The sea looked tame enough to sip.
From the top of the wooden stairs at Majori beach, the Gulf of Riga lay out like wrinkled glass under a thin rind of cloud, the horizon a clean graphite line. The lifeguard flag hung limp. Sand was cool as flour under bare feet. It smelled of pine and salt and the faint sweetness of summer weeds in the dunes.
“See? Perfect,” Ivars said, flipping his towel over his shoulder. “You always imagine monsters.”
“I imagine statistics,” Māra replied. “Wind was north last night, switched early. It can stack a current.”
“Current, schmurent.” He made a show of flexing. His pale chest caught the slant light. “We’ll hug the shore.”
“Promise,” their friend Elīna added, reaching to tighten her swim cap. “No heroics. Spa day after. A civilized Saturday.”
They walked past the early walkers and the old fishermen with plastic buckets. A boy was building a fortress with a moat that greedily drank the tide. Gulls worried at a dead jellyfish like gossips. The beach was not yet loud with families and vendors; it belonged to the air and to breath, to those who came early for penance or peace.
The lifeguard’s chair stood like a watchman’s tower. A man in a faded red hoodie sat sideways on it, one ankle hooked over a rung, binoculars loose in his lap. He had the unhurried manner of someone who had already seen whatever the morning would bring.
“Labrit,” he called as they passed.
“Morning,” Māra said. She had been the kind of child who introduced herself to bus drivers. Even now, that reflex rustled up when there was a person in a bright shirt protecting other people in a place where the worst thing that could happen was wet.
“Swimming?” he asked.
“That was the dream,” Ivars said.
The lifeguard lifted his chin at the line where waves should have been breaking but weren’t. “No waves, but it’s pulling odd. See those darker rips in the texture?”
Māra looked. On the flat there were stripes like satin ribbon, smooth lanes that moved in ways that didn’t agree with the wind. “Yes.”
“Channels,” the lifeguard said. “It’s not big. Just don’t fight anything that takes you. Swim sideways. If it feels cold in your throat, float.”
“Got it,” Elīna said, bright as a student with the right answer. “I’m Elīna. This is Māra and Ivars.”
“Jānis,” he said. “I’ll watch.”
They stashed their phones and shoes under the bench. The air bit just enough to make them applaud the idea of getting in. They walked down to the small lace of foam where sea met sand, and the cold seized their ankles like a grudging friend.
“Three breaths,” Ivars announced, because he always announced. “One… two… three.”
He surged forward first, as he always did, a rush of knees and white hands, then dove under as if the sea were a sheet to be lifted. Elīna followed, neat and quick. Māra went in more slowly; she let the water lift against her ribs and felt the first spark of cold burn in her throat—the old warning that the body lights before it knows the reason.
“Remember,” she said, half to herself. “Small strokes.”
They swam parallel to shore, the way careful people draw their first lines. The sun drew a path over the water and threw it back at them in coins. Voices were small behind: a dog calling to another, a grandmother scolding the tide for behaving like a tide. Their arms made their own metronome.
Ten strokes in, the depth changed as if the floor had shrugged. Māra felt that slipping sensation, like the moment the escalator steals ground from under your feet. She lifted her head.
“Do you feel that?” she called.
“Just a little pull,” Ivars said, which is what people say to persuade themselves that things remain small if named small.
They drifted. The shore tilted away, not much, but enough to slant the conversation. Māra had the sudden, unreasonable notion that the horizon was a door opening.
Jānis’s whistle sounded once—sharp, not frantic.
“Parallel!” he shouted, hands windmilling to show the direction. “Not in—across!”
Elīna pivoted immediately, obedient as a compass needle. Ivars took two chopping strokes toward the beach before remembering what not to do, and his body answered those two strokes by tiring itself as if it had sprinted a hundred meters.
Māra floated for a breath. She felt the current now—no wave, no drama, only a stern hand at the back pulling her seaward smoothly, like a moving sidewalk with salt. The cold pricked the knobs of her spine. She saw, in a quick white-frame image, how a person could mistake that smoothness for safety and then find the shore smaller, the people toy-small, their own limbs heavier.
