The Lifeguard Finally Drowns

The beach house was one of those rentals that looked like it had been arguing with the ocean for forty years and losing slowly, gray shingles bleached soft, wraparound deck sagging in a friendly way, and I stood in the gravel driveway with my duffel over my shoulder and thought, well, this is where I pretend to be a relaxed person for three days.

I was forty-four at the time, and I'd been a lifeguard since I was twenty-one, which is a long time to have a job that's mostly about watching other people have fun. My coworker Brent says I take being self-sufficient as a personality, and he's not wrong, though I'd never admit it to him with words. I'd admit it here, apparently.

The reunion was the idea of Dev and Sherrie, college friends of ours who apparently reached an age where they missed everyone at once and decided to solve it by renting a house on the Oregon coast and telling nobody they could say no. I said no twice. I'm here anyway, which tells you something about my backbone in the face of a group text.

I was halfway across the deck when I saw her.

Billie was leaning on the rail looking out at the tide pools like she owned them, which, in a way she used to, because she spent two of our college summers out here counting anemones or whatever marine biologists count, and she'd drag the rest of us down there at low tide and lecture us about sea stars until we begged for mercy. She was forty-three now, hair shorter than it had been, a little more gray in it than mine, and when she turned and saw me she waved, big and easy, like we'd seen each other last week instead of, God, fifteen years ago.

"Nik! You made it. Dev said you'd flake."

"Dev owes me five dollars, then." I set the duffel down and let her hug me, and I want to be careful how I describe that hug, because it was just a hug, a friend hug, one arm, quick pat, and it still went through me like a current I hadn't accounted for. I'd had feelings for this woman when we were in our twenties and I had done nothing about them for four straight years, on the theory that ruining the friendship was worse than wanting her quietly, and apparently the wanting had just been sitting in storage all this time, dusty but intact.

"God, look at you," she said, holding me at arm's length. "You got old."

"You got marine biologist-y. It works on you."

"Flatterer. Everyone's inside. Brent's already claiming the good bedroom, which, fair warning, means you're on the sofa bed."

"I've slept on worse. I've slept on a lifeguard tower."

"On purpose or as punishment?"

"Both, actually. Long story."

She laughed, that same laugh, and I followed her inside, and that was the arrival, anyway.

Dinner was chaos in the good sense, six adults around a table built for four, Sherrie's chili, Dev's cornbread, Brent telling a story about a tourist who tried to lodge a grievance against the ocean itself because a wave took his hat. Billie's colleague Lesley was there, forty-one, sharp and funny, ten years of research projects with Billie behind her and apparently a long history of watching Billie deflect compliments.

It was Lesley, over the second round of drinks, who lit the fuse.

"Billie told me you were the one who never settles down," she said, pointing her fork at me. "She has a whole theory. She says you're married to the beach."

"I'm not married to anything. Renting, at best."

"Oh, here he goes," Brent said, grinning into his beer. "Six years I've worked with this man. Six years. He turns down every transfer inland, every promotion that involves a desk, and when I ask him about dating he changes the subject to rip currents."

"Rip currents are more interesting than my dating life."

"See? Deflection. Textbook."

Billie was watching me with an expression I remembered, the one where she's pretending this is idle curiosity and it is absolutely not. "So what is your dating life, Nik? Give us the state of the union."

"There is no state. There's a very quiet nation at peace with itself."

"That's the saddest thing I've ever heard," Lesley said.

"It's not sad, it's efficient."

"Nik," Dev said, in the tone of a man who has known you since you were twenty and hasn't been impressed by you in a while, "you turned down Sherrie's cousin. You turned down the woman from the aquarium, and she was great."

"The aquarium woman talked to me exclusively about otters."

"She's an otter specialist, Nik."

"She led with otters, Dev. On a first date. There was no off-ramp."

The table laughed and I let them, because laughing was easier than saying the true thing, which was that for roughly twenty years the only person I'd ever really wanted to date had moved to California and I'd let her go without saying a word about it. Billie raised her glass at me across the table, mock-toasting my efficient nation, and I raised mine back, and if her smile faltered just a little on the way down I decided not to build a theory about it. I've built worse theories over less.

* * *

The next morning I was up at six, which is body clock, not virtue, and I walked down the switchback trail to the beach with coffee I regretted making because the house coffee was terrible. The tide was out and the whole reef of tide pools was exposed, shining, and I was maybe two hundred yards down the sand when I heard footsteps behind me and knew without turning who they belonged to. You spend enough years reading how people move on sand, you get good at it.

"Couldn't sleep either?" Billie said, pulling her jacket tighter against the wind.

"I slept fine. I just wake up early. Lifeguard hours. Your body never lets it go."

"I remember. You used to show up to eight a.m. classes already having swum two miles, smelling like chlorine, insufferable."

"That's fair."

We walked north along the wet sand, and for a while it was easy, the kind of easy we'd always had, her pointing out birds, me not knowing a single one of them, the ocean doing its ocean thing on our left. It was Billie who broke the ease, because she was always the braver one.

"Can I ask you something and you answer it honestly for once in your life?"

"That's a lot of conditions."

"Why did you never come visit me? In California." She kept her eyes on the water when she said it. "Fifteen years, Nik. I invited you. I invited you every single time. You had vacation days, you had a car, you had legs. And every time it was a maybe and then a no."

