Up into a wave, lifted by it; crash through the thin translucent sunlit wall of water at the top, crash back down onto her chest on the blue backside. Kaya was right; this is already a great feeling. She is losing her fear, she is casting it away with every jump and fall. Lofted by a wave, fall; then again, over and over. Salt water in her mouth. Hissing and smooshing and crashing all around her, of water onto water. No need to talk to people, no need to think. Sun igniting a whole quadrant of the sky, can’t look up that way. Very obvious that looking at sunlight could blind you. Never look that way! The ocean tastes so good, it’s not like blood, it’s clear and cool and clean, salty, but somehow nicer than salty. As if it is the true water.
She begins to feel herself, her body. She is definitely more buoyant here than she has ever been in water before, and for a second she is reminded of the weightlessness of the ship’s spine. She casts that aside, but then she reaches out and holds on to it; with a squeeze of her heart she floats over the waves for the ship, for Jochi, for Devi and Euan and everyone else no longer there. Even the memory that comes to her suddenly, of Euan in Aurora’s ocean, is not bad but good. He picked a good end. Ride these waves for him and with him. It’s a kind of communion. She will outswim her fear. She is still shivering.
Finally a wave comes cresting up that seems to want to break and yet hasn’t managed it, a banked slope of water rising up before her in an awesome onrush, and she sees her chance and turns and jumps toward the shore, and the wave picks her up and as she floats up the face she is also sliding down the face, at about the same rate of speed, so that she is both hanging there and flying along: that moment is astonishing, she is still laughing at it when the wave tips more vertically and she slides abruptly down to its bottom and plows into the flat water that is not the wave, the wave catches her as it breaks, flips her in a somersault that shoots water up her nose and into her throat and lungs, she gags but is still in the tumble of the broken wave, she can’t get to the surface, doesn’t even know which way is up, bumps the bottom and finds out, shoves upward, bursts through the surface of hissing bubbles and gasps in, chokes, coughs, snorts, breathes cleanly in, gasps in and out a few breaths, starts to laugh. The whole event has lasted about five seconds, maybe. One has to hold one’s mouth shut when underwater. Obviously.
She tries to convey this to Kaya when he shoots by her, disappears, and then stands next to her chest deep. “You okay?” he asks.
“Yes! I got all tumbled!”
“You wiped out. You got caught in the washing machine.” He laughs.
“I have to hold my breath underwater!”
“Well yeah! And breathe out through your nose when you’re tumbling,” he says. “Then you’ll be fine. It won’t be able to inject its way into you.”
She goes back to cresting the waves. She turns and rides a few more, does better when they crash her down into the still water under the onrushing wave. When her rise and fall equalize and she flies, that puts a no-g spot in her gut, as if she is floating down the spine. She thinks of the ship again and cries out, a laugh of grief for her whole life, ah God that it had to happen this way, so crazy their whole existence, so absurd and stupid. So much death. But here she is, and the ship would be pleased to see her out in these waves, she knows this as surely as she knows anything.
The sun actually feels like it is hurting the skin of her face a little, and also she finds she is shivering between the arrival of one wave and the next; it’s a different kind of shivering than before, she is simply getting cold. The bigger waves come in sets of three, Kaya calls in passing, and she can see how this is roughly true. She can certainly see how they might come to believe it. They see a set coming, and try to get out over the first one before it breaks, then swim to a point where they can get a good takeoff on one of the following two. She wants to ride one across the face ahead of the break, like they do. Hard to arrange. Seems like she would need to be going a little faster for it to work, and Kaya agrees when she says that. “Kick hard with your fins at the moment you need the speed!”
“I’m shivering!”
“Yeah, I’m almost there myself. Go on in and lie in the sun for a while; you’ll warm right back up. I’ll come in in a while.”
She tries to ride a wave all the way in, botches her exit, gets caught up in the tumble of the washing machine, chokes on seawater again, can’t breathe for too long, can’t get to the surface. Suddenly she is grabbed and yanked up, chokes and gasps, coughs up seawater she has swallowed, almost vomiting.
It’s Kaya who has pulled her up, standing chest deep now, staring at her intently. His eyes are a pale blue.
“Hey!” he says. “Be careful out here. This is the ocean, you know. You can blow it pretty fast. You get yourself drowned out here and the ocean won’t care. It’s way stronger than us.”
“Sorry. I didn’t see that coming.”
“Tell you what, maybe just stay in the shallows here for a while. Do what we call grunioning. You just lie here where the shorebreak runs up the beach, you’re floating, but bumping on the ripples of the bottom too, and the waves run you up the beach, then the backwash runs you back down the beach. Just let the water push you around like you’re a piece of driftwood, or a grunion. It’s almost as fun as anything out here.”
She does it and it’s true. No effort involved. Keep her face out of the water, let everything else go. Float like a log. Bump here and there over the wet sand. She sees that the beach is more occupied now, kids up at the high-water mark are building sand castles and screaming. The hissing of the waves is loud, the air is filled with a mist of popped bubbles. Bubbles everywhere, more bubbles than water. Long strands of kelp grunion with her. Their bulbs look like plastic, they pop with a smell. It’s trapped whale breath! a little girl sitting there says to her, seeing her pop and sniff. Freya chews at a leaf of it; it tastes like the kelp they grew in their little salt pond, what a little thing that was, a birdbath. In and out, in and out she floats.
Eventually even here, where the water is warmer, and the sun is on her back and on the backs of her legs, even here she’s cooled down enough to shiver. She takes off her fins, levers herself to her feet, and very carefully walks up to her towel, falling down once. In the wet sand it doesn’t matter.
She lies on the hot dry sand next to her towel, in the sun. Quickly she warms and dries. There is a rime of salt left on her skin that she can taste when she licks it. The sand is warm, it sticks to her wherever she touched it when she was wet; now that it’s dry, she can brush it off with her hand. She can shove her feet and hands under the sand, and feel its sandy heft and give; the warmth extends down a ways, then the sand is cooler. She digs a pit in it, gets the pit down to a level where its bottom suffuses with water. The walls of this pit then fall in from the sides, which collapse into the little pool she has down there. When she scoops up the wet sand and lets it drip between her fingers, the sand hits the rim of her pool and the water in it seeps away and the sand remains in blobs that stack on each other, until they fall over. Once or twice she scoops up little sand crabs that makes her cry “Eek!” as the crabs crawl desperately over her palms, and she drops them back into the pool and they dig their way into the sand at the bottom of the pool and disappear. After a few times she realizes they don’t have any capacity to bite her, their jaws or palps or whatever are too small and soft. Apparently the sand under her is full of these creatures. Possibly they live on bits of seaweed. The beach makers must have put them here, got them started. Down the brilliant wet expanse of strand she sees a flock of shorebirds running up and down over their wet reflections, their knees bending backward. They have long beaks they use to stick in the sand, no doubt going after these same sand crabs. They stop and poke at little bubbles in wet sand, possibly the sand crabs’ exhalations. It makes sense. This beach is alive.