it from my room.”

  “I know you can.”

  “How do you know that?” I say, sitting on the edge of my bed.

  “I saw you in a dream.”

  “What did you see?”

  “You were home. You were painting.”

  I stare across the room at the easel. There’s a canvas on it. I started a picture, but it’s unfinished.

  “What’s on the canvas?” I ask him. My heart starts to pound.

  He laughs softly. “A picture of me.”

  I’ve done more than ten of them, I’m obsessed. If I tell him, he’ll think I’m crazy.

  “You’re scaring me. You know too much.”

  He laughs. “I can’t help it.” Then he’s silent. I hear him exhale. “I miss you,” he says, his voice turning serious.

  “I miss you too.”

  My heart starts to thump in my chest. Can he hear it when we’re so far apart?

  “Yes,” he says. “I can.”

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  copyright © 2012 by Deborah Blumenthal

  interior design by Nick Tiemersma

  978-1-4532-4733-4

  Published in 2012 by Albert Whitman & Company

  This 2012 edition distributed by Open Road Integrated Media

  180 Varick Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Copyright