Aurora (72 page)

She tries to convey this to Kaya when he shoots by her, disappears, and then stands next to her chest deep. “You okay?” he asks.

“Yes! I got all tumbled!”

“You wiped out. You got caught in the washing machine.” He laughs.

“I have to hold my breath underwater!”

“Well yeah! And breathe out through your nose when you’re tumbling,” he says. “Then you’ll be fine. It won’t be able to inject its way into you.”

She goes back to cresting the waves. She turns and rides a few more, does better when they crash her down into the still water under the onrushing wave. When her rise and fall equalize and she flies, that puts a no-g spot in her gut, as if she is floating down the spine. She thinks of the ship again and cries out, a laugh of grief for her whole life, ah God that it had to happen this way, so crazy their whole existence, so absurd and stupid. So much death. But here she is, and the ship would be pleased to see her out in these waves, she knows this as surely as she knows anything.

The sun actually feels like it is hurting the skin of her face a little, and also she finds she is shivering between the arrival of one wave and the next; it’s a different kind of shivering than before, she is simply getting cold. The bigger waves come in sets of three, Kaya calls in passing, and she can see how this is roughly true. She can certainly see how they might come to believe it. They see a set coming, and try to get out over the first one before it breaks, then swim to a point where they can get a good takeoff on one of the following two. She wants to ride one across the face ahead of the break, like they do. Hard to arrange. Seems like she would need to be going a little faster for it to work, and Kaya agrees when she says that. “Kick hard with your fins at the moment you need the speed!”

“I’m shivering!”

“Yeah, I’m almost there myself. Go on in and lie in the sun for a while; you’ll warm right back up. I’ll come in in a while.”

She tries to ride a wave all the way in, botches her exit, gets
caught up in the tumble of the washing machine, chokes on seawater again, can’t breathe for too long, can’t get to the surface. Suddenly she is grabbed and yanked up, chokes and gasps, coughs up seawater she has swallowed, almost vomiting.

It’s Kaya who has pulled her up, standing chest deep now, staring at her intently. His eyes are a pale blue.

“Hey!” he says. “Be careful out here. This is the ocean, you know. You can blow it pretty fast. You get yourself drowned out here and the ocean won’t care. It’s way stronger than us.”

“Sorry. I didn’t see that coming.”

“Tell you what, maybe just stay in the shallows here for a while. Do what we call grunioning. You just lie here where the shorebreak runs up the beach, you’re floating, but bumping on the ripples of the bottom too, and the waves run you up the beach, then the backwash runs you back down the beach. Just let the water push you around like you’re a piece of driftwood, or a grunion. It’s almost as fun as anything out here.”

She does it and it’s true. No effort involved. Keep her face out of the water, let everything else go. Float like a log. Bump here and there over the wet sand. She sees that the beach is more occupied now, kids up at the high-water mark are building sand castles and screaming. The hissing of the waves is loud, the air is filled with a mist of popped bubbles. Bubbles everywhere, more bubbles than water. Long strands of kelp grunion with her. Their bulbs look like plastic, they pop with a smell. It’s trapped whale breath! a little girl sitting there says to her, seeing her pop and sniff. Freya chews at a leaf of it; it tastes like the kelp they grew in their little salt pond, what a little thing that was, a birdbath. In and out, in and out she floats.

Eventually even here, where the water is warmer, and the sun is on her back and on the backs of her legs, even here she’s cooled down enough to shiver. She takes off her fins, levers herself to her feet, and very carefully walks up to her towel, falling down once. In the wet sand it doesn’t matter.

