THE LOCAL NEWS reported a sequence of early morning shark attacks. The first occurred just after dawn along the south shore of Pearl Island. Two paddleboarders went for a sunrise glide. The boarder in front heard a splash. A muffled yelp. He turned. He saw the empty board floating on the surface, and a dark shape in the water beneath. But no sign of his friend.
He made it back to shore, but the shark—or sharks, the newscaster said, suggesting that there might be two, three, a whole squad of vicious predators—had already swum north and attacked a veteran surfer. A local. Juaquin Ortez. A picture of a tanned, gray-haired fellow in a wet suit appeared on-screen. He owned the Pearl Island Cycle Shop and gave free surf lessons to local kids. He had been on his board, drifting, watching the horizon for that perfect wave. Then he disappeared. No one saw what happened. A jogger had seen him from the beach. She glanced away. When she looked again, he was gone.
Farther north along the shore, two more surfers disappeared. Others reported hulking shadows. Dorsal fins. The menacing whip of a tail.
A very large species, the reporter surmised. Not the usual bull shark variety. A tiger, perhaps, or a great white. The local coast guard had sent boats to find and track the beasts. The lifeguard stands flew purple flags. Swimmers were advised to stay out of the water.
“They shouldn’t have sent the boats,” Timmy said. “Haven’t they ever seen Jaws?”
“You’ve seen Jaws?” Evie asked. “Mom, can I watch Jaws?”
“Now is not the time for Jaws. And we still need to figure out what we’re doing with Timmy.”
“Personally,” Timmy said, “if we can’t surf, I’d like to go to the carnival.”
“Yeah!”
“Yeah, Mom!”
“No, that’s not, I mean, Timmy needs to go. Away. To his family.”
Mason pouted. “But I don’t want him to go.”
“I know. But. It’s the right thing—”
“Grown-ups always say that, like they know,” Timmy said. “But they don’t know. They’re just making it up.” He looked up at Jenn, defiant.
“If you’re going to make him leave,” Evie said, “we should at least do something fun first.”
Jenn said yes to the carnival. Yes, she said, they could ride the Tilt-A-Whirl, the giant slide, the hammer-shaped brain shaker, the whirling antigravity stomach churner, the bone-rattle mini-coaster. Whatever they wanted. Yes, they could have swirl cones and funnel cakes. Yes, they could squirt water guns and throw darts to win a prize. Yes because she needed a stockpile of points to stave off child-discontent for when she sent their BFF Timmy away, and she still had not decided where to send him or who to call or how to relieve herself of responsibility for this enigmatic time traveler or runaway.
Yes because she did not want to visit her mother’s house to decide what items to take before the movers packed everything up and dumped it in storage. Yes because she did not want to edit Philipia Bay and the Whatever Whatever. She felt exhausted by Philipia Bay. The predictability. The mysterious packages. The cryptic letters. The shadowy stranger glimpsed from the platform of a train, his face mysterious but familiar. The nunchuck and throwing-star battles. The surreptitious intervention by a sympathetic tertiary character. Victory and romance, with no strings attached.
There were always strings, in real life.
She said yes and got dressed and washed the mascara off her face and let her phone charge enough to see the latest in a string of missed text messages from Chuck.
Chuck: Evie said there is some boy staying at the house?
Chuck: What is going on, Jenn?
Chuck: I really don’t deserve this level of disrespect.
She didn’t know what he did or didn’t deserve. The narrative had gotten tangled in her head. She felt like the fault belonged entirely to him; that he had jettisoned this marriage project; that she had fulfilled her breadwinner obligations and labored slavishly and Chuck, from his luxury station of regular naps and summer breaks, had no legitimate cause for complaint.
He had told her in February, right before Valentine’s Day. She had already thought about the presents she might buy him but had forgotten to order something that would arrive on time, but it didn’t feel like her fault.
Jenn, he had said, looking down at his hands. Jenn, I’m done. Unless…
But the narrative stopped at done. Her brain didn’t register his demands. She shut him out. Head in the sand. Hummed to herself, I can’t hear you I can’t hear you I can’t hear you.
Chuck had been the one who insisted that Evie repeat kindergarten. She had missed crucial hours of learning, he said. She would fall behind if funneled ahead to the first grade. She had suffered a tragedy. Two tiny broken femurs.
Jenn had not disputed these points. She just wanted things to be normal.
