Come to the Edge: A Memoir (20 page)

“Okay. But you
promise
?”

“Don’t worry, I promise.”

We advanced again. A reef. We went back out, paddled farther down the coast, and pushed in once more. Another reef. By now I was tired and ready to give up, but he pleaded. As we got closer, he spotted a break in the coral just wide enough for the kayak. Risky but not impossible.

“If we’re going to do this, I need you with me. And I need you to paddle hard, so we can pull ahead of the break. I can’t do it alone. What do you say, are you game?”

I nodded. And as captain and first mate, paddle we did. John steered us expertly through the chute with the waves rumbling beneath us. At some point, I was frightened and wanted to stop, but he shouted above the roar, “Too late. No turning back, Baby. Paddle. Now!” He was laughing. We were going to make it. We were almost there, a stone’s throw from the beach, when suddenly the tide pulled back to reveal what had been hidden—a large boulder blocking the narrow entrance to dry land.

We were going to wreck. No way around it or through it. I was in front. Beneath the bow, my broken limb lay immobile from knee to foot in its shiny blue brace. My leg and the boat were sure to shatter. I closed my eyes and waited, too afraid to cry.

Then there was a whoosh of sand against the canvas bottom. Not rock—sand. Just as we were about to hit, a wave came, just high enough to carry us over the rock. We—and our craft—arrived without a scratch. John hauled the kayak up. I hobbled out with my soggy crutch, the day pack, and the mango. We caught our breath, unable to speak.

I know now we were in shock. I thought it was just me who was terrified, but then I saw John, my captain, John, who was never afraid. Unable to be still, he paced the beach muttering something, his eyes wide and to the ground. “Don’t tell Mummy, don’t tell Mummy,” he repeated like a mantra to no one. Mummy wasn’t there, and he wasn’t talking to me. I could have passed my hand in front of his eyes, and he would not have blinked. It was then that the danger we had been in really hit me.
John
was afraid. I had never seen him like this—not skiing down a chute in a whiteout in Jackson Hole or nearly colliding with a gray whale in Baja. There was an exhilaration about him, a high. He was almost smiling. Then he noticed that his hand was shaking. He held it out to show me, and we marveled that it continued to shake for the next fifteen minutes.

We didn’t speak as we set up camp on the small beach. The mangroves on either side grew down to the water and made it impossible to walk to the next beach over.

I took the brace off my leg and left it leaning on the kayak with the crutch. Then I hopped to the towel he had laid out and sat down with the book, the damp copy of Mantak Chia’s
Taoist Secrets of Love
. John planned to explore the reef. Broken and mottled, it stretched out from the beach for about half a mile, but lengthwise it seemed to go on forever. Close in, the water was shallow—in some places, no more than ankle-deep—and he tightened the laces of his sneakers so that he could walk on the sharp, dead coral to the deeper spots to dive.

Neither of us broached the question of how we were going to get back. But I knew John, and it was best to let him go off on his own. Physical activity calmed him. As he walked away, swim goggles draped over his shoulder, he turned back to me. “Don’t eat my mango, Baby,” he yelled.

I smiled and watched him disappear behind the mangroves. I wanted him—his tanned body, his jones for adventure. Even his mango hoarding. I wanted all of it. We’d been together a long time, but desire was always there. It ebbed and flowed, but the current stayed strong between us.

I took off my white bikini and lay back. The sound of the waves grew faint, broken by the reef. The sun felt good on my body.
For this moment, we are safe
. We would find our way back. It would be okay. It always was with John. I believed that when I was with him, nothing could happen to me. I believed it, even on that remote beach with the reef out there waiting.

I woke to the sound of voices. There were no roads that we knew of on the high cliffs above, just jungle and goat paths, but through the leafy green, I saw five men making their way down to the beach. Red men—our deserted beach, no longer deserted. Had they seen me? I called for John, but there was no answer.

When they reached a large pile of wood near the rocks on the far side of the beach, they began to place the branches that they were carrying on top. I was sure I smelled smoke. Then one of them saw me and began moving down the beach, stick in hand. As I scrambled for my sarong, I saw the headlines—
NAKED ROMP: JFK GAL PAL RAPED, ROASTED AND EATEN
.