She lies on the hot dry sand next to her towel, in the sun. Quickly she warms and dries. There is a rime of salt left on her skin that she can taste when she licks it. The sand is warm, it sticks to her wherever she touched it when she was wet; now that it’s dry, she can brush it off with her hand. She can shove her feet and hands under the sand, and feel its sandy heft and give; the warmth extends down a ways, then the sand is cooler. She digs a pit in it, gets the pit down to a level where its bottom suffuses with water. The walls of this pit then fall in from the sides, which collapse into the little pool she has down there. When she scoops up the wet sand and lets it drip between her fingers, the sand hits the rim of her pool and the water in it seeps away and the sand remains in blobs that stack on each other, until they fall over. Once or twice she scoops up little sand crabs that makes her cry “Eek!” as the crabs crawl desperately over her palms, and she drops them back into the pool and they dig their way into the sand at the bottom of the pool and disappear. After a few times she realizes they don’t have any capacity to bite her, their jaws or palps or whatever are too small and soft. Apparently the sand under her is full of these creatures. Possibly they live on bits of seaweed. The beach makers must have put them here, got them started. Down the brilliant wet expanse of strand she sees a flock of shorebirds running up and down over their wet reflections, their knees bending backward. They have long beaks they use to stick in the sand, no doubt going after these same sand crabs. They stop and poke at little bubbles in wet sand, possibly the sand crabs’ exhalations. It makes sense. This beach is alive.

When Kaya comes in he is visibly shivering, skin goose-pimpled, blue under his suntan, lips white, nose purple. He throws himself on his towel, shivers there so violently that for a while he almost bounces off the sand. Slowly the shivers subside, and he lies there on his stomach like a sleeping infant, mouth open, eyes closed. Quickly his skin dries in the sun and she can see the
white dusting of salt left on him. His hair is a tangle of curls, he is all muscle and bone, relaxed like a cat. A cat in the sun. A young water god, some child of Poseidon.

She looks around at the beach, squinting hard. It’s way too bright. Always the low grumble of waves breaking, the hiss of bubbles bursting. Haze in the distance, everything seen in a talcum of light.

“Can we really stay out here exposed like this?” she says suddenly, feeling a shaft of alarm spear her again. “The starlight won’t kill us, the radiation?”

He opens his eyes, looks up at her without moving. “Starlight?”

“From the sun, I mean. It’s got to be a massive dose of radiation, I can feel it.”

He sits up. “Well, sure. Might be time for more sunscreen, you’re so white.” He presses his forefinger into the skin of her upper arm. “Ah yes, see how it’s a little pink now, and goes white when I push there, and takes a little while to turn back to pink? You’re getting a sunburn. Let’s put another coat of sunscreen on you.”

“Will that be enough?”

“It will get you through another hour or so, I think. Especially if you go back in the water. We don’t usually just lie out here in the sun. Just long enough to warm up again and go back out.”

“How many times do you go out?”

“I don’t know. Lots.”

“You must be hungry at the end of the day!”

“Oh yeah.” He laughs. “Surfers are like seagulls, they say. Eat everything in sight.”

He sprays the sunscreen lotion onto her skin. She feels a little salty, a little raw, and the lotion is soothing. His hands when he touches her to spread the lotion behind her ears and up into her hairline are cool and smooth. She can tell by the way he touches her that he has touched before, that young as he is, he would be
a good lover. When he lies back down she looks at him candidly. Feeling a little incandescent, stomach unknotted at last, cool but warm, she says, “What about sex on this beach, eh? Right out in the sun? You people must do that!”

“Yes,” he says with a little smile, and rolls over onto his stomach, perhaps modestly. “You have to be sure not to get sand in certain places. But, you know, it’s mostly something we do out here at night.”

“How come? It’s a public beach, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes. But it doesn’t sound like you mean what I mean when you say public.”

“I thought public meant it was yours, that you could do what you want.”

“I guess, yeah. But being public also means you don’t do private things here.”

“I think you should just do what you want! And I’d like to jump you right here and now.”

“I don’t know. You could get in trouble.” He peers up at her. “Besides, how old are you?”

“I don’t know.”

He laughs. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t know. Do you mean how long I’ve lived, or how long since I was born?”

“Well, how long you’ve lived, I guess.”

“One day,” she says promptly. “Actually about two hours. Since I got out in that water.”

He laughs again. “You’re funny. You do seem kind of new to this. But hey, I’m warmed back up, I’m going to go back out for another session.” With a quick darting kiss to her cheek he jumps up. “See you out there. I’ll check you out, I’ll stay right outside from here and keep an eye on you.”

