Holding her fists at her side, Olive stood in the darkness of the lanai, in a cloud of fragrance from the night-blooming jasmine, watching him through the wide opening of the sliding screens. Sharkey looked caged, squatting under the glare of a floor lamp, digging at the cuticle around a fingernail like a monkey in a grooming ritual, his teeth bared, his hair wild, his tattoos gleaming on his golden skin. He wore only his board shorts—he’d been surfing; crusts of sea salt glinted on his shoulders, salt crystals also dusting his hair and his sticky arms.
As Olive stepped into the light he twisted his head—also a monkey move, swiveling his eyes—and, looking up, he ceased grubbing with his fingers and flashed his teeth at her. In her green nurse’s scrubs she was easily seen in the panel of light from the window.
She thought she heard him grunt—or was it a word?—and drew back, a little afraid. She’d been away a week, in silence, and had never run from him before. She did not know what to expect and was so short of breath in her anxiety she couldn’t speak—in any case did not know what to say.
He sometimes smiled when he was furious. He was smiling now. She took another slight step backward.
“Pass me that towel, eh?” he muttered.
She slid the screens apart, kicked her slippers off, and walked through, shutting them behind her, and stooped to pick up the rag that lay beyond his reach. Handing it to him, she drew away, bowing involuntarily.
With the rag in his fist he worked the cloth over his sweaty face, clawing his hair at the same time, another ritual she knew. Then he dropped the rag and began examining his toes. Even from a distance—she was about eight feet away—she could see that he was scratched, the cuts showing as pale scores and grooves and reddened skin.
“You’ve been out?” The words lumped and seemed to catch in her throat.
“Like I said, yeah.”
When would that have been?
“Got pinched in the barrel—gas-chamber action.”
He made a noise softly, kek-kek, that might have been a laugh. He was calm, and so, reassured, she took a seat in the chair near where he squatted.
“Tossed in the foam ball.”
He splayed his fingers, showing how they were badly scratched, then he crooked them like monkey paws.
“Motion in the ocean,” he said. “And after all that I got planted on the rocks.” He gathered himself and hopped upright and stood, grunting again, walking away from her, round-shouldered in his fatigue. “Never mind. A good day. How was yours?”
Now he was lit by the open refrigerator, leaning at the shelves, poking at plastic containers of leftovers—broccoli, pasta sauce, salad, cubes of raw fish.
“I’m hungry.”
Either this was all an elaborate show of being cool, or else he hadn’t realized she’d been gone for seven nights, and that seemed impossible.
But that was all. He halved an avocado, pried out the pit, filled each half with ahi poke, and gave one to Olive.
“Have a beer.”
“Not for me.”
“Wine—I think there’s some in the fridge door.”
“I’ll pass.”
“You joking?”
“I’m off alcohol.”
“You practically killed a bottle yesterday.”
She stared at him with such incomprehension he shrugged and went to the table and began eating, swigging beer, while she watched, not touching her avocado. When he was done he yawned, said, “I’m beat,” and went to bed.
“I’ll put these plates away,” Olive said.
Like that, she moved back in with him.
He was up early the next morning, heading to Sunset to surf—she saw him on her way to the hospital: he was sitting on his board, rocking in the swell, small in the water, with the immensity of the ocean behind him shimmering in the clear dawn light that gave the wide surface of the sea the texture of fish scales.
He was alone on the lift of the wave, still there when it passed, and she slowed her car to watch him. She thought of pulling over to see him take a wave, but she knew his skill and it was enough to see him so solitary, rising and falling on the swell, riding his board as always like a horseman on the steep hill of water, waiting to catch a wave and drop in.
And what after all did she see of his life as a surfer—what did anyone see of the figures rocking in the water? Not much, hardly anything, and so what she knew of this passion of his was negligible. His real life—the life he lived in the waves—was unseen and almost unknowable.
No one onshore, few even in the water, saw the surfer with any accuracy. On a day of good waves she often had trouble picking him out of the lineup of seven or eight bodies, some fighting the boil, others aiming their boards through the crest, a few behind it all bobbing and thrashing, levering their boards into position. They might have been dolphins, alike in their sleekness and size, anonymous in the beauty of their movement in the rough water and the whiteness of the wind-blown chop, the grace of their buoyancy.
