Brazaitis - The Deep

 Mark Brazaitis

 The Deep

On the night of his seventh birthday, Max slipped from his house, climbed the ten-foot, chain-link fence at the back of his yard, and stood above the deep end of his neighbors’ swimming pool. He still heard his parents’ voices, like crows’, like angry cats’. He heard the grinding and moaning of cars and trucks on the highway. Blaring from the open window of another house, he heard hard music, like metal trashcans thrown into the street. 

Max jumped into the pool and, like a leaf falling from a tree, drifted to the bottom, where he sat and closed his eyes. The harsh noises disappeared. He heard, instead, the soft rhythm of his blood. He didn’t sleep but he did dream: of an island where mute monsters, smiling their friendship, danced with him under trees full of silent, beautiful birds.

Whenever he felt the desire to breathe, he said no, and his desire retreated.

His dreams of monsters and birds became electric with color, like fireworks without a bang, before an autumnal orange appeared at their edges. Presently, a substance like bronze sunlight spilled into every frame. Eventually, as he knew it would, although his knowledge came without dread or anxiety, everything turned black.

He opened his eyes to a nightmare of sound and light. His mother stood over him, shouting in worry and recrimination. Beside her were two men in white uniforms. The neighbors whose pool he’d jumped into, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley, stood behind them, stark-white hair askew, their faces tired and annoyed and scared. An ambulance’s blue-and-red lights swirled off the back of their house. 

Soon, he was in the back of the ambulance, his mother by his side, alternately asking him why he’d done what he’d done and thanking God that he was alive.

At the hospital, full of machine sounds, like needlepoints in his ears, and un-soothing light and air heavy with apprehension, like odorless smoke, he was prodded and probed. 

“He’s very, very lucky,” said the doctor, whose voice had in it the trace of a whistle, a sound that made Max’s eyelashes flutter as if they were fending off an insect. 

“Thank you, doctor,” said Max’s mother. “Thank God.”

On the drive home, she played the radio—the songs were a doorbell, a street under repair, a sky filled with low-flying airplanes—and scolded him with the repeated words “why” and “shouldn’t” and “never, ever.” 

When he said nothing in response to her accusations and warnings and worry, she said, sighing, “Wasn’t your birthday party enough, sweetheart? Did you need to go swimming too?”

Earlier, three boys from the neighborhood and three boys from Max’s school had come to his house, shouted the lyrics to “Happy Birthday,” and plundered his chocolate cake. Max had spent most of the party staring at the clock in his kitchen, counting down the minutes until the boys’ parents picked them up.

“Wasn’t it?” his mother prodded.

Softly, he told her that the best part of his birthday was the time he’d spent at the bottom of the pool. He waited for more of her recriminations. What came instead was a confession: “I can’t say I don’t understand, Maxito.”

As a girl in La Paz, she explained, she and her three brothers used to go with their father on his fishing boat. Nothing was expected of her—she was only a girl, after all—and as her brothers and her father hauled in marlin, dorado, yellowtail, grouper, and snapper from the Sea of Cortez, sometimes laughing at the fishes’ agony as they fluttered and flopped on the deck, she stared over the side of the boat at the blue water and wished she could be somewhere far beneath it.

By the time Max and his mother returned home, his father was asleep, although from his bedroom Max heard his snores, like the sound a bear might make as it devoured a salmon.

In the morning, his father interrupted Max’s tooth-brushing. His words were the same as his mother’s of the previous night, heavy with blame and prohibition. After he’d spoken, he moved into Max, curling his arm around his shoulder, pulling him into his thickness. His father smelled like toast and cigarettes. “You scared me and your mother to death, little man. We’d be lost without you, OK?”

Max said, “OK,” although he doubted he could keep the promise his word implied.

