Millennium Summer
Curtis was scoping out the beach. The sun blared across Santa Monica Pier, showing gold on the sandals of the women with sunken sternums in designer sarongs and white on the rollerbladers' inline skates. She was neither, wearing light linen and Teva Velcro sandals as she stepped from the rocking, plaited wood to the still-steaming sand. The sun was low in the sky, blinding even those wearing sunglasses, squinting their noses covered in sunscreen.
Temporarily blinded, Curtis was stumbling slightly, one hand shielding her eyes under the brim of her wide hat, the other dragging her small folding chair, basket, and paperback novel. She just avoided the silhouette of a young woman sitting on a towel in the sand. "Oi, watch it!" she snapped, drawing an oversized, outdated boombox closer to her.
Curtis hadn't even seen it and mumbled "Sorry" as she weaved past the girl and further along the towels and half-naked bodies bronzing themselves. On an empty patch of sand she set up the chair and placed the towel just in front of it. She removed her sandals with a scritch of the Velcro and placed them on the towel. She could almost hear the hiss of the dazzling sand above the whoosh of the tide and the sound of hundreds of people. She leaned back in her chair, found her bookmark, and started to thread her way back into the historical romance.
"I hope you don't mind me saying so," came a voice from above her, "but that really is the fastest way to get a dreadful sunburn."
Curtis put her book down over one knee, tilted her sunglasses and swivelled her hat and looked unflappably down at her well-covered limbs. "Your feet, I mean," the voice continued.
"Excuse me?" she replied, looking more closely at the speaker. With the sun behind him she couldn't see his face, but he was wearing a panama hat and was carrying an umbrella. He seemed quite short and was unseasonably dressed in a woolly vest and a dress shirt rolled up to the elbows. His curly brown hair was tinged with sunlight like an angel's, and he seemed to be smiling. He gestured once more to her feet, and for a moment she thought he was going to touch them. "Skin cancer is a nasty thing," he said, with a strange accent.
"I know," Curtis replied sharply. "I'm a nurse."
She had almost reached to her lapel where her nametag was stationed at all times on her uniform. The gesture was awkward, but she couldn't tell how closely the man was watching her.
"A worthy profession," said the man, despite what Curtis thought was crystal clear body language. "You see, I'm the Doctor."
"Oh yeah?" Curtis asked. "Doctor where?" She was surprised and mildly perturbed. No doctor had ever hit on her, at Walker General or anywhere else. They called her Curtis, not just because it was her last name, but because she looked like the name sounded: dumpy, dull, the see-through dishwater of just another nurse in just another hospital. She had started calling herself that; she never thought of herself as Jackie anymore.
"I'm not tired down to any particular practice," he confessed, rather embarrassed. She wondered if that meant he was a plastic surgeon. She didn't get the chance to ask, as the girl with the giant boombox waded over.
"Professor!"
Seeing her, the doctor tipped his hat to Curtis and started following the girl, who was tramping in big boots down the beach. Curtis didn't bother calling after him; he was clearly a time-waster and not, as she had thought for a split-second, someone from the dating website. She tried to get back to her book, reaching into her basket for bottled water. The backs of the topless on the beach were sizzling like lobsters, but she kept cool. But she couldn't focus on medieval Scotland; her vision kept wandering back and forth to the strange little man in the hat and the girl with the boombox. He was talking animatedly to her and pointing things out with his umbrella, though what he was gesturing to exactly she really couldn't fathom. The girl looked just as out of place, with chunky earrings and carrying a big black bomber jacket in this incredible heat.
Several times Curtis thought about going back to the hotel. There wasn't anything for her to do there, though. She hadn't realized til now how fiercely she clung to chaos in the operating room, as a daily, yearly ritual, the glue that kept her together. Relaxing was weird. But an extended vacation had been recommended; no one had been so cruel as to suggest she should go to Psychiatric for "mind-altering drugs." There had been the disappearance of Bruce, the gory murder of his wife, Dr. Holloway's abrupt resignation, the absconding of the John Doe body, and to top it all off, Pete in the morgue's insistence on occult possession pervading the whole thing. What else did you expect from someone who watched horror movies in the morgue? But it had all stopped being funny. Something had changed, subtly, at the hospital since the events at the end of last year.
When Curtis next looked up from her book—reading the same page over again—the girl was further along the beach and had acquired a metal detector from somewhere, with which she was combing the beach. A lifeguard or an official person next appeared and seemed to be escorting the pair away.
No one had forecasted rain. Indeed, it was very unusual for the weather to change this late in the day. But cloud up the sky had, and very rapidly, growing a magnificent dark purple that blocked out the setting sun's rays like Venetian blinds. Curtis had to take off her sunglasses to see the gloomy page in front of her, noticing with some surprise that most of the people on the beach were picking up towels and shoes and racing across the newly cooled sand, back toward the highway and the city. Swimmers and surfers were leaving. For a second Curtis considered sitting it out, as she would have peace on the vast expanse of the abandoned Santa Monica beach. But the temperature drop made her wary; it was unnatural, and even San Francisco's fogs had never produced such climatological oddities.
She picked up her stuff as the wind whipped the hat off her head, sending it careening across the beach, where the tide, in defiance of normal tide times, was coming in a roar of splashing surf. Curtis squealed as a cold onrush of salty water splashed up her legs as she scrambled to get away. Just as she was wondering where the lifeguards had gone, she spotted the girl again, on her own, further down the beach and still waving the metal detector. "That's dangerous!" Curtis exclaimed, and as if in reply, distant thunder crashed.
The girl hadn't heard her. Curtis, annoyed, tossed her basket, book, and chair as far as she could, so the tide wouldn't ruin them, and awkwardly slid along the slick sand toward the girl. The sky was lighting up with lightning but there was no answering thunder. Instead, all the cars on the highway seemed to honk in unison.
By the time she got down the beach, Curtis was soaked. She was starting to get afraid, in case the girl went further into the sea. She was a nurse, not a swimmer. But by then the man had reappeared, his umbrella open despite the wind, running toward both of them, two-toned shoes in one hand, trousers rolled up to the knee. He was beckoning them, just as the first fall of frogs began.
They were small, slimy frogs that fell gently on Curtis' now bare and sopping head, though at first she didn't realize what they were. She screamed as they continued to pelt her and tried desperately to avoid squelching them underfoot. "Mingin'!" she heard the girl shout as they joined the doctor; Curtis saw the girl trying to disentangle frogs from her hair. He led them to what looked like a blue door someone had abandoned in the sand, and she followed their example, sitting on it huddled under the umbrella. The doctor offered Curtis a hankie to wipe her face, but other than that no one spoke. There didn't seem to be anything to say as they watched the torrent of frogs.
From somewhere the doctor removed a Thermos, untwisted its cap, and gave the umbrella to the girl to hold. He poured something hot into the cap. "Could I interest you in some tea, Miss . . .?"
"Curtis." In the dying light she could finally see the doctor's face and felt horror and astonishment creeping into her veins. "I know who you are," she said.
"Do you?" he replied with a mysterious smile.