Dead in the Water (2 page)

“For a new guy, you must be pretty fast. You were out of the water before my sister,” I said.

“There were two races today, a one mile and a two mile. I only did the first race, the one miler. I was on shore waiting for everyone to finish the longer swim. I saw the whole thing with Dick—the rescue, everything.”

“Did Dick do both swims?”

“Yeah, he did. This is his ninth or tenth swim for the year. Two first place finishes would almost guarantee him an overall win this season.”

“How many swims are there?”

“About twenty. The number of races changes every year.”

I knew from attending swims with Lena that the open water season started in late spring and went to the end of September. During that time, more than 3,000 swimmers, ages 18 to 80-plus drive around Northern California, jump into cold water, tear through a course, then do the same thing again the next weekend, the weekend after that and the weekend after that.

“Maybe it was just too much for Dick’s body.”

“Not likely. He can do double this distance in his sleep.”

Mario walked over to the results board a few yards away. It was surrounded by a crowd of people, trying to peer around the swimmers in front of them or standing on their toes to look over someone’s head, so they could read the spreadsheet of names and find out where they placed.

Does it matter that much? I wondered as I watched the crowd. All that effort for a glass mug that says second place?

From across the beach, there was a loud whistle. It was my sister, Lena. She was waving that ratty towel of hers and pointing to the parking lot. She didn’t care where she placed or if she picked up an award. She was ready to go home.

The long circular parking lot was full of cars since most swimmers were still pecking through the free food and drinks. Not one, but two, additional ambulances were stationed there. Paramedics, solid looking guys dressed in dark blue shirts and trousers, arms crossed, were standing outside, chatting with each other.

“Just another day at the beach?” said Lena to one as she walked by.

“You’d be surprised how often this occurs,” said the paramedic. “The same thing happened to a guy less than a month ago, right here, at this lake.”

I walked ahead to open up the car while Lena continued her conversation with the medics. I personally think she was more interested in them than in what they had to say.

The dark seats of Lena’s ’99 Camry were vibrating from the heat. I threw down a towel to cover the driver’s seat and then another to cover the steering wheel. I slid in and within a few seconds, sweat began to drip down the back of my neck. Pulling my hat off and holding my hair away from my neck with one hand, I quickly turned the key, lowered the windows and switched on the air conditioner with the other. By the time Lena reached in to retrieve her old towel from the steering wheel and went around to sit in the passenger’s seat, the car had cooled down enough to put the windows up. Still, my black tee shirt was plastered to my chest.

“So?”

“So, what?” Lena replied, her head back on the seat rest, her eyes beginning to close.

“This could be a new record. You might be asleep before we even get out of the parking lot,” I said. “So…what did they say about the swimmer, the guy in the ambulance?”

“They took him to the Lake Joseph city hospital. But it doesn’t look good. He never regained consciousness. You know, I can’t remember there ever being a death at one of these swims. Odd though. I asked why they didn’t use the defibrillator if it was a heart attack. They said it wasn’t called for. Not much more to tell…just need to rest a bit….good swims, tough swims…tired.” I pulled out of the parking place and drove down the narrow two-lane road out of the park. In my mind, I was back in the shade near the beach. All I saw was the swimmer on the ground—his pale stomach stretching like a balloon about to explode. I never noticed the three guys on mountain bikes directly in front of me. I stomped on the brake with both feet. The Camry violently jerked to a stop less than 10 feet from the cyclists.

Lena’s eyes flew open. “What?”

One cyclist in a black and yellow jersey flipped me off. “Hey, watch it,” he yelled. “You trying to kill us?” The other two swerved to the side and glared back at the Camry.

“Sorry…so sorry,” I mumbled.

I pulled off the gravel road and stopped under the pines. My heart was pounding. I came that close to hitting three people. Why didn’t I see them? They were right in front of me.

“The swimmer…I keep thinking about him. I hope he’s going to be all right.” I glanced over at Lena who was staring at me.

“Want me to drive?” she asked.

I didn’t respond. Instead, I started up again, going slowly, hearing the crunch of the tires on the unpaved road and forcing myself to focus until I reached the park exit.

Okay, I thought. This should get easier.

The three-hour trip home would be a quiet one. I took a quick look over at my sister before I aimed the car toward Highway 80. Her eyes were shut. Back to normal. I switched on the Giants game. Bottom of the fourth. Giants had slipped one run behind.

