Wish (4 page)

Tommy didn’t.

“Tommy?” she said.

He didn’t respond.

“Tommy?” she asked again.

He shook his head.

Mom looked at me. I shrugged. Tommy refused to budge. She made a small half circle to try to get his profile, but he shaded his body away and continued to look. I guessed that he had taken the shark hat and worn it like a good sport, and he had accepted the news that other kids
might be on the shark boat tomorrow, all without protest. But now the seals lay right in front of him, the real animals, his sharks’ favorite food, and no one on earth was going to interfere with that. He didn’t have to say it for me to know it. He didn’t want to be rude to Mom, but he also didn’t want the trip to become a big snapshot of family fun. And because he had trouble expressing himself, because he was Tommy, he had reacted the only way he could. He had finally reached his sharks’ world, and though it’s probably crazy to care so much about something that you refuse to undermine it even in the smallest way, he did and I admired the heck out of him for that.

Mom fussed a second and said she didn’t know why he was being so difficult, and then she gave up. She looked at the seals for a few minutes, making small observations and oohing a little when they did something cute. After a while she told us she needed a cup of coffee and that she would be right back. I watched her go, then turned to Tommy.

“Tell me about them,” I whispered.

He let me take his hand.

“The males weigh about eight hundred pounds,” he said, his voice flat and sure in a way I had rarely heard it before, “and the females are a lot smaller. They live up and down the West Coast. They can swim almost twenty-five miles an hour. They raft together and play when they feel like it. I’m not sure if they can close their ears when they dive, but
I think they do. They eat rockfish and hake and other ground stockfish. And they eat small fish on the fly, I guess, and squid. Their scientific name is
Zalophus californianus
.”

I’m not sure why but my eyes started to tear. What a nutty kid to know all this. How many hours, I wondered, had he waited for this moment?

“And the sharks?” I asked, still quiet.

“They could be right out there,” he said, pointing with his chin. “Where we’re going tomorrow isn’t far from here. The sharks patrol colonies like these and pick off the young ones or even one of the large males. Scientists just started tracking the great whites’ winter migration. But scientists know the whites come here in the fall. This is an old meeting place. Like for a thousand years.”

“Do the seals know the whites are out there waiting for them?”

He nodded. We watched for a while. Not many people looking down at the pier, I figured, had thought about the sharks waiting for the seals to slide into their strike zone.

“I don’t know if the seals have memory, if that’s what you mean,” Tommy said after a bit. “They know it’s dangerous to enter the water, but they have to eat. Whites ambush them. It’s the way it works. It’s all done in shadows, with the water kind of hard to see through. Things flash around and then suddenly they collide.”

“Do you feel sorry for the seals?” I asked.

“Yes and no. Marine parks use sea lions in their water shows. They’re smart. They can balance a ball on their nose, but nobody really knows why they can do that. The sharks have to be huge to attack them. Leopard seals kill penguins around the South Pole and domestic cats kill robins. It’s just the way nature does things.”

“Is there usually more than one shark?”

He shrugged.

“There could be a dozen patrolling. Maybe more. It’s seasonal. But they used to say that if you escaped Alcatraz and tried to swim for it, the sharks would get you.”

We didn’t talk after that. I listened to the water and the sea lions barking. And I thought about the great whites surfacing on a dark night to watch the land with their black eyes, judging the moment when the seals would slide in and join them.

That night, back in the hotel, Tommy phoned Ty Barry.

Ty Barry was Tommy’s hero, because Ty Barry had survived a great white attack near Mavericks in Northern California. Mavericks was a spot about a half mile out to sea with a famous break for surfing. Tommy had e-mailed Ty shortly after he read the story in the newspaper and never expected a reply. But Ty Barry had e-mailed back, telling
the details as best he could. They continued to write back and forth, and I always wondered if Ty knew about Tommy’s condition, or if he simply liked an insane kid who e-mailed out of the blue to get the inside shark story. In the end, it didn’t matter. Ty put Tommy in touch with a bunch of other surfers with shark stories. Tommy gobbled those stories up. I never read any of the correspondence, but Tommy always had a new shark tale.

Ty Barry’s story went like this:

Ty had been paddling on his surfboard about a half mile from shore when a shark smashed him from underneath and tossed him eight feet into the air. Ty didn’t really know what had happened. Fortunately, neither his arms nor his legs had been in the water, and the shark managed to hit the board perfectly, leaving gigantic teeth marks in the foam core but missing Ty entirely. Ty had been tethered at the ankle to the board, and for a second he debated whether he should climb back on or swim for it. He couldn’t spot the shark. A surfer friend nearby shouted to him, asking if that had been a shark. Ty shouted back that it sure as hell was, then he climbed back onto his board. As soon as he slid his belly onto the surface of the board, he happened to look down and see the shark swim directly underneath. It all happened so fast, he couldn’t say with certainty what length the shark
was, but the teeth gouges led experts to determine that the white had been at least fifteen feet and weighed maybe a ton or more.

