u/schaeffernelson

>!SPOILER CONTENT WARNING: Children die.!<

My wedding went really well. Like, suspiciously well. I’d been flirting with groomzilla status, fixating on every detail, barely sleeping in the weeks and days prior. My husband, who I will not name out of an abundance of caution, kept telling me to relax. It didn’t need to be perfect.

But I didn’t need it to be perfect either. I just could not shake this feeling that something bad was coming. A dread that had begun building in my gut about a month before the wedding. Something was going to happen. I’m not clairvoyant, it’s not that, and I kept telling myself it was just wedding nerves.

It wasn’t.

But the wedding did rock. I wouldn’t call it flawless, but none of the flaws mattered. By the time we got to the reception and our loved ones swarmed us with affection and congratulations, I finally relaxed. All that dread had been for nothing. Just wasteful anxiety. Just nerves.

It wasn’t.

The honeymoon was on a tropical island. I will give no further identifying info. We stayed in a nice, but not luxury hotel. We spent a lot of time on a beach that sea turtles liked. We ate well. We hiked to world famous  waterfalls; my husband gets up early five days a week to hike before work, so I teased him that he just married me for the honeymoon. We only had sex once, actually, but that wasn’t concerning. My husband had wanted top surgery in time for wedding photos and his chest was still sensitive. And besides, gay men aren’t typically wedding night virgins. Exploring the island was the more novel experience.

We scheduled our big adventure for our final night on the island. When my husband first pitched it to me, I said no. I didn’t grow up around water, and even sailing on a sunny day could creep me out if the water got choppy. But my husband knows the vulnerable spots in my resolve. I adore animals. He showed me pictures. Manta rays. Dolphins. Tropical fish. Eels. All swimming within inches of tourists snorkeling together. At night. In the ocean. In one photo, a large ray spreads it wings directly next to a stunned tourist. Okay, I said. Okay. Let’s do it. Let’s do the nighttime snorkeling trip to view the wild nocturnal sea life.

The trip budget was fully flexed. We did not have enough money left to book one of the small, adults-only nighttime snorkel tours. But there was a local vendor who offered a family-friendly nighttime snorkel tour for groups of fifty that was considerably cheaper. I didn’t love that we were going to be doing this with kids. But it was only affordable choice.

The boat ride out to sea that night was chilly and surreal. Even for seasoned seagoers, sailing into the dark ocean is unnerving. The animal part of you keeps asking you what the hell you’re doing. It’s the ocean. At night. In the darkness. Go back to land.

The boat was a large catamaran, with a crew of four cheerful, inked up sailors and a young surf bro captain. The tour group was almost entirely families with children. One family even had grandparents along. My husband and I were the only childless couple, gay or otherwise. But that was fine. The kids ranged from about eight years to twelve years old, and were pretty quiet on the ride out. The dark ocean seemed to somber them.

Thirty minutes after we left the dock, the captain killed the motor and got on the boat speaker. He gave us the basic rules as his crew members passed out wetsuits and snorkel equipment. Touching any wild animals was absolutely forbidden. We were gonna be in the water for about forty-five minutes. The water would be cold, but not dangerously. We would swim out from the boat and hold onto one of several long, floating boards. The bottom of these floating boards was covered in bright headlights, like on a car, that would shine beams of light down into the water. The light would attract plankton, and then manta rays and fish to eat the plankton, and then the creatures that eat fish. And we would be able to lie flat across the surface of the water with the help of pool noodles underneath our ankles.

We suited up. Finally, the kids started giggling. It all felt a little awkward, putting on these skintight suits around strangers. But I was grateful for the giggles. My husband was twitching with excitement, but I felt the beginning of unease. I was about to be staring down into the ocean for forty-five minutes at night. The dolphins better really be majestic.

Nobody even mentioned the possibility of sharks until we lined up to jump off the boat. The little boy behind me asked his mom, “Mom, what do we do if there’s a shark?”

Before his mom could answer, a crew member chimed in, “Son, if you see a shark, just wave hello!”