“Parallel,” she said, and set her face east, toward a wooden pier that stubbed out like an unfinished sentence.
“Parallel!” Ivars echoed, late but loud.
They moved as if on a treadmill. For a few strokes nothing seemed to change. The pier did not hurry to meet them. The shore remained slightly too far, like a friend across a busy street.
Māra kept her eyes on the pier, not on the sand. It felt like staring at a candle during a storm. She shortened her kick. She counted breaths. She swallowed a mouth of clean cold that stung. Her heart was beating in that deep way, like a drum in the next room.
The whistle again. Not panic—presence.
“Good!” Jānis shouted. “Keep that line. Don’t rush. You’re okay.”
The words travelled oddly across the surface. They were not magic, but they were weight, and sometimes weight is what keeps you from lifting into fear.
“Talk to me,” Elīna said between breaths.
“I’m here,” Māra replied.
“I’m here,” Ivars said, though his voice had thinner edges.
They edged that diagonal inch by inch, learning the geometry of water by doing sum after silent sum. The beachgoers had stopped to watch, which is a human thing, and the boy with the moat had abandoned his construction to stare, a plastic spade hanging from his hand like a question.
Māra thought of a poster from school, a cartoon rip current drawn like an eel, arrowed from shore to sea. She had laughed at it then because everything important is introduced to us by cartoon and so we do not believe it fully. Now she thought: the eel has teeth.
“Easy,” she told herself. “You know this.”
She did know this. In the pool, in the winter, she had learned how to let water carry and how to answer it without argument. But you can be right and still be afraid. Fear sketched quick maps on her skin: the exact dimensions of her lungs, the length of her shoulders, the number of heartbeats since cold.
They made the pier, not to touch, but to align with it; the water slackened like a grudging hand letting go. First Elīna felt it, then Māra, then Ivars, who let out a laugh that was mostly relief, and relief has a shaky pitch when it first arrives.
“Across and in,” Māra called, and the three of them stroked toward the shore that had been waiting the whole time in the same place, which is one of shore’s virtues.
They came out shin-deep where the water broke at last into proper waves, small as a polite bow. They stood in the fizz and looked back.
Jānis gave them a thumbs-up from the chair and did not stand, which somehow meant more than if he had run down to clap them. The boy with the spade clapped anyway.
“You good?” Jānis called.
“Good,” Elīna answered, hands on her knees, grinning, wet hair knitting to her cheek. “Thank you.”
Māra glanced at Ivars. His mouth was a flat white line. His hands trembled slightly, not from cold, or not only.
“Let’s—” he started, and his voice, the one that lived high in his chest, wasn’t the one he ended with. He swallowed. “Let’s take a break.”
They walked up the beach. Sand stuck to their ankles like sugar. The air felt warmer after the sea, but not as warm as they’d pretended before, and there was a quiet around them like the quiet that falls after a joke that almost wasn’t a joke.
On the bench, they wrapped in towels, the old kind that carry last summer’s sunscreen in their fibers. Jānis swung down from his chair and walked over, not hurried now, just a neighbor coming to ask if your fence needs mending.
“See?” he said, not unkindly. “Odd pull.”
“Felt like… like walking the wrong way on an escalator,” Elīna said.
“Good image,” he replied. “Happens here on days like this. Doesn’t need big waves. Channels steal back the water.”
He drew a line in the sand with his heel: shore, channel, sandbar. A child wandered closer as if to learn math by accident.
“People think rip, they imagine a river with fangs,” he said. “Mostly it’s just… stubborn. You don’t win by fighting. You win by not playing the game it wants.”
Ivars nodded, too fast. “We were fine.”
“You were fine because you were three,” Jānis said, unruffled. “And because you listened.”
Māra looked at her brother. There was a bruise of thought settling in his eyes, a recognition that bravery and luck had shaken hands and agreed, this time.
Down the beach, a train sounded faint and silver. Someone’s radio tried to find a station and failed beautifully. The sea kept doing its old work, pulling and replacing, pretending to be one thing while being many.
“Tea?” Elīna said finally, eyes on the little café with a chalkboard menu tilted in the sand.
