Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

When Andrea was eighteen, she got a job as a lifeguard at L Street Beach. She wore a red tank suit and zinc oxide on her nose. She had Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and a whistle on the end of a braided cord that she spun around her fingers, first this way, then that way. When Tess came to the beach, she sat, quite literally, in Andrea’s shadow, on the first rung of the lifeguard stand, sucking on cherry Popsicles. In Andrea’s memory, it seemed like Tess was there every day. Andrea would look down and see the straight white part in Tess’s dark hair. Tess would swim, and Andrea would watch her. Tess would attempt the butterfly, but she flailed and humped. Andrea tried to teach her the movement, but Tess’s shoulders weren’t strong enough yet, and Andrea was busy working. There were hundreds of kids to watch.

It was at the end of the summer, the week before Andrea started her freshman year at Boston College, that Tess nearly drowned. Andrea was spinning her whistle, scanning the sand and the shallow water, dreaming about finally living away. After months of battling, her parents had agreed to allow her to board, although she easily could have commuted. In the end Andrea’s winning argument was that she was attending BC on a partial swimming scholarship and the team practices were at dawn. You don’t want me riding the T to Brookline at four in the morning, do you?

In truth, Andrea wanted to separate herself from her family. The DiRosa clan was too close-knit, too loud, too steeped in the politics of the BPD, too Italian, with their garlic and ricotta and veal involtini, their heavy gold crosses and crucifixes everywhere she turned. Andrea wanted to experience a life that was quieter, more reserved, more refined, a collegiate life, an intellectual life. ( Lord help you! her grandmother said. You’re going to the Jesuits! ) The fact that Andrea had not been able to escape the city of her birth discouraged her a little, but there had been no avoiding a Catholic education if her father was to pay for it. Andrea had gotten into Notre Dame as well, but South Bend was deemed too far away.

Andrea was thinking these things, she was twirling her whistle and scanning the shallow water, she was listening to Van Halen on someone’s boom box, she was enjoying the sun on her shoulders, when the feeling struck her: a panic like a sickness. It was as though she had looked down and noticed the lifeguard stand was gone, she was sitting on thin air, about to fall. It was Tess who was gone. This was not unusual-Tess swam and played and visited the snack bar and the restroom just like everybody else. Andrea saw Tess’s Popsicle stick, stained pink, sticking out of the sand. This wasn’t unusual either; Tess, at age nine, was a habitual litterbug.

Lifeguarding was a job that required assiduousness rather than instinct, but it was instinct that kicked in. Andrea scanned the water out past where any other nine-year-old would be swimming, and there she saw a hand. Or what she thought was a hand. A hand!

Andrea blew her whistle-three short blasts, an emergency! She jumped recklessly from the top of the stand and nearly broke both her knees. She grabbed her board, dashed into the water, and started paddling. Andrea spied a flash of someone’s face-yes, it was Tess! Tess was out way over her head. What was she doing out there? The face disappeared, the hand slapped the water. Andrea abandoned her board; it was slowing her down. She was the fastest flyer in the city-she could get there quicker on her own. She swam to the spot where the hand and face had been and dove down and pulled Tess up off the bottom. The effort of this, of getting sixty pounds of deadweight to the surface, nearly killed her. Tess was waterlogged. But not dead, right? Andrea could not let herself worry about anything except textbook lifesaving. Get the swimmer under the chin and paddle with her to the board, secure the board under Tess, and swim for shore. There were lifeguards coming toward her, three of the big lunks Andrea worked with, whom she had thought completely useless until this moment. One of them, Hugo, took Tess and the board and powered her to shore. The other two guards, Roxbury and Toxic Moxie (these were their nicknames; Andrea had no idea what their real names were), laid Tess out on a towel and pumped her chest and gave her mouth-to-mouth while Andrea stood at Tess’s feet and shivered and said the Hail Mary and promised God that if Tess lived, Andrea would repay him by becoming a nun.

An ambulance arrived. There was a crowd around Tess’s gray, limp body, including Roxbury, Toxic Moxie, and Andrea, who was praying and standing as still as a statue of the Virgin Mary. The paramedics sliced through the bystanders, and as they did, Toxic Moxie put the breath into Tess that saved her. He blew death out. Tess coughed up harbor water, spewing out a whole stream in a projectile vomit, and then she pinkened. The crowd sighed, and Andrea wept as Tess opened her eyes. Andrea thought, I will become a nun.

She was forty-four years old now and swimming once again. She hadn’t swum in sixteen years; she had been too busy building sandcastles, and later watching her kids boogie board, pacing back and forth on the shore while they battled the pounding waves. But she was back at it religiously, half a mile of freestyle out past the breakers. God, it felt good! She wore goggles now, showing her age; her eyes couldn’t take the salt anymore. She swam and swam and swam-all the way down to Surfside-and then she swam back. When she climbed out of the water, her legs were shaky and weak from the workout. She was reminded of the superstar she used to be, the fastest swimmer in high school, and then in college. She had been named to the First Team All-American; she had broken four Big East fly records; she had made it to the Olympic Trials in Mission Viejo, where she missed placing in the 200-meter by three one-hundredths of a second.

During the years that her children had been small, Andrea had rarely looked upon her trophies or thought about her name on the record board that hung at the Boston College pool. But when she did, she wondered, was that swimmer really the same person as the one who was now mixing rice cereal with baby food? This summer, swimming as strongly as ever, the answer was yes. (She pictured herself flipping at the wall, or shaking her muscles loose on the blocks before tensing for the gun…)

Andrea DiRosa!

It was impossible to see with her goggles on-it was like looking through a windshield in a downpour. But when she emerged from the water, she thought she saw the Chief sitting on her towel. She removed her goggles. It was the Chief, Ed Kapenash, Eddie, her husband of eighteen years, sitting on her beach towel in his uniform. His cruiser was parked up on the bluff. From out of nowhere the feeling returned, the sick, panicked suspicion that she was sitting on air and was about to fall. It was five-thirty. The kids got off work at six and the Chief normally knocked off around seven, if there were no emergencies.

Was there an emergency now, or a lack of emergencies? Had he shown up to surprise her, to be romantic? The Chief had only one facial expression and that was stoic, but at this moment the stoic looked different, though Andrea couldn’t say how.

“Is everything okay?” Andrea said.

He patted the spot beside him on the towel. “Sit down.”

“Is it one of the kids?”

“No.”

She sat, dried her face, ran her fingers through her hair. Her book was there, The English Patient, open facedown. She had seen the movie but had not read the book, though she’d always meant to. And that was another treat of the Summer of Me-she was actually doing things she’d meant to do for years. The book, as it turned out, was sumptuous and textured, it was a feast for her mind. She had a college education, after all; she had majored in comparative literature, she had read Kafka and Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, but the ideas and images that had been ignited by those books so many years ago were gone.