John was nowhere to be seen, and my crutch was too far away to hop to. My hands trembled. I gave up on the bikini top, shoving it under the towel with the book, and pulled my sarong up over me, knotting it tightly under my arm. Before the men approached, I succeeded in getting the suit bottom somewhere in the vicinity of my thighs. My first thought was to keep the men talking until John got back.

The largest one sat near me, and the rest towered above. With his red hair and freckles, he looked like one of the locals from Treasure Beach, but his patois was harder for me to understand. How had I gotten here, he asked. I pointed to the boat, then realized they would see the crutch and know I couldn’t walk. The youngest sat on his haunches. Was I alone? Married? Oh, yes, I said, and my husband will be back any minute. The leader lit up a joint and offered me a hit off the enormous spliff. Jamaican hospitality and impossible to refuse. In return, I gave him the mango.

As we shared the fruit, they told me they were childhood friends and had fished off this reef as boys. The one who’d spotted me had gone to the north of England for work and had just returned after twenty years away. There would be a full moon that night, and they were here to fish and celebrate. They didn’t have poles, they said, but they showed me the small nets, sharp sticks, and tin cans rigged with string.

Finally, John arrived. He was happy and relaxed, greeting the men and handing me a present—a colored shell he’d found while diving off the reef. When he smiled, saying something to the effect that he’d found a way off Paradise, I pointed to the trail the men had come from. Dismayed to find that his mango had been eaten, he stretched out on the sand and finished what was left of the joint. Then he got a lesson in tin can fishing. As they stood in the shallows of the reef casting their lines, John was especially intrigued by the youngest, who easily skewered the small reef fish with his stick.

He inquired about the goat path. Steep, they said. A thousand feet up. We would have to abandon the kayak, that was clear, and I would need to be carried. He asked for their help, offering to pay them at the hotel, but the men didn’t want to leave before morning. Instead, they invited us to spend the night with them roasting fish under the stars. We stayed on the beach for hours but nixed the idea of sleeping there. As eager as we had been to arrive, we now wanted to leave.

Arguing for the devil we knew, I said we should return the way we had come, through the break in the reef.

“Not an option,” John said, shaking his head.

“But we made it the first time.”

“Yes, but even if we got to the end of the channel, even if we made it that far, we’d be slammed where the surf meets the reef.”

I looked out. He was right. In the distance, the waves hit the submerged coral with such force that they were tossed sky-high.

“My way,” he said, “we steer clear of the reef altogether.”

“How?” I asked. “It’s everywhere.”

“That’s what I thought. But when I was diving off the side, I saw it, I was in it. In front of the other beach, no reef, no coral—it’s clear.”

I tried to stall. “Can we walk there, so I can at least see it?”

Again he shook his head. “Mangroves. And rock. The beach there is lower, set farther back than this one. We’d have to climb down—you wouldn’t make it with your foot. I’ll take you in the kayak and you can see from there. The coral makes a ledge, and if we drop down, we’re home free.”

I looked away from him, my eyes catching sight of the crutch by the boat.

“Just check it out,” he said. “You can always say no.”

After we said goodbye to the fishermen, he picked me up and set me in the front of the kayak and began to pull the boat through the shallow water. Whatever haze we may have felt from the red men’s joint was gone, and we were clearheaded, invigorated by decision. The side of the reef ran perpendicular to the shore and, along with the mangroves, divided the two beaches and their waters. It also created, as he had described, a shelf with a drop of about six feet into the waves on the other side.

We reached the edge. He stood waist-deep in the calm reef waters, one hand steadying the stern. We were silent as we surveyed what lay before us. To the right, there was the wider beach, with jungle behind it and white surf pounding the shore. To the left, the Caribbean, the horizon, and a straight shot back to Treasure Beach. But below, huge swells rolled by, unbroken by reef and rock. That was where we were headed. John would drag the kayak farther out, but where he could still stand. This would place us as far past the wave break as possible once we dropped down. Then he would jump in behind me, in the steering position, and push the kayak off the reef. We’d be parallel to the swells when we landed, but he’d time it between sets and quickly steer the boat a quarter turn out to sea.