“Do you have to listen to that?” said an irritated Lena, opening one eye and reaching for the radio. “It is so annoying.”

I smacked her outreached hand. “Hey, leave it be. Who am I supposed to talk to? You?”

With closed eyes, she turned her hands into puppets having a conversation.

“Blah, blah, blah…strike zone. Blah, blah, blah…outfield. Blah, blah…”

“Go to sleep already,” I said. In less than five minutes, she was out cold. Definitely back to normal.

The four-laned highway heading west was chiseled into the rolling hills. It wrapped around bare granite outcroppings and bordered a wide fast moving river. It was mid-afternoon and there were only a few other cars on the road. As the road straightened out, the mountains moved miles off to each side and straw-colored flat farmland took their place. The drive became long and monotonous.

For almost thirty years, I’ve been driving my sister to swimming events. She was a little girl then and just learning to put her face in the water. Lena is a natural athlete. Me, I’m a natural fan… of her…of baseball…of most sports. There’s just the two of us left in our family; her boyfriend might increase it to three, but the jury’s still out on that.

I’ve been away from the San Francisco Bay area for about ten years. I was married and had a pretty good job as an executive assistant in a healthcare firm. Brad, my husband, and I lived way outside of Denver, surrounded by mountains and pines. A good life, I thought. A few uneasy spots, but basically solid. Then, Brad disappeared. Just disappeared. One day, he never came home from work. He was a well respected consulting software engineer. No one ever figured out what happened. Not the police. None of his clients. Not even his brother on the East Coast. I haven’t heard anything from him since.

“Just like dad,” I said out loud to the radio sports announcers.

When Brad left, I couldn’t make myself do anything. I didn’t want to work any more. I’d wander through the house at night with the lights off and end up sitting in my kitchen, wearing the same clothes I had on two days before. I couldn’t eat during the day, but at night, bags of Oreos were my best friends. Then Lena sent me a cryptic text that said, “I’m moving out of SF back to Marin. Bought a small house, cottage, really, two bedrooms. I only need one. Want the other one?”

That’s all it took. In less than two months, I was back living in San Rafael off Wynnwood Drive, only a mile from where we grew up.

.

2

The baseball game was
over when I turned onto our short street. In our driveway was Terrel Robinson and the love of his life, his mortician black ‘70 Dodge Charger. T. or Dr. T, as my sister called him, was Lena’s boyfriend. The hood was up and Terrel was underneath, long legs sticking out. A post-game talk show was blaring out of a small radio somewhere in the garage.

I got out of the car, opened up the trunk and pulled out my red and white cooler. Lena, still half asleep, pushed her side door open with both feet.

“Take your swim bag,” I called to her as she walked over to Terrel and lightly kicked his shoe.

“Hey, doc. Missed you today. When are you going to start coming to my swims?”

“Never. They’re too white for me. Besides, I’m on call,” mumbled the voice from under the car. He scooted out, stood up, stretched and wiped his hands on the rag sitting next to the five yellow quart bottles of engine oil. Then he wiped the oil smears off his black rimmed glasses on his tee shirt.

“You’re such a phony,” said Lena, easily falling into a longrunning, but congenial argument. “Skin color has nothing to do with it. You can’t swim. That’s your problem.”

Terrel glanced at her and then looked at me, cocked his head, held out his hand and smirked.

“Pay up. Your wonderful Giants lost…again. Those two World Series wins were a fluke.”

“They just ran out of innings,” I said, heading for the door.

“They choked. Pay up.”

“Double or nothing the next game…”

“They got nothing. A bet’s a bet,” he said. “Pay up.”

Terrel Edward Robinson, the product of a white mother and a black father, was an emergency room doctor in San Francisco. His road to and through medical school had not been easy. With his long lanky arms and legs, his aptitude for cars and ‘don’t mess with me’ stare, he was often thought of as a pick-up basketball player, a potential mechanic or a probable thug. He could be all of those things, when needed. But it was his dogged determination and savage intelligence that got him that M.D. after his name.

“You should have been there today,” Lena continued. “Someone nearly drowned or something. I’m really not sure. Maybe you could have helped.”

The baseball bet was quickly forgotten.

“What happened?” he asked.

Lena began to explain what she knew as they walked toward the front door.