Three nights later, after his father stormed out of the house and his mother retreated to her bedroom, weeping, Max again scaled the backyard fence. But as he stood at the edge of his neighbors’ pool, about to jump in, the backdoor of the house opened and Mrs. Stanley rushed outside, her voice a birdcall of distress: “Stop, please!” She wore a nightgown whiter than her hair. His shoes were halfway over the edge of the pool when she stepped next to him, panting in protest: “You could die.” 

Max stepped back, and her breathing softened into silence. Other sounds assumed its place. A car’s horn screamed; a truck complained; a dog barked its distress at the sky. 

“You don’t want to die, do you?” Mrs. Stanley asked him.

“No,” he said.

“So…why?” She gestured to the pool.

He said, “Peace.”

She repeated the word as a question. 

When he didn’t respond, she said, “I used to teach meditation. It helps one center oneself. It helps one…find peace.” She smiled as if she found it funny to be talking to a seven-year-old so seriously. She said hesitantly, “Would you like to learn how to meditate?”

He said, “OK.”

“All right,” she said. “We could begin now.”

She asked him to sit next to her on the grass beside the pool. He copied her pose. Like her, he closed his eyes. “Now,” she said, “repeat the word ‘Om,’ which is the sound of the universe.” 

“Om,” Max repeated.

“Om,” Mrs. Stanley echoed.

Max said the word several times. But he didn’t like the way it sounded in his head, like someone who was pretending to enjoy a bad-tasting dessert. And before Mrs. Stanley spoke next, he heard her intake of breath, which sounded like someone had jabbed her with a fork. He heard another truck. He heard the slamming of a door. He heard a police siren.

“Do you think meditation might help you, Max?”

He opened his eyes. Mrs. Stanley gazed at him with a hopeful smile. She was a kind woman, and he didn’t want to disappoint her. 

“Yes,” he said.

She beamed.

The next night, she found him at the bottom of her pool. 

Max was, the doctor determined, unaffected by the time he’d spent underwater. Nevertheless, his parents brought him to a psychiatrist, who prescribed several medications. Young and as blindingly blond as a wheat field in strong sunlight, the psychiatrist explained to his parents the purpose of each pill. Max didn’t understand him; neither, it seemed, did his parents. Their faces, and their emphatic nodding, as if they were hoping to shake open an incomprehensible box of knowledge in their heads, said as much. 

“Any questions?” asked the psychiatrist. 

“No,” said Max’s father.

“One,” said Max’s mother. “Will this cure him of his desire to…” She paused and looked around the psychiatrist’s office as if she might find the end of her sentence written on the walls. Her eyes settled on a painting of a seascape. Max wished he were beneath the painted waves. As if she knew the answer to her question, his mother began to cry.

A week later, as his mother and father thundered their dissatisfaction with each other, Max sneaked into his basement, whose door to the backyard, unlike the other exits in his house, wasn’t booby-trapped to alert his parents to his escape. Seconds later, he stood over Mrs. Stanley’s pool. It had been emptied of its water. Sounds of lamentation—Max’s persistent moaning—swirled around its hollowness. 

Mrs. Stanley stepped outside, her white hair sleep-shaped, her eyes troubled. “I’m sorry, Max. I’m truly sorry. But you have to understand: if you drowned, Mr. Stanley and I would be liable.” She stepped over to him and placed her hand on his shoulder. Because he was angry, because he had looked forward to the relief her pool would offer, he wanted to shake off her hand. But he knew the old woman was kind, so he remained still.

She said, with a little laugh, “I think you must have been a fish in a previous life.”

Max thought about this. “I don’t like to swim,” he said. 

“But you can swim, right? Your parents told me you could.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well…you must have been corral or a seashell.” She sighed. “You must have been whatever lives in the deepest part of the ocean.”

 The medicine wasn’t water. It only muted what was too powerful: his parents’ angry voices as they argued at night; the wretched fluorescent light that, in his elementary-school cafeteria, turned the meals on everyone’s trays gray; his fear that whoever ruled the world was treating it as carelessly as a baby does a rattle.

