Surrounded by Sharks (4 page)

Davey was in up to his waist. That’s as far as he’d planned to go, but the breakers were coming in right at stomach height and really letting him have it. He decided to wade out a little farther, just past them. It’s not like he would get any wetter. The waves had already declared a splash fight and won handily. When Davey pushed his hand back through his hair, he was surprised to find it slick as an otter’s. He didn’t care; he was having fun. He waded out a little farther.

He’d just been through an entire Ohio winter: bleak and gray and cold. He’d spent almost all of it inside, and most of that in his room. This felt good. Splashing around in the sun. The water gave him a little tug under the surface, and he let out a little bark of laughter as he regained his balance. The splash fight was over, and the sea had just challenged him to a game of tug-of-war.

He wasn’t even sure which sea. His best guess was the Gulf of Mexico, but there was a chance it was the Caribbean. He made a mental note to check when he got back to the hotel room. As soon as he thought about that dark, crowded, smelly little room, he knew he’d made the right decision. Whichever sea it was, even if it was still just the Plain-Jane Atlantic, everyone back at school would be impressed.

He walked parallel to shore for a while. He looked back at the beach. It looked smaller than he remembered, and he had no trouble taking it all in. He was still alone. He saw the sign leaning over in the sand. He couldn’t read it from here without his glasses, but he knew what it said. He thought about swimming a little anyway. Just a few strokes to say he did it. He was a pretty good swimmer. He and Brando used to go down to the lake every day, back when he did things like that.

The ocean had gone quiet around him. He was so lost in thought that it took him a while to notice. When he did, he looked out to sea. The surface was flat in front of him. He assumed it was because he was out past the surf line. But when he looked in toward shore, the surface was flat there, too.

It was the strangest thing. There were breakers on both sides of it, and then this band of flat water in between. It was as if something was knocking the waves down here. And something else seemed weird. It was the breakers; they’d moved so far in toward shore.

He got a sick feeling in his gut.

He took a breath and told himself not to panic.

The breakers hadn’t moved farther in. He’d gone farther out. Much farther than he’d intended. Much, much farther. The water was up to the middle of his chest, and suddenly that seemed way too deep.

He stopped walking and felt the same tug under the surface that he’d felt before. And now the panic flooded through him: It had never stopped. He’d been walking against it this whole time. It had pulled him a little farther out with each step, leading him along like a bad friend. He looked down. The water was so clear that he could see his feet. He could practically count his toes. But he was so far from shore. The slope had been gentle up to this point, but it could drop off five, ten, twenty feet at any moment. He’d be in over his head — over his head in some sea he couldn’t even name.

He started in toward shore. At least he tried to. He took a big step, and then another. He pushed his legs through the water as hard as he could. But the water pulled back just as hard. Every time his feet left the bottom, the sea tugged him backward. After half a dozen steps, he was sure he was no closer to shore.

His forehead was still slick with water, but he felt the sweat break out along it in little pinpricks. He decided to swim for it. He lunged forward and began kicking before his face even hit the water. Once it did, he began throwing his arms forward.

His fear wanted him to flail away, to scratch and claw at the surface. He didn’t let himself. He needed to do this right. He remembered his lessons, maintained proper form. He kicked with his legs and pulled his outstretched hands through the water in full, even strokes. He looked to the side to get his air.

And he needed that air. His lungs began to burn almost immediately. It had been a long time since he’d swum to anything farther out than the raft at the lake. And even that was a while ago. He’d barely gone to the lake at all the summer before. He remembered the swim in from the year before that. How he would run the length of the raft and dive headfirst. He’d glide and kick to see how far he could go underwater. By the time he’d come up, he’d be halfway to shore.

The memory was so strong that Davey expected to be halfway to the beach by now. He was tired and needed a break anyway, so he broke his rhythm and took a quick look forward. If he’d had enough air in his lungs, he would’ve screamed. The beach was farther away now. It looked so small, like he could hold it in his hand. So small, and so empty. He wanted to call for help, but there was no one there.

