The sun is setting when the little boy calls out for help. I don’t hear his scream, but his father does. I am sitting on the wet sand, closer to the water than to my own father, when a man, strong and sturdy, dives into Lake Michigan and wrestles the cresting waves as he swims toward deep water.
“A boy is caught in the riptide!” someone screams, far away but not far enough.
“Get out of the water!”
Dad calls to me then, his voice towing my twelve-year old body from the shore and closer to where he is, on the beach beside my stepbrother, Charlie. They stand together, shirtless, two twin pillars, white skin freckled with sand. Dad wears sunglasses over his eyes, and I wonder if the sunset looks less haunting when dimmed. Charlie squints and raises a hand to his forehead, his bare chest pink and raw. Both hold thermoses in their hands. They look small to me now, standing with the great lake behind me, and as I move toward them, my body sinking into the sand, I feel the water drawing me back as if the riptide has wrapped her wet fingers around my ankles and is keeping me tethered.
Down the beach, another man dives into the water after the first. The father has reached his son: a bobbing head, a grasping arm, a limp body. A woman standing close to the shore is screaming. I am certain that she is the mother. Another has her arms wrapped around her. The mother’s cries remind me of a woman I had seen at the department store weeks earlier. The raw cry of emotion pulled from her throat when her small child fell from the seat of the cart, hitting his head on the hard floor, and was silent.
“This is not good,” Dad says. I stand in front of him now, watching the wild waves. The father and son are small in the water, like two sitting gulls gliding closer to shore.
“That kid is going to die,” Charlie states. I look up at my brother. Charlie is bigger than my father, two inches taller with broad shoulders and a burgeoning stomach that presses against the seams of his swim trunks. I am twelve and he twenty-two but, standing there, watching him drink from a coffee thermos that I know is filled with rum, he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and I feel that he is the child and I am the adult and the weight of death is a burden we will share together.
In the water, the boy’s father calls to the men swimming toward him. He needs help. I hold my breath.
One Mississippi.
Two Mississippi.
Three.
The boy is in his father’s arms. I think they are going to be all right. A man has reached them now. They aren’t far from the beach. The father passes his son to the other, waves growing behind him like the silent shadows that follow me home on the dark nights after summer has given way to fall.
Four Mississippi.
Five Mississippi.
The boy wraps his arms around the man’s neck and then the father is gone. Three bopping heads are now two. The man holding the boy swims toward shore. When he stands, I see there are dinosaurs on the boy’s swim trunks. Green and blue and red and yellow. The woman runs into the water and clutches the child to her chest. Her cries are drowned out by the sound of the waves crashing into shore. Two more men run into the water, but the father has disappeared.
Ten Mississippi.
Eleven Mississippi.
The evening light is fading when the men and the women walk toward the water. The sun has slipped under the horizon, and the sky’s palette is washed with a deepening shade of pink, the same color as the rose bushes my mother dug up when she moved out of the house I still call home and into the duplex halfway across town.
“Stay with Charlie,” Dad says. He sets down his cup and runs toward the water. My father has been a runner ever since my grandfather died five years ago. On every third day of the week, he slips on the same yellowing, sweat-stained T-shirt and pair of navy-blue shorts that were always dirty in the hamper, and leaves the house for two hours.
“That’s when I talk to my dad,” he says. “I hear him best when my feet are barely touching the ground.”
I think about this now as I watch Dad step into line with those who have gathered at the water. He links arms with the strangers beside him, a long thread of bodies stretching down the beach.
Twenty-five Mississippi.
Twenty-six.
The line waits for another minute, until they are sure everyone is linked together, secured by the bones and skin of those beside them. They are hundreds of strangers braced against the beating waves. They are dark silhouettes against the fading sun.
And they are going out to find the father.
Lake Michigan swallows. Over one hundred people die in the Great Lakes per year. More than seventy percent of deaths are in Lake Michigan. I was just over five years old when I got caught in my first undertow. I was staying with my father at a cottage on a hill that overlooked the more desolate parts of the lakeshore. The house was small but looking at the water through the fogged glass windows of early morning, the world seemed large and beautiful.
The beach was seventy-two steps down a set of rickety wooden stairs and littered with sticks and pebbles and pieces of broken glass that had yet to be smoothed by the water. I had taken swimming lessons that year, the same year my mother packed the dishes and the towels and the candles into boxes labeled “kitchen” and “bathroom” and “bedroom” and began to understand that a house could be pulled apart and put into boxes that, when stacked together, looked nothing like a home.
I had always been a water rat, quick to jump into any lake or pool. In swim class, all I wanted to do was hold my breath and let my body sink to the bottom of the pool. It was quieter there, underwater, and I counted slowly, begging my lungs to expand before my body betrayed me and I was forced to break through the surface.
