Rip Current
By Sarah Busching
When my grandmother stepped off the earth and into the wave, it was the first time I’d seen her swim.
With a toddler’s steps, she followed my big brother and me. The ocean lifted us higher, briefly swallowing our heads. Squinting in the sunlight, I ducked under the breakers, the waves that could no longer support themselves. Soon, I couldn’t find the bottom, even when I submerged myself.
My grandmother gasped but cut herself off, keeping the water from her mouth. She clung to my brother’s hand.
It was unforgivable that a grandparent could be scared.
#
Now that she is gone, now that there are children who look up at me and see someone who has reached the height of impossible ancientness—a parent—I can see my grandmother.
When you have spent so long being the raft, it’s hard to accept that you might need one for yourself. For years, it was unimaginable to let my kids out of my sight. But they don’t stay smaller than you, and they swim, letting the current pull them just a little ways down the beach, not quite out of sight of the family umbrella but far enough that if the undertow yanked, you couldn’t save them.
But on that day with our grandmother, I was still a child, and I hadn’t learned what the tide could do.
#
The water rocketed us into the horizon. My brother remarked that we must be miles from shore, as casually as though he were saying, the sun has gotten bright. The shells disappeared, then the sandpipers, then the beach blankets. My brother and I giggled; panic eluded us.
My grandmother screamed.
#
If you have had seven pregnancies, and six live births, and five remaining children, you have the right to fear.
My grandmother told my grandfather she was born in 1920, but she was actually born six years earlier. She never told anyone, until one day she did, a seismic shift presented as a ripple. My grandfather was dead, and she’d served coffee and banana bread to several of her children and grandchildren, including me.
The middle generation gaped, the youngest generation shrugged, and our grandmother moved on to comment on the neighbors’ landscaping.
#
(You sink under the surface and the water avalanches over you and roars directly into your eardrums, but it doesn’t break through. It presses against your eyes and thunders through your brain, but it can’t breach your body. How do you not become the ocean through your eyes?)
#
“Why do Grandma and Grandpa sleep in different rooms?” I once asked my brother. Our grandparents’ house was full of relatives celebrating a baptism, and we’d escaped upstairs to snoop.
“It’s because old people snore. They can’t sleep over all the snoring,” he told me.
“Nope,” said one of my uncles, who’d just emerged from the hall bathroom. “I remember when she moved out.”
“Because of the snoring?” my brother asked.
“No! Dad said…” Our uncle blinked at us. “How old are you?”
“I’m nine. She’s six,” my brother said.
“You came to my birthday party,” I accused my uncle.
“Oh.” He shuffled downstairs to the party.
#
That day stuck on the crest, we were sucked backward. The roofs and the faux widow walks like a tiled floor beyond us. A rip tide is often invisible until you’re in it.
My brother grew wings.
I grew wings.
Our grandmother didn’t grow wings.
I flew up, the water rolling below me.
We flapped above my grandmother, hovering, grabbing her hands, until at last she let go and screamed at us to fly. Our feathers beat like we had always been pelicans. Children adapt so easily, unless they don’t.
My grandmother hadn’t grown wings, but beneath the waves, she’d lost her legs and grown a tail. Like an eel on a hook, she thrashed the silver appendage. It fought her as if it were a separate animal.
But as she gained control, she became more expansive with the scales. She plunged below, swimming along the rip current and then out, away, into the sloping sea.
The sun rushed down the red-flooded horizon, and the orange globe of a moon rose, silver-lined clouds flying past it.
We flew back to the beach and became wingless children again. Our grandmother, though, never returned. The people who found us said it was a miracle we were still alive, but not so much of a miracle that they could believe we’d become birds and a woman had become a mermaid.
#
My grandmother hadn’t ever been to the ocean until half her kids were adults, when she and my grandfather could afford to take the half that remained at home. She could swim, but a local pool is different, isn’t it? You know how to swim in a container.
They say once you get older, you can’t become a mermaid. It’s been several decades since I saw it happen, though, and I still see my grandmother as I did that afternoon: a creature prehistoric and new.
THE END
Author Bio: Sarah Busching writes about things that go bump in the night, happily ever afters, and everything in between. She was the recipient of the Glenwood Clark Prize for fiction at the College of William and Mary. Her work can be viewed at www.sarahbusching.com.