The Weight of Water

I was twelve the first time the ocean tried to take me.

My stepdad and I were sailing our Hobie Cat through the Carquinez Strait on a warm May evening, the kind of evening that makes you trust things too easily. The wind filled our sails as we moved toward the Benicia Bridge, everything smooth enough that it felt like we knew what we were doing.

Then the water changed.

The farther we went, the rougher it got. The wind stopped feeling like an ally and started feeling like something with a grudge. One of the yellow hulls lifted out of the water while the other tried to hold steady against the chop, the boat suddenly unsure of itself. My dad started pulling ropes, trying to turn us around.

Then the sail swung hard and smacked me in the head.

After that, things come in waves.

I don't remember if I was wearing a life jacket. I remember the water being stronger than I was. My arms moved. My legs kicked. Nothing responded the way it should have. Underwater, everything was bright in a way that didn't make sense. I couldn't tell which way was up. I remember thinking: this is me dying.

A stranger pulled me out.

I remember choking up seawater, coughing until my body stopped trying to argue with the ocean. My dad thanked the man who saved us. Then we went home and never spoke about it again. The next day I had school. I went.

Silence was how things got handled in our house. We didn't speak about plenty of things. But water had its own particular kind of silence. I didn't notice that yet.

By the time my daughters were old enough, I'd told them the story, not as a warning, just as a story from my childhood. I almost died by drowning when I was twelve. I didn't think about what it might sound like to them until much later.

***

Years later, my daughters and I vacationed in Cancun.

My younger daughter was already afraid of the ocean. I made it worse without meaning to. Before we headed to the beach, I read aloud from a tourist pamphlet about translucent jellyfish you don't see until it's too late. I thought I was being helpful. She stayed on shore once we got to the water.

My older daughter and I went into the water anyway. I stayed closer to shore, belly-button deep, while she drifted farther out. I turned to check on my younger daughter, still safe on the sand.

I never heard the wave coming.

My legs went straight up in the air before the rest of me understood what was happening. One second I was standing, the next I was upside down inside the wave, and it was so fast there wasn't time to be scared. It was so sudden, so unexpected, the kind of thing your body just responds to before your brain catches up.

My younger daughter saw it happen. She was the one who came running once the ocean spit me out, not my older daughter, who was still out past the break. She crouched next to me in the sand, asking if I was okay, checking my face, checking that I was still breathing, looking for the answer before I could give it to her in words.

She wasn't laughing. But neither was I. Not yet. It would be years before this turned into the story about my legs in the air, my swimsuit up my ass, the ocean deciding it didn't like the way I tasted. That day we just toweled off, gathered our things, and walked in silence back to the hotel. We ordered room service and watched 12 Monkeys in Spanish.

***

The third time, I was river rafting on the American River with my daughters and their boyfriends.

It was August. The air smelled like sunscreen and something almost like hope. I was in the middle of a divorce that would be finalized a month later. Our guide looked a little bit like Bruno Mars.

About two hours in, he pointed to a calm stretch of water and said it was a good spot to jump in and cool off. I was the only one who did.

He told me to cross my arms over my chest and hold my breath. I tried. But when my body hit that cold water, I inhaled before I could stop myself, and then I was under, swallowing river water, pulled down and away from the raft. Every time I surfaced, the raft was farther away. River water burned my lungs differently than saltwater had. It was colder. More aggressive. Less forgiving.

Then I saw everyone paddling toward me.

The guide and my older daughter's boyfriend jumped in and pulled me back onto the raft.

When I could finally breathe, the guide looked at me and asked if I would do it again.

I didn't hesitate. "Hell yeah."

I meant it. It had been exhilarating, the cold, the pull of the current, the disorientation of going under. I didn't let myself think about the part where I almost hadn't come back up. Dying wasn't a thought that entered my mind. Dying was just something that happened to people, the way weather just happened.

The rest of the river was calm after that. The drive home was quiet. I tried to joke about it, about how many times water had tried to take me, about how repetition makes it funny instead of scary. I tried to make it sound lighter than it was, the way I'd made Cancun lighter, the way silence had once done the job for my stepdad and me.

My younger daughter didn't laugh.

She started crying instead.

"You could have died," she said. "You could have died."

I didn't know how to respond to her. I probably told her that I was fine, that things happen, that the guide had everything under control. I know I repeated that I was fine.

It took me months to understand that she wasn't crying about that afternoon. She was crying about a stranger pulling me out of the water when I was twelve. About being the one who came running on the beach in Cancun. About every near-death experience I had turned into a story I could tell for laughs, instead of letting myself feel the weight of the water.