She surfed but could not call herself a surfer—he had encouraged her to improve, bullied her at times to join him; yet even then she knew she would be too preoccupied to watch him. No one but the surfer knew what the surfer was able to do; the surfer was alone on the wave, the succession of waves, a set of seven typically, and chose one and rode it to shore, becoming an individual at the nearer break. Or wiped out and was lost in the foam, and sometimes—without anyone seeing—the surfer was tumbled over the falls and held down and drowned by the wave he was riding, tossed as though from a bucking bronco and trampled to death in the suds.
People had praised Sharkey on the North Shore, he said—mobbed him, touched his arm for luck; women hugged him, men too, some of the women eager to loop a lei over his head so that they could kiss him, as was customary. He was a speck in the surf, an insect skittering on a great wave’s face, but he was for most just a famous name, Joe Sharkey, big-wave rider. His life on the water was hidden. He might, for all of that, have been a fish—sometimes flipping himself free of the sea, twirling across the surface, causing shouts, but most of the time beneath the water, squirming and flashing.
Olive had heard—first from others, then from Sharkey—that his greatest ride had taken place on a high broad marching wave one hundred miles at sea, the wave face eighty or a hundred feet, an immense jawline—witnessed by no one. The jet ski that had towed him out to Cortes Bank had toppled on the far side; the skipper of the boat that had taken him there had been fighting a wave of his own.
“Did you see that?” Sharkey yelled when they found each other, the boatman and the man riding the jet ski.
Neither had seen him. That he was upright at the end of his ride, on his board, waist-deep in froth, was proof that he had ridden the monster. But between the takeoff at the top, tipping himself across the face of the wave, and his howl of joy at the end of it, standing on his board and skidding through the mass of broken water and pools of foam, he had been hidden.
He was hidden from her now. She had returned to live again in the house without his having remarked on it, as though she’d never left. She needed somehow to get his attention. She knew she had the means. The thing was to tell him her news at the appropriate time.
He was entirely self-absorbed, another effect of his solitude—his hidden passion and achievement as a surfer. But it was the apparent selfishness of sick people too, preoccupied with their ailments. She accepted that, because she saw that though he was alone, he was never lonely. But it worried her that his solitude had intensified since the accident, to the point where he seemed in a stall, repeating himself, seemingly oblivious of time passing, lost and left behind, in a bubble.
Part of his memory had been left behind on the rainy road at Waimea, where he’d killed the man on the bike. He needed reviving, he needed to begin living again, he needed new things to care about—new waves, bigger waves; he needed to care about her. And who was his victim, the nameless corpse on the road, the man he had killed?
She thought that her refusing alcohol might make him wonder. But he didn’t ask. He ate, he drank, he slept, he hugged her; and when the surf was up he was in it.
Always disappointed in fine weather when the waves were small—“flat to a foot”—he was becalmed at home. She waited for one of those days, a Sunday when she wasn’t working, and bought a bento and some trays of sushi at Foodland and suggested they have a picnic at Three Tables Beach. There they sat on their towels, balancing the trays on their outstretched legs.
“Might see a late whale,” Sharkey said, and studied the break at Rubber Duckies. But the swell was so gentle a snorkeler was crossing where days before the waves had been head-high.
Olive found she couldn’t face him and say it. She lay flat and embraced him, clasped his head and held it next to hers, put her mouth against his ear.
“Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Say it.”
“I love you.”
“How much?”
“More than my mother.”
She laughed. “You told me your mum was a pest.”
“That’s what I mean. She drove me crazy. You make me happy.”
“Would you be happy if you knew I was pregnant?”
His hair was hot and damp against her forehead, and she could feel his breath moving through his head, vibrant in his scalp. He didn’t speak. He went on breathing, his breath like a process of thought, air seesawing in reflection.
“It’s very early,” she said into his silence. “I almost wasn’t going to tell you. But I’ve been feeling so awful, and now I know that’s related to it. And it’s—see—it’s not just about me. It’s ours, our decision.”