In the summer after his sixth-grade year, his parents told him they would be divorcing. They sat with him at the kitchen table, and he knew he was supposed to cry or beg them to reconsider. Instead, he marveled at how silent and soft the world had become. The harsh light from the window above the sink, as if failing to have its knock answered, had turned away, and the kitchen was a pleasant rose-gray. 

Thereafter, whether because the discord in his house had disappeared or because his medicine had turned down the volume on the garage band in his head, a peace descended. It held until Max was in his first year in high school. 

His mother had dated since the divorce but only three times had she brought men home, one of whom, who Max had liked because of his square glasses and his hula-hoop smile, had been gay. But she was serious about the latest man, whose name was Terry, which, to Max, sounded suspiciously like Terror. 

He was tall, and his high forehead shone like a sheet of ice one could easily slip on. His laughter was a howl, and the first time Max heard it, at the dinner table, he covered his ears. Terror looked at him with a mixture of amusement and disgust. Max excused himself to go to his room. 

Although he closed the door, he could hear his mother and Terror below, discussing him. She said, “He’s sensitive.” Max felt, as he always did, what a burden he was, a sensitive ball around his mother’s neck, a sensitive chain shackled to her ankle. 

A month later, Terror brought Max and his mother to El Sombrero, Terror’s favorite restaurant and his mother’s least favorite—the food, she’d confided to her son, was far from authentic and she hated the way the place was decorated with all the Mexican clichés, including piñatas and paintings, in neon red and gold, of bullfighters. Toward the end of their meal, a mariachi duo, who had been strumming their ill-tuned guitars at the front of the restaurant, at last reached their table and launched, for the fourth time that night, into “Besame Mucho.” Fleeing the sour notes, Max slipped into a stall in the men’s room. Staring into the open toilet, he wished he was a cartoon fish and could be flushed down, down, down. 

Twenty minutes later, Terror tried to coax him from his hideout, his gentle urgings and bribes—“Come on, dude, it’s dessert time”—giving way to frustrated threats: “You’re going to end up spending the night here, man. Maybe it would be better for both of us, huh?” 

Soon thereafter, his mother ventured into the men’s room, whispering like she was in a library: “Maxito, sweetheart? Maxito, we’re ready to go.” But Max wasn’t ready to go. 

In the end, it was the mariachi duo who flushed Max from his hideaway by striding into the bathroom, guitars strapped around their chests, and singing a Spanish version of “Strangers in the Night.”

The next morning, tearfully, Max’s mother sat him down and said, “Sweetheart, I need a little break.” He would be going to live with his father.

But his father lived in Orlando, where every other house had a swimming pool. Over the months of February, March, and April, he visited the bottoms of eighteen of them. He spent the first night of May in the deep end of a pool at Happy Haven, a retirement home. The next morning, a lifeguard pulled him onto the deck in front of an octet of octogenarians about to begin a water aerobics class. When he breathed as casually as if he were walking in a park, one of the retirees, a woman with a dyed-black beehive, exclaimed in a hallelujah voice, “Since Lazarus is here, Jesus must be right around the corner!” 

A week later, he sneaked into the sea-lion tank at Sea World. But the peace he found at its nadir was interrupted when a pair of sea lions prodded him to play with them. If he disappointed them on this count, he delighted them on another: After leaving the water, he found a bucket full of frozen octopuses and squids in a nearby refrigerator and bought it to them with the flourish of a waiter at a five-star restaurant. 

Afterwards, he wandered over to a different but equally inviting tank, where, although the killer whales left him alone, Sea World’s security guards did not.

He returned to his mother, who had broken up with Terror. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” she said. “I thought he was being an asshole because he didn’t know how to deal with you. But he was being an asshole because he is an asshole.”

At the start of Max’s junior year in high school, his mother introduced him to her new romantic partner. His name was Dan, and he was the vice principal for special needs at St. Lucy’s High School. He could relate to his students because he was deaf. As imposing as a linebacker, Dan nevertheless had a smile as soothing as starlight. He gave Max a thumbs up. Max returned the gesture. 

