“Stay with me Stacey,” he said.
“Stay here. I’ve got you. It’s going to be okay. We have you now. Stay with me.”
When her face broke the surface, he let go of her hair, flipped her over and looped his elbow under her chin in a kind of reverse headlock that kept her mouth and nose above the water. The air felt thin and unsubstantial. He went under several times trying to side-stroke back to the shore, sometimes bounding off the bottom. When he could finally touch, he put her over his shoulder and carried her for the last few steps before dumping her back onto the beach like a leaking bag of garbage. He collapsed on his hands and knees and a thin mix of bloody snot and vomit poured out of him. She coughed up mouthful after mouthful of perfectly clear water, then rolled over and stuck out her tongue to taste the sand. It coated her face and the inside of her cheeks and she mashed the grit into her teeth.
Her mother put towels around the two of them and rubbed the girl’s back, trying to get her to sit up.
“Can you hear me Stacey?” she said. “Are you okay?”
There was a raw trill in her voice and she placed her hands again on Stace’s cheeks, steadied the head and tried to look into her daughter’s eyes to see if there was anything there. She wasn’t sure if the girl was actually coming back, was even conscious, or could stay that way.
“Are you all right, Stacey?” She was screaming it now, repeating.
“Talk to me. Say something. Can you hear me?”
Stace’s head lolled off to the side and her eyes rolled back and showed her mother only whiteness. A sandy drool seeped onto her shoulder and she couldn’t keep her mouth closed.
Her mother thought of paralysis and oxygen deprivation and permanent brain damage. There was a thing called secondary drowning. She’d read about it. A person could look like they’d been saved but still end up lost. You could be pulled living from the water and die three hours later with your head on your pillow and your lungs full of fluid.
“Stacey,” she yelled. “Can you hear me? Tell me you’re all right. Nod if you can hear my voice. Tell me you’re okay. Look at me. Are you okay?”
The last thing the girl remembers is reaching out with her left hand and placing it over her mother’s mouth. Then she sucked in one more breath and used that air to say the word “No.”
She sees the water coming and then she doesn’t. The river rolls in and out of her vision as she falls. She is halfway around, on her side, when she hits and the surface stings hot against her skin like an open-palmed slap extending from her cheek all the way down to her left pinkie toe. Spread out across the top, the impact knocks the wind out of her and for a second, while everything is distorted, she thinks maybe she has ruptured an ear drum and tastes a trace of blood spilling into her mouth. The fall is so awkward she barely sinks and instead burps back to the surface. She pulls in one clear gulp of air, and though she can’t feel anything, not the temperature of the water or the air, she knows she is nearly perfectly unhurt. She forces her mind all the way down her arms and legs and makes her fingers and toes wiggle on command. She concentrates and tries to look below, but the dark and the silt obscure everything beyond her knees. When she extends her big toe and tries to feel around with her feet, she registers only an emptiness that might continue all the way to the bottom or might end in a wall of metal six inches farther down. As far as she can tell, the only hardness is the water itself and there is nothing else, no trap, waiting underneath.
She looks up at the hotel bedrooms, shakes her head, and wonders if any insomniac business travellers or romantic getaway couples caught a glimpse as she plummeted past their windows. The water really does taste like nothing and for a moment, as a warm exalted sense of relief washes all the way through her system, the current seems to be pushing her back to the side, back to the pilings and guiding her over to the good climbing out spot where there are two solid footholds and a bit of rope hanging down. Her ears are still foggy so she doesn’t hear and doesn’t respond to the worried calls from above. The mist casts a shadow over everything. They can’t see her and she can’t see them.
She is almost all the way back, almost out, the rope nearly in her hand, when she looks up at the M-shaped string of white lights hanging on the Ambassador Bridge like understated Christmas decorations. There is a faded image of the old Boblo boat, the Mississippi Paddler, painted on the side of a warehouse and permanent fires burning on Zug Island. The smokestacks leak unnatural combinations of purple and grey and almost pink.
She thinks about that man, the guy who jumped off the bridge several years ago in a failed suicide attempt. It was in the papers for weeks but it took a long time before the real story, the scandal, came out. They say he tried to kill himself but accidentally survived. That was the official version. Other people believed it was faked from the beginning. Even though dozens of witnesses had seen him jump, they still thought there had to be a trick behind it, some David Copperfield illusion.
Before tonight, Stace had never given one second of her time to this guy or his story. He was less than a fragment, a particle floating in her memory, one of the million unconnected facts you hear about and can’t forget. Before tonight, she didn’t know what to believe. Now, though, everything seems different and there is no confusion. She knows the fall could not have been planned or staged. Not from the bridge. Look at it. Not from that height. You couldn’t try to survive something like that; you just lived through it. A fluke occurrence.
It must have been strange. He’d have been hurt for sure, broken bones and internal bleeding and the rest, but it must have been shocking to be awake and completely aware of what was happening. The guy on the bridge, he wanted everything to stop when he reached the river. He was hoping to hit on a real ending, but then — surprise, surprise — all these new choices, the nasty ones, showed up only after he found himself floating on his back and he could still breathe and still see out through his eyes.
That’s probably when it came to him, she thinks, while he was moving in the current and looking at the sky.
Police on both sides of the border looked for his body for weeks. They dredged the river and sent dogs sniffing along the shore. When nothing turned up, the family believed he was lost for good. There was a funeral and a little insurance money. They went on and lived without him for years, building up entirely new versions of themselves. The kids moved away and the wife met somebody else.
Then the postcards started to arrive from some messed-up version of heaven. Miami, maybe, or The Magic Kingdom. The handwriting was unmistakable and the postmarks were recent. He wrote about how he missed them and loved them very much. He said he didn’t want them to worry anymore.
STACE BRINGS HER ARM out of the water, circles it through the air, and cuts back in. It feels almost like the beginning and she is surprised by the relaxed, instinctive slice of her hand moving through. Her body can do something it couldn’t do before. She looks at her fingers, barely visible beneath the surface and has to remind herself of what is happening. She is swimming at night by herself in the Detroit River. On the other side, the windows and elevators of the Renaissance Center shine like a downtown lighthouse only a mile away. In the pure terms of distance, it is not that far. One mile. In the pool, the whole expanse would be cut into 64 equal lengths and she does that almost every other day. If she really wanted to, Stace could swim to America, all the way to Hart Plaza. She could pull herself out, climb over the little fence, walk into the middle of the city and stand there in her dripping bathing suit, right in front of the statue of Joe Louis’s big hanging fist.