“Tea,” Māra agreed.
They stood. Jānis tipped an invisible cap and returned to his chair. Behind them, the boy rebuilt his moat farther up the beach, a practical lesson learned, the line between shore and sky redrawn by small hands.
Māra glanced back once more at the water. It was still wrinkled glass, still satin lanes, still all of it. She felt the shape of her fear rearrange itself into something useful, like a knot tied correctly. She thought: We came to swim. We learned to see.
They walked toward the smell of mint and black tea and the shade under a striped umbrella, leaving the first sharp morning behind like a page turned. The day, uncowed, would offer other chapters.
The tea came in glass cups that burned their fingers.
The three of them sat under the striped umbrella, towels draped like cloaks, the sand still clinging. Around them the beach was waking up—families laying blankets, vendors rattling with baskets, children in neon hats shrieking at the cold water.
It was as if nothing had happened.
And yet everything had.
Ivars stirred sugar into his tea until the spoon clinked too much. He was usually the one to make jokes, to be the loud heart in the group. Now he looked older, like someone who had read a line in a book that couldn’t be unread.
“Did you—” He stopped. Began again. “Did you feel… how it didn’t care?”
Elīna blew across her tea. “The current?”
“Yeah. Like—it wasn’t fighting us. It just… didn’t care.”
Māra wrapped her hands tighter around her cup. “That’s the dangerous part. If something fights you, you know you’re in a fight. But when it doesn’t… it feels like nothing until suddenly you’re too far out.”
They were quiet for a time. A dog barked at the foam as though it might bite back. A woman selling strawberries passed by, her voice cutting the air: “Zemenes! Sweet strawberries!”
“I thought about…” Ivars hesitated, embarrassed, but then went on. “I thought about that man last year. The one they pulled out near Vecāķi. Remember? Dad told us not to read about it, but I did.”
Māra remembered. She had seen the headline: ‘Father Drowns Trying to Save Son.’ She had closed the article halfway, afraid of the image it drew.
“People always say—‘don’t go in after them,’” Elīna said softly. “But can you imagine not going in? Your own child, or your brother…”
Her words hung between them like wet fabric.
Māra sipped her tea, which had gone bitter from sitting. “That’s why we have to know. Not just what we think, but really know. Like Jānis said—don’t play the current’s game. If you panic, you lose.”
Ivars pressed his palms flat on the table. “But panic comes so fast. I swam two strokes, and it was like my arms were already sandbags. Just two strokes.”
“That’s how people drown in calm water,” Elīna said. “Not waves, not storms. Just… calm water that hides teeth.”
Later, when the sun climbed high and the gulls turned lazy, they walked the shoreline again. Jānis was still in his chair, scanning with his binoculars, chewing sunflower seeds.
“Back for more?” he asked when they stopped near him.
“Not today,” Māra said. “Just walking.”
“Good choice. You learn faster by staying dry sometimes.”
“Can I ask?” Ivars said suddenly, surprising even himself. “How many… how many have you seen?”
Jānis’s eyes stayed on the water. He cracked another seed. “Too many. Not enough to make the papers every time. But enough that I can still see faces when I close my eyes.”
The three stood quiet.
“The sea doesn’t want you dead,” Jānis continued, finally looking down at them. “But it doesn’t want you alive either. It just doesn’t care. People forget that. They think calm means safe. They think swimming far means strength. They think shouting means someone will hear. They forget that water swallows voices.”
Māra shivered, though the sun was warm.
“So you watch,” Jānis said simply. “You learn the tricks. You listen when someone whistles from a chair.”
“And if you don’t?” Elīna asked.
Jānis shrugged. “Then the sea teaches you the hard way. If you’re lucky, you get to keep the lesson.”
That night, back in Riga, they gathered in Māra’s apartment. Still damp towels in a heap, hair smelling of salt. They cooked pasta and opened a cheap bottle of white wine, trying to turn the day into a story instead of a shadow.
“I thought I was stronger,” Ivars admitted when the plates were half empty. “I train. I run. But in the water… none of it mattered.”
“That’s the point,” Māra said. “Strength isn’t enough. It’s knowing. Knowing how to float. How to turn sideways. How to stop the panic before it eats you.”
