Before the Fall Read online

  * * *

  The plane will have sent a distress signal, he tells himself. The Coast Guard is on its way. But even as he thinks this, he realizes that the last flame has gone out, and the debris field is scattering with the current.

  To keep himself from panicking, Scott thinks of Jack. Jack, the Greek god in his swim trunks, grinning, arms flexed into rippling towers, shoulders hunched forward, lats popped out. The crab. That’s what they called it. Snapping a crab. Scott kept his poster on the wall throughout his childhood. He had it there to remind himself that anything was possible. You could be an explorer or an astronaut. You could sail the seven seas, climb the tallest mountain. All you had to do was believe.

  * * *

  Underwater, Scott folds himself in half, peeling off his wet socks and flexing his toes against the cool deep. His left shoulder is starting to tighten up on him. He rests it as much as he can, pulling his weight with the right, settling for fifteen minutes at a time into a child’s dog paddle. Once more, he recognizes the sheer impossibility of what he must do, choose a direction at random and swim for who knows how many miles against strong ocean currents with only one working arm. Panic’s cousin, despair, threatens to settle in, but he shakes it off.

  His tongue is already starting to feel dry in his mouth. Dehydration is another thing he will have to worry about, if he’s out here long enough. Around him the wind is picking up, roughing the seas. If I’m going to do this, Scott decides, I need to start swimming now. Once more he looks for a break in the fog, but there is none, so he closes his eyes for a moment. He tries to feel west, to divine it like the iron filling feels the magnet.

  Behind you, he thinks.

  He opens his eyes, takes a deep breath.

  He is about to take his first stroke when he hears the noise. At first he thinks it’s gulls, a high-pitched ululation that rises and falls. But then the sea lifts Scott a few feet, and at the wave’s peak he realizes with a shock what he’s hearing.

  Crying.

  Somewhere a child is crying.

  He spins, trying to pinpoint the sound, but the waves rise and fall unevenly, creating bounces and echoes.

  “Hey,” he calls. “Hey, I’m here!”

  The crying stops.

  “Hey,” he shouts, kicking against the undercurrent, “where are you?”

  He looks for the wreckage, but whatever pieces haven’t sunk have floated off in any number of directions. Scott strains to hear, to find the child.

  “Hey!” he yells again. “I’m here. Where are you?”

  For a moment there is just the sound of the waves, and Scott starts to wonder if maybe it was gulls he heard. But then a child’s voice comes, sharp and surprisingly close.

  “Help!”

  Scott lunges toward the sound. He is no longer alone, no longer a solitary man engaged in an act of self-preservation. Now he is responsible for the life of another. He thinks of his sister, who drowned in Lake Michigan when she was sixteen, and he swims.

  He finds the child clinging to a seat cushion thirty feet away. It is the boy. He can’t be more than four.

  “Hey,” says Scott when he reaches him. “Hey, sweetie.”

  His voice catches in his throat as he touches the boy’s shoulder, and he realizes he is crying.

  “I’m here,” he says. “I’ve got you.”

  The seat cushion doubles as a flotation device with arm straps and a cinch belt, but it is designed for an adult, so Scott has a hard time getting it to stay on the boy, who is shivering from the cold.

  “I threw up,” the boy says.

  Scott wipes his mouth gently.

  “That’s okay. You’re okay. Just a little seasick.”

  “Where are we?” the little boy asks.

  “We’re in the ocean,” Scott tells him. “There was a plane crash and we’re in the ocean, but I’m going to swim to shore.”

  “Don’t leave me,” the boy says, panic in his voice.

  “No, no,” says Scott. “Of course not. I’m taking you with me. We’re just going to—I have to get this thing to stay on you. And then I’ll—you’ll lie on top and I’ll pull you behind me. How does that sound?”

  The boy nods, and Scott gets to work. It’s hard with only one working arm, but after a few torturous moments he manages to tie the flotation device straps into a weave. He slips the boy into the harness and studies the results. It’s not as tight as he’d like, but it should keep the boy above the water.

