Ninety-Eight

The ramp at the land end had come away from the pier.

Its top had dropped, so that there was a step of about two feet between the last board of the pier and the first of the ramp, with broken timbers sticking up out of the gap like teeth. Castellanos sat on the edge and put his feet down onto the ramp and stood and turned and held up both arms, and took Frederick by the waist and lifted him down as though he weighed nothing, the way he had lifted him out of cars when he was four, and turned for Theo.

“I can do it,” said Theo.

“I know you can, Mr Hartigan,” said Castellanos, and lifted him down anyway.

Brannigan came down by himself, heavily, and held a hand up to Mr Abernathy, who looked at it and then took it with his right hand, his left still in his pocket. The man with the ponytail sat on the edge and dropped and landed in a crouch and stood up and said, to nobody, “Thirty years I’ve worked this pier,” and said nothing else.

They went down to the sand.

---

The beach was the wrong size.

He knew how wide it was, from the foot of the bluff to the water, the way he knew how long a platform was. It went on now. Out past where the water had been, a great flat shining stretch of wet grey sand with ripples in it, going away towards a sea that was a thin bright line at the edge of the world with no waves on it at all.

There were dark things lying on the wet sand. Some of them were flapping. Fish.

And people were walking out to them. Five or six, perhaps ten, scattered across the wet sand a long way off, walking out the way people walk on a beach, looking down. A man in a white shirt with his phone held up. A woman with a little boy by the hand, pointing at the fish. Two teenagers running, laughing, kicking at the sand. They were walking out onto the floor of the sea because it was the strangest thing any of them had ever seen and nobody had told them what it meant.

“No,” said Frederick.

His feet had stopped. He turned towards them and opened his mouth to shout, because they could not know, because the sign was at the top of the bluff and they were at the bottom.

Castellanos was in front of him. Between him and the wet sand, facing him, so close that all he could see was the grey suit covered in yellow dust and the face above it.

“Sir. No.”

“They don’t know. Somebody has to tell them.”

“The lifeguards are telling them. The police are telling them. There’s a man with a loudhailer by the hut. Listen.” Under the phones and the sirens, faint and flat, from along the beach: come back, come back off the sand, go up, go up now. “They’re being told, sir. By people whose job it is. It isn’t yours. Not this morning. Your job this morning is the stairs. That’s all. Don’t look at them. Look at me. Then look at the stairs.”

Frederick looked at him.

“Please,” said Castellanos.

He had never heard Castellanos say it. The face was the same as always, square and brown and still, except for the eyes. Castellanos was frightened, had been since the noise began, and had not once let it into his voice.

Frederick turned round and looked at the stairs.

“Good,” said Castellanos. “Run.”

---

The sand near the bluff was soft and deep and loose, and every step went in and had to be pulled out, and his legs went heavy at once. Theo beside him. Castellanos on his left, between him and the sea. Brannigan behind, and Mr Abernathy behind Brannigan, and the man with the ponytail somewhere. He did not look at the sea.

At the foot of the bluff, across the road, the heaps. From the wheel they had looked like sandcastles. From the beach they were hills, twice his height, three times, great mounds of yellow earth across the road and the car park, with things sticking out of them: the roof of a car, a lamp post bent like a reed, a street sign, a palm trunk, a bicycle, a shoe. People were coming over them and out of them towards the stairs, people with blood on their faces and people carrying people and a man with no shirt carrying a dog.

The footbridge stood out of a mound on the road side like a bridge in a quarry, its deck level, people on it.

The eleven steps up to it were full. His feet counted them anyway. One. Two. Three. An elbow in his back. Four. Five. In front of him a woman in a blue nurse’s uniform with a little girl on her hip, the girl looking back over her shoulder at him with enormous eyes and her thumb in her mouth. Six. Seven. Theo’s hand on his arm. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Then the deck, and the road underneath it not cars but yellow earth with cars in it, and a policeman standing on the roof of one with a loudhailer, keep moving, keep moving, don’t stop on the bridge. They did not stop on the bridge.

---

The stairs were a queue.

So slow that at first he thought it had stopped. People on every step of the first flight and the landing and round the turn and up the second, as far as he could see, shoulder to shoulder, two and three abreast on stairs built for two, going up one step and then a long pause, the way the wheel had come down an inch at a time before the brake came off. Old people holding the rail. Children being carried. A man on crutches with two other men lifting him up each step. People crying, people talking fast into telephones that did not work, people saying nothing. Nobody was pushing anybody.

Once, from somewhere above on the second flight, a man’s voice, high: come on, come on, it’s coming, can’t you go faster. And a woman’s, very calm: we’re all going as fast as we can, sir, we’re all going up together. The first voice stopped.

Sixteen. The first landing. Over the rail, between the people, the sea: still a long way out beyond the wet sand and the fish, a thin bright line doing nothing. The people out there were running back now, small, all of them, because somebody had told them.

Sixteen. The second landing. A boy of about seven in front of him lost a shoe, a red one, through the rail onto the heap below, and began to cry, and his father picked him up without a word and carried him, and the shoe stayed where it was.

Seventeen. The third landing. One of the seventeens. Wrong on Tuesday, right this morning. With Theo’s hand on his arm and the nurse two steps above, it seemed the most important thing he had ever got right.

Sixteen. The fourth landing. His legs were shaking, not from the climb, from something that had started at the top of the wheel and would not stop. The little girl on the nurse’s hip took her thumb out of her mouth and said, clearly, looking at him over the nurse’s shoulder, “You’ve got blood on you.” The nurse turned and looked at him, and looked again, and he saw her see who he was and decide in about a second that it did not matter.

