The Sea Coming In

It did not break.

He had thought a wave was a thing that broke. A wall, a curl, the picture on the sign. It did not curl. It rose.

From two steps back on the cracked grass he could see only the sea, and the white band coming in across it, wider, and behind the band the whole sea was higher. Not a wave. All of it, out to the edge of the world, as if the floor of the ocean had been lifted from underneath: a long smooth bulge of grey-green water the width of the bay, heavy and shining, coming in without a ripple, and the white band was only its front edge, pushing the last of the old sea ahead of it the way a train pushes air out of a tunnel.

The hiss grew until it was a roar, deep and endless and grinding, like a river in flood, like the noise at nine forty-one but lower and wetter and closer, coming up the face of the bluff at them.

“Sir. Further back.”

“I want to see.”

“You can see from here.”

“I can’t see the beach. I can’t see the stairs. I can’t see him.”

Castellanos did not answer, and did not pull him further back. He stood beside him with his hand on his arm. Two steps from the railing was his line.

Theo was on his other side. Frederick had not seen him come. Lucía beyond Theo, Señora Ruiz beyond Lucía, Mr Abernathy behind them all, and along the whole top of the bluff, on both sides, hundreds of people standing two steps back or further, looking out at the sea, and nobody talking.

---

He saw it reach the far end of the pier.

The white band went in under the piles and the grey-green water came up behind it, past the piles, past the deck, and the end of the pier went under: the boards and the rail and the little buildings at the end, the photograph stall and the hut where the man with the ponytail kept his things. Then the water was going past where the pier had been, and pieces of it were going with it, boards and timbers and a long section of rail turning over and over, and a white plastic chair, bobbing.

And the wheel stood in it.

The water came up round its great steel feet where the man with the ponytail had knelt at the box, past the gate, over the lowest cars, so that the bottom of the wheel was underwater and its cars swung on their hinges in the current like weed. The wheel did not move. White and red, lights out, in the middle of the moving sea.

“It’s still there,” said Theo. “Freddie. The wheel’s still there.”

“Yes.”

“We were on that.”

“Yes.”

“Twenty minutes ago. We were at the top of that.” He made a sound that was not a laugh and put his hand over his mouth.

---

Then he heard it hit the bluff.

He could not see it; it was below the edge, at the foot of the cliff. A long deep boom, like something very heavy being set down, that came up through the ground into his feet, so that people all round him swayed and some sat down and somebody screamed, and the dust came off the palm trees all at once in a soft yellow rain.

Then, from below, a churning crashing grinding, like a hundred waterfalls, and in it sharper noises, metal on metal, glass going, a car alarm that started and stopped, a long tearing crack like a tree coming down.

“That’s the cars,” said a man along the line. “It’s got the cars.”

Frederick took one step forward. Castellanos’s hand did not let go, but it did not pull him back. It came with him to the railing and stopped there, and he put his free hand on the rail and looked over.

---

There was no beach.

Brown and grey and white water, moving, from the foot of the bluff to as far out as he could see, full of everything. The heaps of yellow earth were dissolving into it in long brown streaks, and the cars that had been buried in them were loose, turning over slowly on their sides and roofs, bumping against each other and the cliff, a red one and a white one and a blue one, and a black one with its lights flashing and its horn going on and on under the water, a long drowned bleat. The palm tree was floating. The lifeguard’s hut had come off its legs and was floating upright, quite calmly, the flag still on its roof, going south along the foot of the bluff like a boat that knew where it was going.

The footbridge was there, to his left, below. Its deck was level, but the water was going across it a foot deep, two, pouring off the road side in a brown curtain, and its rail stood out of the water like the rail of a ship going down.

The water had come up the eleven steps and over the bridge and onto the first flight of the ninety-eight, and it was coming up the stairs a step at a time, the way the people had gone up them, brown and churning.

On the stairs, holding the rail, with the water at their chests, were two men.

---

Brannigan, on the fourth or fifth step of the first flight, both arms round the metal rail, back to the sea, the whole brown weight of it dragging at him, and not letting go. And between Brannigan and the rail, pinned there by Brannigan’s whole body with his arms locked round the rail on either side, Mr Ferrante.

His face was turned up to the top of the bluff, the way it had been on the sand. His mouth was open. The water was at his chin.

“Dan,” said Señora Ruiz, quite quietly, and then nothing else.

The water rose. Up Brannigan’s chest to his shoulders. Up Mr Ferrante’s chin to his mouth, and he tipped his head back as far as it would go against Brannigan’s shoulder with his face to the sky, and the water came to his mouth and stopped there. It stood there, brown, churning, at Mr Ferrante’s mouth, with the stairs going up dry above them all the way to the top, and Frederick could not breathe, and held the railing so hard that there were marks on the insides of his fingers for two days.

There was nothing to count.

Then the water turned.

---

It stopped rising, and stood, and then the whole brown surface from the foot of the bluff to the sea began to move the other way. Slowly, then faster. Before, it had gone out quietly, like water out of a bath. Now it went out like a river over a weir, with a roar louder than the one it had come in with, a great sucking dragging roar, and it took everything. The cars, turning over, down the slope where the beach had been, the black one with its horn still going. The palm tree. The boards of the pier and the white chair. The lifeguard’s hut, which turned round slowly in the current and went out to sea upright with its flag on its roof.

