The Second Loss

Undertow

Chapter 18: The Second Loss

The towel was blue. This was the first thing James saw when he arrived at the beach for setup on the morning of September 4, 2022, at six-thirty, fifteen minutes before the morning meeting, ninety minutes before the stands opened, in the gray light of early September when the summer was ending and the beach was emptying and the ocean was cooling and the season was entering its final days, the days that felt different from the June days and the July days and the August days, the days when the light was lower and the shadows were longer and the air had the first trace of the thing that would become autumn, the molecular shift, the atmospheric change, the barely perceptible cooling that said: the summer is done, the summer is almost done, the ending is near.

The towel was on the sand near Stand 3, fifty feet from the waterline, spread flat, with a pair of sandals placed neatly at its edge and a canvas tote bag beside the sandals and a paperback book on top of the tote bag, the arrangement that said: someone is here, someone has come to the beach, someone has set up their place on the sand in the particular way that people set up their places on the sand -- towel flat, shoes off, bag beside the towel, the domestic ordering of the small territory that the beachgoer claims, the square of fabric that says: this is my spot, this is where I am, this is where I will return.

James saw the towel. He noted the towel. He noted it the way he noted everything on the beach in the morning -- as data, as information, as a piece of the daily inventory that told him what had happened on the beach before he arrived. Towels left overnight were common. People forgot them. People left them on purpose, staking a claim for the next day. People abandoned them the way they abandoned sandals and sunscreen bottles and the occasional beach chair that was not worth carrying back to the car. The towel was data, and the data said: someone was here, or someone is here.

He scanned the beach. He did not see anyone. The beach was empty -- the pre-dawn beach, the beach of the guards and the joggers and the gulls, the beach before the public, the beach that belonged to the work. He scanned the water. He did not see anyone in the water.

He continued his setup. He checked the equipment. He loaded the ATV. He placed the rescue cans at the stands. He performed the morning routine that he had performed every morning of every season for twenty years, the routine that was the beginning, the daily beginning, the mechanical prelude to the standing on the stand and the scanning that was the job.

At six-forty he returned to the area near Stand 3. The towel was still there. The sandals were still there. The tote bag was still there. The book was still there. He looked at the arrangement again. The neatness of it. The precision. The sandals placed side by side, aligned, toes pointing toward the water. The book placed squarely on the tote bag, not tossed but placed. The towel smooth, without wrinkles, without the bunching that happened when a towel was dropped or thrown. The arrangement was deliberate. The arrangement was the work of a person who had taken care, who had prepared her place with attention, who had set up her spot on the beach as if the setting-up mattered, as if the arrangement was part of the experience, the first act of the ritual that was the visit to the beach.

The sandals were a woman's. Size seven, leather, the kind of sandal that was not a beach sandal but a street sandal, the sandal you wore to walk from the car to the sand, the sandal that said: I did not come here to play, I came here to be near the water, I came here for the water.

James looked at the water.

The water was calm. September calm. The end-of-season calm that came when the hurricane season had passed its peak and the summer swells had diminished and the ocean settled into the patient gray-green stillness that was the fall ocean, the ocean that was not dramatic but constant, not spectacular but present, the ocean that simply was, without the performance of the summer waves and the summer crowds, without the spectacle, without the audience.

He keyed the radio. "All guards, morning check. Anyone see a swimmer at the south end? Near Stand 3?"

The radio answered with negatives. No one had seen a swimmer. No one had seen anyone near Stand 3. The beach was empty.

James looked at the towel. He looked at the sandals. He looked at the water.

The thing he felt was the thing he always felt when the data did not align, when the information on the beach did not match the information on the water, when the presence of a towel implied the presence of a person and the absence of a person contradicted the presence of the towel. The misalignment was the signal. The misalignment was the disturbance. The misalignment was the thing the scanning existed to find, the thing that said: something is wrong, something does not fit, the grammar of the situation contains an error, a sentence that does not parse.

He walked to the waterline. He scanned the water with binoculars. He swept the surface from the jetty to the south boundary, a quarter mile of ocean, looking for the thing he hoped he would not find and that he needed to find, the head, the body, the object in the water that would explain the towel, that would solve the equation, that would give the sandals an owner and the owner a location.

He did not find it.

He called the Asbury Park police at six-fifty. He described the towel, the sandals, the tote bag, the book. He described the absence. The absence was the thing he reported -- not a presence but an absence, not a person but the lack of a person, the person-shaped hole in the morning that the towel marked, the way a footprint marked the absence of a foot, the way a shadow marked the absence of light.