Elīna leaned back in her chair. “It makes sense now, why they say the safest swimmers are the ones who respect the water most. Not the bravest. Not the fastest. Just the ones who never forget.”
The city outside hummed with trams and conversations. Inside, the three friends sat with their glasses and their silence, each replaying the moment when the shore had looked too far, when the current had pulled like an indifferent god.
For the first time, Ivars did not make a joke.
And Māra thought: Maybe that silence is the real lesson. The space between bravado and respect.
The following weekend they returned to the beach, though not to swim.
It was Māra’s idea: “If we avoid it, the fear grows teeth. Better to face it.”
They packed fruit, books, a flask of coffee. The morning smelled of resin and wet sand. Clouds made slow caravans above the gulf.
By the lifeguard tower, Jānis was again on duty. He raised a hand in greeting, his face unreadable as usual. Near him sat an older man on a folding stool, a fishing rod angled into the surf. His jacket was faded military green, patched at the elbows.
“Morning,” the man called as they passed. His voice had gravel in it, the kind that comes from cigarettes or loss.
They nodded back. Ivars lingered, watching the fishing line tremble against the tide.
“Anything biting?” he asked.
The man chuckled without teeth. “Always biting. Question is, will I catch.”
They stood awkwardly, then settled in near him, sand damp under their towels. Conversation comes easier at the edge of the sea, where silence is always present to break.
After a while, the man tapped ash from his cigarette and said:
“Young ones like you, swimming out there last week. I saw it. Thought you’d be the next I’d remember.”
“You watched?” Māra asked.
“I watch every time someone steps past the shallows. Can’t help it.” He reeled in slowly, then cast again with the patience of ritual. “Lost my brother. Forty years ago, but I still see it.”
The three went still. Elīna leaned forward, as if the story might slip away if she didn’t.
“Summer of ’82,” the man continued. “We were boys. He was sixteen, I fourteen. We sneaked away from chores, came here with nothing but bread and a cheap ball. Sea was calm, flat like today. We thought ourselves clever, daring each other who could swim farthest. He was stronger, taller. He went farther.”
His eyes stayed on the rod, but his voice had gone somewhere else, into that old afternoon.
“I saw him waving, thought he was boasting. Then I realized it wasn’t boasting. He was too far. I ran into the water, but I was small, and fear filled my chest before the sea did. By the time the lifeguard reached him, it was too late.”
The cigarette burned down to his fingers. He didn’t flinch.
“My parents never forgave me,” he said. “Not truly. They said it wasn’t my fault, but I could feel it—the way they looked. The way they set the table with one plate too few.”
The three friends said nothing. There are stories where silence is the only honest reply.
“Since then,” the man said finally, “I sit here when I can. Watch. Sometimes I shout. People laugh, wave, ignore me. Doesn’t matter. If one listens—just one—it’s worth it.”
Elīna’s eyes shone wet. She reached out, touched his sleeve lightly.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
The man shrugged, as if apology were a seashell too small to matter.
“Don’t be sorry. Just remember. That’s all anyone can do—remember.”
He packed tobacco into a fresh cigarette, struck a match, let the smoke coil toward the gray sky.
When they walked away later, the sea still calm, the words hung around them heavier than their bags.
“I kept seeing his face while he talked,” Ivars muttered. “Like it was happening right there.”
“That’s why he stays,” Māra said. “So it never stops happening. So none of us forget.”
Elīna wiped her eyes quickly. “Maybe that’s the price of survival—carrying stories that didn’t end well.”
The waves hissed softly at their feet, a reminder both tender and cruel.
That night, back in the city, Māra couldn’t sleep. She lay awake, hearing the fisherman’s voice under the hum of traffic: “If one listens—just one—it’s worth it.”
And she thought: We listened. Now we have to carry it forward.
She didn’t know yet how, but she felt the responsibility settle inside her like a stone placed carefully in the palm.
The storm came sudden, as Baltic storms often do.
One moment the sea was a pewter mirror, soft and wide. The next, clouds stacked like fortresses above the horizon. The light turned strange—yellowed, heavy. The beach emptied fast: parents gathering children, vendors collapsing umbrellas, the air vibrating with urgency.
