“I’m ready,” I said as I crossed my legs and pressed my hands together in Anjali Mudra.
“You are not ready.” She rolled her shoulders and then her neck. “You have to be here to practice.”
“I’m here.”
“You are not here.”
I growled. Sometimes her Zen was intolerable, especially when my need for relief was so urgent, but she was the expert and there was no arguing with her. At the time she taught meditation and yoga classes on the beach and had dozens of clients, some of whom traveled all the way from the Upper East Side, an hour-and-a-half subway ride, to take her fifty-minute class. She knew her way around the om, so I surrendered to her wisdom and clamped my eyes shut. I inhaled deeply and followed her instructions, imagining the air flowing into my limbs, my diaphragm, and my pelvis. I directed it into my belly and guided it down my legs and into my toes until my breath and body were one and the same. Soon I felt a tap on my shoulder.
“Now you’re here.”
And I was. We got on our hands and knees and pressed the tops of our feet into the damp sand. I eased into the child’s pose and, oh man, that felt good. To this day yoga on the beach is the best medicine for my migraines, better than teas or aspirin or acupuncture. Even better than the Novocain injections I got when I knocked my front teeth out the day I fell off my bike on the Marine Parkway Bridge. Each new pose—the downward dog, the mountain, the pigeon—sent me to the creamy vanilla bliss of a quiet mind. Om kicked the crap out of my migraines every time. I miss om.
When we finished, we sat on the sand, lazy as cats, and watched the crews put the amusement-park rides to bed. I fell asleep at one point and woke with her hand on my shoulder.
“Your dad won’t sleep forever,” she said, signaling that it was time to get back. We helped each other to our feet and retrieved our kicks, but we hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps when we heard a rumbling coming from the water.
“What is that?” I asked as I peered out into the dark, unable to imagine what had created something so loud. I suspected a humpback whale. A few had beached themselves over the years, but this sounded more rhythmic, more a deep plucking than a whale song, and the sound was getting louder.
My mother was stone still, her eyes locked on the tides, her face more serious and focused than I had ever seen it. Without her smile she was almost unrecognizable, but I had no time to question her. Like a sonic boom, the plucking became a trumpeting roar so loud, I nearly fell over. I took a step closer to the water, desperate to see what was out there, but my mother grabbed my wrist and pulled me back, hard. Her grip was so strong, I cried out, shocked at the pain. It felt like my arm was about to come out of its socket.
“Mom, you’re hurting me!”
“Wait here,” she ordered, then took off like a shot, diving into the waves with outstretched arms and disappearing into its black unknown. For the longest time, there was no sign of her at all, and in my growing panic I charged in after her until I was waist deep. I shouted her name until my throat was raw, but when I still could not find her, I went into hysterics. I was sure she had drowned. I ran back to the beach for my cell phone to call my father but remembered I had burned out the battery with all the texting. I was helpless and alone.
After several excruciating minutes, she finally surfaced a few yards away, but everything that was Summer Walker had changed. What came out of that water looked like my mother but seemed more like a cornered animal.
“What’s out there? What did you see?”
“We should get back to the apartment,” she said, and without another word she turned and led us home. I begged for answers the whole way, but she refused to speak of what had just happened, and as soon as we were through the door, she locked herself inside her bedroom.
“Mom?”
“Go to bed, Lyric,” she whispered back. “You’ll wake your father.”
My dreams were brutal that night. In them my mother fought against a hungry sea with waves like greedy hands pulling her down into its dark, insatiable maw. I dove in to rescue her only to find myself pulled in as well. In the morning I woke shivering, my sheets soaked with sweat. I changed and charged into the living room, ready to demand answers, but my mother was gone. Instead I found my father leaning on the kitchen counter, his face buried in a letter in my mother’s handwriting. He didn’t notice me at first, but when he caught me sneaking a peek, he crunched the note into a ball and shoved it into his pocket.
“Is that about the whale?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“The noise from last night. It was crazy loud. It could have been a whale. Maybe it’s still there. Maybe we should go down and see.”
“NO!” he commanded. “I want you off the beach today.”
“Okay, you don’t have to yell!”
“What did your mother do when she heard it?”
“She jumped into the water.”
His face went pale, and I felt I had somehow betrayed her, though I couldn’t say why.
“Dad? What’s wrong?”
Ignoring me, he reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and dialed a number.
“Mike, it’s me. I’m not coming in today. Yeah, I’ve got this thing in my chest,” he said, not even bothering to fake a cough or the sniffles. I was stunned. My father never took a day off from work. He always said we couldn’t afford it, and our collection of “as is” IKEA furniture was proof. Being one of New York’s Finest also made him one of New York’s Brokest, and he dragged himself into the precinct even when most men would be planning their funerals.