He runs down to the waves, splashes through the shallows stepping absurdly high, jumping as he runs, then leaps into the waves
and turns to get his fins on, then swims farther out at speed, stroking smoothly, ducking under broken waves right before they reach him. It looks effortless.

She follows him in. It’s a bit colder than last time; her skin feels taut and warm, more sensitive to the water. But soon she’s back in it and comfortable, and the lift of a wave pulls her back into the sun, and she’s off to the races.

The waves are a little bigger, a little steeper in their faces; Kaya says it’s because the tide is now going out. The sun is higher now, and the ocean is simply ablaze with long banks of liquid light, heaving slightly up and down, up and down, lined by the incoming waves, which as they rise before her turn a deep translucent green. Now as she floats she can look down and see through clear water to the sandy bottom, yellow and smooth. Strands and even big clumps of seaweed float below the surface in masses. Once she sees a big fish swim between the strands, a fish with a spotted tawny back, the sight of which gives her a jolt of fear; it disappears, she calls out about it to Kaya when he swims by, he laughs and says it was a leopard shark, harmless, mouth too small, not interested in people.

She’s getting used to her fins, and finds she can kick from her hips, and swim along at what feels like a great speed. She’s a mermaid. Duck under the broken waves, feel the tug of the wave’s underturn, shoot up out the back through green water. Or over waves just about to break, swim fast at them, breast up them rising fast, crash through their crests and fall down their backsides, laughing. Crack of a wave’s first fall right ahead of her. Swim in with a swell trying to break, she can keep up with it, it picks her up and she’s sliding down the face again, this time at an angle ahead of the break, sliding sideways ahead of the break and across the surface of the wave, which keeps rising up before her, steepening at just the right speed to keep her falling down across it. Holding herself stiff and doing nothing else, and yet flying, flying so fast
she emerges from the water from her waist up, she can even put her hands down on the water like the other bodysurfers and plane on her hands, and fly more!

Delicious.

Now there’s an old man out here, with what looks to be a granddaughter or great-granddaughter on a short rounded board, and as the waves rise he launches her on the waves like throwing a paper airplane, both of them grinning like maniacs. The mermen and mermaids spin down the faces sometimes, rise back up on them, dance with the wave’s particular shape and tempo.

The waves get bigger, steeper. Then there’s a shout and everyone is swimming hard out to sea, trying to catch a big set. As she crests one wave she sees what they have seen, and her breath catches: a really big swell, and it hasn’t even hit the shallows and begun to rise. Looks like it will break far outside her. She swims as fast as she can, just like everyone else.

The rest of them crest the big wave before it breaks, but she’s inside still, and has to dive under it. Go right to the bottom, clutch the sand down there, feel the breaking wave push her, lift her and push her down again, flapping her like a flag, and in the midst of that one of her fins comes off. She keeps on the bottom, comes up with a hard kick off the sand, reaches the surface just in time for the next wave to break right on her, it throws her down and then back up again, and without having to do a thing she is tossed back up to the surface, onto a hissing field of bubbles infused with sand that has been ripped off the bottom, she’s in a slurry of sand and seawater now. Immense roar. And here comes the third wave, outside and building, she tries to get out to it before it breaks, swims as hard as she can but she’s still out of breath, still gasping hard, and the wave’s top pitches toward her and suddenly she has the sickening realization that she is going to be at just the wrong spot, that it’s going to fall right on her, she takes in a deep breath and ducks her head into her chest—

Wham. It hits her so hard the air is driven out of her lungs, and then she is being flailed about, her whole body tumbling, no way to tell up from down, a wild tumble, the washing machine for sure, but so much bigger than those little ones that she’s utterly helpless, a rag doll, when will it let her up? Will it let her up? She’s running out of air, feeling an emptiness in her head she has never felt before, a desperate need for breath, she’s never felt that before and she panics, she simply has to breathe right now! And yet she’s down there swirling with the sand torn off the bottom, eyes clamped shut, whirling about, she’s going to have to give up and breathe water, damn, she thinks, after all that, to get home and drown a month later. Star girl killed by Earth how stupid—

And then she’s cast back up into the air, gulps it in, alas some water in the gulp, chokes, coughs, gasps in more air, in and out.