The police came. Two officers. They checked the tote bag. Inside the tote bag was a wallet. Inside the wallet was a driver's license. The driver's license showed a photograph of a woman with gray hair and brown eyes and the particular composure of a face that had been photographed many times and that no longer performed for the camera but simply presented itself, the face of a person who was accustomed to being seen and who was comfortable with the seeing.

Margaret Daly. Sixty-seven. Morristown, New Jersey.

The address was in Morris County, sixty miles inland, an hour's drive from the coast. Margaret Daly had driven an hour to reach this beach. She had arrived before dawn. She had spread her towel on the sand near Stand 3. She had placed her sandals beside the towel. She had placed her book on the tote bag. She had walked to the water. She had entered the water.

At six-fifteen in the morning. Fifteen minutes before James arrived for setup. An hour and forty-five minutes before the stands opened. In the dark. Alone.

The Coast Guard searched. The helicopter went up at seven-thirty, the orange-and-white helicopter that James had seen before, that he had watched circle the water on the day Tommy Raines was lost, the helicopter that was the search's highest eye, the eye that could see what the stand could not see, the area that exceeded the stand's quarter-mile range, the ocean beyond the beach, the ocean that was not the guard's jurisdiction but the Coast Guard's, the open water where the currents went after they left the near-shore, the place where the water took the things it took when it took them far enough.

The boat went out. The Coast Guard cutter from Sandy Hook, the forty-seven-foot motor lifeboat that was designed for search and rescue in coastal waters, the boat that cut through the two-foot swell with the mechanical efficiency of a vessel built for one purpose, the finding of people in the water, the finding that was the Coast Guard's version of the scanning, the surface search that covered the area the helicopter could not see, the area the stand could not see, the area where Margaret Daly might be.

James stood on the beach. He stood at the waterline near Stand 3, near the blue towel, near the sandals that were size seven and leather and that pointed toward the water, the water that had taken their owner, the water that Margaret Daly had entered in the dark, alone, for reasons that James did not know and that the towel did not explain and that the sandals did not explain and that the book on the tote bag did not explain, because the reasons were hers, were private, were the personal motivations of a sixty-seven-year-old woman from Morristown who had driven sixty miles to the coast before dawn and had entered the ocean in the dark.

Why did she enter the water. James did not know. He would learn, later, from the police report, from the information that emerged in the days after, the information that filled in the outline the way water filled a channel, gradually, from the edges inward. He would learn that Margaret Daly was a retired schoolteacher. That she had taught fourth grade at a school in Morristown for thirty-one years. That she had been widowed two years before, her husband, Robert, dead of pancreatic cancer at sixty-eight. That she had a daughter in Philadelphia and a son in Denver and two grandchildren she saw at Thanksgiving and Christmas. That she had been treated for depression by a psychiatrist in Morristown whose name was in the police report but that James did not remember because the name was not the thing, the name was not the weight, the weight was the water.

He would learn that she had left a note in her car. A note on the passenger seat, handwritten, addressed to her children. The contents of the note were not in the police report. The contents of the note were private, were the final words of a woman who had made a decision and who had carried the decision to the beach and into the water and who had given the decision to the ocean, the ocean that accepted decisions the way it accepted everything -- without judgment, without commentary, without the capacity to refuse, because the ocean did not refuse, the ocean simply received, the body entering the water being received by the water the way a wave was received by the shore, the way the rain was received by the surface, the taking-in that was the ocean's only response to the things that came to it.

They found her at eight in the morning. South of the jetty. In the rocks at the south end of the beach, not the jetty at Deal where Tommy Raines had been found but the rocks at the south end of Asbury, the tumble of granite blocks that the Army Corps of Engineers had placed there in the 1990s to prevent erosion, the rocks that were not natural but engineered, the human intervention in the ocean's project of reclamation, the rocks that were the shore's defense and that became, on this morning, the place where the ocean deposited what it had taken.

James did not see the body. The Coast Guard found her. The police went to the rocks. The EMTs went to the rocks. James stayed on the beach, at the waterline, near the towel, near the sandals, standing in the place where Margaret Daly had stood an hour and forty-five minutes before James arrived, the place where she had looked at the water in the dark and had seen whatever she had seen -- not the grammar James saw, not the currents and the rips and the wave sets, not the language of danger and prevention, but something else, something personal, something that the water represented to her that it did not represent to James, the water as destination rather than medium, the water as ending rather than beginning, the water as the place you went when the not-going was no longer possible.