But not everyone left.
Māra, Ivars, and Elīna had been walking near the dunes when they saw it—two teenagers splashing far beyond the shallows, laughing too loudly, daring each other against the first waves. Their voices carried thin over the wind. They hadn’t noticed the sky, hadn’t noticed the beach evacuating like a theater after the first fire alarm.
“Do you see them?” Elīna asked sharply.
“Yes,” Māra said. Her stomach dropped.
Then the whistle cut the air—long, piercing. Jānis stood on his lifeguard chair, pointing, motioning them in. But the boys only waved back, misreading it as encouragement.
The waves rose higher. The water, suddenly darker, moved not with rhythm but with muscle. A rip opened like a mouth, pulling straight out. The boys didn’t know. They didn’t see.
“God,” Ivars muttered. His feet were already in the sand, running.
“Wait!” Māra grabbed his arm. “Don’t—don’t go straight!”
“We can’t just—”
“We won’t,” she cut him off. “But not like last time.”
For a beat they stared at each other, hearts hammering with the same fear: the fisherman’s story alive again, replaying.
Then they ran together.
The water hit them like iron—cold, fast, insistent.
Māra fought the urge to sprint into the pull. Instead she angled hard left, remembering the eel-shaped current from the poster, remembering Jānis’s lesson: Don’t play its game.
“Sideways!” she shouted to Ivars.
“Sideways!” he echoed, already cutting across the waves.
They swam diagonally, not to the boys but across their path, intercepting. The storm wind slapped spray against their faces, filled their mouths with salt.
“Hey!” Māra yelled when she was close enough. Her voice shredded thin, but it carried just enough. “Float! Don’t fight—FLOAT!”
The boys looked startled, still laughing, but their strokes had turned frantic. One of them swallowed water and began thrashing.
“On your back!” Ivars bellowed, coughing. “Spread your arms—like this!” He demonstrated even as the waves shoved him sideways.
Māra reached the nearer boy. She didn’t grab him—she remembered what panic can do, how it drags rescuers under. Instead she floated next to him, shouting above the churn: “Look! Do what I do! On your back—breathe!”
The boy hesitated, choking, then rolled stiffly. His body bobbed awkwardly, but his face broke the surface. His chest heaved in air.
“Yes,” Māra gasped. “Yes—stay like that.”
Elīna, who had followed slower but steady, reached them with a piece of driftwood. She shoved it toward the boy. “Hold this!”
The boy clutched it like a holy relic.
Ivars swam past toward the second boy, who was farther, almost lost in the rip. Jānis was already in the water now, powerful strokes cutting through. He reached the boy first, grabbing him in a practiced cross-chest hold. Together they angled sideways, not back, letting the current drag them until it loosened.
“Out! Move out!” Jānis roared, voice booming even through the storm.
The current spat them free at last, dumping them into breaking surf near shore. Hands pulled them in—other swimmers, beachgoers who had returned when they saw the commotion. The boys were coughing, sputtering, but alive.
On the sand, mothers wrapped towels around the boys, scolding between sobs. Their laughter was gone, replaced by hollow-eyed silence.
“You could’ve—” one woman started, then broke off, pulling her son so tightly against her that he yelped.
Jānis stood dripping, chest rising steady. He looked at Māra, Ivars, and Elīna. His nod was small but carried weight, like a medal pinned without ceremony.
“You remembered,” he said simply.
They were too breathless to answer, but inside all three felt the same thing: a tremor of relief, pride, and awe at how close the line had been—the line between story and tragedy, lesson and obituary.
That night, back in the city again, they sat in silence over mugs of tea. Rain still rattled the windows.
Ivars finally spoke. “We didn’t save them because we were strong. We saved them because…”
“Because we listened,” Māra finished softly.
Elīna nodded. “Because someone else carried a story long enough to pass it on.”
They didn’t need to say more. The silence this time wasn’t heavy. It was full.
Outside, the storm rolled east. Inside, they carried a piece of the sea with them—not fear, not pride, but a respect as steady as tide.