Wish (11 page)

Ty reached into his pocket and handed me his phone. I walked off about twenty yards, sat on the sand, and dialed Mom’s cell number. She picked up on the first ring.

“Where the hell are you?” she said, separating each word as if she could bite it.

“South of San Francisco,” I said. “We’re fine, Mom.”

“You are so grounded, Bee,” she said, her voice bubbling with bile. “You are even more than that. This is incredibly disrespectful. This is the most disrespectful thing anyone has ever done to me.”

“You left him, Mom.”

“I went on a date!” she said, her voice zooming up in volume. “You have no idea at your age what it’s like for a woman my age.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Put Tommy on the phone,” she said.

“He’s not next to me.”

“I don’t care where he is,” she said. “Put him on the phone. Now.”

“He’s okay,” I said. “He’s having a good time.”

“Bee, what in the world are you thinking? You’re not thinking, are you? Your brother is very sick and you should know that by now. I want to talk to him.”

“We’ll be back tomorrow afternoon. Maybe evening.”

“We have to fly out on the red-eye tomorrow, young lady. I saw you took the money, too.”

“We took
some of
the money. We said so in the note,” I told her. “It’s Tommy’s money.”

“I have never in my life felt so angry.”

“Sorry, Mom. We weren’t trying to hurt you.”

She blew up at that.

“Not trying to hurt me, huh?” she yelled. “This is the most passive-aggressive behavior I’ve ever seen. You do exactly what you like, you abandon me, and you say you had no intention of hurting me. You have the emotional IQ of a child, Bee.”

“What about you, Mom? What about … Never mind.”

I wanted to point out again that she had abandoned us, that she was the one who hadn’t come home, but that would have been tossing gasoline on a fire. Mom flashed on things like that. Besides, she had a point. I probably
did
want to send her a message, passive or otherwise, and I didn’t particularly care what she thought of it. But I held my tongue. Silence worked better than argument.

“All right,” she said, trying to be calm, “tell me where you are and I’ll come and get you.”

“I’m not going to do that,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mom. I really am.”

“What did you just say?”

“I said we’re spending the night here and then we’ll be back to the hotel late tomorrow afternoon. We’ll be there before the flight no matter what. We’ll call when we’re on our way.”

“I won’t stand for this, Bee. I will not be treated this way.”

“I’m going to hang up now, Mom. I’m not trying to be mean.”

“I’ve got your cell number. Are you at that surfer’s house? The one hit by the shark, Ty something? I’ll report you to the police.”

“If that’s really what you want to do, Mom, I can’t stop you. But you will break Tommy’s heart if you do that.”

“I’m the one who has to look after his safety, Bee,” she said. “I’m his mother.”

“I know that.”

I heard her breathing hard. Then she began to cry. I didn’t blame her. I would have cried, too, in her position. I wanted to say something consoling, but anything I thought of seemed too condescending. For just a second, I considered telling her where we were, what we had planned, and asking her to join us. She would like the boys, I knew, but she wouldn’t like the idea of putting Tommy in big surf. She wouldn’t mean to do it, but she would undermine him, start talking about the danger involved, and little by little she would pry the whole idea out of his head. I couldn’t risk it. Tommy deserved to have a day filled all the way to the top. Just one day. And with Mom around, it wouldn’t happen.

I hung up softly. A few minutes passed and the phone rang. It was my mom’s cell number and I switched the phone to Vibrate. I didn’t answer it. I looked over instead at the
campfire. Tommy had stood up and was doing some ridiculous gangster-type movements and the guys were laughing. Laughing hard. It wasn’t phony laughter, or laughing just to please the cystic fibrosis kid, but genuine laughter from down in their bellies. They saw Tommy as I saw him. I started to shiver, and the phone kept buzzing in my hand.

TOMMY SHARK FACT #7:
Probably the most famous shark-attack victim is a guy named Rodney Fox. The attack occurred in Australia, south of Adelaide, during a spear-fishing tournament off Aldinga Beach. Fox sustained bites on his arm and chest area. He fought back by sticking his fingers in the shark’s eyes and cut his hand on the shark’s mouth in the process; during a second attack, Fox managed to fend the shark off by grabbing the animal’s snout. Running out of air, Fox tried to make it to the surface, but the shark bit a dead fish attached to Fox’s belt. The shark dragged Fox across the sea bottom before finally releasing him.

The injuries Fox sustained were massive. The shark fractured all the ribs on Fox’s left side, collapsed his lung, jabbed through his scapula, and uncovered his spleen. Fox nearly died from blood loss. Some experts say his wet suit saved him by keeping the organs in place. Doctors administered 462 stitches. Part of the great white’s tooth is still embedded in Fox’s wrist.

The coolest thing about Fox from Tommy’s standpoint is that Fox became one of the world’s leading defenders of great whites. Instead of going on a quest to kill sharks, Fox opened a great white dive business and serves as a consultant and speaker about sharks. He is an advocate for shark education and shark awareness, which is what Tommy believes in, too.

Fox went back in the water less than a half year later. Tommy says Fox is tougher than anyone.