It had been a mistake to swim. He knew that now. He stopped kicking and let his feet fall back underneath him. He pushed his arms sideways through the water to keep his head and shoulders steady. In a few moments, he was straight up and down in the water. But he wasn’t standing. His feet could no longer reach the bottom.

He kicked a few times, just to stay afloat. He took a few quick gulps of air. And then he began kicking and throwing his arms forward. He scratched at the surface of the water. He clawed.

Panic turned to desperation and Davey turned that into effort. He was cranking out more effort than he ever had. Swimming had been a mistake — this whole thing had been a mistake! But here he was, and swimming was all he had now. He just needed to try harder, to get back to where his feet could touch.

But desperation is a fast-burning fuel. His muscles ached as he threw them forward. His lungs screamed for more oxygen. His rhythm fell apart. He turned his head to the side to breathe, but he got greedy. He was still sucking in air as his head turned back down. He inhaled bitter salt water and coughed facedown in the sea. More water slipped in. He spit out as much as he could and kept going.

He was no quitter. He never had been. He could read an entire book in one sitting. A lot of people have probably done that, but for Davey, the book might be four hundred pages and the sitting six hours. He’d won races in gym by being kind of fast for longer than his classmates could be really fast. And Davey was pretty sure that if he stopped trying now, he would die. Keep trying or die. It wasn’t even a question.

As he got farther from shore, he approached a sandbar lurking under the surface. That’s what had caused this. As the ocean had pushed forward and the waves had piled onto shore, tremendous pressure had built up for all that water to get back out to sea. The sandbar had shifted, as it did sometimes, and a gap had opened up. The water had found the gap and rushed back through it. People called them riptides, but they weren’t really tides at all. Rip current was more accurate. That’s what they were: currents, shifting and dangerous.

Davey had started counting his strokes in sets of four. It helped calm his raging mind and gave him something to focus on. He couldn’t keep swimming forever, but he could do another four. On the fourth stroke of his next set, he forced himself a little farther up out of the water. He sucked in a lungful of much-needed oxygen and risked a quick look forward. With water in his eyes and without his glasses, the beach was a blur of color far away. Still so far away. He fell back into the water. Higher up meant deeper down, and now he was under the surface.

It was quiet under here. Even his aching muscles eased a bit in the warm churn. It was almost peaceful.
This is how I’ll die
, he thought.
Under the warm, clear water
. They say that, right before death, your whole life flashes in front of you in seconds. And if a whole life takes seconds for an adult, how long does it take for a thirteen-year-old? And how long does just one memory take? It flashed into Davey’s mind fully formed, like a fish pulled from the water.

It was his family’s last vacation, two years ago. They’d skipped last year. They were staying with relatives in Colorado and had spent a day riding down a fast-moving river on inner tubes. They were all bundled in fancy, neon-yellow life jackets. Fallen tree branches had snagged on the river bottom and collected into big bird-nest-looking tangles in some places.

The family had sailed past the first few with their dad calling out orders: “Watch out!” and “Left, left, left!” or “Right, right, right!” But Brando had managed to bull’s-eye the third one. He rode the fast-moving current right into the center of it, and his tube stuck fast. Brando popped right out of it and into the water. His life jacket had been way too big for him, and he’d bobbed down the river like a yellow rubber ducky. Their mom angled over and scooped him up. No harm, no foul, except that now his tube was hung up on branches back upstream.

They’d left a security deposit, and their dad was determined to get the tube back. The rest of them angled their tubes over into the shallow water along the bank and watched. He took off his life jacket, dove into the water, and swam for it.

Tam was a good swimmer. At first, he made some progress. It was two steps forward with every powerful stoke. But the current would push him one step back on every little pause in between. He made it maybe ten feet back upriver before the ratio started to reverse. One step forward with every stroke, two steps back with every pause. Pretty soon he was right back where he started. He’d looked at his family, surprised to see them right there. Davey remembered his father’s face, exhausted and embarrassed.