  “Okay,” says Scott, “I need you to hold on tight and I’m going to pull you to shore. Can you—do you know how to swim?”

  The kid nods.

  “Good,” says Scott. “So if you fall off the cushion I want you to kick real hard and paddle with your arms, okay?”

  “Dog and cat,” says the boy.

  “That’s right. Dog and cat with your hands, just like Mommy taught you.”

  “My daddy.”

  “Sure. Just like Daddy taught you, okay?”

  The boy nods. Scott sees his fear.

  “Do you know what a hero is?” Scott asks him.

  “He fights the bad guys,” the boy says.

  “That’s right. The hero fights the bad guys. And he never gives up, right?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I need you to be the hero now, okay? Just pretend the waves are the bad guys and we’re gonna swim through them. And we can’t give up. We won’t. We’ll just keep swimming until we reach land, okay?”

  The boy nods. Wincing, Scott loops his left arm through one of the straps. His shoulder is screaming now. Each swell that lifts them adds to his sense of disorientation.

  “Okay,” he says. “Let’s do this.”

  Scott closes his eyes and tries once again to feel which way to swim.

  Behind you, he thinks. The shore is behind you.

  He rotates carefully around the boy in the water and starts to kick, but just as he does moonlight breaks through the fog. A patch of starry black is briefly visible overhead. Scott searches desperately for constellations he recognizes, the gap closing quickly. Then he spots Andromeda, and then the Big Dipper, and with it the North Star.

  It’s the other way, he realizes with a sickening vertigo.

  For a moment Scott feels an overwhelming urge to vomit. Had the sky not cleared, then he and the boy would have set out into the Atlantic deep, the East Coast receding behind them with every kick, until exhaustion overtook them and they sank without a trace.

  “Change of plans,” he tells the boy, trying to keep his voice light. “Let’s go the other way.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. That’s good.”

  Scott kicks them into position. The farthest he has ever swum is fifteen miles, but that was when he was nineteen, and he had trained for months. Plus the race was in a lake with no current. And both of his arms worked. Now it’s night, and the water temperature is dropping, and he will have to fight the strong Atlantic current for who knows how many miles.

  If I survive this, he thinks, I’m going to send Jack LaLanne’s widow a fruit basket.

  The thought is so ridiculous that, bobbing in the water, Scott starts to laugh, and for a moment can’t stop. He thinks of himself standing at the counter of Edible Arrangements, filling out the card.

  With deepest affection—Scott.

  “Stop,” says the boy, afraid suddenly that his survival is in the hands of a crazy person.

  “Okay,” says Scott, trying to reassure the boy. “It’s okay. Just a joke I thought of. We’re going now.”

  It takes him a few minutes to find his stroke, a modified breaststroke, pulling water more with the right hand than the left, legs kicking hard. It is a noisy mess, his left shoulder a bag of broken glass. A gnawing worry settles into his gut. They will drown, both of them. They will both be lost to the deep. But then somehow a rhythm presents itself, and he begins to lose himself in the repetition. Arm up and in, legs scissoring. He swims into the endless deep, ocean spray in his face.
It’s hard to keep track of time. What time did the plane take off? Ten p.m.? How much time has passed? Thirty minutes? An hour? How long until the sun comes up? Eight hours? Nine?

  Around him the sea is pockmarked and ever changing. Swimming, he tries not to think about the great tracts of open water. He tries not to picture the depth of the ocean or how the Atlantic in August is the birthplace of massive storm fronts, hurricanes that form in the cold troughs of undersea gorges, weather patterns colliding, temperature and moisture forming huge pockets of low pressure. Global forces conspiring, barbarian hordes with clubs and war paint who charge shrieking into the fray, and instantly the sky thickens, blackens, an ominous gale of lightning strikes, huge claps of thunder like the screams of battle, and the sea, which moments ago was calm, turns to hell on earth.

  Scott swims in the fragile calm, trying to empty his mind.

  Something brushes against his leg.

  He freezes, starts to sink, then has to kick his legs to stay afloat.

  Shark, he thinks.

  You have to stay still.

  But if he stops moving he’ll drown.