It went down the stairs the way it had come up. Off the first flight step by step, off the footbridge in a long brown waterfall, down the eleven. Mr Ferrante’s mouth came out of it, and his chin, and his shoulders, and Brannigan’s chest, and his waist, and it was dragging past their knees, the whole sea going back where it had come from and trying to take them with it.

Brannigan did not let go of the rail.

Then the water was below their feet, and they were standing on the fifth step, two men with their arms round a metal rail, brown from head to foot, water draining off them. Below them the footbridge with the water pouring off it, and below that a long slope of wet brown mud and wreckage going down to the sea, which was still going out, roaring, further than before.

Brannigan let go of the rail with one arm and took Mr Ferrante by the back of the collar, the way Felix had held Marcus on the pier, and turned him round and pushed him up one step, and came up one step behind him with his other hand on the rail. Another step.

They came up like that. One step and a pause and one step.

---

Nobody said anything until they reached the second landing.

Then somebody along the line to the right began to clap, one pair of hands, slow and uncertain, and then another, and then the whole line along the top of the bluff, hundreds of people two steps back from the railing in the yellow dust, clapping, not cheering, steadily, while two men came up a staircase one step at a time with the water running off them.

Frederick could not let go of the railing.

At the fourth landing Mr Ferrante stopped, held the rail, bent over, was sick, stood up, and went on.

At the fifth landing Señora Ruiz let go of the folder.

She had held it against her chest since the pier, on the beach and the stairs and the grass, in both arms, for three quarters of an hour: fifty-eight permission slips and fifty-eight medical forms and fifty-eight telephone numbers that did not work. She put it into Lucía’s arms without looking, and walked to the top of the stairs, past the crooked sign with Theo’s handprint on it, and stood there with her hands at her sides.

They came up the last flight. Sixteen. Mr Ferrante first, Brannigan behind with his hand on his collar.

At the top Mr Ferrante stood swaying, brown from head to foot, his hair plastered down and water running out of his shoes, and looked at Señora Ruiz.

“Carmen,” he said.

She put both arms round him, wet, brown, sick, all of it, and held on, and his arms stayed at his sides at first, and then not, and over her shoulder his eyes were shut.

Frederick looked at Brannigan.

---

He had stopped at the top beside the sign with his hands hanging at his sides, dripping. The Delaware sweatshirt was brown and torn across the shoulder, and the insides of both arms were scraped raw from wrist to elbow where he had held the rail. He was breathing very hard, looking at nothing.

Then he looked at Castellanos.

“Sir,” said Brannigan.

“Sergeant,” said Castellanos.

That was all.

Then Brannigan looked at Frederick.

“The old man, sir.” His voice was hoarse. “I gave him to two guys on the bridge. Surfers. They came back down for him. They took him up. I went back for the teacher.” He swallowed. “Is he up? Did they get him up?”

Frederick looked round.

Kimura, by the bench, raised one hand and pointed. At the foot of the big tree, sitting with his back against the trunk in a blanket somebody had found, with his one shoe, was the old man. On either side of him, in wetsuits, with their arms folded like two guards, sat the two surfers.

“He’s up. They got him up. He’s under the tree.”

Brannigan looked at the tree for a long time. Then he nodded once, and his face did something, and he looked down at the grass.

“Sergeant Brannigan.”

“Sir.”

“Thank you.”

“You sent me, sir.” And then, in a slightly different voice, as though reporting something for the record: “Sergeant Castellanos would have carried you, sir. But I’d have carried him. The teacher. If I’d had to.” He looked at his arms. “I didn’t have to. He walked.”

---

Mr Abernathy called the roll at twenty-five past ten.

He did it standing on the bench by the big tree, with his left hand wrapped in somebody’s T-shirt and nothing in his right, because the clipboard was in the sea. From memory, in alphabetical order, in the homeroom voice, all fifty-eight, and every one answered from the cracked grass. Hanover. Here. Hartigan. Here. Marcus said it twice by accident. Priya said it very loudly. Lucía said it holding the folder.

When he had finished he stood on the bench a moment, looking at them.

“Señora Ruiz.”

“Presente,” said Señora Ruiz, from the grass, beside Mr Ferrante, with her arm through his.

“Mr Ferrante.”

Mr Ferrante was sitting with his left leg out in front of him and his shoes off, his face grey, mud in his hair, a long scrape down one cheek. He looked up at Mr Abernathy on the bench, and something happened at the corner of his mouth.

“Present,” said Mr Ferrante. “And there will be a question on it.”

And the whole sophomore class of Ellicott High School, on the cracked yellow grass at the top of a broken cliff, with the dust on them and the blood and the sea still roaring away from the land below, began, all at once, helplessly, to laugh.

Out beyond the edge of the bluff the sea had stopped going away, and was standing. Castellanos, who had not laughed, at the railing looking at it, said quietly, to nobody, “It’ll come again.”