“Forgetting something? Your swim bag? I’m not your maid,” I called out.

Lena glanced over her shoulder at me standing by the car, hands on hips, “Don’t worry about dinner, Trish. I’m calling in for Chinese.”

When the food was delivered, we placed the white cartons on the dining room table. Well, you couldn’t really call it a dining room table in the formal sense. It looked more like a sturdy oak work table found in a country kitchen decades ago. Lena’s chairs were mismatched, all with different color cushions she’d picked up at garage sales. That’s the way the rest of her house looked. Colorful, comfortable, but at times a little odd.

On the walls were framed enlarged samples of typography; Helvetica E, Garamond I, Century Gothic G and Tahoma M. A mobile made up of tarnished silverware hung by the window and swayed and clinked in the afternoon breeze.

Lena was a graphic designer, sought after and well paid. She specialized in web sites. About 50% of her clients were related to the swimming world. She had a great eye for color and design and understood what made readers come back to a site time after time.

Terrel came out of the kitchen carrying forks, two sets of chopsticks, serving spoons and a six pack of Tsingtao beer. “Confucius say, ‘Hot food, cold beer lead warrior over Great Wall to paradise. Kung Pao, Tsingtao.’”

“That is lame,” said Lena, reaching out for a bottle of beer.

“I suppose you can do better,” said Terrel.

“I’m sure I can.”

“Go ahead. Now, do it. Now. Don’t think about it. Just say it… go ahead.”

“Well, ah…”

“Can’t deliver…I knew it.”

As they sparred across the table, I dug into a carton of food. Thanks to a suggestion from Lena who kept the website for the Northern California Swimming Association humming along, the organization hired me for some temporary work. It wasn’t much of a job, but at least I had money coming in. Nor Cal Swimming was the group in charge of today’s open water event.

“You know, I found the swimmer’s goggles floating right at the water’s edge. T, give me your best guess. What do you think happened?” I asked.

Terrel was eating the Kung Pao chicken and decided not to let medical questions come between him and his dinner. He didn’t answer.

“Come on, T. Here’s the situation. Older guy…,” said Lena.

“I’d say he was more middle-aged.”

Lena rolled her eyes.

“Okay, middle-aged guy in good shape, swims hard and then drowns, almost. He is pulled from the water, put in the ambulance; they hook him up to some machines and then run some tests. So what happened?”

T looked up at Lena, then down at his plate. He was about to take another bite.

“I’m eating here. Can’t you see that?” Terrel said. “Look, he’ll probably recover. Maybe he was just dehydrated.”

“Dehydration can lead to unconsciousness?” I asked.

“It can,” he said. “You’ve seen marathon runners who can’t stand on their feet at the end of a race, right? Dehydration has a lot to do with that. Maybe his blood pressure dropped. Caused by…who knows what?”

“I heard the paramedic talking to the ER before they drove off to the hospital. They were talking about blood sugars.”

“Okay,” Terrel said, staring first at Lena, then at me. “Do you know if his blood sugar was too low? If so, he may be hypoglycemic. That could be the underlying reason he lost consciousness. It’s very dangerous if not treated. Did he have any known medical conditions? Any heart abnormalities?”

“How would I know,” Lena said. “I never met the guy, not really.”

“What medications was he on? Was he taking them? Was he taking something else? Something he shouldn’t have been taking. He’s an athlete. Athletes are known to take drugs, performance enhancing drugs.”

“You’re talking steroids? In Masters swimming? Oh, please,” I said.

But Terrel had started diagnosing and once he started, it was hard to stop him. I watched as he began to free associate, something he liked to do.

“Ok…then…maybe he had too much coffee. Coffee…caffeine… one of those high powered energy drinks…maybe there was some kind of interaction. Stimulants, good possibility, amphetamines, speed. Whatever he took might have stimulated his heart into an arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat. Maybe he was juiced. It doesn’t take more than 60 seconds to find performance enhancing drugs—PEDs—on line.”

“T,” I said “You keep coming back to these…PEDS…or whatever you called them. This is Masters swimming. They don’t do drugs for that.”

“Well,” said Lena. “That’s what I thought, until I went to Australia for the World Games a few years back. They had an open water swim as the last event. I was standing at the train station in Perth with some swimmers from Costa Rica trying to get to the venue.

