NOVA SCOTIA HAD BEEN wrong from the start and they should have turned back earlier. It rained for a week, seven solid days and nights. The wipers got stuck at their highest setting and even when the sun came out, they kept banging back and forth like a pair of deranged metronomes. Her father missed the turn at Rivière-du-Loup, couldn’t ask for directions, and had to double back. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. The Bluenose Schooner from the dime was out on tour and a lazy-looking moose nearly killed them when it wandered out of the fog on the Cabot Trail. They swerved to avoid her and the guard rail left a long scar across their sliding door on the passenger side. Stace broke a tooth at the Fortress of Louisburg biting into an unbuttered chunk of old-fashioned, “historically accurate” bread that looked like a cannon ball baked in a dusty forge. They drank only Pepsi and ate nothing but blond, deep-fried morsels of indistinguishable seafood served in fake woven baskets with red and white checked wax paper and little plastic cups of pale green coleslaw served on the side. When the rain finally gave up, the air still felt damp and cold.
Her mother saw an opening in that first patch of sunlight.
“This is it,” she said. “Today we are going swimming. Come on. At least once before we go back. I want Stacey to feel what it’s like, the real ocean.”
Her father tried to shut it down.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Look at it.”
Across the road, the water steamed in steady and grey and metallic, like an assembly line churning through its rotations. Before they broke, the waves rose up three or four feet, not big, but jagged-looking and ugly. You could see chunks of debris and streaks of roiled-up seaweed in their faces like lines of graffiti scrawled on broken concrete walls.
“I think we better leave it alone this time,” he said. “Nothing we can do.”
He had a cold coming on. Stace could see red veins cracking in the corner of his eyes.
“Maybe we can lay low today. Go for a walk, pick some shells, take some pictures. Get something good to eat. We’ll book real lessons when we get back.”
“No,” her mother said, pushing it all the way through.
“When are we going to get the chance again? A girl can’t go through life being afraid of a little cold water.”
He didn’t have the strength.
“Whatever you want,” he said and he held up both his hands so she could see all ten of his fingers.
“But this one is all yours. I’m not going in.”
THE BEACH MADE STACE think of a city park during a garbage strike. To find a spot for their towels, they stepped through a jumble of sharp rocks, faded blue bottles of fabric softener and shredded Styrofoam buoys. There were a couple of broken lobster traps with short brown nails sticking out through the lathe and some larger, irregular shaped logs, even whole trees, bleached a petrified white, like the leftover bones of a rotted sea monster. Long, unfollowable lines of yellow rope wove in and out of the boulders and there were dozens of smashed Alexander Keith’s beer bottles scattered around a firepit. At the far corner of the beach, at the base of the cliff, Stace found a kid’s inflatable raft with paddles and oar locks and everything. It was a faded pink and yellow colour and there was a picture of a surfing Barbie on the punctured plastic floor.
WHEN STACE PUT HER FOOT in the ocean for the first time, the water came on hot, scorching hot and not cold at all. It seemed to pour itself into the space where her ankle met her shin and it felt like a metal crowbar had been jammed into her weakest soft spot and was trying to pry her open.
Her father came to watch but he wore his jeans and a heavy sweatshirt as a sign of protest. He sat on an overturned milk crate and opened his book.
“I am here as a witness,” he told them. “You wouldn’t catch me dead in there.”
It was hopeless. Three minutes in needed twenty minutes out. Five minutes required half an hour. Between trips, they wrapped themselves in layers of summer-coloured towels, hopped on the spot and took turns drinking hot chocolate from a thermos. They never went in past their hips. Below the surface, the beach sloped away from the shore at a sharp angle and after five or six steps, dropped away completely.
“You need to relax,” her mother repeated. She squeezed her hands too hard against Stace’s cheeks and spit instructions into her bluing ear.
“Belly up,” she said.
“Belly up. Lean all the way back. Look at the sky. Look at the sky.”
There was no chance. The cold came all the way through, making it impossible to sense anything else and whenever Stace felt even the beginnings of a fragile balance, a new wave would barge through and wash out her best efforts. The terrible salt water went fiery up her nose, into her eyes and down her throat. When she rolled onto her front, she put her hands on her mother’s shoulders and tried to blow bubbles and kick.
“Great, great,” her mother said.
“That’s the way. You’re doing well.”
It happened maybe a minute before they would have given up on their own. The big wave, the one that did it, seemed sent on purpose, an extra pulse of energy whipped into the sheet of water a hundred miles offshore and timed exactly for this task, triple the size of the ones immediately before and after. Her mother faced the shore and Stace was on her back again, looking up and hoping this would be the last time. The wall of water came into her vision, looming over her mother’s shoulder like an old-style gangster thug sifting out of the crowd in a grey trench coat with the brim of his fedora pulled down low. He was so thick and so wide, he blocked out the sky. He shoved her mother forward headfirst into the sand before grabbing the girl and carrying her off in the opposite direction.
Stace felt each one of her mother’s fingers releasing from around her head before the water spun her sideways and drew her away. She tried to thrash against the current and get her head back to the surface, but in the gritty mess she lost all sense of direction and couldn’t tell if she was moving up or down. They called this an ‘undertow.’ That was the word to describe what was happening. People said to watch out for it and she’d seen the letters printed out on warning signs. Use Caution: Severe Undertow. Beware: Dangerous Undertow in this Area. She thought the name was exactly right: an explanation that must have come from someone who felt this once and was able to report back to other people. Undertow. Water, working like a rope, like a tangled line attached to a massive winch at the bottom. I am going down the drain, she thought. I am going down.
The ocean was vast and empty and it could move in several different directions at the same time. It jostled her and she felt her neck snap back very hard while her hips and her legs went the other way. She reached out her arms, but there was nothing to hold onto and she felt like a person fumbling for the light switch in the middle of a dark room with a high ceiling and walls moving always farther apart. It could go on forever. She knew this. The ocean could go on forever.
Timing blurred. It was impossible to keep track of the minutes and seconds. The first flash of panic gave way to a cloudy, sleepy feeling. Nothing came in or went out — no air and no water. She felt completely full, as if all the gaps and extra spaces in her body had been made solid. She went limp and for a moment she felt like a floating thing, like a person who really might be able to move easily, and for a long time, in tune with the up and down beat of the ocean. This, she thought, this was it. Swimming. Almost right.
But then a series of sharp stinging pains came through her skull and she felt first the individual hairs, then whole clumps of her scalp being yanked out of her head. In a dizzy haze she thought she saw her father, but his glasses were gone and his sweatshirt seemed bloated and pulled strangely across his shoulders. His nose was scrunched up like something smelled very bad and he seemed angry, furious with somebody. She thought she heard her name.