Lifeguard Read online

  the lifegaurd

  Deborah Blumenthal

  albert whitman & company chicago, illinois

  To Ralph

  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

  Prologue

  DANGEROUS RIP CURRENTS:

  STAY OUT OF THE WATER.

  It was close to one hundred degrees, but swimmers were heeding the signs all along the beach. As far as the eye could see, no one was in the water.

  Sirena wiped the sweat off her forehead with the back of her hand and stared out at the waves. For three days straight there was no relief from the steamy weather and the ocean stretched before her, cool, inviting, and off-limits. It was like someone putting a tall, icy glass of lemonade in your hand when you were thirsty, and then warning you not to drink it.

  She waited until the lifeguard turned and walked to the far end of the beach. Slowly she got to her feet and made her way over the burning sand to the surf outside the swimming area in the direction of the jetty, carefully sidestepping blankets shaded with umbrellas and people pressing cold soda cans against their pink, flushed faces.

  She wouldn’t go more than a few yards from shore.

  No deeper than her knees. She’d splash around and come right back. It would be safe. Anyway, when you were wet it was easier to tan, and her pale skin needed color.

  She edged in, immediately aware of the drawing sensation around her feet as her red polished toenails sank beneath the gritty sand. The tingling pull of the water felt strange and exciting. She took a few baby steps farther until she was in just above her ankles, aware of the water pulling as if it was trying to draw her out deeper. She smiled to herself —superwoman battling the brute force of nature—like the latest video game.

  Only now there were no buttons to push.

  No play. No pause. No stop.

  No controls.

  One more step forward and she dipped down to soak herself before getting out. But the water level deepened sharply as if she had stepped into a crater. She was thrown off balance as the water smacked against her with surprising ferocity. She tried to recover, to steady herself, but she toppled forward, thrown to her knees as the hard, pebbly sand abraded her skin. She tried to stand up again, but the current was like a powerful rope that lassoed her waist, tightening its chokehold, momentarily letting go then tightening again, intent on dragging her out farther and farther, deeper and deeper into the sea where no one could possibly find her or hear her calling, the wooden planks of the jetty now blocking out the light and striping her with shade.

  She tried to grab hold to push herself out, searching frantically to see if anyone saw her or was running to help, but she saw nothing but the blank faces of people stretched out on beach towels, eyes closed, iPods blocking outside sound, oblivious to what was happening just a few hundred yards from their safe havens in the sand.

  Her head bobbed to the surface momentarily and she pushed herself out from under the jetty, gasping for air, sheer terror spreading through her as she tried to lift an arm to signal for help. As if a strong, sadistic hand were above her, she was shoved roughly underwater. She panicked, running out of air, trying to hold her breath so she didn’t swallow water. She surfaced again, gasping to fill her lungs, arms and legs flailing wildly, despite the leadenness and exhaustion overtaking her body, setting in like paralysis.

  “HELP,” she managed to shout before another wave crashed over her head, the pull of the riptide dragging her down again like a bouncing ball being roughhoused by the currents.

  “HELP! HELP!” she cried over and over as her foot stomped on a hard mound in the sand. Without warning, the thing came alive, rearing up and viciously lashing her leg, sending a shock of searing pain through every nerve of her slackened body. As she sank to the silent, green world of the ocean floor, she opened her eyes and watched in horror as a swirling veil of blood surrounded her, darkening the water.

  Dreaming.

  She remembered dreaming.

  A voice was whispering to her. “Breathe, breathe, breathe,” it kept urging. A warm body was over hers, pressed against her. Someone bigger than she was, stronger, a powerful life force. A mouth on hers, warm lips, lips she didn’t want to leave hers.

  Then the dream ended.

  She was left, abandoned.

  Everything turned cold.

  A deep, penetrating quiet filled the universe like a silent scream, just before the darkness.

  one

  The summer my parents were getting divorced in Texas, I was exiled. Like a child playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, I felt blindfolded, turned in circles, then pushed to stumble off on my own.

  I remember the airport. The roar of jet engines. The smell of diesel fuel. I headed for the plane with my beat-up carry-on bag that said Travel Pro—even though I wasn’t one—my sketchbooks, art supplies, Ollie, my worn brown teddy bear, and a turkey sandwich on a roll, in case I didn’t like plane food.

  Before I boarded I stared up at the wide blue sky.

  “Good-bye,” I whispered. Then I waited. Would a cloud move or the sun shift? All I wanted was a sign, the smallest change, invisible to everyone but me. Something I could hold on to.

  But there was nothing.

  I fastened my seat belt and pulled it tight. We took off and I pressed my head back against the seat, feeling the rush as the plane went faster and faster and faster until it rose up into the air, as if it turned weightless. I reached up to the chain around my neck and closed my hand around the gold charm from Louisiana that my best friend, Marissa, gave me before I left.

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

  Would it turn out that way?

  Six hours later with a one-stop layover, I arrived on another planet.

  Aunt Ellie was waiting for me at the small airport.