Still he said nothing. She held him, the warm breathing man, the sun on them both, the small waves pushing at the shore, their splish-splash, their gulp on the sand. She did not want to say anything more, either to convince him or to talk herself out of it. So she moved away from him and rolled onto her back, feeling pleasantly scorched by the hot sand.
But he threw his arm around her and drew her to him. And now his mouth was against her ear.
“Getting tubed is like being born,” he said.
“So you’re okay with it?”
“I’m stoked.”
“You’re always so down on other people’s kids.”
“This is not other people’s kids.”
Now she turned to him and held his face and said, “You’re happy.”
“It makes me feel young.”
“You are young.”
“When did you find out?”
“That week—when I was away.”
“What week? When were you away?”
He seemed to believe that she was teasing him. He had taken such pleasure in the news of the child that she didn’t want to break the mood by insisting he was mistaken about her not having been away.
Instead of contradicting him, she said, “I seemed to have morning sickness. I thought it was a bug. One of the nurses made me take a pregnancy test. ‘You hapai,’ she said. I still feel like a dog’s dinner sometimes, but it passes.”
“Imagine,” he said—he was looking past her, smiling at their baby. “People will think I’m his grandfather.”
“They’ll adore him. They’ll know his father is Joe Sharkey.”
“Little kids are amazing surfers. I started young. I’ve seen five-year-olds paddle out and catch a wave.”
He was still staring past her head, studying the water, seeing his child on the gentle wave that was bulging toward shore, the sort of wave a child might ride, planted on his board and shrieking with joy.
“Three-year-olds can learn to swim. These great athletes—they always started young. And you know, surfing saved me when I was miserable at school. It’s not a sport—it’s a life choice.”
Olive could feel his body tensed with excitement, the eagerness hardening his muscles. She’d been unprepared for it—she thought it was something she’d have to defend or argue for; but he accepted it, and it was more than acceptance. He had seized the thought, and he was already seeing a surfer, a companion, a friend, in a way that first surprised and pleased her and then alarmed her.
He was gleeful on the way home, nodding, seeing through the front window—what?—the child on a surfboard, a child in his arms, a little hero.
“It’s still early,” she said, to caution him. “Maybe six weeks. Anything can happen.”
“It’s going to be fine. You just need to stay healthy.”
“I’ll stop working nights.”
“I don’t mean that. You have to eat better. You need to spend more time in the water. You have to be buoyant.”
One of his unshakable beliefs was that to be healthy a person needed to be immersed, floating, tossed by waves, twisting beneath them, reliving the ancient memory of our ancestry as sea creatures, recreating that life and evolution by spending part of every day in the water. And in the late afternoon, the sunset blazing in the distance, swimming to shore and flopping in the shore break and scrabbling in the boils of foam and the lacework of bubbles, until finally, streaming with water, crawling onto the sand and creeping up the beach. It was his daily ritual, a celebration of his being a waterman.
“Take some time off. Get into the water.”
“I’ve got some sick days coming to me.”
“You need some water,” he said. He was still driving. He reached for her leg and squeezed it gently.
But the deftness could only have come from many years of practice. How often in a car with a woman has that gesture served him, she thought—the reach, the squeeze, the click of his tongue on his teeth? A man winking at her had always made her sigh and turn away.
So she was surprised when he kept his attention on her. That night and thereafter she became the embodiment of the child for him. He seemed to treat her with the tender love that he had for the child to come. Holding her, he was holding the baby, and all the fear she’d had in telling him the news vanished. He was a different man, a hopeful one, thinking of someone other than himself. And she was different too, incredibly, soon to be a mother. That gave her joy and a sense of power she had not known before. Already she felt a throb of new vitality; she was strong.
She had not expected him to take such an interest, but he did, he was inquisitive and full of advice, seeming to take possession of the child while the little thing was not yet a bump in her belly. The child, so far, was her nausea, her dizziness, her feeling in the morning that (having drunk no alcohol at all) she had a hangover.
