She hated wearing that life jacket. It was cold and damp and squeezed too tightly against her chest. She shuttered at the thought of all of those germs planting themselves on her body. Gross.
“My ancestors didn’t wear life jackets,” she thought defiantly. But then she remembered her uncle Bill, whom she had never met because he drowned at age sixteen in Red River Lake. Perhaps her ancestors were just lucky.
Pushing the sail boat out into the sound, where the wind and the waves were, always made her feel useless. She was sure her camp leader, a twenty-year-old college student, and her best camp buddy, Aaron, whom had nicknamed her The Four Square Queen, could paddle the sail boat across the Atlantic Ocean without an iota of help from her.
It was a majestic day for sailing. The wind smelled of salt and seaweed. The sun was bright but not overbearing. She would have closed her eyes to savor the feeling but the beautiful blue of the sea kept them open. She felt like she had died and gone to heaven.
The camp leader’s voice was the only sound interrupting her peace. His instructions and remarks didn’t make an impact on her, although she heard them, like she vaguely heard the seagulls overhead.
“Alright, let’s get this sail boat turned around so we can make the loop back home. Keep your heads down…. Uh-oh. Wind is getting tricky. Aaron, quick, grab that line…. Crap! C’mon, girl, work with me…. Okay, we might have to get out. The boat might turn over, but that’s fine. We’ll just turn it back over. No worries! Aaron, you jump out first. Now, you, Ophelia. Watch those ropes…. Well, it looks like we’ll just have to swim to the pier, then. This has never happened to me before, guys.”
Coming out of her daydream, she realized the sail boat was emerged in the waters. Sail boats sink?
Dog paddling after the camp leader and Aaron, she felt so tired. Maybe it was the large amount of four square she had already played that morning. Or maybe it was because the pier just seemed so dang far away.
Her arms and legs were moving but she wasn’t going any further. In fact, she seemed to be sinking.
“Aar–!” and then she was underwater, the life jacket choking her in a futile attempt to keep her afloat. She tried to struggle back to the surface of the water, but the beautiful sight of the sun meandering through the murky blue salty water distracted her. It was just too lovely.
The wooden pier was warm on her back. The sun was too bright. Aaron’s face loomed above her. His wet hair and red-rimmed eyes startled her.
“You drowned,” he stated. She tried to ask what happened, but her voice wouldn’t work. He knew, though.
“The sail boat’s lines were caught in your life jacket. It pulled you down. The more I swam to get you, the more you were pulled away. I ripped that life jacket off you. When we brought you up, you were dead. They had to bring you back.”
He grabbed her shoulders firmly.
“What would I have done without you?”
“But I’m useless,” she thought.
His voice dropped to a desperate whisper. “What did you see? In those minutes… when you were gone…”
An image of the sunlight floating in the waters came back to her.
“Nothing,” she thought with her sea-green eyes. “Nothing.”