The sun was already high, but a thin, misty layer of cloud veiled it and gave it a rainbow aureole. Tommy was glad it was not fierce and glaring the wy it could be along this beach in midsummer when the sea relfected it in painful flashes and the high presuure set in to kill the breeze.
He sat on a rock beneath the cliffs and watched a squadron of pelicans flying just above the water two hundred yars out where the big kelp beds began.
He watched one of them swoop up, and then plummet downward in the graceless, folded jumble that pelicans made of themselves, crash into the water and emerge with a silvery, flapping fish. The other pelicans wheeled and spread out, working the school as the first had.
His back haunches were beginning to feel stiff from sitting, so he reached for his bagpack. The movement brought his eyes along the bench so he noticed the girl standing on the sand staring out at the ocean just past the next curve of the shore.
He knew he should stand up and resume his walk past her up the beach toward home, but the way she stood, it seemed to him that she could not see him. He supposed that a suntanned, barefoot man wearing khaki shorts and gray t-shirt could easily be lost to the eye among the rocks beneath the cliff.
She was clearly not expecting to see anyone here; she might have walked a mile along this stretch of beach without meeting anyone at mid-morning on a weekday. There was no nearby place where a person could park a car and easily climb down here.
He savored the feeling of invisibility; it gave him a chance to take an unhurried look at her. She was young. He judged her to be about seveten or eighteen. He considered standing up, but he didnt want to startle her now - certainly not frighten her - so he watched and waited for her to move on.
She was pretty, with long, brown hair. She was wearing a pair of khaki shorts not so very different from hi, and a top of the sort with thin straps like strings to hold it up. She took a step. She paused, and then leaned her body forward. Her left foot moved ahead just in time to keep herself from toppling, then her right took a step to compensate, and she was walking.
She kept her head down and her legs moving in a dtermined stride until she reached the firm margin of tightly packed sand just above the tide line, and thn kept going in to the water.
The first five steps were easy, the waves foaming around her ankles, then her shins. He watched her walking in, an act so familiar that he felt her teps in his own body; the first wave hit her thighs and made her progress stop, then pulled her on its backwash.
The next one hit her at the top of her legs, and made her take an involuntary hop because the cold was reaching the tender spots. She leaned a little to the side when the next wave hit her, the nstraightened, hugged her arms around her chest and kept walking.
She did not dive under and begin to swim as the next wave approached, although that was what he had been sure she was going to do. She simply let it go over her.
Then he realized he was getting uncomfrtable - short of breath - and he stood up quickly.
When she had gone under, he had unconciously taken a breath and held it. But this was too long. He pushed it out and inhaled deeply, already running across the sand toward the water.
He kept his eye on the spot where she had disappeared, leaping over the first two incoming breakers, then diving over the third and crouching to let the fourth surge over him before he pushed off and began to swim.
He sawm a hard freestyle, his feet kicking up a wake and his arms stabbing furiously into the water and pulling, his head turning to breathe every six stroke.
His mind had begun to enumerate the possibilities: maybe she had gotten tangled in a big clump of kelp, panicked and gulped water. Maybe she'd had some kind of seisure. He reached the spot where he was almost sure she had gone down. He stroked to raise his body high, pointed his toes, and went under, feet first.
His foot hit something, and in a relfex he pulled it back, unbelieving. He realized the he had been sure he was going to find nothing, toch nothing. The odds that he could ffind an unconcious person out her was minuscule. He came up for air, dived, and swam straight down.
The water was dim and cloudy, but he saw her, not below, but beside him. She was hanging about ten feet down, her limbs glowing white in the murk, her haird swirling in the curent, radiating out on all sides. He put his left arm around her torso, stroked with his right and kicked toward the light.
When he broke the surface, she did not move or twith or join him in the gasp for air. As he shifted his left arm across her chest and began to thug her toward shore, for the first time he let himself think that she might be dead. He struggled to bring her to shallow water, trying to keep her head up, but everal times finding that he had failed, taken a stroke with her head under. Each time it made him swim harder, desperate to get them to the beach where he could do something.
Then his foot hit sand, and he hauled her in more quickly, finding that he moved faster if he held both her arms and dragged er through the shallow water.
When he reached the tide line he beached her on the firm, wet sand, her lower legs still in the water but her head, torso, and thighs out. She still had a pair of sneakers on her feet.
Tommy rapidly went through the preparations for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. He bent her head back, opened her mouth, and made sure her tongue was visible. He carefully placed the heel of his hand below her sternum and gave the required ten pushed, then pinched her nostrils shut, leaned forward, placed his lips over her mouth and gave her a breath, then sat up and pushed her chest again.
She gasped a sound like a whistle, coughed, and vomited. He rolled her onto her side so she could keep coughing up water without blocking her airway. "You're going to be okay," he said quietly. "That's right. Cough it up so you can breathe." He patted her back as he remebered people doing to him when he was choking on soemthing as a child, but a very strong mesagge came from the attitude of her body to tell him that itt was not what she wanted.
Then he saw that her eyes open, and that she was trying to get a look at him, but the sun was in her eyes because he was aboe her. He forced himself to say something about himself, just to reassure her that he was real, and ordinary, and frinedly. "I saw you go under, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to find you."
She sat up with great effort, and stared at him in absolute disbelief, then lay on her stomach, her face pressed into the sand in sorrow.
He stood up and asked her, "Were you trying to die? Why were you foolish enough to end your life?" She had not wanted to be saved. All she ever wanted and though was to die.
"Why did you save me? Why didn't you let me end my life?" she looked into his eyes remorsefully.
Tommy grabbed her by her arms and wiped her tears from her cheek, "You're born with a beatiful, angeice face. It's a pity if you end your life here." He supported her up, her hands over his shoulders and his hands grabbing tightly onto her waist.
He brought her to a nearby long bench.
"Michelle..."
Huh? Tommy looked at her in bewilderment. "Is that your name?" he smiled.
She smiled back and looked deep into his eyes.
"Tommy - that's my name." He said with a smile on his face.
"Maybe it's fate that we meet. It's fate you would save me and its fate that I wouldn't be able to die today..." she said sorrowfully...
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