“You’re on your way to learning sign language,” his mother said, her statement less a joke, Max understood, than a wish, which, thanks to YouTube and Dan’s tutoring, he soon fulfilled.

For dinner one night, Dan brought them to the Fountain, a restaurant so named because of what was at the center of its brick courtyard. Although Max was no fan of the disco lights that flashed a crazed yellow, red, and blue onto the cascading water, he gazed at the statue in the fountain’s center—a stone mermaid with a mischievous smile—as if he’d found a long-long sister. Dan signed to him, “I bet you hope she invites you in,” and gave him a friendly wink. Max stunned his mother, who, it was clear, hadn’t caught what her boyfriend had said, by laughing.

Her name, he was to learn, was Beatrice, and she was from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Befitting of her birthplace, she had a pilot’s license. Her voice, appropriately, was airy and soared as if on wings. He heard it when, as he stared out the window of his Calculus III class in his sophomore year in college, she stumbled into the room, tripped over the leg of a desk near the door, and tumbled to the floor with an “ohhhhhhhh,” which sounded to him far more like the universal music than Mrs. Stanley’s “om.” She was nearly six feet tall, with a face as round and radiant as a black sun. When she collapsed into the seat next to his, his heart was as still as a present about to be opened. “No need to congratulate me,” she whispered, “on my brilliant entrance.”

“I’m Max,” he said, his voice so loud the entire class turned to him, grinning like they knew his secrets. He thought of dark, calming waters until a dark, warm hand was extended to him. She introduced herself by her full name. “But call me B—like the letter or the verb to exist.”

When class ended, she said, “Do you like to fly?”

A week later, they were at the airport, standing in front a Cessna P210 Javelin painted yellow and black. “Naming it the Bumble B would have been too obvious,” B said. “So I call it the Interstellar Space Station.”

Her parents were both in flight-related fields, her mother a professor of aeronautics at the U., her father a private pilot. They were married but lived three hundred miles from each other—a distance easy to bridge since both of them owned planes. 

“This one is all mine,” B said, stroking the propeller like she was petting a dog. “Some families have three cars. We have three planes. Of course, mine is the hand-me-down. It’s from the last century.”

“Is it safe?” Max asked.

“You’re about to see.”

When she’d asked him if he liked to fly, he’d said, “I don’t know.” He’d been on two flights his entire life—to and from Florida—and he’d been miserable on both but only, he’d decided, because he’d been anticipating what awaited him: his father’s apprehension at the end of one flight, his mother’s sadness and resignation at the end of the other.

“You aren’t afraid, are you?” she asked as they stepped into the cockpit.

“No,” he said shakily, “although I’m more of a water person.”

He thought she’d ignore his statement. But she said, “Tell me.”

So he did, starting with the Stanleys’ pool and concluding with his latest adventures in deep-water meditation. For six straight weeks in the winter of his freshman year, he’d checked into the university’s aquatic center half an hour before closing time and hid in a bathroom stall until the place was empty and he had the pool to himself. Each morning, Jim, the center’s sixty-eight-year-old chief custodian, pulled him to the surface with a net attached to the end of a pole. Jim seemed unfazed by Max’s behavior. “We all need our escapes,” he mused as the two of them stood poolside that first morning. “For some of us, it’s wine, women, and football. For others, it’s chlorine and what must surely be the recipe for one terrible earache.”

After Max finished his stories, B asked, “And you weren’t trying to kill yourself?” 

“No,” he said.

“Not even in the killer-whale tank?”

“No,” he repeated.

“But you knew you could have died. You were putting yourself right at…what’s the phrase?…death’s door. Or death’s underwater grotto. Did you do it because it was a thrill to be so close to death, because it was the most alive you would ever feel?”