Jenn drove to the island’s carnival center but could not find a spot to park. They circled the full parking lot for twenty minutes. Everyone had the same idea for family entertainment when confronted with shark-infested waters.
So they had to turn around and drive back. They waited in traffic. A father walked by, carrying a kicking, screaming toddler potato-sack-style over his shoulder. Behind him came a family peddling a four-person Surrey bike, a crew of vacation grandmas in matching Pearl Island souvenir shirts, a teen in a fish-shaped sandwich board offering coupons for the Clamfish Bar and Grille. A line had formed outside the door to the Mermaid’s Paradise Palace. A salacious name for a kitschy wonderland of mermaid wind chimes, abalone earrings, and sequined scaled full-length water skirts that made a swimming child’s lower half resemble the tail of a delicious mermaid or seal. Evie had seen a girl waddling the beach in one of those tails. She wanted one.
Dad would let her have one, she said, and you couldn’t blame her for using the animosity between her parents to get what she wanted.
“That was a bust,” Jenn said when they got back to the house.
The kids stared at her.
“But we’re going back, right?” Evie asked.
“Right, Mom?”
“It’s not that far,” Timmy said. “We could walk.”
It was almost two miles in the hot sun. They walked along the shore, barefoot. She carried all the shoes, and a bag with bottles of water and her phone, which had almost zero battery power. If it died, it died.
The kids waded through tide pools. They chased foamy breakers across the sand, through the gleaming sunlit surface of shallow waters. They collected shells, rocks, hunks of battered cement, broken glass worn smooth from the churning sea. These went into her bag. Her bag grew heavy. Sweat soaked her shirt and rolled down her forehead, into her eyes. She thought, as she trudged through the sand, about Timmy. Not present Timmy, but Timmy from the past, thirty years gone.
In a blink.
Before Timmy, Jenni’s mom had let them stray from the Church. But Timmy’s disappearance pushed them back. There had to be some larger purpose. Some lesson to glean. Some salvation, born from tragedy.
Jenni hadn’t wanted to talk about what had happened. She retreated to her bedroom closet, huddled beneath the hanging clothes, hemmed in by shoeboxes packed with toys, headphones on. The sensation opposite that of the open sea. She slept in the closet for how long—weeks? Her mom delivered grilled cheeses with the crusts cut off, apple slices, chocolate pudding in plastic cups. Milkshakes. She sat beside Jenni in the dark closet, not speaking. She said: It’ll all be okay. I know it hurts. But I promise. It’ll all be okay. And Jenni had wanted to believe her. If she could only remember how it felt. Believing. But her belief was tempered by the understanding, newfound, at the worldly age of ten, that her mother said what her mother was supposed to say, that her mother’s promise was a flimsy shield against the random cruel world.
The promise of church backfired. The pastor assured her: The Lord takes who he takes, but he didn’t explain why. Why Timmy? So she stopped listening. She was there, in the pew, in body. In black tights and patent-leather Mary Janes. Scraping the paint from a tiny pencil with her fingernail. Standing when told to stand.
In spirit, she ran. And she kept running until the world blurred, and there was no use then in trying to make sense of it. There was no time to dwell on a drowned boy when living required every effort. The more effort that was required, the less time there was to think.
After that summer ended, and the picture windows on the storm-gray house got shuttered for hurricane season and the letter she had sent to Timmy’s mom came back in the mail stamped Return to Sender and the pastor suggested that Jenni’s evident lack of faith belied a deeper, darker problem, demonic in nature, imperiling her soul, which was two mutilated tiny pencils shy of eternal damnation, Jenni hurled herself at the Church of Constant Activity. A flexible institution. The type of activity didn’t matter so long as it was immersive and hindered rumination. Devotion was rewarded in an earthly sense, with blue ribbons, gold medals, printed awards for Excellence in Sixth-Grade Spelling or whatever.
I’m in it to win it, Jenni told the pastor, not because it was true, but because she was done forever with any practice that bordered on reflective self-flagellation. She was done with Mary Janes and tights. What she wanted—what her soul wanted—was to forget.
It was around then that she started writing.
She wrote short stories and then a novel and then more novels and she forgot about Timmy. She kept busy and carried on.
Until now.
Until Timmy made himself unforgettable, a physics-defying fixture in her vacation rental kitchen, a sage of chocolate-slathered breakfast cereal and good fun times.