It was the right answer. Sharks almost never bother humans. It’s natural to be afraid of them. But they aren’t dangerous. You’re safer off swimming with sharks than driving to work. 

The shark comment wasn’t what scared me. It was the life jackets. As we approached the edge of the boat to jump into the black ocean water, I realized no one was being handed life jackets. I just assumed we’d get them right as we prepared to jump in.  

 

I asked the crew member for a life jacket. He just smiled and thrust the pool noodle in my face. I was stunned. He couldn’t be serious.

But he was. Apparently, life jackets make you bob up and down. They make it hard to lay on top of the water and look down. And to see the sea animals, you gotta be looking down.

“You’ll be perfectly fine,” he reassured me.

There was a line of forty people behind me. My husband passive-aggressively kissed me on the forehead and then leapt into the ocean. So, I grabbed the noodle, cursed under my breath and stepped out into the air.

And there I was. There we all were. My husband and I. And fifty other people. About half of them children. In the ocean. The pitch black ocean. At night. With pool noodles.

We all swam to our floating light boards and grabbed onto the handles. I was shaking like a leaf. Not because the water was cold—which it was—but because on an animal level, my body hated this. My husband sensed that I was scared. Not that he did a damn thing about it, but he sensed it. I know the man. He could sense I was on the verge of having an anxiety meltdown, and I could sense that he was silently apologizing for putting me through this but he was absolutely going to keep putting me through this because this was going to be objectively awesome. And he probably sensed that I was cussing him out in my mind, but that I knew he was right.

None of this telepathy was exchanged through glances. There was no glancing. We were both face down, staring into the bottomless, black ocean, breathing through our snorkels.

At least I wasn’t the most scared person in the water. Across from us on the board was the family with the grandparents. They had a little boy, only child maybe, and he was trembling harder than I was. I felt bad for him. He was probably eight. Too young for this. He was struggling to keep his pool noodle under his feet. I could see his legs from the edge of my snorkel goggles. And every time the noodle slipped, the kid would thrash in panic. His mom would grab the noodle and help him get it back under his feet. But every time the kid lost it, and he lost it about every other minute, he thrashed harder. He was just getting more and more scared.

I’m not really a kid person. So rather than feel compassion for the scared child, I felt a perverse gratitude. This scared little boy was making me look brave by comparison.

It took a moment for the lights to attract the sea life. We spent a good ten minutes just staring into the shadowy abyss, illuminated by the half dozen headlights pointed downwards. But then the plankton found us. They just looked like particles, but when you squinted, you could see them twitching and alive.

Then came the tropical fish. This was the first cool thing to happen. The first moment this felt like it had maybe been a good idea. I heard my husband shout with delight through the water. The fish were big, extremely colorful, and unafraid of us. Some big yellow dude with tiger stripes swam right up to my goggles and stared at me. We had a moment. He was like my brother fish or something. With all the adrenaline pulsing through me, I felt an embarrassing amount of tenderness for that yellow fish. I teared up. And, as if also embarrassed by my emotional reaction, the striped yellow fish zipped away.

The manta rays came next. And they were gorgeous. And massive. Maybe twelve feet across. And they flew through the water by flapping their wings. They would arc upwards and turn a summersault just underneath the headlights to catch the most plankton. The manta ray’s stomachs would occasionally brush my wetsuit. It would have unnerved me if it wasn’t also one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen in my life.

But the many, many children in the water did not share my sense of wonder. Every time, and I mean every time, a manta ray would swim close, all of the children would start screaming. You could hear it through the water. My husband was cracking up, which I could also hear through the water. I tried to be amused. These kids were just not old enough for this. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to put like twenty-five elementary school kids in the ocean and night and expect them to appreciate manta rays swimming next to them?

Their parents. That’s who.

The little boy across from me was really struggling. He had given up on the pool noodle. I could see his legs wrapped around his mom’s, using her as his floatation device. She had put his noodle under her legs to compensate, but it wasn’t really working. In between the children screaming, I could hear the mom asking the nearest crew member, who was in the water alongside us, if she and her son could get back on the boat early. I couldn’t hear whatever the crew member said back. But the mom and the little boy didn’t leave.

