March to the Sea, a Twenty One Pilots Fanfic

Three

Josh Dunn was distracted. His partner had asked him twice if he wanted a stick of gum, and both times he'd said no without knowing what he'd been asked. It wasn't like Josh to be distracted; he wasn't what you'd call a thinker. The whole business was making him downright uncomfortable, if you want to know the truth.

"You feeling all right?" Debby asked.
"No," Josh said, without looking at her. "Yeah, I'm okay."
It wasn't that Josh didn't feel like talking to Debby, he just didn't feel like talking. Something was trying to work its way up inside his brain to where he could grab hold of it, and until it got there he had to keep the pathways clear. The problem was, he didn't have much experience with this sort of thing. With all these thoughts drifting in and out of his head like so much flotsam and jetsam, how was he supposed to know which was the one distracting him?
"Josh, wake up!" Debby snapped. "Didn't you hear me say I'm going in? I got a kid in trouble here. Come on, get with the program!"
He watched Debby run down the beach to pull a winded toddler out of the surf. From the look of it, the kid had been caught in a backwash. Where the hell were the parents, anyway? He imagined the mother looking up from some trashy paperback she was probably reading and running to wrap herself around her bawling kid. My poor baby, are you all right? Mommy's here now, don't cry, don't cry . . .

Josh reminded himself to turn his attention back to the ocean. Why was he having so much trouble keeping his mind on the job today? Hey, it wasn't just today. Lately, there had been times he found himself getting lost out there, when he could see himself, honest-to-God see himself, floating in the air out there, hovering over the ocean like one of those blimps advertising sunblock or some crazy thing. No, more like a pelican on the lookout for a tasty fish, gliding, drifting, riding the wind until it swooped down and nabbed that sucker up in its beak. Only, Josh didn't swoop. He just floated, drifted, looking, not knowing what he was looking for.
And all the time that he was out there floating he never moved from his seat atop the lifeguard stand, elbows propped on knees, the cord of his whistle always in motion, twirling clockwise around the index finger of his left hand, then counterclockwise, then clockwise. Tick. Tock.
Debby climbed back up the stand, the smell of the surf clinging to her wet skin.
"Nice save," Josh said evenly.
"That was nothin'," chirped Debby, which Josh knew basically to be true. Lifeguards made this kind of save every day. As far as he was concerned, you could hardly even call it a save when all you did was pull somebody out of water you could stand in. Even in deeper water, a rescue wasn't usually a matter of life and death, although he knew—because he'd heard it about a million times in training—any trouble in any water had the potential of being life or death.
Still, he'd never saved anybody from drowning— not the real life-or-death thing, anyway. Sometimes, when he was hanging out with the other guards, Josh would let on that he couldn't wait for the chance to be a big hero. But the truth was—and nobody knew this, nobody—he was scared he'd blow it and instead of being a hero...
The movement of Debby's arm as she slicked her lips with gloss caught Josh's eye. He moved his head a few degrees past her to see if he could get a glimpse of the girl on the steps.
He didn't know how he knew she was watching only him and not them. He could just feel it. Every day, usually an hour or so after he came on duty, he'd sense that she was there. He never saw her arrive.
He'd just turn his head and there she'd be: sitting on the same top step, leaning her shoulder against the same two-by-four upright, holding him with her gaze as if it were a microscope and he a measly amoeba. She was, what, 15 maybe. At first, Josh had been sure she was just another lifeguard groupie. They came with the job, and Josh wouldn't say he minded. But there were a couple of things wrong with this one. She never came over to the stand, for one thing, never approached him or said hi if he happened to pass within twenty feet. She never smiled. And she was always alone.

And, always, it seemed to Josh, watching him.
It was a few days after he'd first noticed her that he'd started feeling distracted. It was like being with somebody who drops some tiny object on the ground, a contact lens or an earring, and you spend an hour trying to help them find it, and pretty soon it becomes an obsession, you have to find it, you keep looking, maybe the person who lost it isn't even there anymore, maybe you've even forgotten what it is you're looking for, but you keep looking because you have to, because suddenly your whole life is about looking, and you realize that you've never really looked for anything before, not really."