“Hey,” Timmy said, splashing up in the surf beside her. “What day is it?”
“Um, Friday?”
“No, I mean the month.”
“June. The fourth.”
“So the Fourth of July hasn’t happened yet.”
“Nope.”
“Excellent,” he cackled. He rubbed his hands together in a Monty Burns–ian gesture of villainous machination. “We just had the Fourth of July. And now we get to have it again! And I bet the fireworks they’ve got in the future are bonkers!”
Jenn’s own children were not so thrilled. They moaned and sulked. They complained of thirst but did not want to drink the boring water. The carnival, which had appeared very close from far away, was now, with a mere quarter mile to go, impossibly far.
She picked Mason up. On her back. And carried him.
Stymieing his advancement toward self-sufficiency, yes. Chuck would not have approved. But lugging fifty-ish pounds of clammy child across the blistering beach beat listening to him whine. And she could feel his hot breath on her neck. The pat-a-pat-a of his little heart. The sea-and-syrup smell of him.
Time traveled so fast.
Thirty years could whip by in an instant.
Then the trip ended, and they stepped into the Krazy Kones, an air-conditioned soft-serve paradise of dip cones and candy toppings. They ordered extra toppings, to complement their healthy-choices breakfast chocolate. They got ice cream on their shirts, in their hair, in drips down their legs. They rinsed sticky fingers in the drinking fountain. Then Mom bought a boatload of tickets. The tickets cost a dollar each, but every ticket earned another point. They rode the bumper cars and the Tilt-A-Whirl. They played the ring-toss game a dozen times each, the requisite number of plays to win a plush key chain consolation prize. They all picked the pink octopus, the obvious choice, with its silly arms and sharp little teeth. Jenn clipped each key chain to each child’s belt loop. They got in line for the Ferris wheel. They waited for twenty-five minutes, in the sun, in the hot path of generator wind.
“But I don’t want to get on,” Evie said, after the operator had taken their tickets.
“What?”
“It’s too high.”
“But we waited.”
“You can go.”
Mason and Timmy climbed onto the Ferris wheel seat.
“No, we need to stick together,” Jenn said.
“Come on, Mom!” Mason called. Timmy rocked the seat, trying to build momentum.
“Evie, can’t you just—”
“It’s too high! It’s scary.”
“It’s just a Ferris wheel,” Jenn said. “It’s fine. It’s perfectly safe.”
The Ferris wheel creaked. The seat swung higher as Timmy pumped his legs.
“But I’m afraid of heights,” Evie said.
“Oh. Right. But then why didn’t you say something when we got in line?”
“I did. But you weren’t listening.”
“I’m listening now,” Jenn said, but only part of her brain was listening. The other part watched the seat sway back and forth, propelled by a giggling relic of her past. Mason looked tiny next to the older boy. Tiny enough to slip out from under the lap bar.
“Are you sure he’s tall enough to ride?” she asked the operator.
The operator coughed. Scrunched his nose. “Looks tall enough to me,” he said, without looking back at Mason.
“You’re not listening. Mom,” Evie said. “I’m telling you. I’m afraid of heights. You do remember how I broke my legs?”
The slide. That terrifying apparatus of schoolyard danger.
“Your femurs. How did that happen anyway? Because—”
“Can you hurry it up?” said the man in line behind them. “We’ve been waiting for fucking ever.”
“Hey, language,” Jenn said. “There are kids.”
“You swear all the time, Mom.”
The man turned to the operator. “Can you please tell this lady to hurry it up?”
The operator smirked. “On or off?”
“I guess I can stay down here if—”
“Mom! Come on!”
“Jenni!” Timmy waved.
“All kids gotta be accompanied by a a-dult,” the operator said.
“But you won’t give back the tickets, will you?” Jenn said.
“Nope.”
“Just go without me, Mom,” said Evie.
“But—”
“I’ll be fine.”
“But—”
“I’ll wait right here.”
Jenn sighed. “Right here?”
“I’m ten years old. I’ll be fine standing here by myself for just a minute.”
At ten, Jenn had free rein to wander all of Pearl Island. She went swimming by herself. She cooked on the stovetop. But Evie wasn’t supposed to use the toaster without parental supervision.
“Fine,” she said. “Stay right here. Don’t. Go. Anywhere.”
