That innocent, yet inherently creepy giggle plus the sound of scattering stones from the ground in front of the tent. Someone was outside.
I sat up as quickly as I could, body poised, my heart pounding painfully, flooding my head with blood and pressure. My eyes searched wildly around the walls of the tent, looking for signs of anything abnormal. The walls ebbed and flowed with the wind but there wasn’t anything peculiar.
The giggles came again, this time from right behind my head. I spun around expecting to see a child there in the tent with me. But I was alone.
Then I heard it again. I quickly turned to the sound and caught a glimpse of a small shadow running back from the tent flap.
I stood up and unzipped it as quickly as I could and burst out of the tent. The giggling had stopped but I could hear delicate footfalls over the wind. I ran a few steps and stopped in the middle of the path. The rain had led up for the moment but the ground was already muddy, like brown soup. I looked down towards the beach area and then up to where the path led either into the woods or the outhouse.
There was nothing.
A terrible, skin–crawling feeling washed over my arms and legs, as if I were being watched by something I couldn’t quite see. I wanted nothing more than to see Dex coming around the corner.
The giggle again, this time from behind me in the direction of the beach.
I turned and saw a little girl running along the sliding wet pebbles, skirting the incoming waves and dodging the hulking driftwood. She was wearing only a long men’s shirt that covered her whole body. It was pressed against her tiny form in a bluish transparency, soaked from the rain.
I wasn’t sure what to do. Why was there a kid here on the island, running around in the storm? Why was she wearing just a men’s shirt? Where were her parents?
I looked around me and started off after her. I didn’t have much of a maternal instinct but I still couldn’t let some young girl run around in this weather dressed like that. As I reached the beach, I could see she didn’t even have shoes on.
I stopped and watched her run excitedly down the beach until she stopped halfway, her back to me. She couldn’t have been more than three or four years old. I started to take off my jacket, wanting to put it on her while I figured out what was going on. It was totally possible that she was the child of someone visiting. Maybe boaters or kayakers on the other side of the island. Or maybe there were people on the island all along. We were at the one campsite but that didn’t mean people weren’t camping on other areas of the island. For all Dex and I knew, there could have been a whole group of people on the south end. Maybe that was even the voice I heard last night, carried from a far–away bonfire.
The girl slowly turned around and made eye contact with me. She looked afraid. I held out my jacket for her to see.
“You’re going to catch a cold,” I said, raising my voice forcibly and trying to keep it from shaking. Couldn’t say the same thing about my arms though. “Where are your parents?”
The girl didn’t say anything but her face grew increasingly concerned like she was about to cry. I didn’t want to scare the poor thing.
“I won’t hurt you. I’m not angry,” I yelled. “You look cold. Your parents must be worried about you.”
The girl shook her head. “She hates me.”
I was startled at how strange the girl sounded. Her voice was almost accented and a bit stunted. She might have even had a lisp.
I looked around me, thinking that at any minute some distraught hippie couple would come out of the woods and run towards her, while giving me a dirty look for scaring their kid or something like that. But there was nothing but the wind and the cold spray it whipped up from the waves.
I couldn’t let the girl be out here like this. I didn’t care if she was scared of me or if her parents were going to get mad at me over my parenting. She was a little kid and a lot colder than I was.
I started walking towards her, confidently, but not forcefully so I didn’t scare her.
“Here, wear my jacket. It’s warm, you’ll like it.”
I was ten feet away from her. She looked a lot worse off than I thought. Her legs were all scratched up, her hair was long and a total mess. Her skin was dirty and there was a strange dullness to her blue eyes, almost like they were clouded over by that same fog that sat a few yards off shore.
She watched me approach, but didn’t seem to take me in. She looked afraid but I knew it wasn’t because of me, as hard as that was to explain. She was afraid of something else. I might as well have not been there.
She looked at the waves.
And ran into the ocean.
I was stunned. I watched her splash through the grey water until the waves broke on top of her. And finally I was able to snap out it.
I dropped the jacket and ran after her, my boots sliding around on the pebbles as I tried to gain traction. After a few paces I headed into the water as well.
I could barely make out a flail of her small arm or a glimpse of her head as the waves crashed over and over again but she was out there and that was enough for me to keep going.
I was annihilated by the sheer coldness, as my legs sank into the water and the ocean crept into my boots and splashed violently up the front of my jeans. In seconds my feet and legs were unfeeling blocks of ice and I thought my whole internal system would collapse on me, even with the water just below my knees.
But that didn’t stop me. I kept pushing through until the waves reached me and started to crash into my stomach.
The first hit took my breath away. I couldn’t even inhale if I tried, it was that cold. It took over everything and spread through my limbs and to my brain, where it erased all thought and reason. The only thing left outside of the numbness was the instinct that some little girl was drowning in the waves, somewhere near me.
