Whenever echoes of last summer’s panic attack hit me, like now, I take refuge in facts, actions, and distractions. Fact: This golden light won’t stick around for the Whitehalls. Action: I send my clients another text message. Distraction: I survey the beach and am surprised to see Eva Krap after her tumble yesterday.

Eva is photographing a large scrum on the north end. She usually shoots with a Hasselblad, but she’s using rented gear today. Eva Krap is my private nickname for her—Park Ave backwards. Her mother was one of Richard Avedon’s assistants, which she never lets anyone forget. I have no such pedigree. I was trained by Niles, whose claim to fame was convincing a mid-tier retailer to put out their recession-era fall clothing catalog with all the models making goofy faces, a lark appreciated at the time by advertising wonks for its subversive daring and for Niles’s apparent powers of persuasion.

Yesterday, as Eva plucked her Hasselblad from the surf, it was the first time I’d seen her move without grace. I was almost sympathetic, especially considering that her husband left her only weeks ago. I lost Niles a decade ago and still haven’t found my footing. Fact: Grief can linger far longer than a person’s tenure in your life. How’s it been going? My last hookup tested wastewater for a living. He told me there’s a bigger spike in toothpaste ingredients in the morning than in the evening. “Make of that what you will,” he said, as though pondering this knowledge could keep a person up at night. At least he was decent in bed. No—stick to facts. He was lousy. So was I.

I check my phone. Still no reply from the Whitehalls. I watch another competing photographer, Josie, shoot a Korean family. Their young son is showing a good dose of rebellion. Maybe ten years old, his hair is stubbornly uncombed and his shirt untucked. I admire the couple’s pragmatism as they fold their son’s shirttails under and up, giving the shirt the appearance of being tucked. Their teenage daughter stares off at the other kids on the beach. I feel for her. There’s something funereal about getting dressed up but then only standing around. Life pauses in the same formal, unwanted way while the rest of the world seems to frolic.

Thanks to the winter heatwave, the beach is packed. I’ll need to Photoshop out the couple in their matching folding chairs, the family with their eroding pail-and-shovel-dug Jacuzzi, the frisbee flingers, the dog owner, the church group circle, the chubby college girls, even the couples at the railing up on the bluff. I’ll hide them behind selections of stolen sand, borrowed water, cloned cliffside. Making strangers disappear is simple.

I text the Whitehalls again, but this time in their native language: a series of hourglass emojis and dollar signs. Only ten minutes of decent light remain before I’ll need to push the ISO and warm the color temperature. November cuts the golden hour to the quick. I snap a burst of photos of a guy zooming over the large swells on his e-foil. I’m rich and free. Can’t catch me. I wish he’d lose his balance. Also: I wish he’d take me on a ride. I enlarge the shot on my camera’s screen until nature and humanity turn into values of blue and gold incapable of inspiring envy or lust. I’ve applied the same reductionist logic to panic. Panic is an electro-chemical process. Dive to the atomic level and there’s nowhere for dread to exist.

My last attack hit me at a treetop adventure course in Gold Country. A fear of heights, the exertion, and the altitude all clambered on top of one another for front row seats to my coming distress. I started the day calm, however. I recall sitting through the safety training in the equipment hut where a mural depicted young Native Americans displaying their find of gold to a mission friar, a finger to his lips. Outside, a cutout of Francisco Lopez held a bunch of wild onions with gold flakes in their roots, his free hand pointing the way to a recreation of Sutter’s Mill and the start of the obstacle course. I welcomed the challenge.

I ascended into the canopy on a ship’s mast representing the half of forty-niners who arrived by sea. I tightened the straps on my helmet and harness, checked my knee and elbow guards, and attached my carabiner from one safety line to the next as I maneuvered high above the forest floor, pickaxes as handholds, a series of gold pans as steps. I began to hear music. That initial neuron, soon to fire off what would become a cascade of panic, recognized the melody long before I did.

I continued my ascent and climbed an interconnected run of suspended sluices, their scuffed bottoms painted with stats about the genocide, vigilantism, and racism that decimated Native populations and foreign immigrants during the California gold rush. I next made my way across a precarious rope bridge to an old-timey saloon perched between two colossal and close-set trees. Music from an out-of-tune piano galloped out the pair of saloon doors as I pushed inside, a song Niles used to batter out on his equally dissonant piano. I was met by cutouts of miners in front of the bar—men dancing with men, mostly. Hidden speakers piped in the sound of shuffled cards and shuffling boots, a white noise commotion pierced by catcalls and laughter. Sweat stung my eyes. My heart rate skyrocketed and skipped. I had entered a house of ghosts and felt their doom become my own. Panic surfaced my greatest fears and presented them as facts: That the rush I’d experienced with Niles would never find its equal, the gold never to be found, the work unrewarded. I would forever chase fool’s gold. I became a quivering, keening mess.