“No,” he said. What he’d done wasn’t about death or the thrill of being in death’s presence. And if it was about life, he said, it was about finding either a moment before life began, when life’s soon-to-be noise and chaos were preceded by their opposite in silence and peace, or about connecting to what extends beyond life, to the great quiet of the universe, which holds the screaming earth in its vast arms like a serene mother.

“I think I understand,” B said. “When I’m up in the air, I leave all the madness behind. And I’m not talking only about all the racist motherfuckers who, when they look at me, might as well be whistling ‘Dixie’ and standing in a schoolhouse door. No, I’m also talking about the professors who congratulate me on overcoming my circumstances, as if I was born in a crack house, or even my friends who assume I love rap and hip-hop and the blues when it’s only Beethoven who rocks my spaceship. You know?”

Max said he did, although he couldn’t possibly know in the way she did. Even so, he understood what it meant to hear the world as a chorus of unsettling voices.

“Besides,” she said as they taxied to the runway, “I flat-out love flying. It’s the closest I’ll get to heaven while still having a heartbeat.”

She grinned. “Are you ready to kiss the sky?”

“No,” he admitted.

“Too late.”

The plane accelerated, and a few seconds later, they were up in the air. Max had been wrong about the source of his fear on his flights to and from Florida. The higher they flew, the more terrified he became. 

“Admit it,” B said. “You love it.”

She glanced at him and, given her smile, which was as tender as a new leaf, she seemed to sense his anxiety. She began to hum, a lullaby, perhaps, or something from Beethoven, and the sound was the sound water would make if it had a voice at 15,000 feet.

“Look,” B said, pointing down, “we’re flying above your home.”

Below them was a lake, an expanse as blue as the sky.

B’s roommates and friends—Max was living at home, so he didn’t have the former and he’d never had the latter—thought they were a couple. They said he and B were their own, two-member mile-high club. They joked about how, in B’s plane, they were enjoying some SOAP—sex on auto-pilot.

But Max and B weren’t a couple. Max had never kissed her; he’d never kissed anyone. He’d never wanted to kiss anyone. In the past, he’d thought of how lips would feel against his lips: like a combination of Jell-O and sandpaper. Yet when he thought of B’s lips, he didn’t imagine Jell-O and sandpaper. He imagined clouds.

He didn’t tell her this, although he told her just about everything else: 

No, he wasn’t studying to become an oceanographer or a submarine captain or even a pool-maintenance specialist, as she sometimes joked, but a mathematician because, yes, numbers spoke to him—with a perfect, silent economy.   

Yes, he knew how to swim, but he preferred sitting at the bottom of a body of water to splashing across its surface, and to swim, therefore, was like walking across a barren field when, below it, was a gold mine.

He never spoke about his ex-girlfriends because, as a condition for not being charged with a crime, he’d signed an agreement with Sea World to keep his liaisons with the sea lions secret. Ha, ha, ha. 

For her part, she told him a lot, but she didn’t tell him everything. She didn’t tell him whether she would be spending her junior abroad, as she sometimes alluded. She didn’t tell him about the friends she had back in her hometown, where her father lived and where she often visited, or whether her friends included a boyfriend. She didn’t tell him whether she’d ever wanted to kiss him.

What Max didn’t know about her became in his head like a convention of fortunetellers whose voices, although a traffic jam of sounds, all offered the same prediction: She would, one day, fly off, either literally—off to another country or back to her boyfriend—or metaphorically, in no longer wanting to be with him. Having, with B, known the opposite of loneliness, he at once feared loneliness’s return and craved it because it would vanquish his fear of it.

He and B flew over cities and towns and suburbs. They flew over farmlands and factories. Whenever they flew over a lake or a river, he stared down at the water and thought, with resignation, with sadness, with relief, I’ll be with you soon.

Over spring break, B planned to meet friends from her hometown at the beach. One of her friends was renting a cabana. It didn’t have much space, B said, which is why she planned to stay only one night. “I need my sleep,” she said, although Max was sure she could stay up three nights in a row without so much as yawning. “Do you want to come with me?” 

