Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 85 - Undertow

Photo by Naja Bertolt Jensen on Unsplash

He looked as she’d seen only in pictures, black and white yearbook photos of him in a lineup of other adolescent athletes gawkily wearing awkwardly oversized wrestling team sweatsuits, most of them with poor skin and flop sweat. But not David, who was handsome, but subtly so, comfortable amidst others, and at ease even as a teenager, as he’d confidently appeared in one particular ancient candid shot from his biology class, a headline blazoned above it in a curly-cue scrawl: “Growing Minds.”

These were the few keyholes to his past, tangible proof of some lived experience in the years before Susan, her college roommate, pushed them together at that frat party a lifetime before. Even as they haltingly attempted to flirt with each other that night, she was already as struck by his visage now as she’d been when they’d first met, a catch of her breath to the point where both times she realized that she’d stopped breathing for just a moment, and had force herself to inhale oxygen.

The David she knew was, from that point forward, the David she knew in marriage, in commitment, a young man who aged gracefully. The slightest of gray forming at his temples. The need for reading glasses. But always so much more than his appearance.

He was a constant mystery revealing himself in the most subtle ways - waking early after a late night to surprise her with breakfasts. He’d scrambled out of the house on Saturdays with Mark and Rosie so she could sleep in for thirty minutes more. She knew the man with whom she’d spent her entire adult life.

But the boy who just walked through the doors at the end of the concrete hallway and now stood before her was an ethereal vision, a stranger, at least in physicality. But within and throughout and in his piercingly dark brown eyes, she saw her David. David, who’d been lost and flung into tumultuous waves, was sent home to North Carolina in a casket and now back again, walking out from the blackness of the tomblike staircase like one resurrected and absconding from the captivity of a crypt.

Scant family photos adorned the walls of his childhood home. Olivia somehow always sensed that the lack of photographs was simultaneously a taboo subject yet something for which David was grateful as if he took comfort in the absence of pictorial evidence of his youth and immaturity.

But now here in this place, as gratefulness welled up within her, cascading and pouring over, the absence of photos from his youth was so secondary, of such minuscule concern, because it was never about photographs, but his presence, tangible and tactile and certain. And how beautiful he was now. It didn’t matter if he were in this sixteen-year-old body before her or the slowly aging body like the one he’d previously lost as long as he was here.

Her eyes blurred quickly with tears, the emotional upswell so sudden it was like drowning, somehow being pulled down deeply beneath the waves. She had a faint recollection — re-experiencing an avalanche of memories in the blip of a moment — of the first time she went into the Atlantic Ocean, shortly after arriving for college in South Carolina years prior. Susan Drummond, her new friend and roommate who introduced her to David, was a midwestern transplant who’d never seen the ocean. Together, they’d spontaneously hitched a ride with a couple of boys from the floor below theirs who were road-tripping to Surf City and promised they’d be back by midnight.

“Why wouldn’t you want to go to a place called ’Surf City’?” one of the boys temptingly asked. That one would later hit on Susan, who rejected him so soundly that he’d avoid them for the next four years whenever they awkwardly passed in the dining hall.

Olivia now couldn’t remember either boy’s name. Still, she remembered her exuberance upon arriving at the beach, the crunch of the sand beneath the tires of the boy’s tiny white car, of crawling out from the collection of discarded grocery bags in the backseat, gathered like a menagerie of paper trophies from a seemingly unending series of late-night fast-food runs, and feeling the pervasive heat of the sun blasting upon her face like she’d opened the door of a broiler too quickly, the harsh but deliriously wonderfully heated rush mixed with a cool salty breeze that made her lips feel instantly dry and chapped.

They’d raced across the dunes through patches of seagrass, laughing and whooping as they splashed into the late afternoon waves. She expected the water to be awash in sky blue shades, as she’d seen in pictures, or the color used for water in atlases and wall maps. But the water off the coast of South Carolina matched closer to the color of the dark green clumps of seaweed washed up and drying upon the dark brown sandy shore as if the tint of the vegetation had soaked throughout the ocean, staining the water before being discarded and tossed aside.

Wading in up to the hem of her shorts, Olivia had delighted at the tickling of the murky ocean floor squishing between her toes, the ebb and tug and flow of the water’s current swirling around her thighs, pulling her backward a step, then pushing further back out two steps more, deeper into the ocean’s tide. The water was surprisingly warm but considerably colder around her feet as if a straight, tangible line of temperature differentiation formed right at the ball of her ankle. There were so many sensations and an inundation of new impressions that she was nearly blinded by it all, by the brightness of everything in this new life.

The sun reflected in sparkles upon the water’s surface, and Susan was off to her side, allowing the boy who would later ask her out to momentarily hold her hand for balance as they laughed their way into the water. The water tugged at her again, Olivia joyfully laughing, enthralled in exuberance she’d never before encountered, the experience so unlike anything she’d ever imagined it would be with amplified sensations bursting forth from multiple sources - sky and water and salt and heat and cool and happiness and freedom all at once.

Racing forward, though, the joy was abruptly snubbed out, like a snuffer suddenly brought down too quickly over a candle, extinguishing all light from a room in an instant. Stepping onward, away from the shore, Olivia suddenly found no place for her feet, as if the ocean’s floor had no more than fallen away, ceasing to exist.

Olivia stammered forward and down, toppling clumsily into the water just as the rippling curl of a wave turned white and crashed into her face, flipping her backward and spinning her. Her arms flailed, eyes wide underwater as she peered into the murky black and green. The saltwater stung so intensely and surprisingly that she squeezed her eyes shut, losing her sense of everything, the ocean heavy and pressing from every direction.

Feet flailing, a toe brushed sand barely, then nothing again. One hand broke through the surface. She could feel the air, grasped for it like reaching for a limb while falling from a tree, then pulled entirely back under.

Her mouth opened - nearly involuntarily - wide and gaping, sucking in water so forcefully her eyes clenched shut all the more as she spun backward once more, carried upon a surging tide.

Then there was screaming - Susan’s voice for sure - but she heard other panicked voices, too. Then, she was pulled up suddenly by her armpits, her skin being pinched and feeling as though it would be ripped from her bones. Still, her face was free from the water’s pull, and she began to cough - hacking and harsh - as water blurted from her lungs, and the sun seemed overly bright now, brighter than would seem possible. So much light — too much light — after being pulled from the darkness and back to the land.

And now, years later, she was in the cold desolation of the foreign concrete hallway, accompanied by strangers once more — newly made acquaintances — and she was falling again, her knees giving out. But once more, she was caught before going under all the way. She was once again delivered to the safety of firm footing, familiarity, and comfort.

Before she’d fallen, David rushed across the space separating them and pulled her into his surprisingly strong arms.

“I’ve got you, baby,” he said. “Oh dear Lord, I’ve got you.”

Olivia had to force herself to breathe.

Photo by Amy Humphries on Unsplash