James was not on duty. James was not responsible. James had not been at the beach when Margaret Daly entered the water. James had not been on the stand. James had not been scanning. The drowning had occurred before the patrol's hours, before the guards arrived, before the system was operational. The system was not operational at six-fifteen in the morning. The system began at eight. The system was designed to operate during the hours the public was expected to be at the beach, and the public was not expected at six-fifteen, and Margaret Daly was not the public, Margaret Daly was a woman alone in the dark entering the water for reasons the system was not designed to address, reasons that existed outside the jurisdiction of the Beach Patrol, outside the scope of the lifeguard's responsibility, outside the territory that the stand surveyed and the scanning covered and the rescue can reached.

James carried it anyway.

He carried it the way he carried Tommy. Not the same way -- the weight was different, the shape was different, the carrying was different because the loss was different. Tommy was the loss of the rescue that failed, the loss of the swim that did not reach, the loss of the body in the water that James went after and did not find. Margaret Daly was the loss of the rescue that did not happen, the loss of the absence, the loss of the not-being-there, the loss that occurred in the gap, in the space between the end of the night and the beginning of the day, in the dark hours when the stand was empty and the guard was at home and the water was unsupervised, unwatched, unscanned.

He carried it because the water was his. Not legally, not officially, not in any sense that the Department of Public Safety or the city of Asbury Park would recognize. But the water was his in the way that a farmer's field was his, in the way that a doctor's patient was hers, in the way that the thing you spent your life attending to became yours by the attention, became your responsibility by the caring, became the thing you answered for by the fact that you had been answering for it every day for twenty years. The water at Asbury Park was James's water. He had read it ten thousand times. He had scanned it from Stand 4 every day of every season. He knew its currents and its rips and its sandbars and its tides and its moods, if moods was the word, which it was not, because moods implied emotion and the ocean did not have emotions, the ocean had conditions, and the conditions were the thing James knew, and the knowing was the ownership, and the ownership was the responsibility, and the responsibility did not observe duty hours.

Margaret Daly died in water James knew. She died in water he had scanned ten thousand times. She died in a current he could read, in a depth he could swim, in conditions he understood. She died in the dark, before he arrived, in the hour he was not there, the hour that was not his hour, the hour that belonged to the night and to the ocean and to the woman who had chosen the hour for reasons that were not the ocean's and not the guard's but her own.

He was not responsible.

He carried it anyway.

He carried it because the not-being-there was a kind of failure that did not have a name, that did not appear in the operations manual, that did not have a box on Form 7-B, that the department psychologist could classify as irrational guilt or misplaced responsibility or any of the clinical terms that described the thing without touching it, the way a description of the ocean did not touch the ocean, the way words about water were not water. He carried it because the carrying was not rational, was not clinical, was not the product of analysis but of identity, of the who-I-am that he had described to Dr. Okonkwo, the identity that was the standing-between, the identity that was the readiness, the identity that did not have off-hours, that did not clock out, that did not go home at seven in the evening and stop being the person between the living and the dying, because the person between the living and the dying was not a job title but a state of being, and the state of being did not have a schedule, and the schedule that the department imposed -- eight AM to seven PM, Memorial Day to Labor Day -- was the institutional schedule, the official hours, the bracket of time within which the city of Asbury Park assumed liability for the safety of its beachgoers, and the bracket was a bracket, was a container, was a set of walls around a thing that did not have walls, that spilled over the bracket the way the ocean spilled over the seawall, the overflow that was the reality, the reality that said: the water does not stop at seven PM, the water does not start at eight AM, the water is the water at all hours, and the danger is the danger at all hours, and the guard is the guard at all hours, even when the guard is not on the stand, even when the stand is empty, even when the beach is dark and the woman walks into the water alone.

He did not talk about Margaret Daly the way he talked about Tommy. Tommy was the story he told Dr. Okonkwo every year, the narrative, the sequence of events -- the day, the rip, the swimming, the diving, the not-finding. Margaret Daly was not a narrative. Margaret Daly was a silence. She was the thing James did not tell because the telling would require the explanation of the carrying, and the carrying could not be explained, could not be justified, could not be defended against the reasonable objection that he was not on duty, that he was not responsible, that the drowning occurred outside his hours and outside his jurisdiction and that the guilt he felt was irrational and that the irrational guilt was something to be processed, to be worked through, to be resolved in the therapy sessions that were designed to resolve such things.

But the guilt was not irrational. The guilt was the natural product of the identity. If the identity was the standing-between, and the standing-between did not have hours, then the failure to stand between was a failure of the identity, and the failure of the identity was the guilt, and the guilt was rational, was the logical consequence of being the person he was, the person who had made himself the thing between the living and the dying and who could not unmake himself, could not turn off the thing, could not say: I am off duty, the dying is not my concern. Because the dying was always his concern. The dying was the thing he had organized his entire life around the prevention of. The dying was the thing he scanned for, swam for, carried the can for, blew the whistle for. The dying was the thing. And the dying had happened in his water, in his ocean, on his beach, in the dark hours when he was not there.