I had a whole answer prepared, actually, the one I'd been rehearsing in the truck on the drive down, something about work and coverage and how summers are the busy season, and I opened my mouth to deploy it, and she said, "And don't say the busy season, because you have coworkers. I've met Brent. Brent is literally standing around all day."

"Brent would like you to know he works very hard."

"Dev told me last night that you turned down my wedding invite. The party, whatever it was, that thing I did in Santa Cruz. He said you claimed you were on shift and there were three other guards on."

I stopped walking. So did she, a few steps ahead, and she turned to face me with the wind pulling her hair sideways, and there was nothing idle about her curiosity now.

"I don't remember why, exactly," I said, which was true in the sense that I remembered exactly and couldn't say it. "It was a long time ago. It seemed like a good idea at the time."

"What did?"

"Not going. Not going always seems advisable at the time. That's the whole problem with not going."

She waited. She was always good at waiting, which was one of the things I'd liked about her back when liking her was a thing I managed instead of admitted.

"That was a weird answer," she said finally.

"It's the answer I have today."

"You're the most stubborn person I have ever met, and I work with people who argue with whales." She started walking again, and after a moment I caught up, and she bumped her shoulder against mine like nothing had happened, which was its own kind of mercy, or maybe its own kind of warning. "You've got three days, Nik. Somebody's going to get the truth out of you before Monday. It might as well be me."

"That sounds like a threat."

"It is a threat."

We turned around at the rocks and headed back, and the whole way I was doing the arithmetic I'd been avoiding for twenty years, which was the simple one, the one where you subtract the person from the number of days remaining and realize the answer keeps getting smaller.

After the walk we came back to a house in full brunch chaos, Dev making eggs he'd already burned once and Sherrie defending her mimosas as a food group, and by early afternoon the group had sorted itself into a plan without consulting me, the way groups do. Lesley announced she needed to go into town for supplies she refused to specify, and Brent, who had been angling all morning for an excuse to get off the property and find a bar with a pool table, volunteered to drive her with a speed I found frankly insulting.

"We'll be back by four," Lesley said, pulling on her jacket in the doorway. "Billie, don't let him do that thing where he cleans as a personality."

"I don't do that," I said.

"He does that," Billie said.

"He absolutely does that," Sherrie called from the kitchen.

And then the door shut and the truck crunched down the gravel and the house went quiet in a way that felt less like silence and more like a held breath, and I realized I'd been left alone with Billie for the first time in twenty years with no witnesses and no agenda, and my first instinct, God help me, was to start cleaning.

* * *

She caught me at it, of course. I was wiping down the counter that didn't need wiping, and she leaned against the doorway with her arms crossed and just watched me until I put the cloth down as a man caught doing something worse.

"So," she said. "What's for dinner?"

"That depends. What did they actually go buy?"

"Lesley said groceries. Lesley said, quote, supplies. I think she's buying wine and lying about it."

"Then we're improvising. There's that halibut in the fridge Sherrie bought yesterday, and I saw potatoes."

"You cook?"

"I live alone, Billie. You either cook or you develop scurvy."

She laughed, that same laugh, lower than it used to be, and pushed off the doorframe and came over and started opening cabinets like she owned the place, and twenty years fell off the sentence, just like that. She found the olive oil and the garlic and a lemon that had seen better days and she lined them up on the counter like evidence, and I got out a cutting board, and we started cooking together the way we used to, her doing the parts that required finesse and me doing the parts that required hands.

"You know I spent two summers out here counting marine life," she said, zesting the lemon. "Right up the coast. I used to think about you out here. In the water."

"You thought about me in the water?"

"You know what I mean. This is your coast. You had your first lifeguard job out here somewhere, didn't you?"

"Twenty-three years ago. I was twenty-one. A beach with one tower and a lot of ambitious tourists." I watched her hands, which were quick and sure and had a new scar across one knuckle I wanted to ask about and didn't. "You really used to think about it?"

"I really used to think about a lot of things out here." She said it to the lemon, not to me. "It was very quiet. Good weather for thinking about things you're not doing."

"Billie."

"What."

"Nothing. Keep zesting."

She kept zesting. I cut the potatoes into halves and then into eighths and then into something acceptable, and the halibut got salted and the oven got hot, and the whole time the house made its old-house noises around us, the pipes ticking, the deck boards complaining in the wind, and I kept waiting for one of us to fill the silence and neither of us did, which used to be our whole religion, the two of us comfortable not talking.

She broke it anyway, because she was always the braver one.

"I wondered, for a long time," she said. "What would have happened. If I'd stayed."

I put the knife down. Not dramatically, I hope, just put it down, because I didn't entirely trust my hands with it.

"You had a fellowship," I said.

"I know I had a fellowship. I'm not saying it was rational. I'm saying I wondered. That first year in Santa Cruz, I'd sit out on that terrible apartment balcony and wonder, what if I'd turned it down, what if I'd stayed for one more year and figured it out later. What would have happened with us."

"With us."

"Don't make me say it twice, Nik, I'm already doing the hard version."

I dried my hands on the towel, slowly, buying time the way she'd once caught me doing in a diner in Eugene when she asked why I never dated anyone and I gave her the busy season answer even back then, apparently, because I have been giving the busy season answer my entire adult life.

"I wondered too," I said. "Every time you called. Every time you sent one of those long emails with the data and the whales in it. I'd read the whole thing twice and then sit there and wonder what would have happened if I'd gotten on a