At the cottage, my father watched me in the lake from the base of the stairs. He puffed on cigarettes and nodded while I dove and cut through the waves, practicing holding my breath for longer than a minute. I had just learned how to do a somersault underwater, and I was folding my knees to my chest when I twisted under the waves and felt the water wrap around my ankles and hold me under. My body writhed against the current. The water pushing against my calves and knees was colder, fiercer, and I kicked hard to free myself from its grasp. When I surfaced with a sharp gasp and wild eyes, I ran from the lake, betrayed by her icy clutch.
My father held a towel spread wide between his arms as I stumbled toward him, breathless and trembling.
“That was a marvelous performance,” he said, sitting on the bottom step and pulling me onto his knee. He was thin then, the weight shedding off him with every box my mother filled, and I was still getting used to the feel of his bony arms and legs holding me close, not as warm and secure as his embrace had been when she was still just in the other room.
“There was an undertow,” I said, my eyes wide.
“Was there?” His eyes crinkled and I knew he didn’t believe me. “The water is quite calm today, kiddo.”
My father never loved the water like I did and, because he didn’t sink into the waves and feel his body lulled by the rolling liquid, I imagined that he didn’t know what it felt like to feel betrayed by something that had once been only comforting. He hadn’t felt the fear of the riptides and the icy currents and the unrelenting clutch of the deep waters that grasped you.
“I felt it,” I told him. “I felt it grab me.”
Four hours before the human chain forms, Dad and Charlie and I walk across the hot sand toward the water. We park in a lot about a quarter of a mile from the lake. We gather the towels and the cooler and the chairs and the bags filled with chips and cheese and crackers into our arms until there is nothing left to do but trek across the long strip of sand that greets the lake. There is nowhere closer to park. The burning sand is the price, the lake the reward. Lake Michigan demands to be wanted.
We walk past the red flags flying on the poles. No one should be swimming today. But everyone does. Michigan natives are born with lake water and sand in their veins, my grandmother likes to say. And, with such strong currents rushing through us, we know that red flag days mean body surfing and whitecaps that crash against your body, that slap your skin wet and wild.
We settle in the open space between countless other beachgoers. Those who sit in chairs, lie on towels, huddle under colorful umbrellas that threaten to fold in the wind. Dad and Charlie sit in chairs facing the water, the red-and-white cooler placed between them. No alcohol is allowed on the beach, but they pour rum into coffee thermoses and top it off with a quick splash of soda. Dad hands me the rest of the can to drink.
I tell Dad that I am going in the water. The wind is fierce against my skin and I am aching to be in the waves, to feel the whitecaps push my body up and over the crest making me laugh and shriek because, in the water, I feel alive.
“Hey,” Charlie says, pulling his T-shirt over his head. “Where’s your swimsuit at?”
I look down at my body. I am wearing gym shorts and a long T-shirt of Dad’s that falls to midthigh, hiding the curves of my chest and hips, still foreign to me in the last few months. I fold my arms over my chest. “I’m just going to wear this.” I shrug.
“No one is going to be looking at your new boobies.” Charlie laughs, and my face burns hotter than the sand.
Dad laughs, too, a cough and a hiss.
I walk away from the two men and let the water slowly envelop me. I jump over the small waves, tempered by the shore, until I am waist-deep and the waves lunge at my stomach, my chest, my shoulders. The shirt that was once my father’s clings to my body, and I can see my white, paisley-printed bra through the damp fabric. The water has undressed me.
“Stay where I can see you,” Dad calls out.
When I look back, he and Charlie are laughing while they pour more booze into water bottles. A few paces down the beach, a boy with a dinosaur-printed swimsuit is playing in the sand.
Lake Michigan freezes but stays wild under the ice. Once, in the middle of winter, on a frigid Sunday afternoon just after my mother moved all of her things from the house she had shared with my father, he and I walked along the Grand Haven pier toward the red lighthouse that dripped with sharp icicles larger than my body. It was mid-January, two weeks after my fifth birthday, and my father told me he was going to take me to see something I would never see again.
It was cold that year,the coldest Michigan had seen in decades, and the lake had almost completely frozen over. But when a Great Lake freezes, it doesn’t harden into a smooth, glass-like pane, but curdles into sharp, ice-crusted peaks that look more like a snow-capped mountain range seen from high above. The waves, rolling and ready to crest, get caught in the winter air and freeze, like a sharp gasp startled from a sigh.
“This is because Lake Michigan is a sister to the ocean,” my father said. “She is always restless and never at peace.”
We walked carefully along the pier, one foot in front of the other. Concrete ices over much faster than water. By the lighthouse, we stilled and looked out over the frozen lake. The day was gray and I watched my fogged breath circle around me. Two men stood about fifty feet away from the pier, on a flat part of the mostly uneven ice. They wore long coats, thick hats with flaps that covered their ears, mittens, and heavy boots as they stood beside a hole in the ice, a fishing pole held in hand.
