For the third time in her life, Alannah felt herself leaving. She swallowed hard, nausea threatening its way up her esophagus. Her hand, shaking and sweaty, gripped the metal bar beside her seat. She could no longer see her exits. The B train was just too packed. The din on the shaking subway car scraped at her eardrums, clawed along an auditory neuron, settling in her brain. Her panic was palpable. Her breath shortened to something like short gasps. Her eyes ping ponged around the train car. Wall to wall people. Then it began to happen. The crowd began to fade out, the lens of her vision dialing back from crisp to soft focus. The jangling dissonance all around her became filtered, as if she wore earplugs. The seat and pole felt less solid, as if she were crouched on a pretend bench, as if her right hand curled around the memory of a pole.
Before she left, she pictured a destination.
This nightmare ride began at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, where she had spent a peaceful afternoon among the flowers and budding trees. When she was ready to head home, she had caught the B train towards the Bronx, intending to get off at 116th Street in Manhattan, near Columbia University, where she was a first-year graduate student. She had ridden subways plenty of times since moving to New York, but never had she experienced such a confluence of varied passengers, all seeming to conspire to make the ride unbearable.
When she first boarded, the train was fairly empty, an unoccupied seat between her and a woman absorbed by her phone. At the first stop in Manhattan, there was quite a passenger turnover; most of the Brooklynites departed and a northbound crowd boarded. By midtown, a boisterous group of Yankees fans took over a third of the car, sipping beer hidden in the brown paper bags, making noisy predictions about the upcoming game, taking up way too much space. At Rockefeller Center, a man laden with shopping bags squeezed into the seat next to Alannah, his bags spilling from his own lap onto hers and the woman on his left side. He didn’t even apologize or attempt to rein in the bags. At Columbus Circle, two young guys in untied high tops, droopy jeans, and backwards baseball caps got on, one carrying a boombox-esque speaker. Just after the doors closed, he blasted hip hop music, and the second guy began a cap-flipping, pole-spinning routine that nearly left a sneaker imprint on Alannah’s face. The people not in the line of fire found it entertaining enough to cheer him on. Alannah just wanted to ask him what the fuck he was thinking. At 81st Street, a mother sat across the aisle, a toddler perching on her lap and what appeared to be twin babies in a double stroller in front of her, blocking the aisle. It wasn’t long before all three children screamed with delight at the pole dancer-slash-hat flipper. The coup de grace, a noisy group of teenagers recapping the drama of their school day, entered the train at 96th Street, just three stops before hers, and took up residence behind the pole dancer, who started a new routine, equally careless of safety or courtesy. Alannah could no longer see the doors, not even the ones right next to her end seat, because of boombox-speaker-boy. Her discomfort had started at Grand Street Station, the first Manhattan stop, and ballooned over the next twelve stops until reaching full blown panic by 103rd Street, two stops from her destination.
But now, the train menagerie dimmed, their noise waning as if someone was turning a volume knob. As the train chugged onward, Alannah left the crowded subway car between stops, fading out, and then she slowly appeared at her imagined destination: a bench on the South Lawn of Columbia University, facing the Low Library on 116th Street. She drew in a deep breath, filling her lungs, their expansion pushing the terror out of her. She sat on the wooden bench surrounded by a lush carpet of grass under foot, a blue sky with wispy clouds overhead, and the ten Ionic columns forming a Pantheon-like façade to the university’s most Instagrammable building, a setting that brought her instant peace.
As the sweat evaporated from her hands, their shaking subsiding, Alannah recalled the day she had first “left” somewhere. She had been five years old, enjoying a day at the beach in Delaware. Her family had arrived early to stake out a prime spot near the lifeguard chair. While her older cousins ventured far out into the ocean to catch breaking waves on their boogie boards, Alannah spent the morning with her mom, wading and splashing among the waist-high waves of low tide that gently lapped at the shoreline. When the family regrouped on the blanket for lunch, Alannah was dismayed at how crowded the beach had become. She hated a crowded beach. She feared going too far from her family’s camp, because after a certain distance, it was swallowed up in a confusing maze of bright blankets, striped chairs, and loud, flapping umbrellas. Down by the water, the crowd became a thick forest of thighs and calves, knee and ankle knobs, and running and jumping feet.
After lunch, her father had convinced her to leave the blanket so they could build a sandcastle near the water, away from the crowded swimming area. Alannah filled buckets with sand and water that her dad turned into bucket-shaped sand sculptures. They became the corners of their castle. Her dad began building connecting walls while she collected shells and stones for decorating. While her dad put the finishing touches on the castle, Alannah became interested in a nearby tidepool filled with pleasantly warm, shallow water. She sat down, legs straight out in front of her, the water just reaching her bellybutton. She filled a small pail with the warm water and poured it over her own head. It made her giggle. The sound of the crashing waves was distant enough to ignore. Every third wave or so washed high enough up the beach that small rivers would run into her pool.
The first sand crab to wash into her pool startled her, until she poked at its floating body and realized it wasn’t moving. She used the pail to scoop it out and dump it in the sand behind her. The next wave brought a mole crab, only about an inch long, a grey armadillo-like shell and tiny scrabbling white legs. It buried itself quickly in the sand. Curious, Alannah dug her fingers in right where the crab had disappeared. She felt it move, its legs tickling her finger as it buried itself deeper. There was a nearby crash and another wave washed up, bringing more water into her pool and several more mole crabs, one smaller than her pinkie fingernail. She watched them scurry and bury themselves as the water retreated down the beach. They were funny little things, weren’t they?
