Jack & Jill
An Excerpt from Tumbling After
I caught it! he thinks. I actually caught it!
As the wave swells beneath him, Jack looks out over the wind-swept, all-but-deserted beach (where his sister Jilly stands watching, dwindled to doll size) and surrenders to the same mix of elation and terror that makes roller-coasters irresistible. The cry that bursts from his lips is the primordial cry of the ocean: raw, fierce, and proud. Jack’s up so high that he can see over the crest of the dunes to the houses beyond; even to his own house, where the antlike figures of his father, Bill, his older sister, Ellen, and Uncle Jimmy are hard at work taking down the porch screens. It seems entirely possible that he might fly to them, joining the gulls angling through the air on the knife-edge gusts and thrusts of wind preceding Belle like the outriders of an advancing army. Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird; it’s a plane; no, it’s Super Jack!
The ocean yaws and pitches. The next thing he knows, he’s falling. The surf is miles below. He screams, desperately trying to right himself, or the world. At the same time, he catches sight of Jilly. She’s up to her waist in the surf, arms rigid at her sides, gazing at him with an expression of fearful excitement, her mouth open as if she’s shouting at the top of her lungs. But he can’t hear her. Then he can’t see her anymore either, because the wave curls behind him and slaps him down. There’s no time to register the pain of striking the surface in the pummeling he receives beneath it as the wave rolls him toward shore. Jack tumbles like a sneaker in a washing machine, slammed into the bottom again and again until his body is numb and all sense of direction fled. His lungs burn with the need for air. A directionless roar envelops him.
He struggles against the current, but the incoming surge passes him off smoothly to the outgoing tide, which drags him back the way he’d come… or a different way, he can’t tell. At last he goes limp, thinking to conserve his strength. He’s wishing he hadn’t come down to the beach with Jilly to look at the storm-tossed surf; more than anything, he’s wishing he hadn’t accepted her dare to ride one of the enormous waves. “In or else, Jack,” she’d taunted. “You’re not chicken, are ya?”
When will he learn? Why does he let her talk him into these things? Bill’s going to kill him… assuming the ocean doesn’t do the job first. He’d give anything to go back and change the moment when he’d pulled off his shirt and run headlong into the water. It seems like ages ago; another life altogether. Pinpricks of light are flaring and dying in the dark of his inner vision, illuminating shapes he doesn’t want to see: immense, unmoving forms that also take notice of him somehow, as if the flashes by which he sees them are lighting him up as well, bringing him fitfully, like a flickering ghost, across some invisible threshold and into the range of their perceptions. He senses a sluggish stirring in the depths and imagines a scaly arm or tentacle reaching for him as he might reach to swat a fly. He strikes out blindly.
The current falls away as if grown weary of the game. With the last of his hoarded strength, Jack kicks and claws his way toward what he hopes is the surface.
All at once, there’s air to breathe… if you call this breathing. Sputtering, half-blinded by spume and spray, he flounders, legs churning, arms splashing. Shards of leaden sky shatter across his eyes, but no glimpse of shore obtrudes to guide him, no hint of where he is in relation to the land. For all he knows, he’s been swept miles out to sea. His straining toes brush no bottom. Wherever he turns, a wave is waiting to slap him in the face. He wants nothing more than to strike back, bursting with a rage that rises up in him like the wave he’d caught, or that had caught him, and like it crashes down. It pours through and out of him, leaving him drained, empty, tossed about like a cork. It’s all he can do to keep his head above water.
Dazed and half-drowned, Jack finds himself recalling the expression on Jilly’s face, the naked avidity with which, having set these events in motion, she’d watched them take their course, her insatiable eyes drinking in his spill like she thirsted for it, and it’s this memory, rather than his current predicament, that swings open, wider than ever, the floodgates of his fear: his deepest, most secret and spectacular fear. Not of dying. No, it’s the prospect of losing Jilly that truly terrifies him.
But that can’t happen. He won’t let it. He opens his mouth to call her name. Water rushes in. He swallows it like a stone. With a last, stinging slap, the ocean slams over his head, severing his sight from the sky. Sinking into those sisterless depths, he feels himself breaking apart, all the bits and pieces of Jack Doone dispersing in different directions like minnows fleeing a predatory darkness.
Kestrel wakes with a groan. He lies unmoving amid the tangled sheets of the bed, his thoughts sluggish and muddy. The room stinks of stale beer and cigarette smoke. What little light filters past the curtains reveals a shadowy murk that looms up like a wave before his bleary, half-open eye. He watches with vague interest the emergence of beer bottles, cigarette butts, pizza crusts, loose feathers, and dirty clothes from this inchoate mass, not quite connecting any of it with certain dimly remembered events of the previous night. He’s doing his best to ignore an urgent need to piss. Every muscle and bone in his body hurts. His teeth hurt. His eyelashes. He feels like he might be all right if he could lie absolutely still for about a thousand years.