“Are you hurt, honey?”

“No.”

“Good,” she said, and went on up.

Seventeen. The fifth landing.

Sixteen.

And then there were no more steps.

---

The sign was there.

On its post at the top of the stairs at the height of his head, blue, white-bordered, the white wave and the running figure and the arrow. The post had been pushed sideways so that it leaned like the clock on the pier, and the sign was covered in yellow dust so that its blue was the colour of sand. The arrow pointed up, at an angle, at the sky.

Theo stopped in front of it so suddenly that the man behind walked into him and said sorry, sorry and went round. Theo did not notice. He put his hand out flat on the sign, on the dust, on the white wave, and held it there.

When he took it away there was a clean blue handprint over the wave.

“I said it didn’t mean anything.”

“I know.”

“I said nobody ever looks at those.”

“I know.”

“You looked at it. You counted.” His face was white under the dust and his eyes were red and he was not crying. “You were wrong by two.”

“Yes.”

“Ninety-eight. I counted too, coming up. The whole way.” Then, very quietly: “Thank you.”

Frederick did not say what for. He nodded once, and Theo nodded back, and Castellanos said from behind them, “Gentlemen. Away from the edge. Now,” and they went.

---

The park was yellow under the dust, and the grass was cracked in long jagged lines, and in places the edge of it was simply gone where the bluff had come away underneath, so that the railing ended in mid-air and the path ran up to a raw edge of earth and stopped. Two palm trees lay across Ocean Avenue. A third leaned against a building. Hundreds of people were sitting on the cracked grass and standing in groups and walking up and down calling names, and across the road every window on the whole street was gone, so that the buildings stood in the settling dust like faces with the eyes out.

Far down the street, through the dust, the hotel’s tower. Standing. Not straight.

“There,” said Brannigan. “By the big tree. Kimura.”

She was standing on a bench by the trunk of a big tree on the inland side of the park, as far from the edge as the park went, one arm straight up so that she could be seen, and round the foot of the bench, close together on the cracked grass, sat the sophomores of Ellicott High School.

He did not run. Castellanos and Brannigan walked him across the park at a walk, because a running man in a frightened crowd makes the crowd run. The clump got closer and became faces. Felix. June. Devon with blood on his knee and a T-shirt tied round it. Señora Ruiz on the grass with the folder in her lap and both hands flat on it. Marcus.

Marcus stood up. His mouth opened and nothing came out, and then he said, very loudly, so that the whole clump turned round:

“I didn’t look at the gaps.”

Frederick stopped.

“On the way back. Along the pier. Everybody was looking because the water was going away, Felix looked, but I didn’t. I didn’t look at the gaps the whole way.” His face crumpled. “I took my own advice.”

Priya came out of the clump and ran at them and stopped three feet away, the way you stop at the edge of a pool, and her hands came up and went down, and then she threw both arms round Theo instead and held on, and Theo held on back, and over her shoulder Theo’s face had gone at last, completely, and he was crying, and so was she.

Kimura got down off the bench.

“Hanover,” she said. “Hartigan.” Not sir. Their names, the way Mr Abernathy said them, and she wrote something on the back of her hand with a pen. Then she looked past them at Mr Abernathy coming across the grass with his hand in his pocket and his grey face, and wrote something else. “Mr Abernathy. You’re bleeding.”

“I’m aware.”

He stopped in front of the bench and looked at the clump and his lips began to move. Every face, slowly, round the clump, and then again from the start, and when he got to the end the second time he stood very still.

“Fifty-eight,” said Mr Abernathy.

“Fifty-eight,” said Kimura. “Now. It was fifty-six for twelve minutes. I counted it four times.”

“Fifty-eight sophomores. Señora Ruiz.” She looked back at him from the grass. “Myself.” He looked round, at the clump and the bench and the tree and the people on the grass and the fallen palms and the buildings with their eyes out, and Frederick saw him not find something, and his face went greyer.

“Where,” said Mr Abernathy, “is Mr Ferrante?”

Nobody answered.

Lucía stood up from the middle of the clump with dust in her hair and her phone in her hand, very white, and looked at Mr Abernathy and then, for some reason, at Frederick.

“He went back.”

“Back where?”

“To the pier. When we were coming off.” Her voice was very small. “There was an old man. One of the fishermen. The one with the cap. He fell on the sand by the ramp, and the men carrying him had to let go because somebody else fell, and Mr Ferrante saw, and he said keep going, Lucía, keep going with the others, go up, and he gave me to Señora Ruiz.” Señora Ruiz nodded once with her hands on the folder. “And he went back for him.”

Frederick turned round.

He walked back across the cracked grass, through the people, to the edge, to where the railing still stood by the top of the stairs and the crooked sign with Theo’s handprint on it, and Castellanos was beside him and did not stop him, and he put his hands on the rail and looked down.

The beach was empty now. The lifeguard’s hut stood on its legs with nobody in it. Far out, beyond the wet sand and the fish, the thin bright line of the sea lay flat at the edge of the world.

Between the foot of the ramp and the foot of the stairs, on the soft dry sand, a long way down, there were two people. One was lying down. The other was kneeling beside him. As Frederick watched, the kneeling one got up, and bent, and got his arms under the other, and lifted him, slowly, and stood, swaying, with the old man in his arms, and began to walk.

He was walking very slowly towards the stairs. He had a long way to go.

It was four minutes past ten.