With the next wave, Alannah realized the crashing sound was much closer, not to mention that almost every wave now brought cold water into her pool, stirring it up, forcing her to put her hands in the sand to steady herself. And each time she put her hands in the sand, she stirred up the mole crabs, their tiny scurrying legs now uncomfortable on her fingers, their numbers having grown to a troublesome amount. The water was almost up to Alannah’s chest, the pool now twice as long as it had been when she sat down, water freely flowing in and out.
The second sand crab that washed into her pool was very much alive. It was all pointy edges, flicking legs, and flashing claws. It swam across Alannah’s legs, prickling her skin, and made a dash for the edge of the pool, where it dug into the sand, only its eyestalks sticking out. It looked menacing. She gasped and tried to stand, but the force of the retreating water kept her down, unable to find balance. She looked around for her dad, but he was building a protective moat around the far side of their castle, out of earshot. He couldn’t help her now.
The next wave was more powerful. Water rushed into her pool, and her body swirled around in its current. She couldn’t draw enough breath to scream or call for help. As she righted herself, she saw a flash of legs and sharp claws. Two more sand crabs flailed around her pool, looking to bury themselves. She shoved her fists into the sand, stirring up several of the darting mole crabs, their tiny legs skittering across her knuckles, and pulled her legs under her until she was kneeling. She dug her feet into the sand and pushed herself into a standing position. In a flash, a red-tipped white claw shot out of the sand and snapped at her pinkie toe.
Alannah screamed and lifted her foot out of the water. She instantly lost her balance and fell sideways as the water retreated from the tidepool, the current pulling at her. She flailed her arms and legs, unearthing an impossible amount of scrambling mole crabs. Wonder had been replaced by utter panic. The water was all push and pull. The sand was crawling with pointy monsters. The pleasant, shallow pool had turned into a pit. She couldn’t escape.
There was another thunderous crash, alarmingly close, and another wave flooded the pool. It knocked Alannah backwards into a sitting position, her back against the sand that formed the pool’s rear wall. Something brushed against her hand, and she gasped. It was her small yellow pail. She snatched it up, thinking it could help her somehow. Something scurried across her foot, and she shrieked. The sand crab looked huge, a greenish shell, spindly legs, and wide-open claws with blue sides and reddish orange tips. So pointy. So threatening. Without thinking, Alannah threw the pail at it, but she missed. She screamed again as the water gushed out of the pool, carrying both the giant crab and her tiny pail with it. She was pulled forward. Her hands hit the sand in front or her as the water swept around her legs.
How could she make this nightmare end?
That’s when it happened. Her vision blurred as if she had water in her eyes. For a crazy second, she thought she had gone underwater, that she might drown. She made to scream again, but no sound came out. The air seemed to leave her lungs. The noise around her became muffled, and she imagined herself hiding under a pillow. Terrified, she pictured the first safe place that came to mind, back on the blanket with her mom and aunt, warm and dry.
The tide pool, nearly completely flushed out by the pummeling tide, faded from view. The beach blanket, full of orange, yellow, and powder blue squares, shaded by an aqua umbrella, faded into view. The crashing waves and yells of delight from the crowd by the water’s edge were replaced with the calm tones of her mom and aunt’s conversation.
Alannah blinked, her vision coming into sharp focus. She was actually sitting on the blanket facing towards the water, her mom and aunt in the beach chairs, their backs to her. She could clearly hear a radio playing rock music on the nearest blanket. She looked down at herself. Her legs and bathing suit were completely dry, free of sand. There were no crabs in sight. Her pinkie toe looked normal. It didn’t even hurt. It was like it had never been pinched at all.
“Alannah!” Her father called from far away.
She had never heard him sound afraid before. Her mom and aunt stood up together, the sound of her unusual name frantically called across the beach rousing them. She understood. Her father didn’t know where she was. He had not seen her leave the tidepool. Before she could react, her mom and aunt turned around, saw her, and turned back to yell to her dad.
“She’s here! Jack! She’s here!” Her mom waved her hands in the air, summoning him.
Alannah worried she was in trouble. She wouldn’t be able to explain how she ended up here. She hadn’t told her father she was leaving the tidepool. And she had lost her yellow pail.
Twenty-three-year-old Alannah shuddered, despite the warmth of the sun on her skin, that terrifying day on the beach hijacking her psyche. Her dad hadn’t been cross with her, but he had asked a thousand questions about her disappearance. Her mom and aunt got in on the act, scolding her for wandering back alone without telling him where she was going. She just said she had “left” the tidepool, being unable to articulate how one minute she was trapped in the shifting current and the next she was on the blanket, completely dry. The memory of that day, even the palpable feeling of panic, stayed with her these last eighteen years. It fueled her intense efforts to avoid enclosed spaces. However, in moments when she did feel trapped, her escape routes shuttered, like today on the subway, like three years ago in a locked upstairs bedroom of that college frat house, she drew a certain strength from the tidepool memory. It gave her the power to leave.