Matt Manco
Rescue Chain
One hundred strangers link arms and shuffle into the surf. The dark water of the north Atlantic obscures the seafloor before it reaches their knees, so they keep their legs close together to feel for a body, the body.
Ben’s been missing for seven minutes. A lifeguard on shore with binoculars around his neck blows two sharp notes through a whistle. At the sound, the line turns around, begins its march back toward us. The line is a hundred feet across. They walk out until they are chest high, then come back. At each turn, they take two steps west with the current.
The first breaths of fall blunt the late summer heat. The smells of the season—dry leaves, mud, and wood smoke—mix with high tide brine so much that I expect to find red and brown oak leaves scattered somewhere close. The creeping hibernation is all around us: in the falling water temperature, the slow-to-rise sun this morning, the too tan face of the lifeguard before me. It’s the final week- end before the tower chairs are wheeled into the parking lot, before kids return to school and lifeguards become students and house painters and bar flies again. We trudged across the rocky beach out of guilt and obligation. The week was cool: summer retreating under a hail of acorns and the bright green husks of fresh black walnuts.
“You’ll miss these days come winter,” I said.
I said, “You’ll regret not coming when you had the chance.”
Mothers hold small children, all in variations of the same pose: a child held close, both arms around them, heads buried in hair and breathing in deep the smell of salt, sunscreen, and baby shampoo all children share. The mothers understand what the children do not, that it could be them tumbling under the water, they could be the ones restrained by lifeguards on shore.
An elderly couple, trailed by a gray whiskered Scottie, walks past. The dog sniffs around the Goldfish crackers and grapes left on the blanket. The old man tries to be discreet when he pulls hard on the leash to keep the dog moving.
Farther away, children skip stones into the water and build castles from the coarse, speckled brown sand common to the glacial beaches of southern New England. Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard, and a constellation of small, rocky islands dot the horizon. The sound of the waves crashing and rolling on shore, the constant petite roar of this place, has burrowed into me and reset the timing of my thoughts and breath. Concentrate on something small, the lifeguard says, over and over. The small rocks scattered in the sand have dull edges and lines like faces. This remote stretch of Atlantic beach has a thousand rocks for every person.
There are no street signs between here and the highway. The roads are narrow and reluctantly paved. The few residents in town do whatever they can to keep tourists and millionaires away. Goosewing Beach is the town’s second most popular pastime between the ice cream stand and getting lost.
The lifeguard explains the mechanics of the rescue chain; stronger swimmers and taller people lead, lifeguards post approximately thirty feet apart, the line’s measured westward lurch tries to outrun the current. Parents are not allowed in the chain, he says, they can’t stay in formation. Maybe he’s trying to convey competence or keep our minds off what we imagine is happening to Ben. They must be trained to do this; to distract us with minutia.
It’s early and I smell coffee on his breath. He moves too much. Eyes and hands dart rapidly between me and the water. He’s a knot of kinetic energy and nerves. He speaks as much with his hands as with his dry, stretched out voice. I wish his energy would fight back the rolling tide. I wish he was in the water crawling on the seafloor, searching with those hands that won’t stop moving. I wish he’d let me back into the water.
The other lifeguard takes a different approach. She’s younger and doesn’t share the deep lines the sun has cut in the older guard’s face. She tells Jess about successful search operations and stories of children who survived. Her blonde hair is shocked nearly white by a full summer’s work, but she seems tired. She’s hardly more than a child herself. I catch her trying to hide a yawn when Jess looks away. It’s crazy to think this is who we trust against the Atlantic.
Ben’s been missing for eleven minutes. He’s fifty-five pounds and cannot swim. When the lifeguards turn their backs, we are alone.
“They look like they’re playing a game,” Jess says. “They’re like bored school children forced to be out there.” They were. “Why aren’t there more people? Shouldn’t there be boats or helicopters or a rope or something?”
Dread settles on the beach. Hundreds of pessimists on shore watch a few dozen reluctant searchers in the water. The faces in the line that aren’t bored look exhausted. Those not exhausted look terrified. Not one looks like they believe they’ll find him.
When he was younger, he would charge into the water as soon as we arrived. It was something he’d seen me do—sprint into the surf until waves cut me down at the knees—and imitated. I hadn’t realized he was watching and that he’d reached the age where all of life is imitation. When he was a toddler, and his soft legs couldn’t outrun us, we’d let him get a head start before I raced from behind and snatched him up at the water’s edge. We tried to explain the danger, how he couldn’t go in without a grown-up. But he was too young to understand. As he grew stronger, faster, and more convinced of his place atop the natural world we had to be vigilant. At any moment he could remember my bad example and take off for the water alone. Waiting for him were the waves he could see, and taunted, and the current he couldn’t. It’s hard, at his age, to believe in things you can’t see.