  “Sirena,” she said, hugging me.

  I gave her a half smile and heaved my bag into the trunk of her Volvo wagon. She rolled down the windows, and we took off to her giant old gingerbread house near the water. She took my hand and I followed her up a flight of stairs to a dark attic bedroom. Dark until she flung open the blue wooden shutters.

  “Voilà,” she sang.

  Sunlight lit the room like a flash fire.

  I stepped to the window. Ocean everywhere with no beginning and no end. A view like that shrinks your head. It puts your life into perspective.

  “Surreal,” I said.

  For hours at a time that summer, I would sit on my window seat hypnotized by the waves, imagining the world hidden below the surface and wondering how I, a miniscule flicker of life, fit into the IMAX-sized universe before me.

  My whole world would change after that summer. My parents were living together when I left. When I went back, they’d be apart.

  “You’ll come b
ack to two homes instead of one,” my mom tried. But a positive spin couldn’t convince me I’d be gaining something, instead of losing everything. I have friends whose parents are divorced. They need calendars to tell them where to sleep and checklists to track down their stuff.

  And then there were the holidays. Where would I go for Thanksgiving and Christmas? How could I celebrate? Who wanted to go back and forth between new homes, no homes? Who wanted to live with sad, single parents looking to start over?

  What I wanted was for everything to stop and rewind. I wanted to live in before, not after.

  But no one asked me what I wanted.

  I try not to think of that now. Everything is different in Rhode Island. I guess that was the point of sending me.

  Aunt Ellie’s wooden house was built about a hundred years ago, and when the wind blew it groaned like an old person getting out of a rickety chair. One night when it was stormy and it sounded like an atomic battlefield in the sky, I heard strange whispering coming from upstairs. Was I imagining things?

  In Texas we have tropical storms and hurricanes that turn cars into boats. We have surprise tornadoes and roaches big as baby mice. But the one thing we never had, in our house at least, was ghosts.

  “Is your house haunted?” I ask Aunt Ellie, pretending to joke.

  She takes off her glasses and looks up momentarily from the National Geographic on her desk. “Oh sure,” she says.

  My bedroom had blue-and-white wallpaper with old clipper ships with billowy sails and a double bed with a curvy white iron headboard and sheets as soft and white as magnolia blossoms. Fish X-rays in gossamer shades of inky blue hang on the walls like aquatic Warhols. But the best thing about the room is the pillow-covered window seat in front of the large bay window where I like to sit and watch the ocean.

  I don’t mind being away from home, I decide right then. I don’t mind missing camp and being all alone. In some ways I like it better, because no one will ask me questions I don’t want to answer.

  Aunt Ellie has a curly-haired dog named Will who’s very curious about the new person in his house. He’s part wheaten terrier, part something else. Like a dog detective, Will sniffs at my pants, and then at my hair when I bend down to pet him.

  “Am I okay?”

  His answer is to sniff and keep sniffing, instantly putting together a scent impression of me, the doggy equivalent of a police profile.

  Will is five or so, Aunt Ellie thinks. She found him walking near the ocean one day, like a drifter who lost his way. He wasn’t wearing a collar, and when she took him to the vet, he didn’t have a microchip to tell them where home was. Even though he was a stray, he looked well-fed and he must have been well cared-for because he wasn’t skittish in any way.

  “It just seemed like the natural thing to bring him home and start the next chapter of his life and mine together,” Aunt Ellie said. She already had three stray cats—Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria—a gerbil, two turtles, and a canary, so one more animal wouldn’t make all that much of a difference.

  Aunt Ellie is like that. Nothing is a big deal to her. Not stray dogs or cats, not ghosts, not divorces, and especially not kids who are homeless. And that’s good because I honestly don’t think I could survive five minutes in her house if I felt that she pitied me or anything.

  two

  There won’t be any structure to her summer,” my dad yelled to my mom when they were having one of the fights they somehow assumed I couldn’t hear. I sat in my room helpless as a chicken facing slaughter. “What’s she going to do all day?”

  My mom wasn’t concerned about doing. She wasn’t a structure freak, or an ex-Marine, like my dad. “Ellie lives at the beach,” she said in a weary voice, like that should have explained everything.

  What she wanted most was to have me airlifted out of our house, the city, and most of all, away from their fights. The beach was a good alternative and probably their only one. Without asking, I knew they wouldn’t have money anymore to send me to camp.

  “Why can’t I just stay home with you?” I asked my mom.

  “It’s hot here,” was all she said. “I want you to have a real summer.”

  A nanosecond later I was gone.

  Aunt Ellie seems okay with having me, although I can’t imagine why. Maybe to her I’m some new specimen—the freaky teenage loser artifact—to study like a bug trapped in amber. Still, she’s the relaxed type, independent. Totally not uptight. She’s six years younger than my mom and she lives by her own rules, which is why she’s content on her own in a creaky beach house with unmatched rattan furniture and weird specimens everywhere—from prickly cacti from the Sonoran desert to exotic seashells, Maori masks, and necklaces of snake vertebrae that seem to hiss a warning when you touch them.