“Takes a lot of courage to be standing out there.” My father nodded toward the men. “The ice may look sturdy, but it’s never as thick as you think.” He lit a cigarette under a cupped palm and slowly blew out the smoke. “The current is strong. If you fall through,” he said, looking down at me, “it will grab you so fast you will be pulled under and never find your way out.”
My eyes widened and my small hands balled up into fists inside my mittens.
My father chuckled and pulled me to his side, ruffling the top of my head with his hand. “Don’t you worry, kiddo,” he said. “If you fell in, I would be right there to save you.” He bent down and picked me up, lifting me onto his shoulders. I looked out over the frozen water and spread my arms wide, trying to touch every part of the lake with my fingertips.
My father looked up at me through softened eyes. “I’ll always be there to save you.”
Two weeks before a little boy wearing dinosaurprinted swim trunks went out into the water, Charlie grabbed me. I was coming upstairs from my basement bedroom. It was evening and I had been busy puzzling through equations and variables, and I was thirsty and hungry and twelve years old.
My father was sitting on the couch, a crossword puzzle in hand. He was wearing thick reading glasses and rubbed a palm over his thinning hair as he bit the end of the pen.
“You finish your homework?” he asked, not looking up from the puzzle.
I nodded, headed into the kitchen, and filled a glass with water from the sink. Charlie came in from the back porch. He smelled like cigarette smoke and cheap cologne. My stepmother was working that evening and it was just my father, Charlie, and me in the house.
Charlie’s face broke into a grin when he saw me. “Hey look,” he laughed and pointed at my chest. “I think you’re getting boobies now!”
I looked down at my body involuntarily. I was wearing pajama shorts and a tank top, and I was suddenly aware of all the parts of me that had curved and widened and rounded. I dumped the rest of the water in the sink and turned away from him, heading back toward the living room.
My father chuckled.
“It’s a good thing,” Charlie exclaimed, following me. “All of the boys will want to kiss you now.”
At the base of the stairs, I paused and looked at my father. He crossed his legs at the ankle, one over the other, and pressed his pen against the paper.
Charlie walked to where I stood, wrapped his large fingers around my forearm. I stilled. He pulled my body to him with a twist of his wrist and pressed himself against me. His wet, sour lips pressed hard on my own. My palms pushed against his chest, but his icy grip was too strong. He thrust his tongue in my mouth and I couldn’t breathe.
One Mississippi.
Two Mississippi.
Three.
And then it was over. He pushed me away and laughed. “Hey Bill!” he called to my father from across the room. “I just gave your daughter her first kiss.”
“Hmmm,” my father grunted. A nod of the head. He never looked up.
I ran downstairs and closed the door to my bedroom behind me. I twisted the lock but it wouldn’t click. I swirled the broken lock around and around in my fingers, begging it to latch. I slid against the back of the door and used my weight to hold it closed.
Four Mississippi.
Five Mississippi.
How long can you hold your breath underwater before you need to breathe? I had never lasted more than two minutes. Upstairs, I heard my father and Charlie together. Their laughter crashed over me in waves.
The human chain searches for over thirty minutes before they find the father. Four ambulances have arrived, red and blue drops of color splashing the water. It is nearly dark. The wind has settled and the water is calmer than before. Two boats drift close to the sand and a helicopter circles over the air. But it is the chain that finds the father. Somewhere down the line, not near my own father, someone calls out, and they pull the body from the lake and into a boat. The chain retreats, weaves its way back toward the shore, dark silhouettes with linked arms still held tight.
On the way home from the lake, Charlie sleeps in the back seat. The darkness has settled and the light from the moon shines on my father’s face as he drives. His hair is still wet, his swim trunks bleeding a water stain onto the seat cushion. His skin is weathered from the water, and he looks older than he did that morning.
“You were so brave out there today,” I say to him.
“I did what I had to do,” he tells me. “When someone needs saving, you act. You do what you can to make sure they are safe.”
We are quiet the rest of the way, the three of us, together. Charlie snores in the backseat and my father drives with one hand on the wheel, the other braced against the window and leaning against the side of his face. I look out the car window and watch the dotted white lines slip under the car wheels as we drive. I don’t think about the boy with the dinosaur-printed swimsuit. I don’t think about the ways his father saved him. I don’t think about how tonight, when I get home, I will peel off my wet clothes and wrap myself in layers of clothing before I slip into bed just so I can feel safe in my own skin. I don’t think about how I will try the lock on my bedroom door once again. Just in case. I don’t think about how I will wedge a chair underneath the knob, how I will sleep with a plastic whistle under my pillow just so I can fall asleep and not wake up afraid.
The car rides faster now on the interstate. The lines blur and roll beneath us and I lean my forehead against the glass of the window. I hold my breath and I begin to count.