Whisper to Me(126)

They closed around its clammy surface; it was as taut as a cable, almost resonating with the pull of the pier above and some weight below—a boat, long-since sunk?

Whatever: it was a rope hanging from the pier and I was going to climb up it.

I was going to live. And I was going to ask you to forgive me.

I wasn’t going to be competing in Nationals. I wasn’t a Navy SEAL, but my dad taught me to swim when I was three years old, and I could do our house to the end of the boardwalk when I was seven, and I was not going to die in the ocean.

Slowly, hand over hand, I pulled myself up and out of the water—my head broke free and I took a long, rasping, hitching breath. It was half-ocean, that breath, and I coughed as the acrid cold water hit my throat, but there was air too, and it filled my lungs. I felt instantly less like I was going to burst, less like a balloon on the verge of popping.

Greedily, I gulped down air, felt it filling my lungs, wheezing. I had never been so hyperaware of my chest, my diaphragm and bronchioles, the simple mechanics of being alive. The stuff I took for granted.

For a long time, I just breathed in and out, relishing it, enjoying it. I couldn’t tell what was rain falling on me and what was sea spray, whipped by the wind from the waves. It was still dark, and then FLASH, everything was lit.

I glanced all around, getting my bearings in the light of the lightning.

Good news: whatever happened when I fell, whether a few planks had broken or the end of the pier had collapsed or what, there was still some of the structure remaining, a dark frame against the darker sky, rising up like a promise.

Bad news:

It was high.

For a moment, I just clung to the rope, in the cold, cold ocean, gazing at the far-off safety of the pier, mind spinning.

Gym ropes was the absurd phrase that kept repeating in my head, like a prayer, like something to hold on to.

Gym ropes.

I was looking up at the impossible five feet between the surface of the water and the top of the pier, the rope glistening, leading up to the wooden bollard it was tied to above, and I was thinking about gym ropes and how in gym class I had never been able to climb them.

“But in gym class you weren’t in danger of drowning,” said the voice. “You’ve got this. It’s going to hurt, but you’ve got this.”

I sighed. Fine.

I reached up my other hand and grabbed the rope a little higher up—then I pulled my body out of the cold water. My arms burned; my fingers were numb from the cold.

Other arm.

Other arm.

My muscles screamed at me. Maybe I was screaming too, out loud, I don’t know. But the air was beginning to warm my skin, I was starting to feel less like I might shiver out my teeth.





“Not far now,” said the voice. “Not ****** far now.”

Dear Manager,



I am writing to you because I am interested in the position of teller at your South Side branch. I am a good team player with





Sorry, Dad came in.

So.

Where was I?

Oh yes, I was climbing the rope.

My legs were out of the water; I could feel the moist air on my skin; my clothes were plastered to my body. I wrapped my feet around the rope, chafing my ankles—one of my Converses had come off and was sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic, where I would have been if not for the voice.

“Two feet now,” said the voice. And it was true; the pier, what was left of it, was just above. “Come on, you ******.”

But I couldn’t. My arms wouldn’t work. It was like something had been cut between my head and the muscles. Snipped.

“*********, come on,” said the voice. “You can ******* do it. You can do it. You can do it. You can do it.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. You can do anything. We can do anything. Come on.”

“Okay,” I said. I was just pain, all over. My head, my arms, my throat where the cold water had burned it.

And then suddenly there was more strength flowing into my arms; that’s what it felt like, hot liquid flowing; lava.

“We’re ****** doing this,” said the voice. “We’re not ****** dying in the ******* ocean.”

One arm went up; the fingers were gone, I mean I didn’t feel them anymore, but somehow they gripped onto the rope and … and then slid … but then they caught, found purchase, and again that’s what it felt like—

—like I had to buy every inch, pay dearly for it. But I was moving again, moving up the rope, even if I felt something tear in my shoulder, and in my forearm. Something detaching from the bone, a tendon maybe, I didn’t know.

Then.

Then a miracle. I was by the side of the pier, hooking my knee over it, and then I fell, hard, and sprawled on the wooden top.

Tears filled my eyes, blinding me, as if the water was still trying to get me, as if the ocean had gotten in behind my eyes, as if it didn’t want to let me go.

Let me go, I thought.

“No, I’m staying with you,” said the voice.

“Not you,” I said.

“Oh,” said the voice. “Well, then move. You keep still, you’re going to die of hypothermia.”

“Okay.”

I could see the knots in the wood of the pier below me. I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees. Rain no longer seemed to be falling, and the sky was lightening, a fast wind somewhere far above scouring the clouds, scrubbing them away, so that it almost seemed like the daytime that it really was.