Undertow does not pull predictably. At his weight, with his lack of strength, the undertow will pull him hard out to sea while the waves roll and crash. The waves will hold him against the ocean floor while the riptide carries him farther out. It’s violent and disorienting and endless. He has probably swallowed a belly full of salt water and been unconscious for several minutes. To find him now would make real some far-off fear. I understand why so many people in the chain wouldn’t want to find him. How they might dread a brush against their leg or a flash of color tumbling passed them.
When I was a little older than he is now, the school nurse called our class into her office. It was a test, she said. Taped against the dulled, hospital-white walls behind her were eight panels with pools of color. Each panel was a circle made of smaller circles. They were green and blue and red and yellow.
“Look closely,” she said and held up a card in her hand. “There is a number in each of these pictures. Can you see it?” Twelve, we cried. “Excellent, now you’re going to walk with me and you’ll tell me what numbers you see.”
We filed in one at a time. “It’s easy,” the first boy said. “There are numbers in the picture. Just tell her and you’re done.”
“This is the stupidest thing,” the next girl said when she returned from the office.
When it was my turn, the nurse flashed the first panel again. After the twelve, the numbers disappeared. Only flat greens, blues, and reds remained. It felt like a joke, or a trick question.
“You really can’t see anything?” she asked. She traced her finger inside the circles, made the shapes of the numbers eight and five. She held the next card. “Here is twenty-nine,” she said, and pointed to a blue-green puddle. Still nothing. I’d been in the office much longer than the other kids and became scared and angry.
“There is no nine.” I started to cry. “I don’t like this game.”
“It’s here,” she said, and traced her finger again. She sat with me a while, then picked up a clipboard and scribbled something with the pen she wore on a string around her neck. She ripped a piece of paper out of her notebook—a message for my parents, she said—and told me I could go.
“I can read, you know,” I said through tears. “I’m not dumb.”
“I know, dear. This doesn’t mean you’re dumb,” she said. “It just means you’re not going to be able to see everything everyone else sees.”
The whistle blows two more times and the rescue chain turns back toward us. They take three or four exaggerated steps to their left, and begin their march back to shore. A thick, white cloud crosses the sky and blocks the sun. In the shadow, a shudder runs across my back and down my arms. The cool, dry air stings against my wet trunks. I feel cold and ridiculous.
The faces in the chain run together. The sun reflects off the water and obscures their bodies. They are smudges of toy soldiers in a child’s game. When they’re close to land they stare at anything but us, unlike those on shore, who can’t look away. The lifeguard holds Jess, keeps her pinned to her chest on our blanket while she kicks and screams to go back in the water.
Across the beach, mothers pull their children closer and try not to get caught staring. The respectful, mournful silence that fell over the beach when the rescue began has grown deeper, heavier, the longer it’s gone on. Fire and rescue trucks arrive, their red and white lights reflect off the bodies and waves. Before the trucks arrived the water had been a long, unbroken stretch of dark green. Somewhere in that forest he’s fighting or hiding.
The sound of waves breaking and wind whipping against tents are pierced by whistles and thoughtless calls of seagulls.
He’s been missing for seventeen minutes. The fire chief stands in front of me. He has replaced the lifeguard and explains what he’s doing; there are boats coming, and a helicopter from Woods Hole. His mustache and eyes have grayed with age, but he’s a stout man, solid and commanding in a starched uniform. Divers have been summoned. A call to all nearby boats went out over shortwave radio. A pair of police officers join the lifeguard who refuses to let go of Jess. She’s hissing at the taller one, while the short one searches our bags, coolers, and blankets.
The short police officer unscrews the lid to our canteen, puts his nose in close, then offers the bottle up to his partner with an arched eyebrow. He’s looking for a reason. Something to comfort those who will read about us in tomorrow’s newspaper, or watch search boats on the evening news. Reassurance that this could never happen to them.
While the police kick over blankets and beach toys, I watch the chain turn and march back into the sea. If he’s still tumbling out there, anywhere near the chain, they will find him soon. The officers in long pants and black leather shoes are out of place on the beach. Nightsticks, handcuffs, and pistols on their hips sway with their unsteady movement on the sand. They look ridiculous here.
Handcuff the riptide. Tell the rocks you have them surrounded. Fire rounds at the waves. At least ask their demands. He’s been missing for twenty minutes. The lifeguard can no longer hold the police away and they’re asking a lot of questions. They separate us; one pulls me aside while his shorter partner presses Jess for details about our morning. The taller one has his back to the water so I stare over his shoulder as the chain reaches shallow water, turns, and trudges out again.
