Tumbling After

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Chapter One

Jack and Jill

I caught it! he thinks. I actually caught it!

As the wave swells beneath him, Jack looks out over thewindswept, all-but-deserted beach (where his sister Jilly standswatching, dwindled to doll size) and surrenders to the same mix ofelation and terror that makes roller coasters irresistible. The cry thatbursts from his lips is the primordial cry of the ocean: raw, fierce,and proud. Jack's up so high that he can see over the crest of thedunes to the houses beyond -- even to his own house, where theantlike figures of his father, Bill, his older sister, Ellen, and UncleJimmy are hard at work taking down the porch screens. It seems entirelypossible that he might fly to them, joining the gulls anglingthrough the air on the knife-edge gusts and thrusts of wind precedingBelle like the outriders of an advancing army. Look! Up in thesky! It's a bird; it's a plane; no, it's Super Jack!

The ocean yaws and pitches. The next thing he knows, he'sfalling. The surf is miles below. He screams, desperately trying toright himself, or the world. At the same time, he catches sight ofJilly. She's up to her waist in the surf, arms rigid at her sides, gazing at him with an expression of fearful excitement, her mouth open asif she's shouting at the top of her lungs. But he can't hear her. Thenhe can't see her anymore either, because the wave curls behind himand slaps him down. There's no time to register the pain of strikingthe surface in the pummeling he receives beneath it as the wave rollshim toward shore. Jack tumbles like a sneaker in a washing machine,slammed into the bottom again and again until his body isnumb and all sense of direction fled. His lungs burn with the needfor air. A directionless roar envelops him.

He struggles against the current, but the incoming surge passeshim off smoothly to the outgoing tide, which drags him back theway he'd come ... or a different way, he can't tell. At last he goeslimp, thinking to conserve his strength. He's wishing he hadn'tcome down to the beach with Jilly to look at the storm-tossed surf;more than anything, he's wishing he hadn't accepted her dare toride one of the enormous waves. "In or else, Jack," she'd taunted."You're not chicken, are ya?"

When will he learn? Why does he let her talk him into thesethings? Bill's going to kill him ... assuming the ocean doesn't dothe job first. He'd give anything to go back and change the momentwhen he'd pulled off his shirt and run headlong into the water. Itseems like ages ago; another life altogether. Pinpricks of light areflaring and dying in the dark of his inner vision, illuminatingshapes he doesn't want to see: immense, unmoving forms that alsotake notice of him somehow, as if the flashes by which he sees themare lighting him up as well, bringing him fitfully, like a flickeringghost, across some invisible threshold and into the range of theirperceptions. He senses a sluggish stirring in the depths and imaginesa scaly arm or tentacle reaching for him as he might reach toswat a fly. He strikes out blindly.

The current falls away as if grown weary of the game. With thelast of his hoarded strength, Jack kicks and claws his way towardwhat he hopes is the surface.

All at once, there's air to breathe ... if you call it breathing.Sputtering, half-blinded by spume and spray, he flounders, legschurning, arms splashing. Shards of leaden sky shatter across his eyes, but no glimpse of shore obtrudes to guide him, no hint ofwhere he is in relation to the land. For all he knows, he's been sweptmiles out to sea. His straining toes brush no bottom. Wherever heturns, a wave is waiting to slap him in the face. He wants nothingmore than to strike back, bursting with a rage that rises up in himlike the wave he'd caught, or that had caught him, and, like it,crashes down. It pours through and out of him, leaving himdrained, empty, tossed about like a cork. It's all he can do to keep hishead above water.

Dazed and half-drowned, Jack finds himself recalling the expressionon Jilly's face, the naked avidity with which, having set theseevents in motion, she'd watched them take their course, her insatiableeyes drinking in his spill like she thirsted for it, and it's thismemory, rather than his current predicament, that swings open,wider than ever, the floodgates of his fear: his deepest, most secretand spectacular fear. Not of dying. No, it's the prospect of losingJilly that truly terrifies him.

But that can't happen. He won't let it. He opens his mouth to callher name. Water rushes in. He swallows it like a stone. With a last,stinging slap, the ocean slams over his head, severing his sight fromthe sky. Sinking into those sisterless depths, he feels himself breakingapart, all the bits and pieces of Jack Doone dispersing in differentdirections like minnows fleeing a predatory darkness.

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Excerpted from Tumbling After by Paul Witcover
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