She climbed onto the Ferris wheel in between the two boys, so she could harness them with her arms when the lap bar failed. The ride turned slowly, one seat at a time, loading and unloading passengers. Timmy tried to rock the seat, and she tried to make him stop.
“It’s dangerous.”
“It’s not dangerous,” Timmy said. “You said so yourself. It’s perfectly safe.”
“Not when you’re rocking it.”
“You’re no fun.”
“Yeah, Mom,” Mason agreed.
“You used to be fun,” Timmy said. “What happened?”
The ride jolted forward. It swung, at last, into continuous motion. Mason grabbed her hand and held it tight. Up they went. Over the top. The whole island unfurled beneath them: the towering hotels clustered near the carnival center, oceanfront balconies hung with neon beach towels, string lights, painted signs shaped like surfboards and sandals, grid lines of streets, stilted houses in shades of mint and turquoise, gleeful yellow cottages, pink condos with rooftop tiki decks, planted palms and spiky ornamental bushes, and lots, here and there, where the trees grew thick and the indigenous jungle revealed itself, the snarled revenge of thistle and creepers, the refuge of mosquitos and stranded frogs, their night songs lonely amid the bustle of vacation life, songs she remembered from the starry summers of her island childhood, when she stayed out late to play in the weedy sandy yard, her mother on the front porch with a cold can of Blue Lagoon, and all around, in chirps and murmurs, in birdcalls and whistles, in the distant purr of waves beating against the shore, the sounds of life.
They circled down, toward the Krazy Kones, the pastel booths that sold hot dogs and onion rings and cotton candy and deep-fried handheld pizza pies, past Evie waiting in the same spot, right there, perfectly safe. Then up, up, up, to where they could see the whole inimitable diamond sapphire sea, reaching out to the edge of the earth, calm and flat, except for that strange long line that seemed to run parallel to the shore, or was moving toward it.
A glitch, she thought, and her eyes looked past it. The wheel turned. The boys squealed as they went down. They cheered on the way back up. At the top, she saw the line again, still there, moving closer.
The wheel turned, and on the downslope her stomach dropped. The Ferris wheel whooshed and groaned. She felt queasy, hot, trapped inside her bloated spinning body but also outside of herself, looking down, at the burgeoning panic on her face. Her body had recognized what her mind had not, because her mind wanted her convinced that it was all okay, all ordinary, progressing in a normal forward fashion, a regular summer family vacation except it definitely was not that. It was unhinged burnt-out future divorcée Jenn having a mental breakdown, risking a coveted successful career as a bestselling adventure-romance author for charges of child abduction, believing the fantastic lies of a ten-year-old runaway.
It was a tidal wave.
It was not clear, from the shifting vantage of the Ferris wheel seat, how big of a wave this wave might be. But its nature was unmistakable. From somewhere above or behind, someone yelled. Then came a scream.
“Stop the ride!”
And another.
“Tsunami! Tsunami!”
The ride didn’t stop. It swung them back down. She called to the operator. Then to Evie. “Tidal wave! Run!”
Her voice was frantic. But the operator didn’t hear. He wore headphones. Sunglasses. A baseball cap. He didn’t look up.
Evie looked confused. She blinked, waved, stood fixed in her spot at the base of the ride, just like Mom had told her.
The ride whipped them up.
“Mom?” Mason chirped, oblivious. “Mom? What’s wrong?”
Everyone on the ride was yelling, pointing, waving at the people on the ground below to Please make it stop and to Start running, damn it! Run!
People ran, but only some of them. Others stood and stared up at the flailing frightened people on the Ferris wheel. Some climbed up onto tables, benches, anywhere to get a better look. Some ran toward the ocean, to be the first to see it.
This was not a town that ever saw tsunamis. There were no fault lines along the Eastern Seaboard. No earthquakes. Hurricanes brought massive waves, but also warnings, days in advance. The sky today was blue and cloudless.
The ride swept up. The tsunami broke against the shore.
She heard it crash. She heard the rush of water. She couldn’t see its crest, or the beach. Just water, rising up over the sand. She thought about Timmy in his last summer house, the storm-gray house with its big picture windows, aquarium windows for a tidal-wave view, the water sloshing against them, the fish flung at the glass, their black blank eyes, their listless minds unable to fathom this sudden uplift, the last wet moments before fate left them flopping on the sundeck, baking on the road. A wave would have to be massive to reach windows that high.