The officer is not actually tall, just taller than his partner, with dark hair cut short under his navy-peaked hat. I tell him Ben was playing by the water’s edge, digging with a plastic truck, flipping wet sand in the air. We were here—I point down to the blanket that doesn’t feel like our blanket anymore—giving him space.
The officer asks a few questions I can’t hear. The wind picks up, the surf rougher over his shoulder. Little white caps dot the expanse of green. The gusts pass and the heavy silence of the beach returns. He repeats his question, louder and with more determined eye contact.
I don’t remember if we were reading or looking at our phones.
I remember he was there then he wasn’t.
Maybe a wave broke on him. He was on his stomach and it must have been enough to lift him off the sand because I saw him, then he was gone. I ran into the water, Jess ran up and down the beach. Near Jess I hear a stern voice repeat, “Ma’am, ma’am.”
The officer explains that at a certain point missions shift from rescue to recovery. Behind him the chain thins and breaks apart at the shore. New rescue personnel replace exhausted civilians and enter the water. Those not required to help fall back, let professionals take their place. The chain is half as long as it was when it began. When there was hope.
The new, smaller chain walks toward a line of jon boats. These boats are anchored where the shelf in the seafloor tumbles down into darkness. That drop, one hundred feet offshore, forms the break that calls surfers and open water swimmers year-round. They wrap themselves in thick wetsuits, brave sub-freezing temperatures and forty-degree water to ride waves and test them- selves against the strength and permanence of the tides.
Far out in the break, divers in wetsuits with heavy oxygen tanks on their backs line the edges of the boats. They cradle wide dive lights against their chests and drop over the gunwales. Four divers disappear into the water this way until the boats are empty, rocking back and forth. The boats are held in place by anchors and faith. They’ll be where the divers expect them when they come up for air.
He’s been missing for forty minutes. The senior lifeguard huddles with three firefighters in striped overalls and a boyish Coast Guardsman. Behind them the search line turns around, points themselves back to shore. There is solemn nodding. There are bowed heads.
Beside me, the young lifeguard holds Jess again. They rock gently on the blanket. The guardsman and the firefighters turn from the water and walk toward us. They move deliberately, do their best to stay tall while the sand shifts under their boots. They look overdressed. Around them others try to be discreet, but they are all staring. I catch one looking. The shock and embarrassment, written across their face, stayed with me.
If they never reach us the search can never end. They cannot stop without talking to us first. I want the sand to open beneath their feet. I want a wave to rise and crash over us all, take me and leave him.
All around us, mothers and fathers have joined in little communion with sons and daughters. They watch because they need to know. They need to see what devastation looks and sounds like, to know how close it all came to them. Others collect their things silently and hustle away to be anywhere else.
In the corner of my eye I see Jess shake free. The message starts and she tries to stop it. She compresses herself against what we’re about to hear. It’s too big, the words that will make it real. I watch as she tries to harden herself, to dam the part of us Ben created where grief will try to pass. She swings, vibrates, then quakes hard until beside me, free from the lifeguard’s embrace she hums. All her muscles contract and release so quickly they emit a high frequency I can feel in My bones. The force of her convulsions scare me. She’s beautiful.
The search line will not go back out I hear before the sounds of the world coming apart. There are strong hands on my shoulders before I know why. They surround me before I feel tremors, before whatever held me up gives way and I drop. Pinned down, I collapse, shake, and allow the grief, strong as the current, to tear through the place in me Ben carved from nothing. I hear Jess’s scream break, hear hard, uncontrollable sobs and I can see in her eyes that something new surges where her light had been. It’s called wailing because it’s the only way to honor the immensity of the sound.
Sixteen days later a police car pulls up in front of our house. The same officers, tall and short, brush their pant legs on the seed heads shooting from the lawn, step around a dozen newspapers and knock on our door. Jess clears dirty plates from the table, but they won’t sit. The tall one removes his hat, holds it with two hands in front of him and doesn’t look up.
The short one tells us they believe Ben was found that morning.
We choose a plot on the inland side of St. Vincent’s Hill. Though we plan to cremate ourselves, the thought of burning him after all he’s been through feels wrong, like a continuation of some elemental torture.
From the peak, I can see the loose connections of our town. The long, rambling roads that lead nowhere in particular. Shingled roofs peek through the explosion of red and yellow in October maple trees. The beach is a splinter of light brown against the rich blue of the ocean. When the wind shifts I can smell the salt air as it rises up the hill. Lost in the landscape are a thousand invisible currents, imperceptible until they’re made so plain it’s cruel. I know they are there and always will be, tearing at the land with wild and unstoppable force.