I saw it before the little boy did. The large, grey, unmistakable shape. Moving in a soft zig zag and without hurry, about ten feet below us. A tiger shark. But I felt surprisingly little fear at the sight of it. I knew, even in that moment, that it was just checking us out. Just seeing what was up. Yes, tiger sharks can be maneaters. But I knew that the shark would probably just leave us alone.

The kids didn’t know that. The little boy didn’t know that. And when he saw the large, gray, unmistakable thing swim beneath his feet, he screamed a new kind of scream. Not a scream of skittish fear. A scream of animal terror.

This started a chain reaction. As the shark passed beneath the floating boards, beneath all of us laying on top of the water, beneath our legs and our pool noodles, the children began to panic. The water churned as the kids began to kick and thrash.

The crew members in the water tried to save the mood. They started laughing and told everyone to be calm. This was a special experience. Nothing to be scared of.

Some of the kids believed the crew. But some of them kept thrashing. And the little boy across from me went into a blind panic.

I sensed what was about to happen before my husband did. He was laughing. But I knew we were too close to that little boy and his parents. I realized that the most dangerous place to be in the ocean at the moment was within grasping distance of the panicking little boy.

I grabbed my husband’s shoulder. I pulled his head out of the water. I yanked the snorkel out of my mouth. And I told him, “Swim away from the kids! Now!”

I grabbed my pool noodle out from under my feet and let go of the lightboard. And I swam into the dark ocean. Away from the other tourists. My husband was shocked. But he followed me. And once we swam about twenty feet away, he shouted, “What the hell, man?!”

But I didn’t need to answer. I just began to tread water and pointed back at the tourists, all of them glowing from below.

The little boy had latched onto his mother like she was a parachute. He was bucking wildly. She was trying to get him to let go of her legs so she could keep them both afloat, but it wasn’t working. The little boy’s father was trying to support her. He grabbed for his son’s legs.

And he took a foot right to the nose. Even over the sounds of thrashing and children screaming, I heard the man’s nose break. And then the mom did the one thing she knew to do, and also the stupidest thing she could have done, and she screamed, “HELP!!!!”

Every tourist in the water panicked. Adults and children alike. Everyone swam like mad for the boat. Panicked families swarmed at the base of the ladder that would take them out of the water and back to safety.  

First came the curse words. Mostly men’s voices. Screaming at their kids to calm down. Screaming at their wives to move. And then screaming at each other to get the fuck off. The captain on board got on a speaker and told everyone to just calm down and form a single file line in the water. But it was a terrible joke. Nobody obeyed. Nobody even could.

The men’s cursing gave way to the sound of skin colliding with skin. The men had begun to kick and punch at each other. Every one of them had reverted to primal father protector mode. Every one of them was willing to do whatever they had to do to get their kids onto that small ladder.

The women’s high-pitched screaming filled the air. Screaming in pain. Screaming the names of their children and husbands who were disappearing beneath the water. The smallest children simply got sucked under by all of the thrashing bodies. Some of the moms and dads vanished trying to dive after them. A few came back up. Some took kicks to the head. Or bashed their heads against the boat. Or in blind panic, just swam further the down instead of back up. It was amazing how few of them actually managed to climb the ladder. There was so much flailing and clawing and punching and kicking and shoving and biting at the base of the ladder that no one could get a grip on it.

A pattern emerged. A child would claw at her mother and begin to pull her mother under. The mother would scream and grab hold of her husband. And then she would pull him under. And he would bellow and the bellow would become a gurgle as water filled his mouth and he jerked below the waterline. And the space where the family had been would close up immediately by the remaining people fighting for space near the ladder. Every so often a pool noodle would shoot straight up in the air, sometimes landing in the boat.

The captain did what he could. He threw all of the circular lifebuoys he had into the water. But the dads began to fight over those as well, spreading out the terrified rage into little pockets along the side of the boat.

