Chapter Seventeen Nate
Chapter Seventeen
Nate
Oh, God. She’s in the water. What have I done?
Another explosive wave crashes onto the rocks, and I feel the vibrations in my chest, already burning with a terror I’ve never known.
My eyes sweep the raging ocean in a mad search for Sienna, but she’s gone. I can’t see her. Where is she? I look left . . . right . . . across the edge of the rock where we were standing.
“Help!”
No one hears me over the hellish thunder of the waves.
My brain stumbles in the wake of my panic, and I don’t know what to do. Even if I spotted her, I couldn’t save her. No one could survive those temperatures or swim through the power of those waves.
I need to ask for a boat. A helicopter.
After scanning the waves desperately one last time, I turn and run toward the restaurant. I leap over a dip in the granite and run like hell to the gravel path at the lighthouse. A young couple approaches. They catch my terrorized eyes and stop.
“I need help! My wife was swept off the rocks!”
The woman cries, “Oh, my God!” and the young man pulls his cell phone out of his pocket.
“I’ll call 911.”
“They’ll take too long to get here,” I reply, hating this sense of powerlessness as I leave them and continue running toward the restaurant, where there must be safety equipment or life preservers.
I pull open the door and burst into the gift shop.
My eyes dart everywhere, looking for someone.
There are a few tourists browsing. I turn to the cashier.
“My wife was swept off the rocks.”
She stares at me blankly, and I realize she’s just a high school student.
I run into the restaurant and find an older man behind the counter. “My wife was just swept off the rocks. Is there a boat?”
He turns to his coworker. “Call 911.” Then he hurries out from behind the counter. “Take me there.”
I run outside, and he follows, but he stops briefly at a life preserver station I hadn’t noticed before. He loops the orange doughnut over his shoulder.
I point toward the spot where Sienna fell in. The frothy surf is still crashing onto the rocks and erupting into the air.
She’s dead, I think to myself. She has to be. There can’t possibly be any hope.
There are moments in my life when I despise myself, when I know I’ve done everything wrong and I’m a complete and utter failure.
In those moments, I’m overcome by a sense of dread.
My bad decisions will surely turn on me, and I’ll wish I’d acted differently.
I’ll wish I was smarter and possessed a better understanding about how certain situations might unfold.
The man from the restaurant is a faster runner. He’s familiar with the crests and valleys of these sloping rocks, and he leaps like a gazelle over tidal pools.
I’m out of breath when I reach the high point where Sienna and I argued. I stop abruptly and watch the man hop from one outcropping to another. He then jumps into a small chasm, out of sight.
I follow. I run. I trip and fall, skin the heels of my hands on the rough surface of the granite. Quickly, I scramble to my feet and continue until I reach the edge of the rocks, halt, and look down.
I freeze.
There she is.
Sienna . . . lying on the rocks while two young men on their knees, on either side of her, perform CPR.
One pumps her chest while the other bends to breathe into her mouth.
The man from the restaurant stands over them with the life preserver on the ground at his feet.
He’s talking to someone on his cell phone.
All I can do is stare in shock at the scene before me. How did they get Sienna out of the water? Did one of them dive in after her? Did they swim and pull her to safety?
Again, I’m a failure, drowning in my inadequacy.