  He rolls over onto his back, breathing deeply to inflate his chest. He has never been more aware of his tenuous place on the food chain. Every instinct in his body screams at him not to turn his back on the deep, but he does. He floats in the sea as calmly as he can, rising and falling with the tide.

  “What are we doing?” the boy asks.

  “Resting,” Scott tells him. “Let’s be real quiet now, okay? Don’t move. Try to keep your feet out of the water.”

  The boy is silent. They rise and fall with the swells. Scott’s primal reptilian brain orders him to flee. But he ignores it. A shark can smell a drop of blood in a million gallons of water. If either Scott or the boy is bleeding they’re done. But if not and they stay completely still the shark (if it was a shark) should leave them alone.

  He takes the boy’s hand.

  “Where’s my sister?” the boy whispers.

  “I don’t know,” Scott whispers back. “The plane went down. We got separated.”

  A long beat.

  “Maybe she’s okay,” Scott whispers. “Maybe your parents have her, and they’re floating someplace else. Or maybe they’ve already been rescued.”

  After a long silence the boy says:

  “I don’t think so.”

  They float for a while with this thought. Overhead the fog begins to dissipate. It starts slowly, the clearing, first a hint of sky peeking through, then stars appear, and finally the crescent moon, and just like that the ocean around them becomes a sequined dress. From his back, Scott finds the North Star, confirms that they’re going in the right direction. He looks over at the boy, eyes wide with fear. For the first time Scott can see his tiny face, the furrowed brow and bowed mouth.

  “Hi,” says Scott, water lapping at his ears.

  The boy’s expression is flat, serious.

  “Hi,” he says back.

  “Are we rested?” Scott asks.

  The boy nods.

  “Okay,” says Scott, turning over. “Let’s go home.”

  He rights himself and starts to swim, certain that at any moment he will feel a strike from below, the razor grip of a steam-shovel mouth, but it doesn’t come, and after a while he puts the shark out of his mind. He wills them forward, stroke after stroke, his legs moving behind him in figure eights, his right arm lunging and pulling, lunging and pulling. To keep his mind busy, he thinks of other liquids he would rather be swimming in; milk, soup, bourbon. An ocean of bourbon.

  He considers his life, but the details seem meaningless now. His ambitions. The rent that is due every month. The woman who has left him. He thinks of his work, brushstrokes on canvas. It is the ocean he is painting tonight, stroke by stroke, like Harold and his purple crayon, drawing a balloon as he falls.

  Floating in the North Atlantic, Scott realizes that he has never been more clear about who he is, his purpose. It’s so obvious. He was put on this earth to conquer this ocean, to save this boy. Fate brought him to that beach in San Francisco forty-one years ago. It delivered to him a golden god, shackled at the wrists, battling the ocean winds. Fate gave Scott the urge to swim, to join first his junior high swim team, then his high school and college crews. It pushed him to swim practice every morning at five, before the sun was up, lap after lap in the chlorinated blue, the applause of the other boys’ splashing, the kree of the coach’s whistle. Fate led him to water, but it was will that drove him to victory in three state championships, will that pushed him to a first-place medal in the men’s two-hundred-meter freestyle in high school.

  He came to love the pressure in his ears when he dove down to the pool’s apple-smooth bottom. He dreamed of it at night, floating like a buoy in the blue. And when he started painting in college, blue was the first color he bought.

  * * *

  He is starting to get thirsty when the boy says:

  “What’s that?”

  Scott lifts his head from the water. The boy is pointing at something to their right. Scott looks over. In the moonlight Scott sees a hulking black wave creeping silently toward them, growing taller, gathering strength. Scott measures it instantly at twenty-five feet, a monster bearing down. Its humped head sparkles in the moonlight. A lightning bolt of panic hits him. There is no time to think. Scott turns and starts swimming toward it. He has maybe thirty seconds to close the gap. His left shoulder screams at him, but he ignores it. The boy is crying now, sensing that death is near, but there isn’t time to comfort him.

  “Deep breath,” Scott yells. “Take a deep breath now.”