I kept going until the water was at my waist. At this depth, the waves continued to break on me, the current wrapping itself around my thighs like a thick noose carved out of an ice block. The grey hues in the water and sky started to fizz darker and details began to blur. I felt nothing. There was a girl out there but my movements were becoming too sluggish to look for her.
I had to turn around. I had to head back, to get out of the water. But my will to return, my will to live was no stronger than the will to find the girl, who must have drowned somewhere in front of me.
I thought I heard someone call my name from far off but it was ragged and phantom–like against the roar of waves and the hiss of wind and scattered foam.
With the little strength I had, I turned and looked. Dex was running along the beach towards me. I couldn’t do anything except get jostled by the breaking waves.
He was swearing his head off, his face pale, eyes flashing. He started coming in after me, which was up to his mid thigh, and grabbed me by the arm. He pulled me roughly towards the beach. I was too numb to feel any of it. I let him take me, looking back at the water in a daze. There was something out there, right?
He dragged me over to a piece of driftwood and sat me down. He was yelling, his arms raised, gesturing. I couldn’t look at him. My eyes were locked on the waves, looking for some sign of the girl. She had been there…I know she had. Why else would I have gone in there?
I felt a sting at my right cheek. He had slapped me. I think.
I brought my eyes up to look at him. It felt like it took all the effort in the world.
“Perry. Perry Palomino. Look at me. Focus. Please.”
I tried.
“What the fuck happened?” he asked, his voice high and breaking. His eyes were wild like the waves.
I felt drunk. Stupid. Unable to articulate anything.
I tried to speak but everything came out in a chatter of schizophrenic teeth and a convulsing spasms. I was in ice–cold, wet clothing from my breasts down and my body was finally kicking into survival mode.
Dex decided that slapping and yelling at me wasn’t a priority anymore. He literally picked me up in his arms. The vague recollection that this was becoming a common occurrence crossed my mind, but I put my arms around his neck and held on tightly as he took me up the beach and to the campsite.
He put me in the tent, in my sleeping bag, and then lay his sleeping bag on top. My head rolled back and I looked at the tent ceiling, which was shaking in the constant wind. I heard zippers open and clasps and a furious shuffling sound. It seemed like a pile of clothes were was being place on me. They didn’t stay on for long as my out–of–control convulsions rocked them off.
I shivered violently for awhile, feeling an unbearable pain as the cold numbness left me and the hot pricks of pins and needles came wheeling through like I was bring dragged through a swath of prickle bushes.
It seemed to go on forever. My thoughts were more or less empty but the one that stood out was the one of me wondering when this would end.
It eventually did end, though. The spasms stopped, the shivers slowed, my teeth were able to rest against each other without clicking. My breath was coming back hot, deep and normal. My heart rate felt reassuring. My brain was starting to work over what had just happened.
I turned my head to the side and saw Dex sitting in the corner of the tent, his wet legs pulled up to his chest. He was staring at me. There were so many intense looks flowing across his eyes and lips, waxing and waning with each passing second. He looked deep into my eyes, trying to get something out of me. I hoped he could. I hoped I wouldn’t have to explain it.
But I knew nothing was that easy.
He looked down at his boots that squeaked with the water that had pooled inside of them. I wasn’t sure why he wasn’t trying to warm up. His feet must have been dead inside.
“Your feet are wet,” I said thickly.
“What the fuck, Perry?” He took in a deep breath and looked up at me. “What the hell were you doing? Going for a swim?”
“There was a little girl…”
“A little girl?” he repeated, his eyes wide and disbelieving.
“I…I was in the tent. I was in here. I was reading and I heard a kid laughing.” It was taking a lot out of me. I paused and tried to regain my breath. He waited, the furrow in his forehead never leaving.
“A girl. I heard a girl laughing,” I continued. “I got up and went outside and saw a girl on the beach. She was maybe three years old? She was just wearing a long white shirt. I asked her where her parents were but there was no answer. There was something…wrong with her, or something. I don’t know but she was cold and already wet and there was no one else there. I tried to go near her, to give her my jacket and she just…she just ran off into the ocean. The waves broke…and…and I could still see her, though; I thought I could still save her. Then you came. And I couldn’t.”
Dex’s expression never changed, though I knew he was trying to comprehend my story as quickly as he could. Finally he said, “Perry. I never saw a child. I was watching you. I saw you run into the water. I was just about to put my bag down in the tent. I saw you on the beach just staring at nothing with your coat held out. And then a second later, you ran into the water. I didn’t see a little girl.”
I felt sick at what he said. I brought my hand up to my mouth. Of course there was a child.