Sharkey had a child’s impatience, a need for news, the mildly cranky are-we-there-yet? sigh of frustration. She knew his hatred of waiting, yet with his harping on the fact that the world was overpopulated—“man is an invasive species”—it seemed odd to her that he clung so fiercely to the notion of having a child of his own. Maybe his age was a factor, the realization that he could have an heir, someone to carry on in his name. He was protective of her because the child was within her, and at times he was so single-minded about the baby she had to remind him that she was only in her second month—there were months more. She knew she didn’t look pregnant, and were it not for the bouts of nausea and sleeplessness she would have paid no attention.
Yet he talked of little else. He still surfed when conditions were favorable, and always begged her to come with him, something new for him. Or was it that his memory was faulty, that he could not remember that he’d asked and been turned down? She sometimes regretted that she’d broken the news of the baby so soon; but he had to know, because it was his too, and if he had objected, or lectured her, she might have considered a termination. She didn’t want to raise a child alone—that she imagined to be a lonely and difficult road, in spite of what girlfriends, being brave, telling her what she was missing, had said to her. But to raise a child with Joe Sharkey—that would be an adventure. His enthusiasm now was a pleasant foretaste of what his involvement would be, like those parents of surfers who stood on the beach during the Triple Crown, screaming at their kids in the lineup, hugging them when they came ashore. Sharkey had always shaken his head at them—“My mother never did that for me”—but now he promised to be one of them, while the child, months from being born, was smaller than a peanut in her womb.
“You’re happy,” she said, grateful for his mood but still suspicious.
“Totally stoked.” His pride in his potency was unmistakable.
“This is good for both of us.”
“For the three of us,” he said, his hand on her belly.
In the uncertainty, the oddness, the amnesia, the repetition, and the confusion since the accident—Who are you? she often thought—this was the first positive sign. It was hopeful, the assurance of a future, a good omen. He had not seemed to realize how badly stalled his life had been by the accident, the death of the cyclist. But he had not uttered the banal sentence “I ran into a drunk homeless guy” since he’d learned of her pregnancy. She had been a witness to his dullness, and (though he had not mentioned anything of his change of mood) this was a relief. He had been lost, going in circles, and at last this was a way forward. Perhaps, she thought, this was the reason people had kids, one after the other: to be assured of a future, for the children, for themselves.
Sharkey was insistent that she exercise. Work at the hospital, no matter how strenuous, was not enough. What she needed was the thrust and uplift of waves, the purification of the sea.
“The sea is pono. It makes you right. It will make you strong—both of you.”
Already he saw a family when he looked upon her. He still showed signs of damage—of trauma—from the accident, but she was reassured by his support, and she began to think of them as a family too. Sharkey and she embracing, their little swimmer squeezed between them.
Sharkey led the way, taking her for morning swims before work or meeting her at the end of the day at Waimea Bay or Three Tables, always swimming with her. The waves were so small that once through the shore break they were in smooth water, Sharkey stroking beside her, rising and plunging, dolphin-style.
It seemed to work; the exercise helped her sleep, the sleep itself calmed her, and her nausea was eased. She began to believe in him again, in the way she had when they first met, listening to his stories, seeing him triumphant on a wave; and he was a hero to her again, all that a father should be.
“You could try stand-up paddling. We could go out of Hale‘iwa in the harbor, where it’s really glassy.”
“What if I fall?”
“Falling in water is like flying. Or take one of the boogie boards.”
She allowed herself to be persuaded to use a boogie board. She took a swim fin for one foot, as was the custom. Sharkey drove along Kam Highway, looking for a likely spot, and passing Waimea he glanced at the waves and said, “You could handle that.”
“Not here,” she said. “Not this place.”
“The waves are clean.”
But superstitiously—he was near the spot where he’d killed the cyclist—she said, “Let’s go farther down.”
He had not noticed the pothole, usually filled with a slop of reddish water, the runoff from the clay of the embankment, the scene of the accident. Though he passed it most days he never spoke of it; it was as though it had never happened. Now she was on the verge of admitting that it was over, except that he was at times as repetitious as ever in his stories and reminiscences. Only the promise of the baby offered hope: the one bright spot in their lives, something to live for.
“Gotta stay healthy,” he was saying—and now she heard the cawing of his mother’s voice in his nagging. “Maybe try Lani’s, or Alligators.”
