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Excerpt from "When I Was Your Age", Volume Two: Original Stories about Growing Up by Kyoko Mori, 2002

I don't know how long we were riding the waves before I noticed that my mother and I hadn't seen anyone for a long time. I thought of another thing, too. When we first started, my feet had brushed against the sand bottom almost every time we came down. In the lull between the waves, I'd be standing in the water only up to my chest.

That hadn't happened for a while. My feet hadn't touched bottom for at least twenty waves now. I stretched my body as straight as I could, trying to touch bottom with my toes. Nothing. Just as I opened my mouth to point that out to my mother, a big wave came, my head went under, and my hand was swept loose from hers.

When I came up again, I was turned around, facing the shore for the first time. I couldn't believe what I saw. The people on the beach looked so small that I couldn't tell our family from anyone else's.

Before I really understood what this meant, another wave rose, my head went under again, and I came up coughing and spitting. My mother, to my relief, was right beside me, treading water.

"Mom," I tried to warn her, but the look on her face told me she already knew. Her eyes were wide open and there was a big frown between her eyebrows.

"Turn around and swim,'' she said. "It's not as far as you think."

"I can't," I gasped before a wave pounded me, filling my mouth with a burning, bitter taste.

My mother started flinging her hand upward, trying to wave it from side to side. She was calling for help. That meant we were drowning.

Before the next wave hit us, I kicked my legs as hard as I could and lunged toward my mother, making up the short distance between us. The wave hit. We came up, both of us coughing and spitting, my arms clutched tightly around her neck.

"Listen," my mother said, in a choked-up voice. You have to let go."

"But I’ll drown," I wailed.

She stopped moving her arms for just a moment — long enough to put them around me and draw me closer. I could feel my shoulders, wet and slippery, pressed against her collarbone. "Let go," she said in a voice that sounded surprisingly calm. "Now, or we'll both drown."

By the time the next wave went over my head I was swimming alone, flailing my arms and legs to come up for air, and my mother was beside me. If it weren't for me, I thought, she could easily swim back to shore. She was a strong swimmer. We were drowning because of me.

"Stay calm," she said, "and float."

We treaded water for a while, and between the waves my mother looked around, no doubt trying to measure the distance we had to swim.

"Look over there," she said, turning away from the shore and pointing toward the piece of land jutting into the sea. "We can't swim back to the beach, but we can make it to those rocks."

The waves had been pushing us sideways, toward the rocks, as well as farther from the shore. From where we were now, the tip of that land was about as far away as I could swim in the river without stopping if the current was with me.

That piece of land was our last chance. If I couldn't make it there, I would surely drown. Heading toward the rocks meant turning away from the beach completely, swimming farther out to sea. If I drifted too far to the side and missed the tip of the land, there wouldn't be anywhere else.

Every time I came up for air, I'd better be looking at those rocks, making sure they were still in my sight. The only stroke that would allow me to do that was the breaststroke.

I took a big breath and started kicking my legs with my knees bent, flicking my ankles that way my mother had taught me in the river. The arms, I told myself, should draw nice big arcs, not a bunch of little frantic circles that would make me tired.

My mother swam right beside me in her easy graceful breaststroke - she was between me and the rest of the sea, guiding me toward the rocks, showing me how I should swim.

The waves we had been fighting were suddenly helping us. In just a few minutes, my mother and I stood on the rocky ground of that slip of land, looking back toward the shore. My legs felt wobbly, and I was breathing hard. The two of us looked at each other, too stunned to say anything. For a while we just stood trying to catch our breath, listening to the waves as they continued to crash at our feet.

Then we started walking. The rocks formed a steep cliff above us, but at the bottom, there was enough room for us to walk side by side. Cautiously we picked our way back to the beach, trying not to cut our feet or slip back into the sea.

On the way we noticed a group of people gathered on the sand, watching us. When we got there, they came rushing toward us. They were my uncles and several other men we had never seen.

"I waved for help," my mother said to them.

"We thought you were just waving for fun," one of my uncles said. "We didn't know anything was wrong until we saw you walking on those rocks."

One of the strangers, an old man in a shirt and trousers, shook his head. "You got caught in a rip tide," he said. "A fisherman drowned there a few years ago."

Several people were talking all at once, saying how lucky we were, but I wasn't listening very carefully. My brother was running toward us. Behind him, the beach was more crowded than when we had first started swimming. For the first time, I noticed an ice cream stand not too far away.

"Mom," I said. "My throat hurts from the seawater. I would love some ice cream."

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