Immediately, Max said, “Yes,” although he knew his mother would never approve. A beach meant there was, attached to it, an ocean. And an ocean was deeper and wider than any pool in which he’d ever settled at the bottom. He could imagine his mother’s horrified objection: “We’ll never find you and, this time, you’ll drown.” He could promise he wouldn’t step foot in the ocean. But it was a promise he wouldn’t be certain he could keep. 

So he told her he was going to an amusement park on the other side of the state with his friend Steven and would be spending the night at Steven’s uncle’s house. Max didn’t have a friend named Steven, but his mother might have wished him into existence with her hopeful smile and her relieved words: “I’m so glad.” Later, Dan, who knew a lie when he saw it, gave Max a discerning smile and signed, “It’s a girl, isn’t it?”

Max nodded.

“The beach?”

Max nodded again.

“Will you be OK?”

Max signed back the truth: “I don’t know.”

On the appointed morning, he and B flew into the sunrise. The light shocked his eyes and he covered them with his T-shirt. 

“Good God, man,” said B, digging into the pocket of her bomber jacket, “have you never heard of sunglasses?” She handed him a pair. When he put them on, the light was no more menacing than a field of buttercups.

They landed at an airport so close to the beach they could have walked to the water. One of B’s friends, Tiger, as tall and as dark as B, picked them up in a car whose red paint reminded Max of lipstick, which reminded Max of lips, which reminded Max he wasn’t B’s boyfriend. He sat in the back of the car—B had offered him the front seat, but he’d declined—hoping he wouldn’t be upset by whatever words left Tiger’s mouth. But of course he was—they were, God help the comparison, a roar.

Several times, B turned back to him and each time he forced a smile onto his face and each time she frowned because she knew his smile wasn’t sincere. 

“Here we are,” Tiger announced—roared—as he pulled onto the sand-swept driveway of a house that looked like the letter ‘u’ turned upside down. The three of them marched toward the front door, Max trailing like a child, which is how he felt. On the front stoop, he heard the party within: music that had all the melodic grace of a hundred arguments, laughter that sounded like claws scraping a wall, boastful shouts that might as well have been drunken foghorns. B glanced at him, glanced at Tiger, glanced at Max, glanced at Tiger. “We’ll need a minute,” she said to her friend.

Tiger examined Max and, misinterpreting the way he was standing (legs crossed, body trembling), said, “There’s a bathroom inside.”

B laughed like he’d told a joke. Shrugging, Tiger stepped into the house.

“This was a mistake, wasn’t it?” B said.

“No,” Max said. “No, no, no, no, no.” If he repeated the word enough, perhaps it would be true. 

She bit her lower lip. “I think I know what will help. Come on.”

He hoped she was going to take him back to her airplane and the safety of the sky. But she dragged him into the house, which was full of people and sound and a crisscross of sensations emanating from everyone inside: lust and awkwardness and boredom and bravado. B handed him a plastic cup full of wine. “Self-medicate and I promise I’ll find us a peaceful place in an hour.”

Over the next several minutes, he drank three, twelve-ounce cups of wine. Although he’d been told what to expect of the experience—he was supposed to float; he was supposed to find everything funny; he was, eventually, supposed to throw up—he felt nothing but a profound and unyielding desire to be in the water. Nevertheless, he remained where he was, frequently checking his watch like a kindergartener who’d been told when his mother would return to pick him up. Three times, party guests stepped over to him, appraised him as if he were a plant they were trying to determine was real or fake, then left without a word.

When an hour had passed, B returned, only to say, “Give me another fifteen minutes, all right?” She refilled his cup. When he smiled at her, she smiled back, which suggested she could no longer see the truth on his face—or didn’t want to see the truth on his face—or was too drunk to see the truth on his face.