The ride jolted. It stopped. She heard then the sound of her own voice screaming. Mason screaming. Timmy sitting silent beside her, seemingly unafraid. He had already died once, according to everyone everywhere. A wave was just a wave, beautiful and fierce and, in the mind of a ten-year-old boy, a harbinger of fun.
They were stuck at the top. She couldn’t see Evie. The spot where Evie had stood was directly beneath them, the seats below now blocking her view.
The wave rolled up over the dunes. Over the boardwalk. Across the cement. The carnival-land beneath them became a foamy sea.
Except the water wasn’t very high.
Jenn had expected a violent swell, and maybe the beach had gotten pummeled by a treacherous high wave. But when it reached the carnival, it was just water. A minor flood. The high mark looked about knee-deep, high enough to spill into the ground-level candy stores and ice creameries and beachwear shops and fill the seaside swimming pools with sandy salt water, but not high enough to flood the stilted beach houses. The water splashed the feet of the people standing on benches, but those who had taken refuge on the picnic tabletops stayed dry.
“Wow,” Timmy said. He sounded not at all afraid. “That’s the biggest wave I’ve ever seen.”
“Me too,” Jenn said. “But the important thing is, we’re safe. Everyone is safe. It was just a wave.”
She stared down at the lake below. The people in the lowest Ferris wheel cabins climbed out. Timmy pumped his legs to make things exciting.
“Stop that,” Jenn said.
“I’m just—”
“Please.”
She still couldn’t see Evie. Or the operator. The power, she noticed, had gone out. The generator had stopped humming. The breeze blew hot, and on it she caught the scent of rotting fish. And something else, a long latent decay. A cold smell. Like the dark yawning abyss of a star snuffed out in the deepest nothingness of space.
“Are we stuck?” Mason asked.
“Yes, but. We’re just a little bit stuck. I’m sure they’ll—”
“What if we’re stuck here forever?” he asked.
“That won’t happen,” she said.
“Yeah,” Timmy agreed. “I could slither down. And then I could get a rope and climb back up and lower you both to safety.” He turned and looked over his shoulder at the Ferris wheel spokes. Reconnaissance for his climbing options.
“No,” Jenn said. “We’ll wait. I’m sure—”
They waited. She searched the lake for signs of Evie. She saw none. She yelled the girl’s name. The girl didn’t answer. She would call, but she had told Evie to leave her phone at home so she could not serve as an unwitting spy for Chuck.
She had expected the lake to recede as they waited to get unstuck from the Ferris wheel. But it didn’t. The water lowered slightly, from knee to shin height, but the ground stayed covered. The humans who had taken refuge on benches and tables climbed down and trudged away. Another pair from a lower Ferris wheel cabin climbed out and dropped down into the water below. Mason sang a song about waiting, one he had made up just then. Timmy lamented their lack of aquarium view for the tsunami event. He practiced spitting into the water. After a while, they heard sirens. A fire truck pulled into the roundabout canal beside the carnival. Firefighters in high-water boots stepped out. Eventually, the Ferris wheel turned. Just a few feet. People in lower cabins hopped out. It turned again. The power was still out, but the firefighters turned the ride manually, one cabin at a time.
Halfway down, Jenn still couldn’t see Evie. She called the girl’s name, but no one answered. She wasn’t certain of the spot marked for Evie to wait. Everything looked different now, with all the water. But she didn’t see her daughter anywhere.
Their cabin finally reached the bottom. A pair of firefighters helped them out.
“My kid,” she told them. “She was standing right over there. And now she’s not.”
“Right over there? You left her there alone?” The firefighter’s question felt like an accusation.
“She’s ten. I didn’t just leave her! I could see where she was from the ride. I mean, she probably just wandered off to find someplace dry. And she doesn’t have her phone with her so—”
Now they could judge her for letting her child have the phone and for not ensuring that her child always had the phone with her in case of emergency.
“Ma’am, we need to get the rest of these folks off the Ferris wheel. If you need some help finding her, there’s a police officer right over there.” The firefighter pointed at a cop standing in shin-deep water near the lemonade stand.
“Um, okay, thanks,” Jenn said. She stepped away from the ride. The boys pogoed through the water behind her.
“Where’s Evie?” Timmy asked, only just now realizing that the girl was missing.
“I don’t know. She’s— She was supposed to be here.”
“Oh no! What if the tidal wave swept her away? What if she’s gone forever?”