Stuart Dybek - I Sailed with Magellan

Swerving and fishtailing in the sand, police calls pouring from their radios, the squad cars were on us, and then they were by us while we struggled to pull on our clothes.

They braked at the water’s edge, and cops slammed out, brandishing huge flashlights, their beams deflecting over the dark water. Beyond the darting of those beams, the far-off throbs of lightning seemed faint by comparison.

“Over there, goddamn it!” one of them hollered, and two cops sloshed out into the shallow water without even pausing to kick off their shoes, huffing aloud for breath, their leather cartridge belts creaking against their bellies.

“Grab the sonofabitch! It ain’t gonna bite!” one of them yelled, then they came sloshing back to shore with a body slung between them.

It was a woman — young, naked, her body limp and bluish beneath the play of flashlight beams. They set her on the sand just past the ring of drying, washed-up alewives. Her face was almost totally concealed by her hair. Her hair was brown and tangled in a way that even wind or sleep can’t tangle hair, tangled as if it had absorbed the ripples of water — thick strands, slimy looking like dead seaweed.

“She’s been in there awhile, that’s for sure,” a cop with a beer belly said to a younger, crew-cut cop, who had knelt beside the body and removed his hat as if he might be considering the kiss of life.

The crew-cut officer brushed the hair away from her face, and the flashlight beams settled there. Her eyes were closed. A bruise or a birthmark stained the side of one eye. Her features appeared swollen, her lower lip protruding as if she was pouting.

An ambulance siren echoed across the sand, its revolving red light rapidly approaching.

“Might as well take their sweet-ass time,” the beer-bellied cop said.

We had joined the circle of police surrounding the drowned woman almost without realizing that we had. You were back in your bikini, robed in the Navajo blanket, and I had slipped on my cutoffs, my underwear dangling out of a back pocket.

Their flashlight beams explored her body, causing its whiteness to gleam. Her breasts were floppy; her nipples looked shriveled. Her belly appeared inflated by gallons of water. For a moment, a beam focused on her mound of pubic hair, which was overlapped by the swell of her belly, and then moved almost shyly away down her legs, and the cops all glanced at us — at you, especially — above their lights, and you hugged your blanket closer as if they might confiscate it as evidence or to use as a shroud.

When the ambulance pulled up, one of the black attendants immediately put a stethoscope to the drowned woman’s swollen belly and announced, “Drowned the baby, too.”

Without saying anything, we turned from the group, as unconsciously as we’d joined them, and walked off across the sand, stopping only long enough at the spot where we had lain together like lovers, in order to stuff the rest of our gear into a beach bag, to gather our shoes, and for me to find my wallet and kick sand over the forlorn, deflated Trojan that you pretended not to notice. I was grateful for that.

Behind us, the police were snapping photos, flashbulbs throbbing like lightning flashes, and the lightning itself, still distant but moving in closer, rumbling audibly now, driving a lake wind before it so that gusts of sand tingled against the metal sides of the ambulance.

Squinting, we walked toward the lighted windows of the Gold Coast, while the shadows of gapers attracted by the whirling emergency lights hurried past us toward the shore.

“What happened? What’s going on?” they asked without waiting for an answer, and we didn’t offer one, just continued walking silently in the dark.

It was only later that we talked about it, and once we began talking about the drowned woman it seemed we couldn’t stop.

“She was pregnant,” you said. “I mean, I don’t want to sound morbid, but I can’t help thinking how the whole time we were, we almost — you know — there was this poor, dead woman and her unborn child washing in and out behind us.”

“It’s not like we could have done anything for her even if we had known she was there.”

“But what if we had found her? What if after we had — you know,” you said, your eyes glancing away from mine and your voice tailing into a whisper, “what if after we did it, we went for a night swim and found her in the water?”

“But, Gin, we didn’t” I tried to reason, though it was no more a matter of reason than anything else between us had ever been.

It began to seem as if each time we went somewhere to make out — on the back porch of your half-deaf, whiskery Italian grandmother, who sat in the front of the apartment cackling at I Love Lucy reruns; or in your girlfriend Tina’s basement rec room when her parents were away on bowling league nights and Tina was upstairs with her current crush, Brad; or way off in the burbs, at the Giant Twin Drive-In during the weekend they called Elvis Fest — the drowned woman was with us.

We would kiss, your mouth would open, and when your tongue flicked repeatedly after mine, I would unbutton the first button of your blouse, revealing the beauty spot at the base of your throat, which matched a smaller spot I loved above a corner of your lips, and then the second button, which opened on a delicate gold cross — which I had always tried to regard as merely a fashion statement — dangling above the cleft of your breasts. The third button exposed the lacy swell of your bra, and I would slide my hand over the patterned mesh, feeling for the firmness of your nipple rising to my fingertip, but you would pull slightly away, and behind your rapid breath your kiss would grow distant, and I would kiss harder, trying to lure you back from wherever you had gone, and finally, holding you as if only consoling a friend, I’d ask, “What are you thinking?” although of course I knew.

“I don’t want to think about her but I can’t help it. I mean, it seems like some kind of weird omen or something, you know?”

“No, I don’t know,” I said. “It was just a coincidence.”

“Maybe if she’d been farther away down the beach, but she was so close to us. A good wave could have washed her up right beside us.”

“Great, then we could have had a menage a trois.”

“Gross! I don’t believe you just said that! Just because you said it in French doesn’t make it less disgusting.”

“You’re driving me to it. Come on, Gin, I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just making a dumb joke to get a little different perspective on things.”

“What’s so goddamn funny about a woman who drowned herself and her baby?”

“We don’t even know for sure she did.”

“Yeah, right, it was just an accident. Like she just happened to be going for a walk pregnant and naked, and she fell in.”

“She could have been on a sailboat or something. Accidents happen; so do murders.”

“Oh, like murder makes it less horrible? Don’t think that hasn’t occurred to me. Maybe the bastard who knocked her up killed her, huh?”

“How should I know? You’re the one who says you don’t want to talk about it and then gets obsessed with all kinds of theories and scenarios. Why are we arguing about a woman we don’t even know, who doesn’t have the slightest thing to do with us?”

“I do know about her,” you said. “I dream about her.”

“You dream about her?” I repeated, surprised. “Dreams you remember?”

“Sometimes they wake me up. In one I’m at my nonna’ s cottage in Michigan, swimming for a raft that keeps drifting farther away, until I’m too tired to turn back. Then I notice there’s a naked person sunning on the raft and start yelling, ‘Help!’ and she looks up and offers me a hand, but I’m too afraid to take it even though I’m drowning because it’s her.”