I bit my lip and watched the water rise and unfurl until it crashed on the sand of the larger beach. Then I remembered my leg.

“But what if a wave hits us? What if we capsize? I can’t swim in that.” My doctors had said yes to pool swimming only. And by the looks of it, I wasn’t even sure John could make it in that surf.

“That’s not going to happen.” He sounded more confident about his plan now that we were actually here. “We’re sneaking in from the side, not head-on. And look how evenly they’re breaking.”

It was true. The waves weren’t wild; they were rolling straight. And from our perch on the reef, there was nothing sideways about them.

“It’s our best shot. There’s no reef below. No way we’ll wreck. I know I can turn the ’yak. I can time it right. I’ll get us past the break. You just paddle and I’ll steer.”

It was a risk, I knew—a roll of the dice. But it did look less harrowing than our arrival earlier through the channel in the reef. And we’d survived that, hadn’t we? I looked at John. He was counting under his breath, as serious as I’d ever seen him, marking the time between wave sets. His brow was furrowed, his jaw set. I squeezed his hand, took the leap, and nodded yes.

He pulled the boat out a little farther and hoisted himself in back. Then, with his oar, he pushed us off the reef. Once we dropped down, the tip righted itself—just as he had said it would—and we began to make the turn out to sea before the next swell. But he had misjudged; the waves were much larger and the current stronger than they had appeared from the shelf above, and we soon realized that we were being dragged sideways to the shore, the prow in danger of heading toward the surf. If we were caught in the break, we’d be tumbled in white water and slammed against the sand. To avoid the danger of the reef, we had put ourselves at the mercy of the sea.

I heard his voice. He was shouting for me to keep paddling as he tried furiously to keep the tiny boat away from the shore.

Then, without warning, we were underwater, inside an enormous swell. Like a hurricane’s eye, like its very own world, it was silent and still. Time stopped. My eyes opened to unending pale blue. I was amazed that I could see everything. I looked to what I thought was above. My eyes widened: Ten feet, fifteen feet up, I saw a trail of light filtering down. Not white water—just the smallest ridge of curl. It meant we were beneath the crest, in its thickness, but it hadn’t broken. Not yet. It meant the boat was still righted and we hadn’t flipped. It meant hope.

Suddenly, there was pressure on every part of my body. We were surging toward the break somewhere to our right. I didn’t know if I could hold my breath much longer—the wall of water was endless. I panicked and began to push myself out of the boat, to swim toward the light, when I felt a hand on my back pulling me down. I turned; his eyes were open. He was shaking his head as forcefully as he could against the weight of the water. I had forgotten that he was there, that he was caught in the wave with me.

Air hit, and we gasped. But the next swell came, rough and hard, and we were under again. I watched as the paddle was lifted from my hand. I watched as my fingers let go of the wood. I wanted to breathe but reminded myself I couldn’t. My head was light, so light. I thought,
This is it. This is how it ends. We are going to die together. This is what it means to drown
.

But the sky broke through. In the air, the sound was deafening. My lungs hurt, and as we crested a steep wave, I coughed, spat water, and clung to the edge of the boat with my head down. I waited, fully expecting to be flung backward out of the boat, but we made it over. I looked back at him, amazed, and saw that he had never stopped. He’d never given up, and he was beginning to shepherd us over the waves, not under them. He had turned us out to sea, just as he’d promised, and we were coursing past the break to safety. Then I heard him yell.

“Bail!”

“What?”

“Bail. Find the bailer. Now!” he ordered.

I looked down. Water to my waist. No spray skirts; they were somewhere in a closet in New York. I rummaged frantically around the bottom of the boat. My crutch, like the paddle, was gone, and there was nothing to bail with. I started to cry, but I was furious.

“There is no bailer, John! How could you not pack a bailer?” I shouted. “We’re in the goddamn ocean!”

“Fuck, use anything, use your hands! We’re sinking.”

“The hell we are.”

Resolute, I scooped the water overboard with both hands, until he found a cotton baseball cap wedged under his thigh. And when the danger had finally passed, when we were far enough out so that there was barely a ripple in the surface of the sea, I remember thinking how beautiful the day was, how clear the sky. And that it was all so incongruous with what had nearly happened to us three times that day. A jeer almost.