“Did you see me?” Trudy asked as I sat down next to her.
She had returned to the beach before I did, because the swells were making her dizzy, and her goggles were slipping. So I was just now rejoining my fair and industrious wife.
“Did you see what happened when I got out?”
I wasn’t sure what she meant.
“It was terrible,” she said.
It turned out that when she swam to shore, she was disoriented and got out on the rocks instead of the sandy beach. The ocean swells and breaking surf tossed her back and forth against the sharp lava rock.
She couldn’t stand up. She couldn’t sit down. She couldn’t swim to shallower water away from the waves. And evidently she couldn’t swim away from the rocks, either.
“I couldn’t get out,” she said, pointing to a bloody scrape on her leg.
As she was struggling with this predicament, being battered on the rocks by the waves, I was oblivious, swimming with the fishes and looking at urchins nestled in the lava. And no one on the nearby beach noticed her trouble, either.
When she did finally pull herself ashore, where was I? I was out in the water swimming with the fishes and urchins having a grand time periodically poking my head up and waving to her obliviously as she nursed her wounds.
She had a sad look on her face and even a hint of tears in her eyes.
“Your husband abandoned you,” I said.
“He did,” she said.