Did he land on top of me like we were in From Here to Eternity?
Yes, that happened.
Was it in any way romantic like that?
Um. No.
As soon as he could, Jack scrambled up and stomped away, leaving me drenched, and stunned, and coughing on the sand.
When I caught my breath, I said, “What was that? A riptide?”
“Are you kidding me?” he demanded, his jeans soaking wet from the thighs down. “Did you just wade out into the Brazos? Did that just happen?”
I stood up and tried unsuccessfully to brush the wet sand off my legs. “Was I … not supposed to do that?”
“Nobody’s supposed to do that! Don’t you know how many people drown in that river every year?”
“Why would I know that?”
“Everybody knows that! Never swim in the Brazos.”
“First of all, I wasn’t swimming. And second—no. That’s not a thing everybody knows.”
But Jack was ranting now. “And why? Why can’t you swim in the Brazos? Because it’s sandy at the bottom, and so the current makes eddies, and the eddies carve caverns in that sandy floor of the river, and the current swirls around in there like liquid tornadoes—and if you’re unlucky or stupid enough to get sucked into one, you’re done for.”
“That’s some pretty specialized knowledge, there—” I started, coughing some more.
“So,” Jack went on, like I wasn’t even talking, “when idiots decide to go swimming or fishing or wading in that water, the next thing they know, they’re pulled into the undertow. Whole families die trying to save each other, one by one!”
Did he just call me an idiot? I tried to decide if it was worse than being the epitome of ordinary. “So. Not a riptide then.”
I eyed the water, so tranquil looking from here. I could still feel the pull of it, like some liquid death magnet. Suddenly there were shivers prickling my arms and legs. “Scary,” I said, almost to myself.
My calmness just seemed to make him madder.
“Scary?” Jack yelled. “You’re damn right! What the hell were you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” I said, turning to him now. “I was hot? The water felt nice?”
“You were hot?” he said, in a tone like he’d asked me why I was drinking gasoline and I told him I was thirsty.
He went on. “Do you have a death wish? Do you? Because here’s why it’s called ‘the Brazos.’ From ‘los brazos de Dios,’ which means ‘the arms of God’—and people think it’s from thirsty travelers who were so grateful to find water, but it’s actually because it drowned so many people that it’s where God collects their souls.”
Yikes. Okay. That took a dark turn.
I will grant that Jack was conveying an important safety tip. But, I mean, really? I was obviously half-drowned and super-shaken. Did he have to yell?
I don’t know about you, but I can only get yelled at for so long before I start yelling back. Jack wanted to yell? Fine. I could yell, too. I could yell all day.
“Why are you yelling at me?!” I yelled.
Another first for me—yelling at a client.
“Because!” Jack yelled back. “You’re going to get yourself killed!”
“Not on purpose!” I yelled back.
“That doesn’t matter once you’re dead!” Jack yelled.
“People wade into water all the time!” I yelled. “It’s a totally normal thing to do!”
“Not in the Brazos!”
“But I didn’t know that!”
“And if you go under, then I go under—because then I have to go in after you!”
“So don’t go in after me!”
“That’s not how this works! If you die in the river, I die in the river! And I really don’t want to fucking die in the fucking river!”
For a second, I had no response. I didn’t know what to say to that. And in that second, I realized something else: I was shaking. A lot. Hard. From someplace deep in my core.
Most likely, it was fear.
Though it didn’t feel like fear.
But maybe I’d just forgotten what fear felt like.
Usually, the antidote to fear was preparation—but I hadn’t been prepared for anything about this week, from watching my job mutate into something I didn’t even recognize, to moving in with a bunch of strangers, to losing my best friend, to winding up in the middle of some hatefest between Jack and his brother, to being called “ordinary,” to almost drowning, and—now—to getting yelled at like I hadn’t been yelled at in years.