Finally, after perhaps ten eternal minutes, the water began to calm. The tourists were still screaming and thrashing and weeping. But there fewer of them at the surface of the water. A few had made it up the ladder. Others had snatched a lifebuoy for their family and were guarding it like a pitbull.

My husband and I waited. Until everyone else had gotten up the ladder and into the boat. The captain began to sweep the ocean with a spotlight, searching for survivors, and the light found us quickly. Beside my husband and I, only a few feet away, the light revealed two crew members, also treading water. I made eye contact with one of them, and then we both looked away.

Exhausted but afloat, we began the swim back to the boat.

About halfway to the hull, she burst above the waterline. The elderly woman. She exploded out of the water immediately beside me. Thrashing and terrified. I gasped in shock. And that gasp was a good, involuntary reaction. It flooded my lungs with oxygen, which probably saved my life, right before she sunk all ten fingers into my shoulders and jerked me under the water with her.

We struggled under the water for what felt like a long time. I kicked and twisted to shake her loose. But every time she lost her grip on my body, she found it again somewhere else. In her panic-numbed brain, my body was her only ladder out of the abyss and back into the air and she would die before she let go.

We sank together. The saltwater burned my eyes, but I had to open them if I was going to have chance at breaking free. The water was bright with the headlights, but as we sank deeper, the bright water turned grey. At that grey border, I began to surrender. My oxygen levels were lowering, my muscles were cramping, and the old woman would not let go. She would not and could not sink into hell alone.

Because my oxygen levels were low, it is tempting to regard what happened next as a hallucination. I choose to trust it, but until writing this, haven’t told a soul, not even my husband. The old woman let go of me. Not because she was weakening or had some flash of benevolence. But because she was pulled off of me. By hands. At least three of them. That reached up out of the darkness below and grabbed her legs and arms. The hands didn’t belong to the other drowning tourists. They were large and gnarled and green like moss. They had four fingers each, no thumbs. And the hands weren’t connected to wrists, or arms, but to tentacles. Long, long tentacles that stretched into the impenetrably dark water beneath us like bungee cords. And like bungee cords, they snapped the old woman off of me and down into the deep.

I couldn’t see the look on her face. I couldn’t tell if she had been fleeing the thing already, or if she was as astonished as I was. I mean, I assume it was a single thing. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe there were many of it. I saw what I saw and no more.

With what was left of my energy and oxygen, I swam back to the surface. My husband burst into tears when he registered that I had returned. He clutched me to himself and shepherded me to the boat. He pushed me up the ladder. I said nothing. I just focused on breathing as hard as I could without hyperventilating.

Back on board, the surviving tourists were either sobbing or dead silent. Everyone wrapped in towels, trying to heat up. The coast guard arrived and told the captain to take the survivors back to shore. My husband held me. And I counted. I counted thirty-one people in the boat. More kids than adults, which I guess was a win. At least that parental rage had sort of worked.

At the far end of the boat, I saw that little boy. The one who had panicked across from my husband and I, whose panic had started this whole thing. He was alone. No parents. No grandpa. No grandma, but I knew that already. The little boy just stared into the night.

When we finally got back to land and deboarded, paramedics were waiting for us. I thought my husband and I would be the last ones off the boat, but when we approached the gangway, that one little boy was still sitting in his seat, frozen. I stared at him. And I leaned down and whispered in the boy’s ear, “You did your best. I saw it too.”

After the paramedics cleared us to leave and we got back to our rental car, my husband asked me what I said to the little boy. I lied. I said that I told him it would all be okay again one day. And out of some vacant corner of my mind, I muttered, “I hope people don’t blame the shark.”

My husband stared at me. I shrugged. And he laughed. He couldn’t stop laughing. And he goes, “Maybe they’ll just blame the tropical fish.” And we just laughed and laughed until we broke down.

Anyway. Perhaps there were no four-fingered hands. No tentacled thing snatched that old woman and carried her away into the deep. Maybe, in my terror, I imagined it and everyone who drowned that night just simply drowned.

But what keeps me up at night, still, is not the question of what actually happened. It’s the question, what do I hope happened?