“The woman pointed to a baldheaded man at the end of the platform. She said, ‘I know him from home. He’s on ‘roids. Everyone knows it. He looks different and he acts crazy.’ That was the first time I heard talk about performance enhancing drugs in Masters. I couldn’t believe it then. Still can’t.”

“There are many reasons for a fit athlete to collapse, whether in the water or on a playing field,” said Terrel. “Cardiac arrest is only one of them. Maybe the water was too hot, hyperthermia.”

“Not here,” said Lena.

“Okay…maybe it was too cold. Hypothermia. Blood clot. Cramps. Panic. You know, there’s a new drug on the streets based on a synthetic testosterone derivative. It is supposed to help with muscle retention and growth, but it can make someone very sick if too much is absorbed into the body. It is primarily injected. Street junkies call it High Test. You use it to top off your tank.”

“Back to steroids again,” said Lena. “Testosterone, High Test, top off your tank. You’re making this up, aren’t you? You’ve been in the ER in downtown San Francisco too long. Not every death is caused by street drugs, guns or gangs,” said Lena.

“What do you know? Ah, right, you’re the Marin expert on downtown street life. If this man is as fit and as clean and upstanding as you think and he dies, and the family thinks something seems off, they may ask for an autopsy. Autopsies aren’t done as a matter of course anymore. Otherwise, if he lives and doesn’t want to talk about it, you’ll never know.”

I watched as they quibbled and snapped at each other. It was like this all the time. From a distance, it was disconcerting. But for them, this was foreplay. The fight would often finish in bed.

I picked up a bottle of beer and wandered off to my room. Bedrooms can be depressing places when you can’t sleep and there is no one to talk to. Each night I tensed up when I headed in that direction. My bedroom held a tempting promise of rest and relaxation. That’s what I wanted and desperately needed. But that’s all it was…just a promise. Each night, I thought it would be different. But no matter how tired I was, I could sleep only an hour or two at a time, if that.

I heard Terrel call out ‘later’. The front door shut. Next came the deep throaty rumble of the Charger’s engine followed by the sound of its tires crunching over the small pebbles in the driveway. The noise soon faded, as he drove down the street.

I stretched out on my bed and picked up a book. After reading the same words over and over, I found myself gazing out the window to the gentle uneven peaks of Mt. Tamalpais. At 2,571 feet, it wasn’t much more than a bunny slope, if you compared it to the Colorado Rockies. But Mt. Tam, with its sensual curves was soothing to look at. Tall Douglas fir and oak dotted the hills and there was a promise of the Pacific Ocean just on the other side.

My eyes closed. Hours passed as I dozed, woke up, dropped back into a light sleep, and then woke again. The house was dark. It was three in the morning and sleep seemed as elusive as the swirling grey fog that was sitting on top of Mt. Tam. I pulled on a sweatshirt and sweatpants, slipped on a pair of socks and started my nightly cruise through the house. First to the living room. I wandered from the front window to the bookcase and back to the window. Inside my head, a hamster was running an endless loop on his wheel.

How did I get back here, not more than one mile from where we lived as kids? No husband. An on-call temporary delivery job that paid next to nothing. No place of my own. An expanding waistline. And I’m living with my sister, my younger sister. This isn’t how I pictured my life. I tried the positive thinking approach. ‘It won’t be this way forever. I can change it, I know I can.’

I moved into the kitchen. The tangy aroma of soy sauce still hung in the air from the empty food cartons. Opening up the refrigerator, I pulled out the last beer and headed back to my room.

Warm milk does nothing for me, but a beer could sometimes put me to sleep. I began to doze again. The open water swim drifted into my dream. I was waiting at the lake’s edge; the warm sun on my face; the cool water swirling around my toes. Flecks of fool’s gold glittered in the water and the tiniest of fish, no wider than a toothpick and half the length, swam around my ankles.

I was the only one on the beach. It was completely empty, just me standing there looking out at Lake Joseph. The wind was blowing. I could see it in the trees, but it remained deathly quiet, as if I were standing in a vacuum.

The swimmers were spread out across the lake, silently coming toward me. Then, they stopped and calmly, serenely began to disappear, one by one, sinking slowly below the surface. There was no panic, no screams, no thrashing of arms and legs. Only deep stillness. The ripples that spread out from their movements in the water began to subside until the water grew tranquil as if no one had ever been there. And I was frozen on the shore, not able to move, not able to help any of them.