The surf breaks served as way markers on the road along the irregular shore; no one spoke of a particular tree or house or bridge but always of the name of a break. I live at V-Land.
He pulled in at a stony opening near the break at Leftovers, parked in the shade of a dense hedge, and unstrapped the boards from the roof of the car.
“Don’t worry—I’ve got your back.”
On the smooth lava boulders near the black rock pools at the shore she slipped the swim fin onto her foot, then followed Sharkey into the water, dropping onto the board and holding herself against it, kicking hard with her fin. Sharkey, plunging under waves, was still heading out when she turned and bumped in on a small wave. Gesturing to the larger break, he was saying something.
“I can’t hear you!” she called out.
She paddled in his direction, and she found, as she had discovered on other occasions, that without much effort she was farther from shore than she imagined—was it the riptide or an effect of the wave action that drew her out? Sharkey was nearer now, roaring in the turbulent water, still beckoning.
The shore was now just a strip of yellow sand, the green slope of hill, the mountainside behind it. Olive became afraid, so far from shore, in the lift of waves, her face slapped by sudden chop, her board pushed against her.
She wanted to say, “I’m scared.” But Sharkey would have scoffed. Instead she said, “Show me how.”
In the moments of this confusion she realized she was being pulled beyond the outer waves of the break.
“Use the wave to get back,” he said. “You’re trying to swim. Do this.”
He crested a wave and hugged his body board and rode, gliding beneath it out of her sight line. Bobbing up thirty feet away, he gestured and shouted.
“Take that one!”
But she mistimed it and floundered behind it, and when she tried to chase it she had to struggle to hold the board, kicking fiercely, wondering whether she was making any progress. As she fought the push and slap of the water a wave broke over her, tipping her sideways, yanking the board out of her hands. She plunged after it, caught its rail, and tucked it under her, trying to steady herself again—and where was Sharkey? Another wave took her and rolled her over, but this time she clung to her board, first awkwardly under it like a turtle on its back, then climbing onto it. And then, looking for Sharkey, she saw that the shore was more distant than before—and, worse, a crosscurrent was taking her sideways toward Waimea. So she kicked harder and clawed the water.
What started as a stitch in her side widened and gripped her in a cramp, preventing her from being able to kick—kicking brought pain, and she was immobilized, hugging the board, trying to get a glimpse of Sharkey. She tried to yell, but simply raising her voice made the pain worse, straining the muscle in her belly, tightening the knots of her cramp.
Then she screamed, helplessly, intensifying the pain, feeling foolish and desperate. It was a new and frightening voice. She thought, Why did I agree to this? and mocked his solemnity—The water is pono—and tried not to cry.
Then Sharkey appeared, rising out of a nearby wave, not like a man but like a water creature, an agile sea monster, large and unsinkable, his hair plastered to his face, streaming with frothy water. He swung himself across the wave and tumbled next to her, smiling, reaching to steady her board.
“Help me,” she said, gasping in a small voice, because it was too painful to shout. Even a deep breath worsened the stomach cramp.
“Let go of your board. Hold on to me.”
She flung herself at his shoulders and held tight, and could feel the warmth and strength in the hard sinew of his muscles. His head was down, plowing the water, as he swam and surfed, riding successive waves toward shore, flat on his body board. She was sobbing with relief now, glad he couldn’t see her, thinking, I’m saved.
But he was slowing, the heavy water was an obstacle, and there were long moments when he seemed lost and weakened by the butting waves. And she felt weak and in pain. Though she wasn’t kicking—couldn’t kick—she felt the cramp twisting her insides. Only by drawing her legs up and bending her knees was she able to lessen the pain. Her crouching posture impeded his swimming and slowed them, yet they were nearer shore, in smaller waves and in sunshine, Sharkey parting the water and propelling them with outstretched arms, grunting with the effort—unusual for him.
“You okay now?” he said. “You can probably stand up here.”
Slipping from his back, she tore off her swim fin and found her footing in the sand, staggering a little, whimpering with exhaustion, still bent over with the cramp and that obscure pain in her gut.
Behind her, Sharkey said, “Hey, there’s blood in the water.”
By then she was kneeling on the beach, clutching her belly, howling.