The swimmer tried to sit up, groaning in pain, but was kept supine by the medics, who affixed an oxygen mask to his face.
Jeff asked for a blanket, and it took a moment for the lifeguard to recognize that the long-haired young man before him, in T-shirt and boxers, had been involved and was soaked and hypothermic. He fetched another blanket from the truck and tossed it to Jeff. Jeff pulled it tight over his shoulders. The lifeguard turned his attention to Jeff, and Jeff stood to answer his questions. Dennis—per the name tag, though whether it was a first or last name was never revealed—asked him to describe what had happened. Jeff saw that Dennis’s mustache wasn’t entirely silver but had patches of yellow in it. As Jeff ran down everything that had occurred, he watched Dennis’s eyes go from squinting to wide open, his crow’s-feet stretching to reveal little folds of paler skin usually hidden from the sun. Dennis said that the swimmer had been very fortunate that Jeff had been on the beach. This could have been a very different call, he said, as if concerned mainly with the progress of his morning.
The swimmer clutched his chest and moaned again. Dennis went to the truck to pull out a wooden board with straps attached to it. He and the medics started securing the swimmer to it.
The swimmer turned his gaze to Jeff for the first time. With the oxygen mask on his face he was the inverse of the man Jeff had pulled from the water, nose and mouth now covered, eyes exposed, one lid slightly drooping, whether congenital or from the trauma it was impossible to say. His eyes were light, blue or green, and together with his furrowed brow, conveyed puzzlement. He raised his arm a few inches, as if he might point at Jeff or make some other gesture, but a medic guided it back down and strapped him in.
I saved your life, Jeff wanted to say. But it was for the swimmer to say, not him.
More people gathered to see what was going on, and in an effort to get closer, a few moved in front of Jeff. Dennis and the medics loaded the swimmer onto the back of the truck. With the tailgate down and a medic on either side, they rolled toward the beach lot.
The onlookers returned to whatever they’d been doing with their morning, and Jeff was left alone. He gathered his pants, his socks, his shoes—the trail of panic he’d left on his way into the water. He peeled off his soaked shirt and, under the blanket, his underwear. Then he pulled on his dry pants.
The ambulance left the beach lot, sirens howling, and the lifeguard truck U-turned away from the lot. Jeff stood, expecting it to return to him, but after heading his way for a moment, it turned south toward the pier. Perhaps Dennis hadn’t seen him standing there, or had been called away to handle another emergency.
Jeff collected his shoes, shirt, and underwear, then trudged across the sand to the spiral ramp that led to the pedestrian bridge. Joggers and walkers gave him wide berth. None would meet his eye. Wrapped in a rough wool blanket, barefoot, with disheveled long hair, shirtless, he must have looked like just another of the hard-luck cases wandering aimlessly around that so-called paradise.
5
“A hero,” I said.
He looked out the window, then at his nails. A quiet “I wouldn’t” escaped from his lips, and he seemed a different person from the one who had described the rescue in such vivid and energetic detail. I sensed that he wasn’t sure how or even whether to proceed.
“You must have felt a sense of pride in what you’d done,” I said.
He sipped his beer. “I was exhausted. I got back to the house and collapsed on the bed. Didn’t get up until the afternoon. Only then did it occur to me to call somebody. My first thought was G, but we’d put a moratorium on communication after one too many late-night drunk dials. Dylan, the actor friend whose house-sitting gig I had taken over, was shooting in Vancouver. My other college buddies Emilio and Mark—remember them?”
I did not.
“They’d moved to the South Bay after graduation and I’d lost touch with them because of the G thing, classic case of guy meets girl, guy abandons friends. I knew I could call them, and that they’d let me right back in, but I knew also how they would react to my story—big congratulations and a round of drinks. You know, walk me up to a girl in the bar and tell her that I’d just saved a man’s life.”
“Not what you wanted,” I said.
Jeff finished his beer, set the bottle down a bit too hard.
He shook his head.
“I didn’t want to be celebrated, no.”
“But you’d done something remarkable.”
“That’s how they would have seen it.”
“And you?”
“I might as well have had a gun to my head. I’d acted on instinct, or at least on the fear of what would happen if I didn’t act. I would never have chosen to find myself in that situation. In fact, I resented it. I didn’t want those images in my head, the purple lips, cold, the broken ribs scraping, not to mention that I had no idea whether the guy had actually made it, I mean, after the ambulance took him away, he could have succumbed to whatever it was that had left him floating there in the first place.”
“To be honest, if you’d called me, I probably would have tried to buy you a drink too.”
“I get it. But that would have been like dropping a manhole cover on everything.”
“You were traumatized.”
He brought his hand to his chin and cast his eyes down. He may have been considering my words. After a moment, he sat up straight, his forearms resting on the arms of his chair as if he were readying himself for electrocution.
“In any case,” he said, “I ended up not telling anyone.”
“Then.”
“Ever.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right.
“Surely I’m not the first person you’ve told this to?”
He nodded.
“You’ve been hanging on to this story for going on two decades, and now you tell it to me? Me? Come on. You’re pulling my leg.”
He removed his glasses, rubbed his eyes, put his glasses back on.
“Wish I was,” he said. “You appearing out of nowhere must have sparked some old circuitry up in here.” He tapped his temple.
“Assuming you’re being serious—”
“Oh yes.”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone? You couldn’t have been that averse to someone calling you a hero.”
“That wasn’t it. It just— It became impossible.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“I don’t want to monopolize our conversation.”
“Not at all.”
“Besides,” he said, “I don’t know if I should get into it.”
I sat back and waited for him to make up his mind.
6
The next day, he continued, clearing his throat, he called in sick. Whether it was the chill, or whatever had caused his stuffy nose in the first place, or a coincidence, he ended up developing a terrible cold and fever, at times slipping into a state of delirium, reliving the rescue in his dreams, haunted by the reflective goggles and purple lips.
After the fever and cold had passed, he returned to the beach, hoping to tamp down the images circling in his head. To go there and have nothing happen, he thought, might overwrite his memories.
He went early again, parked on the bluffs. It was warmer than it had been before, with a light offshore wind blowing. The ocean was an antique mirror under low clouds, the horizon razor sharp. There were bigger waves in the water, long smooth blue walls collapsing all at once, trapped air exploding out the back in plumes. It was a different ocean. A good sign, he thought. The ever-changing ocean wasn’t going to repeat itself.