Tam had dived back in. Tried again. But this time he hadn’t even made it five feet, not even the length of his body. In the end, he had to walk through the bushes and prickers along the bank, wearing just his shorts and life jacket. He got scratched and cut and stung by a bee. He got upstream of the tube, dove back in, and got a hold of it, but he never said another thing about it.

Davey pushed back to the surface. His muscles roared with outrage. They thought they were done with effort, done with everything. But he battled on. He breathed in quick gulps, but water still slipped in, this time through his nose. He cleared it as best he could, but he could feel himself beginning to hyperventilate. He pushed his muscles to the point of exhaustion and then past that.

All that effort, and this time he was the one who couldn’t make it five feet. A river in the sea. That was the only way he could understand it: He was in a river in the sea. How could he fight a thing like that? How could he win when even his dad had given up?

He gave up and the current took him. The sun pushed light through his closed eyelids. He was barely conscious, floating backward. Some primitive part of his brain — not even human, really — kept his systems going. The rest of his brain — all the higher functions, the brain that had been able to read a fat book in one sitting — could hold only one simple thought now:
Stay afloat
. His legs twitched when they could into something like a kick.
If you can, stay afloat
.

And he was carried out to sea.

Brando fell off the bed. It was bound to happen. He’d fallen asleep on the very edge of the thing. He rolled one way to get more comfortable. Then he rolled back and onto the floor. His head pumpkin-thunked on the soft carpet.

“Corn dog!” he blurted. It’s what he said when his Spider-Sense told him his parents were around.

They’d been close to waking anyway. Now, as if they were garage doors activated by the words
corn dog
, they rose. His mom sat straight up in bed like a zombie rising from an autopsy table. His dad finally stopped snoring. In the sudden quiet, Brando could hear him throw off the covers on the far side of the bed.

Pamela was the first to speak. “Brando?” she said. “Davey? Was that you?”

From her perch on the bed, she could see neither of her sons.

Brando rubbed his head and heard himself say, “Davey’s not here.”

And, oh boy, that did it. Pamela followed his voice down. She wasn’t especially surprised to find her youngest on the floor in between the beds. Then she looked over at the cot and her mouth dropped open.

“What do you mean, ‘not here’?” she said at the exact same moment that Tam said, “Well, where is he?”

Brando got to his feet. His mom’s face was puffy from sleep. The side of his dad’s face was a web of red lines from where it had been pressing against the pillow. Brando almost felt bad for them. They’d been awake for seconds on the first day of their first vacation in two years and they already had something to be mad about. He was just glad it wasn’t him. “How should I know?” he said.

*  *  *

Three minutes later, they were at the front desk. Marco, long back from the dock, was on the other side.

“Has our son been past here?” said Tam.

Uh-oh
, thought Marco, but what he said was: “What does your son look like?”

Tam waved his hand toward Brando. “Like this one, but a little bigger,” he said. “Has glasses.”

Marco looked at Brando and tried to picture him older and with glasses. “Sorry,” he said. “Not this morning.”

“How long have you been back there?” said Pamela, still tugging at the sundress she’d thrown on.

“Do you mean behind the desk?” said Marco. For some reason, he didn’t like the phrase
back there
.

“Yes,” she said. “Obviously.”

Marco didn’t like that
obviously
, either, but he took a deep breath and told her, “About half an hour.”

“That’s not very long,” said Pamela.

Marco did not like this lady.

“Who was here before you?” said Tam, trying to edge back into the conversation.

Marco knew this would set the lady off, but he said it anyway. “No one. It’s ring for service during overnight hours.”

“What? That’s … I’ve never even …” sputtered Pamela before collecting herself. “I’ve never been to a hotel that didn’t have
someone
on duty!”

Marco wanted to say,
Well, you’ve probably never been to a hotel on a tiny island before. We don’t get a lot of walk-in business from frickin’ dolphins!
Instead, another deep breath. “Well,” he said, “I can tell you that he didn’t ring the bell.”