  I guess Aunt Ellie has so much life around her, she doesn’t need a husband and kids, or maybe doesn’t want them. I don’t know because I never asked her.

  “You don’t ask unmarried people why they’re not married because it’s an embarrassing question, like why didn’t you get asked to the prom,” my mom once said, so I remembered that.

  I’m relieved Aunt Ellie isn’t married. If she was I’d have to deal with two people wondering what I’m thinking 24/7. The truth is more often I try not to, escaping to art or zoning to a safe haven in my head where it doesn’t even matter if my parents are together or not.

  “How do you split up someone’s life?” I asked Marissa before I left. “Will my dad take my things from birth to eight, and my mom from eight to sixteen?” I was only half kidding. “Will the rest be dumped into garbage bags like clothes from a dead person and hauled off to a thrift shop?”

  “You’ll still be you,” she said. “That’s what counts. You won’t change, you know?”

  I didn’t.

  I didn’t know anything. My brain was on mute along with my life. I’d walk into a room to get something, and then forget what it was. I’d stare into my closet unable to come up with a basis for picking one outfit over another, as if it actually mattered anyway. And when I opened the refrigerator or went to the grocery store, there was food everywhere, but nothing I wanted.

  So why not move to a different state, even if it was the smallest of the fifty, a cubbyhole compared to Texas?

  At least I’m in a house with a real animal. I fell for Will at first sight. He’s sad and scruffy with liquid eyes and a Doberman-sized soul. But even though I’m dog-crazy, I’m almost glad we don’t have a dog at home now because of a story I once heard. A married couple who had a dog they both loved desperately was splitting up. They were so angry with each other though that neither of them wanted to give the other the satisfaction of getting the dog.

  The one who suffered most was the dog.

  He ended up abandoned at a shelter.

  Maybe Aunt Ellie knows things like that happen. Maybe that’s why she never got married. Anyway, she seems to have this sixth sense about making people feel better, because before I arrived she bought me a present.

  “Close your eyes,” she said. When I opened them a wooden easel was open in front of me.

  “I love it,” I said. I really did. It was the perfect gift. It felt like someone had just crowned me a world-acclaimed artist. I never had an easel before and just looking at it made me feel important. I think she found it at a garage sale or something because it had little splatters of paint on it from the person who owned it before. Based on nothing, my turbo-charged imagination decided that the previous owner was an extraordinary painter who transferred mythical powers to the easel, and now it was my responsibility to uphold that artistic legacy. Of course if I told anyone something like that they’d just look at me and say, “You know, Sirena, you live in a total fantasy world.”

  And they’d be right.

  Before I even unpacked my bag, I set up the easel near the window. I had never done any sea pictures before. I’d watch the water in different lights and changing weather to know it and learn to draw it. I could do it, I deci
ded, if I tried hard enough. All it would take was willpower.

  What I didn’t know then was that my entire summer at the ocean would be about knowing new worlds. Things would happen that weren’t supposed to. Miracles would come true. And for the first time in my life, I would find out what it means to fall completely in love. Only it would happen in a way even I could never have imagined.

  But let me start at the beginning.

  three

  My red bathing suit is old and faded. I haven’t worked out in a month, so what I see in the mirror is the Pillsbury doughboy reincarnated as a 16-year-old girl. I could hide under a sweatshirt or wear a bathrobe to the beach, but rare-day alert: I don’t care.

  Why?

  Refresher course: The state of big hair, big oil, shirts with snaps, and barbeque—my real world—is two thousand miles away.

  Texas is also a state of man-made lakes and easy tides and hello, in front of me is a giant ocean with wild, crashing waves, so I morph into a psyched six-year-old and zigzag in and out of the water, playing tag with the surf. I pretend that Marissa’s with me, because an imaginary friend is better than no friend at all. The sunlight glints off the water like a million winking lights.

  “Ow,” I call out, suddenly. Something sharp has stabbed my sole. Now I get why serious runners don’t go barefoot. Pebbles and sharp shells poke out of the smooth blanket of wet sand. You can’t avoid them. I hop into the water to numb the pain then focus on the music in my iPod and keep going.

  I concentrate on the rhythm of the music; the bongo drum beats of my heart. Eyes closed, I’m making my way through a world of darkness, all outside distractions shut away. When one sense is closed off, do the others compensate? I open my eyes to make sure I’m not about to collide head-on with anyone, then close them again and fill my lungs with salty air.

  Breathe, they tell you when you exercise. Don’t forget to breathe. I take hungry breaths and fill my lungs, flashing back to early morning hikes at camp when the world smelled fresh and piney as if it were the first day of creation and it belonged to us alone, the children of paradise. We’d run back on empty chanting one sorry chorus of a hundred bottles of beer on the wall after another and finally reward ourselves by fueling up on spongy yellow French toast and maple syrup. Then we’d go back to the bunk to write letters, mostly because we wanted to get mail, the only tangible proof of popularity.