  The wave is too big, too fast. It is on them before Scott can get a good breath himself.

  He pulls the boy from the flotation device and dives.

  Something in his left shoulder pops. He ignores it. The boy struggles against him, against the madman dragging him down to his death. Scott grips him tighter and kicks. He is a bullet, a cannonball streaking down through the water, diving under a wall of death. The pressure increases. His heart pounds, his lungs tick—swollen with air.

  As the wave passes overhead, Scott is certain he has failed. He feels himself being sucked back up to the surface in a maelstrom of undertow. The wave will chew them up, he realizes, rip them apart. He kicks harder, holding the boy to his chest, fighting for every inch. Overhead the wave crests and topples into the sea behind them—twenty-five feet of ocean falling like a hammer, millions of gallons of angry surge—and the updraft is replaced in an instant by a churning rinse cycle.

  They are spun and dragged. Down becomes up. Pressure threatens to rip them apart, man from boy, but Scott holds on. His lungs are screaming now. His eyes are burning from the salt. In his arms the boy has stopped struggling. The ocean is pure blackness, no sign of the stars or moon. Scott releases the air in his lungs and feels the bubbles cascade downward across his chin and arms. With all his strength he flips them over and kicks for the surface.

  He emerges, coughing, his lungs half full of water. He screams them clear. The boy is limp in his arms, his head lying inert against Scott’s shoulder. Scott turns the boy until his back is against Scott’s chest, and then, with all his strength, compresses the boy’s lungs in rhythm until he too is coughing up salt water.

  The seat cushion is gone, chewed up by the wave. Scott holds the boy with his good arm. Cold and exhaustion threaten to overwhelm him. For a time it’s all he can do just to keep them afloat.

  “That was a big bad guy,” the boy says finally.

  For a moment Scott doesn’t understand the words, but then it comes back to him. He told the boy that the waves were bad guys and they were the heroes.

  So brave, Scott thinks, amazed.

  “I could really go for a cheeseburger,” he says, in the calm between waves. “What about you?”

  “Pie,” the boy says after a moment.

  “What kind?”

  “All of them.”

  Scott laughs. He ca
nnot believe that he is still alive. He feels giddy for a moment, his body thrumming with energy. For the second time tonight he has faced certain death and lived. He looks for the North Star.

  “How much longer?” the boy wants to know.

  “It’s not far,” Scott tells him, though the truth is they could still be miles from shore.

  “I’m cold,” says the boy, his teeth chattering.

  Scott hugs him.

  “Me too. Hold on, okay?”

  He maneuvers the boy onto his back, working to stay above the spray. The boy hugs Scott’s neck, his breath loud in Scott’s ear.

  “Finish strong,” Scott says, as much for himself as the boy.

  He gives one more look to the sky, then starts to swim. He uses a sidestroke now, scissoring his legs, one ear submerged in the salty murk. His movements are clumsier, jerky. He can’t seem to find a rhythm. Both of them are shivering, their core temperature falling with every passing second. It is just a matter of time. Soon his pulse and respiration will slow, even as his heart rate increases. Hypothermia will quicken its pace. A massive heart attack is not out of the question. The body needs warmth to operate. Without it, his major organs will start to fail.

  Don’t give up.

  Never give up.

  He swims without pause, teeth chattering, refusing to surrender. The weight of the boy threatens to sink him, but he kicks harder with his rubbery legs. Around him the sea is bruise purple and midnight blue, the cold white of the wave caps glimmering in the moonlight. The skin of his legs has started to chafe in the spots where they rub together, the salt doing its insidious damage. His lips are cracked and dry. Above them, seagulls chatter and glide like vultures waiting for the end. They mock him with their cries, and in his mind he tells them all to go to hell. There are things in the sea that are impossibly old, astonishingly large, great undersea rivers pulling warm water up from the Gulf of Mexico. The Atlantic Ocean is a nexus of highways, of undersea flyovers and bypasses. And there, like a speck on a dot on a flea, is Scott Burroughs, shoulder screaming as he fights for his life.

  After what feels like hours, the boy shouts a single word.