Beach Rental(60)

He dove and swam. He did his best to find little Charlie in the roiling ocean. Adrenalin fueled the strength that drove Ben into the manic waves, but it faltered too soon. He couldn’t withstand the ocean’s power. Nor could she. As Juli grabbed him, the waves slammed their faces and snatched the ground from beneath their feet.

Juli dug her fingers into his arm, fighting the slippery wetness of his flesh. His face was white and his eyes stared at her, then past her.

She lost her grip on him, bested by the pull of the ocean. She couldn’t find bottom. Her toes searched for purchase and found only water. The next wave came as she surfaced to breathe. It filled her eyes and mouth with vile salt water and sand. This is it.

A hand closed on her upper arm with a viselike grip and pulled. She had no sense of direction, but felt ripped through the water, her arm in agony. Her toes hit sand and then her knees as she was dragged onto the beach. Ron released her. She huddled, gasping and coughing. Her lungs burned. Ron knelt beside her. She waved him away, rolling over onto her butt and pushing her hair out of her stinging eyes. Desperately, she scanned the waves and the beach.

“Ben?” Juli tried to yell, but only croaked. Her throat was raw. Ben was nowhere in sight. Charlie’s yellow water wings had vanished, too, claimed by the ocean.

Ron, above her, was saying over and over, “I’m sorry, so sorry.”

Juli tried to rise. Her legs failed her. Ron caught and steadied her. She felt otherworldly, disbelieving. She wanted to scream this was a mistake. Ben had been working a stupid, boring puzzle. They had a doctor’s appointment in two days.

Victoria was crying. Her words came to Juli through thick tears. “He got away from us. I’m so sorry. We saw his floaties and thought he’d…. but they were tied together.”

Juli turned to look. Beyond Victoria, Violet stood near the crossover. Beyond Violet was Charlie, oblivious, playing in the deep sand beneath the wooden steps, well-camouflaged by the strips of shadow and light.

Someone dialed 9-1-1 and Juli stayed on the beach. She answered the questions of the emergency workers, as did Ron and Victoria. Seeing the Beach Patrol vehicle took her back one day. Just one day made all the difference in the world. A big if-only. So she stayed, not because she had hope, but because the idea of returning to the house while leaving Ben in the ocean was more than she could bear. She waited.

For what? Acceptance? Would that come when her heart stopped shrieking, no, no, no? When tears burned the truth into her denying eyes and shattered her control?

For now, she was paralyzed, trapped in denial. She dropped her head onto her arms. A kind stranger draped a large beach towel around her shoulders.

They’d known from the start he would die, but not today. Not this way.

She couldn’t accept and hold the reality. It kept slipping away from her like mist through her fingers.

How grossly unfair that so much of life could be built upon chance, like a mom who believed her toddler had gone into the ocean alone at the moment Ben was handy to hear her frantic screams.

“Ma’am. Mrs. Bradshaw. You should go to the hospital. You took in a lot of water yourself.”

“No. I’ll stay here.” She waited. Maybe for an ocean of tears or for hysteria. Maybe for someone to come running up the beach shouting Ben was okay.

Ron walked over to the emergency workers and the beach patrol. They’d already tried to convince her to leave the scene. A police officer detached from the group and came to her.

“Is there someone I can call for you?”

“Yes,” she said. “His cousin, Luke Winters. Crescent Street. I don’t know the phone number.” Coward. But no, not a coward, it was merely a physical impossibility to speak such words into the phone, to say them aloud, to anyone.

“No problem. I can get it.”

At some point, when the remaining emergency personnel grew anxious and her vigil began to feel like a spectacle, she trudged up the steps, back over the crossover and faced Ben’s empty house. She pushed through the door, but couldn’t manage more than to reach the sofa. Sandy and salty, still wrapped in the stranger’s towel, she fell upon the cushions and curled up into as small a ball as she could manage.

Not long after, she heard someone at the door and Luke asked, “What happened?”





Chapter Nineteen



She pushed herself upright. There he stood, filling the doorway.

“He went into the ocean to save a child.” Her throat was made of sandpaper. She hardly recognized her own voice.

Luke stared.

Juli ran her hands over her face and forced her breathing to stay within normal bounds. What more was there to say?

“Did he?”