Josh shook his head, half expecting it to rattle, wondering what the hell was making him think this kind of shit.
"Look," he heard Debby say.
He turned to his left. A girl (seven? eight? Josh had this need to guess kids' ages. He wasn't all that good at it, wasn't even all that interested, just needed to do it for some reason) was being turned into a sand mermaid by an older boy (fifteen? sixteen?).

"I like how he did the scales," Debby said.
Josh lifted his mirrored sunglasses and squinted to get a better view. Grunting, he lowered the glasses as the boy said something and the girl laughed. He watched the boy run to fetch the parents who put down their books and came to see. They patted the boy on the shoulders. The father ran back to get a camera.
"Nice family," Debby commented.
Josh shrugged. "All families look nice on the beach," he said.
"Gee, that wasn't too cynical," said Debby. "What's your family like? Do you have any brothers or sisters?"
He shrugged a second time. "I'm an only child."
"Callie!" he heard the boy calling. "Come swim with me!"
He watched the boy pull the girl out of her mermaid cast, then grab a Boogie board and run to the water.
"Wait, Tyler!" the girl called after him. "Wait for me!"
"What is it with her, anyway?" Josh asked.
"Her?" Debby said. "She likes mermaids, I guess."
"Not her," said Josh. "The one back there on the steps. The one who watches me all the time."
Debby glanced over her shoulder.
"Oh, her," she said. "I wouldn't get all paranoid, Josh. She's probably just terminally shy. Besides, aren't you used to being gawked at? I thought you hunky guys actually liked being sex objects."
"She doesn't look at me that way," said Josh. "She looks at me like she wants something."
"So why don't you ask her what she wants?"
Josh snorted. "Right," he said."

"I can't imagine what it's like being an only child," Josh heard Debby say, "although sometimes I used to wish for it. I have two older sisters and a younger brother. Did you ever wish you had brothers or sisters?"
Josh shrugged. "Not really What's the use of wishing?"
When Debby didn't say anything, Josh fell into the silence between them and got lost in it. In no time at all, he was out there over the ocean again, floating, drifting, remembering ..."

Once there was a carpenter and this carpenter had a wife. They were only nineteen when they got married right out of high school, and it wasn't a year before they had a baby. Little blue-eyed boy named Michael. Michael Junior. After his daddy.
The carpenter had a workshop in the garage that was attached to his house, so he was home a lot, and that meant he could spend more time with his son than most fathers could. He taught him his trade—as much as you could teach a boy of four— and he made up stories while they worked side by side. And whenever Michael the son put his hand in the way of danger, Michael the father pulled it away. Then one day a couple of weeks before the boy's fifth birthday the father took him along on a job in a neighboring town.
"Now, Mikey," he told the boy when they got to the house, "I'm going to be working up on the roof today."
And Mikey said, "Let me go with you, Daddy. Please."
Well, the carpenter laughed at that, of course, because the boy was too little to have any business crawling around on a steep roof. No, he would never put his son in danger like that. "You go on now and play," he told Mikey. "There's a nice swing set in the yard. Play on that, and I'll be able to keep my eye on you."
From the roof, the father watched his son pumping away with his strong little legs, telling himself stories the way he always did. He saw him jump down off the swing to pet a dog that had wandered into the yard and he smiled, thinking how much his son loved dogs. I'm going to get Mikey a dog for his birthday, he thought, that's what I'm going to do.
Pleased with himself for coming up with such a clever idea, he went back to his work. Gotta concentrate, he told himself, or I'll take one helluva spill and break my neck. Pretty soon, he was so busy he didn't catch sight of the dog running off or little Mikey chasing after it. All he saw when he thought to check back and see how his son was doing was the motion of the empty swing.