We got to sleep around two in the morning. Tommy should have been exhausted, but the boys pumped him up and sassed him and he loved it. They even joked when he was on the chest massager, making him say words so that his voice was garbled and came out like the Terminator’s. They made him recite “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” then say
I’ll be back
, then
Here’s Johnny
from
The Shining
. I would have stopped them there, but then they made him suck in helium from a balloon a friend got at the mall, and Tommy had to say a bunch of lines from
Anchorman
while they all doubled over. Tommy was a star, at least for the time being, and when he said
I’ll wear sex panther
, which was one of the lines from
Anchorman
, the boys could hardly control themselves.

I had to fight hard not to interfere, not to make everyone go easier on him. Guys kept piling into the house and then leaving, and a few girls swung by, too. The group could have gone another way, heading to the skate ramp or finding something else to do, but Ty and Little Brew kept Tommy in the center. Tommy started to nod off a few times, but they wouldn’t let him. They threw pillows at him if he faded and eventually he got a second wind.

After everyone left, it was just the four of us sitting on two beat-up couches. Ty and Little Brew talked about what it was like to be out on a board in big waves, to feel the whole world lift and begin to carry you forward, knowing the wave had come all the way from the Aleutians in Alaska, that it had run a couple thousand miles just to throw its guts against the California shore. Nothing like it, they said. Nothing as sweet. They rode big boards—guns, they were called—and once you headed down a wave that size, fifty feet of water, the top just turning a little in a horse mane, and then the slow arch, the crack that came as you shot down the wave face and began to cut, it was beyond words. And when the waves caught you, as they inevitably did, then that was something, too, something weird and otherworldly, because you were dragged below, your board yanking at your hip socket, the bottom sometimes hitting you, trying to detain you, and part of you didn’t know which way was up. But you held your
breath and let the waves churn you. You couldn’t fight. You had to give in, to face your fate, and except for every once in a great while, the board brought you up and you had no problem. Nowadays they had Jet Skis that shot in to help you, Jet Skis that could ride over the biggest waves, mostly, and pull you to safety, running parallel to the beach until you escaped the surf wash. Sometimes you just lay on your board afterward and coughed your ribs out; other times you felt ready to go again. And sometimes, though rarely, you realized you needed to quit for the day because the sea felt too hungry. You had to get out of there and head back to land.

Tommy had been listening intently. Then in a soft, late-night voice, he said that when the air wouldn’t come into his lungs, he would imagine being able to breathe through his eyes, or to suck in air through his skin, the way he thought frogs could, which made him feel like an amphibian. Then none of us said anything. We sat and listened to the wind pick up outside, and finally Ty and Little Brew headed to bed. They slapped five with Snow Pony. And Tommy and I went to sleep feet to feet on the couch, Tommy’s smelly socks carrying the whole day’s heat with them, his breath ragged and heavy and never quite full.

COLUMBUS DAY

“S
hhh,” someone whispered. “Bee? You awake?”

I sat up. I didn’t know where I was. Then I saw Little Brew bending over the couch. He had an armful of blankets. He wore a Windbreaker and an absurd pair of earmuffs. The band of the earmuffs held back his hair.

“Want to see some shooting stars?” he whispered.

“Where?” I asked, not quite awake.

“Just out in the back. We have an old tree house.”

“What time is it?”

“Around three-thirty. It’s Columbus Day.”

I swung my legs off the couch. Little Brew handed me a
sweatshirt and a Windbreaker. The sweatshirt smelled like him. Then he grabbed my hand and led me through the dark living room. A light in the vent above the stove kept the kitchen dull and quiet. He took back the Windbreaker as I pulled the sweatshirt over my head. The sweat shirt said
Big Waves
. I told him to wait a second, then I ducked into the bathroom off the kitchen and washed my face. I squeezed soap onto my finger and brushed my teeth. It tasted horrible but it was better than night-zombie breath.

“Where are we going?” I asked again when I came out.

“Just in the backyard. You’ll be able to hear Tommy if he needs you.”

“He’ll be fine. He has his inhaler next to him. He used it right before he went to sleep.”

I followed him into the yard. We walked across the belly of the skateboard half-pipe. He wore flip-flops. They made funny duck sounds against his heels. When we reached a grove of oak trees, he kicked out of his flip-flops and began climbing up an aluminum ladder propped against a tree. I followed him. When I made it up about ten feet, I saw the platform—about the size of two picnic tabletops bolted together—that had been built between two trees. Little Brew showed me where to put my hands to pull myself up over the edge. He made sure I was settled before he let me go.

“I’m a sky nerd,” he said, bending down in the darkness
next to a plastic box. “I’m into the stars. Do you like any of that stuff?”

“I’ve never really looked at the stars.”

“Well,” he said, lifting a telescope out of the box and setting it up on a small tripod, “it’s a little early in the season for the Perseids, but it’s a new moon so we should be able to see some of the Orionids. I just like looking up.”

“Awesome. Did you guys build this?”

“When we were smaller. With Dad, actually. We don’t really use it anymore. It’s just a place to get away from the house. I keep my telescope out here in this box. The platform gives you a little elevation, so you can see out toward the ocean more.”

“Do you do this a lot?”

“Often enough. Here,” he said, reaching down and handing me a blanket. “If you’re cold.”

“I’m from New Hampshire,” I said. He laughed and took the blanket back and tossed it onto the platform.

“Right,” he said, and went back to fiddling with the telescope. He looked through the eyepiece and began adjusting knobs. “I’m a member of an amateur group. I don’t know why I like doing it, but I do. A friend of my dad’s lives in the Sierra Madres and he has a big telescope. I go up there once or twice a year. He’s a star geek, too.”