The not-being-there. The phrase was the weight. Tommy was the not-reaching-in-time. Margaret Daly was the not-being-there. The two losses, the two weights, the two absences that James carried -- the absence of the boy in the water where the boy should have been, and the absence of the guard on the beach where the guard should have been. Two different absences. Two different failures. Two different weights. But the same carrier. The same body. The same man who climbed Stand 4 every morning and settled into the chair and scanned the water with the eyes that had seen everything except the two things they needed to see: Tommy Raines going under, and Margaret Daly walking into the dark.

The day continued. The stands opened. The guards took their positions. The beach filled with the September crowd, smaller than the summer crowd, the end-of-season population that came to the beach not for the spectacle but for the quiet, the calm, the particular beauty of the September ocean that was not the June ocean, that was softer, grayer, cooler, the ocean in its autumnal register, the ocean that was winding down, the ocean that was ending its public season and returning to its private self, the self that existed all winter, unseen, unscanned, the ocean without guards, the ocean without stands, the ocean that did what it did without witnesses.

James scanned. The scanning continued. The scanning always continued. The scanning was the answer to the not-being-there, the compensation, the corrective, the doubling-down on the thing that the not-being-there had made more necessary, not less. He scanned harder after Margaret Daly. He scanned earlier, arriving at the beach before five, walking the waterline in the dark, checking for towels, checking for shoes, checking for the signs of the person who had come to the water before the guards, the person who had entered the water in the absence that was the gap, the gap that James could not close, could not fill, could not stand in because the gap was the night and the night was the ocean's own time, and the ocean's own time was the time the guard could not cover, could not scan, could not be present for, because the guard was human and the human needed sleep and the sleep was the gap and the gap was the vulnerability and the vulnerability was the thing that Margaret Daly had found, the opening in the system, the hour when the standing-between was not standing, the hour when the space between the living and the dying was empty.

He carried it. He carries it still. He will carry it to Trenton. He will carry it past Trenton. He will carry it the way the ocean carries the sand -- constantly, incrementally, as a permanent condition of the body in motion, the body that cannot set the weight down because the weight is not in the hands but in the structure, is not on the shoulders but in the bones, is not a thing held but a thing absorbed, a thing that has become part of the body the way salt becomes part of the water that dissolves it, invisibly, totally, the dissolution that is not a destruction but a transformation, the weight becoming the carrier, the carrier becoming the weight, the two things merging into one thing that moves through the world with the steady persistent forward motion of a man who carries what he carries and does not set it down, because the setting down would be the forgetting and the forgetting is not possible, because the water does not forget, the water does not remember, the water is the water, and the water has Margaret Daly, and James Calloway has the water, and the having is the carrying and the carrying is the life and the life continues, wave after wave, day after day, save after save, the count that grows around the losses the way a tree grows around a nail, the bark closing over the metal, the wood incorporating the foreign object, the tree continuing to grow with the nail inside it, the nail that is permanent, the nail that is Tommy, the nail that is Margaret, the nails that the wood cannot expel and does not try to expel but simply grows around, year by year, ring by ring, the growth that is the life, the life that contains the losses, the losses that are contained by the life, the carrying that continues.

He closed the blue towel. He folded it. He placed it in the lost and found bin at the equipment building, beside the child's pink sandal and the forgotten sunglasses and the abandoned beach chairs and all the other things the beach collected from the people who came to it, the deposits and the tributes and the things surrendered, the things the beach kept and the things the ocean took, the taking and the keeping that were the shore's two operations, the two movements of the tide, the coming in and the going out, the arrival and the departure, the living and the dying, the save and the loss.

The blue towel stayed in the lost and found for thirty days, per the city's policy. No one claimed it. After thirty days it was donated to the Asbury Park homeless shelter on Springwood Avenue, where it was washed and folded and placed on a shelf and given to a person who needed a towel, a person who did not know where the towel had been, who did not know that the towel had been spread on the sand at Asbury Park on a September morning by a woman who had driven sixty miles in the dark to reach the water, a woman who had placed her sandals beside the towel and her book on the tote bag and had walked to the ocean and had entered the ocean and had given herself to the ocean, and the ocean had taken her the way it took everything, without judgment, without refusal, without the capacity to say no, because the ocean could not say no, because the ocean could only say yes, because the yes was the water, and the water was the thing that received, and the receiving was the taking, and the taking was the loss, and the loss was the weight, and the weight was carried, is carried, will be carried.