Dancing commenced in a room beyond the kitchen, and Max saw B and Tiger entangled in each other’s arms. It wasn’t fair to be jealous, he knew, because he and B had never been anything but friends. But everything he saw, felt, touched, heard, and tasted (the wine, which might as well have been lemonade for all the medicinal good it had done him) were monsters who, unlike the monsters in his long-ago dreams, were as scary as the end of the world. The monsters chased him out the front door. 

It was late afternoon. He headed toward the sound of water, which was, until he’d met B, the sweetest sound he knew. He walked down a sidewalk, up a wooden set of stairs, and onto a ridge of sand. In front of him, the beach was empty. Summer was a couple of months off, and the air was cold with what was left of winter. The ocean’s waters slid up the sand, extending toward him like hands. 

He marshalled arguments about why he shouldn’t go in—because it would be cruel to B and his mother; because it would be a capitulation to what was certainly an illness, even if one unique to him; because the ocean would be by far the vastest body of water he’d ever entered and, although he’d proved capable of holding his breath all night he didn’t know if he could hold it forever; because…

But he’d kicked off his shoes and pulled off his socks, and his toes met what should have been off-putting ice-water but felt like a temperate bath. He didn’t bother removing any more of his clothes. He strolled in as if to a party at which he was the long-awaited guest. The ocean embraced him and pulled him in deep.

He hadn’t expected to be rocked, and if he had, the thought might have deterred him because he would have assumed the sensation would be nausea-inducing. But it was blissful, peaceful, a lullaby turned into motion. He drifted blissfully, peacefully, as the blackness edged in from the corners of his eyes. He wanted to say, I’m sorry—to B, to his mother, to life in all its hard light and confusing noise. But it was too late, and he was, anyway, feeling too good to feel any remorse.

Max opened his eyes to a full moon and, beside it, its opposite in color but its equal in allure, roundness, and radiance.

“I bet you didn’t think I could swim,” B said, her face beaming down on him. She was wearing a one-piece bathing suit. Her arms and legs hosted drops of water illuminated in the silver light like pearls.

The un-watery world returned to him: His body was spread over sand.

“This was a test, understand?” she said.

“A test?” Max asked. “You were testing me?”

“Yes.”

“I guess I failed.”

“Yes, you did,” B said. She sighed. “But so did I.”

“You?”

“Listen: I was always going to save you. Don’t worry. But I thought I’d resent it. I don’t like saltwater or seaweed, and sharks scare the shit out of me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I thought we would come here and I would see I wanted what I used to have—the parties, the drinking, even the old boyfriend. I thought I would realize that you were only a sweet sideshow and the mainstage was elsewhere.” She sighed again. “Or I thought, because of me, you would be able to keep your head above water. But if oxygen and I aren’t enough…” 

“I’m sorry,” Max repeated.

He thought he would find disappointment, even disgust, on her face. Instead, he saw something in it he couldn’t define but that set his heart going so fast he felt his blood might shoot out of him and write a love poem on the sand. 

“We’re both sorry,” she said. “Sorry and soaking like a couple of cats who dragged each other in from the rain.” 

She leaned over him and placed her lips against his. Even enveloped in a pleasure he’d never felt before, a pleasure so profound he didn’t think it would be possible to emerge from it even if he’d wanted to, he knew he would need to save this moment in his memory. He would need it when the world intruded again in too large portions of sound and sensation and he wanted to escape again into the deep.

B pulled back, smiled down on him with a serenity matched by the moon’s, and pointed to the ocean. “Go on,” she said. “Go back. This time, I’ll call the Coast Guard to save you.”

A wave sidled up to him, touched his shoulder, and whispered an invitation. 

He reached up to take B’s hand, and she pulled him to his feet. As they walked hand-in-hand on the beach, away from the party and the lights of the city, B said, “A submarine.”

“Excuse me?” Max said.

“I’m thinking about what you can buy me for my birthday.”

They laughed at the same time, laughed until, wet still from the water, they shivered and decided to turn around. The moon shone as bright as before, and the ocean never ceased coming and going.