Another adventure course participant entered the saloon behind me and helped me to a doorway behind the bar. This led out to the course’s final platform set a dizzying height over the forest floor. She clipped my harness to a zip line and assured me it’d all be over soon. She had no idea that it had been over for years. I descended between the trees, soon soaked to the bone by blasts from high-pressure nozzles meant to highlight the development of hydraulic mining.

My phone vibrates, taking me from past mountains to present sea.

—We made it!

I see the Whitehalls emerge from a hired Cadillac Escalade up on the bluff and feel the reprieve of work push aside my endless bowl of dread. The matriarch who hired me is keeping the family in line, one as large as the SUV’s carrying capacity, plus some lap sitters. They swagger slowly down the ramp as though the sun wouldn’t dare set on them, their faces bronzed and wearing smiles so broad you’d think this was the first time they’d seen an ocean. My family was once like this: large, laughing, and seemingly immortal. But the mothers and fathers, the aunts and the uncles—it felt like they died all at once. My big quilt of a family unraveled to distant cousins in a decade, and Niles wasn’t there to help me through it. Instead, he was the vanguard of my grief.

“Where do you want us?” my client asks.

Josie is still shooting the family behind me, and the south beach is too full of beachgoers and shadow. I lead the way to the north end, where Eva looks to be finishing her photo shoot.

“You have a flash, right?” my client says, and I pretend not to hear her over the roar of the surf.

Eva’s mob collides with mine as we jostle past one another on the dry sand, everyone but me and Eva wearing shoes. A shoulder is bumped, voices raised. There’s a shove and a reciprocal push, and it’s while I’m trying to corral the Whitehalls that a sneaker wave lives up to its name—me the only one with my back to the ocean and not a single warning from anyone.

More an upwelling than a wave, the water is deep and frothy. My feet touch nothing, my camera and gear bag—gone. We are swept against the garlands of ice plants spilling down the bluff, which a few people manage to cling to. The rest of us are pulled out, the sea stealing children and adults, coolers, beach chairs, umbrellas, thoughts. The air is thick with gulls. A man floating near me mutters an ominous string of “oh boy”s as the receding sneaker wave chokes out the approaching swell and rides us roughly up into the last sweep of golden light, then down into a wide turbulent trough bobbing with beach goers and gear, the water so cold it feels thick. The next swell approaches but we ride over it. The surf booms, seethes. “Oh boy” man gets his hands on me and sputters, and it takes me a moment to realize that the man can’t swim. I tell him to shut up and kick. We ride the next swell in and are dropped into a stinging tumble of sea and sand, knees skinned on the exposed reef, our bodies the ocean’s to command. Underwater, it is already night.

In one scenario, I step out from the surf alone. The golden hour has winked to dusk, replaced by red and blue splashes from an ambulance. An EMT hooks “oh boy” man’s cheeks with his fingers and pulls them wide while another EMT scoops packed sand from the opened mouth with his gloved fingers. I hope “oh boy” man is a single bastard, no kids, no friends, an unloved nobody.

In another scenario I help the man get to his feet, gird him to withstand the pull of the next ebb, then bring him beyond the water’s reach. I let him cough out the seawater and we say things like “Boy was that something, eh?” and “Never seen anything like it.”

I refuse to settle on a fact.

At home, I need distraction. I pull out the clothing catalog that Niles shot. The cover is unremarkable, but after a few pages the models’ faces begin a crescendo of smiles, grins, and laughter, followed by an encyclopedia of contorted expressions: lips fashioned into impressive snarls, eyes white and gleaming in portraits of rage, delirium, shock, grief, and disgust. Some expressions are ecstatic, others are shriveled and tight. The models pose in vests and slacks, dresses and high heels, in pajamas, blazers, and winter coats. The Big & Tall, the petite, the Plus-sized, Black and white, Asian and Hispanic, young and less young. The expressions look fresh, even if the fashions and hairstyles have aged. The catalog—Niles’s compendium of who we are when we allow the mask to fall—is a work of art. I should close it, I should close it, I should close it, I should close it, but I turn the page.

There’s the man himself, Niles, posing in the workwear section. A self-portrait in steel-toed boots, rugged jeans, and a plaid shirt. A modern-day miner. He’s dead-faced, as though he knew, even then, that his number was nearly up. The panic tries its best, but I ward it off by hooking my cheeks, opening wide, and making a dreadful noise that is fact, action, and distraction all in one. Fuck off, my expression says. I am among the living. I turn the page and mirror every remaining expression in the catalog until my face is sore. And when I reach the back cover, I make myself into the woman pictured there in the white room wearing a gray cable-knit sweater, Merlot scarf (see page 83 for additional color options), a cozy Merino wool skirt, lambswool-lined suede boots (sizes 5–12), and, most importantly of all, a practiced expression of utter calm.