Pamela glared at him, but Tam pulled her away. “Thank you very much,” he said. “I’m sure he’s just checking things out.”

Marco nodded and gave them a halfhearted smile.

*  *  *

Brando followed his parents toward the front door. He was close enough to hear his dad whisper to his mom, “Don’t make him mad. We might need his help this week.”

“I hope not,” she whispered.

They pushed through the glass double doors and began calling out Davey’s name. Brando trailed after them, mortified.

“Davey!” shouted Tam. His voice was blunt and loud.

“Davey!” called Pamela, her voice sharper and still a little raspy.

Brando kept his mouth shut. An older couple out for a walk turned and stared at them, and Brando burned with embarrassment.
Yep
, he thought,
the Tserings have arrived
.

His parents looked around and stopped shouting. They could see the whole front of the hotel and most of the main beach from here, and the old couple were the only people in sight.

“Least he won’t get lost in the crowd,” said Tam.

“We should’ve gotten coffee first,” said Pamela, batting his arm.

That’s when Brando realized that they weren’t all that concerned. And why should they be? It was an island. How far could Davey go? They weren’t even especially mad. Brando exhaled.
Good
, he thought.
Maybe they won’t kill him when they find him
.

“Maybe there’s somewhere out here that sells it,” said Tam. “I think I see some kind of stand up the path.”

He pointed to the left. Pamela leaned over to look around him. Two sharp thumps carried through the air as the stall’s storm shutters were thrown open. “Looks like they’re opening up.”

Without another word, they began walking in that direction. Adults and their coffee. Brando didn’t understand it: The stuff tasted like motor oil. But he knew that they were now looking for two things: one was served in a cup, the other wore glasses.

He looked around as they walked. It was seriously nice out here, and it felt good to be outside without a jacket. He looked up at his parents. They were looking around, too. He followed his mom’s eyes out to sea and saw that she had the beginnings of a smile on her face. That was good for her, especially these days. He was now ready to contribute to the search.

“He took his book,” he said.

“What’s that?” said Tam.

“He took that book. It wasn’t with the others.”

His parents were quiet for a few moments, and then Tam broke the silence. “Ha!” he barked.

Pamela smiled, a real smile this time. “Our outlaw son,” she said. “Sneaking off to read.”

They both laughed. They didn’t look at each other when they did, but they still kind of shared a laugh. Brando hadn’t seen them do that in a long time, and it made him feel good.

“Keep an eye out for the reflection off his glasses!” he said, and got a few more little laughs out of them. They were making the most of it, but the mood started to change after that. The farther they went with no sign of Davey, the tenser they got.

“I was sure he’d be right outside,” said Tam.

“On one of those chairs out front or maybe that little patio,” said Pamela, picking up the thought.

Their heads were on a swivel now. Their lazy looks to the side had become sharp turns toward the slightest sound. They began stepping off the walkway to look behind trees or down side paths.

And then they began calling out again. His mom stuck with his name, just “Davey! Davey!” over and over. His dad mixed it up sometimes with a “Where are you, champ?”

It didn’t bother Brando as much anymore. He wasn’t too worried. Davey had been going places without his parents — the lake, the store, the library — since he was nine or ten. And not just going to those places, but taking Brando there, too. So he wasn’t exactly worried. Not exactly. But he wasn’t embarrassed by the calls anymore, either.

He saw a woman walking along the edge of the beach with a baby slung to her front in a harness. He pointed her out, and his mom walked over and did the talking. “Have you seen a young boy? About this tall? With glasses?”

Even from back on the walkway, Brando could see that she was embarrassed. She’d lost her boy, and here this woman was holding her child closer than her purse. His mom didn’t like being embarrassed at all. She wouldn’t do it if she wasn’t at least a little worried.

The stand they’d seen opening up did sell coffee, but the first batch wasn’t quite ready when they got there.

“Five minutes,” said the man, who hadn’t seen Davey, either.

They could already smell it beginning to brew, but they didn’t wait.