Ty Barry and his friend paddled the entire way back to shore expecting to be attacked by the shark again. But the shark had disappeared.

Ty Barry said the only thing he felt the instant before the impact was a blister of water surging up from the bottom. A bullet inside a wave, sort of.

According to Tommy, Ty also said that the chances of a great white hitting you on a surfboard were maybe one in a million. For a shark to hit your board and
not
touch you had to be one in a trillion. He imagined it had to be similar to walking through the jungle while carrying an ironing board in front of you, and having a tiger jump out of the undergrowth and hit just the ironing board, then take off without touching you. He said that had been his experience with the shark.

Ty Barry meant more to Tommy than anything except sharks. In most ways that counted, Ty Barry was Tommy’s only friend.

After Tommy called Ty Barry, Mom got a call from the guy on the plane: Businessman Bob. I realized, watching her, that she had known it was coming, because she snatched
up her cell phone right away and turned her back so that we wouldn’t see her expression.

I hated her guts for expecting a call from him. I hated her guts for giving out her number. I didn’t know for sure, but I suspected that she had talked to him while Tommy and I looked at the seals, and that the coffee search had simply been her phony excuse to get away from us. I cringed as her voice got airy and flirty, giving guys the impression that she’s some dizzy idiot chick who believes the world revolves around them. She had changed into a pair of pajama bottoms and a hooded sweatshirt (it said
Jellystone Park
on it and had a small picture of Yogi Bear on the right sleeve), and she had three kernels of Smartfood cheese popcorn in her left hand, halfway to her mouth, and she put the popcorn down slowly so he wouldn’t hear her mowing her big mouth, and she said, “Jerrod, how are you?”

Gag.

She talked for a second, her voice getting bright, and I happened to look at Tommy. He stared straight ahead at the TV—a monster truck thing that he had found—and I saw the color rise in his face. You didn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to understand what he felt, or thought. His mom had scooped a guy on the plane, and now she was compromising the shark trip by turning her focus away from our half-baked family night. And you could tell
Tommy wondered why she had to flirt that night, why it was so important, and I felt the same way, so when she glanced at where we sat on the bed I pointed to the bathroom and made her go in there. That hardly helped, because her voice cut through the walls and it sounded even worse, almost as if she had a lover in there with her and they were laughing and kissing and cooing. Eventually Tommy pointed the remote at the TV and blasted the volume up so that all you could hear was Big Daddy Dan driving his crushing big-tire truck over the bodies of a bunch of beat-up sedans. Then Tommy pointed the remote at the bathroom and pretended to turn the volume down. In other words, he muted our mother. It was pretty funny, and I started to laugh. We both did.

“That was Jerrod,” Mom said when she came out of the bathroom ten minutes later. She was all jazzed up. Someone had paid attention to her.

“What flavor is Jerrod?” Tommy asked, his eyes still on the television.

My mother stopped dead.

“What did you say, young man?” she asked.

He didn’t answer.

She walked over and turned down the television. She crossed her arms over her chest. Tommy raised the remote and shot her.

The sound went up behind her.

“Tommy?” she asked. “What did you say, young man?”

She turned down the volume again. He turned it up.

I couldn’t help laughing.

Then we had a good moment. For just a second I saw the Angry Mom swing in behind her eyes, but then she left. Instead Normal Mom smiled and pretended to go for the volume a third time, and Tommy turned the television all the way off. When she took a step away, he turned it back on. Mom smiled again. For once it was a really good smile, an ear-to-ear grin, and she looked young for a second, carefree, and you had to smile back watching her. Part of me knew she played around to kind of smooth out the business about getting a call from Jerrod, and part of me knew she was making things up to Tommy, but another part of me knew that life wasn’t always easy for her. She had figured a way to get Tommy to California so that he could look at sharks. I had to give her credit for that. Besides, it was hard to be mad at her when she stood in front of our two beds and goofed around. Tommy called out that she should shing-a-ling, which was part of an old game we used to play: you called out a dance and Mom had to do it. Dance jukebox, we called it. Some nights we went crazy at it in the kitchen, but that was years ago.

She didn’t hesitate, which is what is good about my Mom. As soon as Tommy shouted “Shing-a-ling,” she started
hamming it up, dancing this corny sixties dance, prancing and moving her hands up and down.

“The monkey,” I called and she did that, too, monkeying like a maniac, then switching into the mashed potato when Tommy told her to, and Mom went extra-wild, goofy, smearing everything right into a version of the hustle and the shopping cart, and the water sprinkler. She did a gogo move with her legs pumping up and down for a few seconds, and she swung her arms around and up and down as if she wanted to pound her fists on a big drum, then she brought her hands across her eyes to do the Batman. She made an awful noise clunking around. Sometimes her knees creaked and cracked and that made us call out more dances, trying to get her to cave. Afterward we made her rap, throwing out topics that she had to rhyme and look “street” about. It was all absurd and pretty hilarious.

I looked at Tommy, who was laughing as hard as I had seen him laugh in a long time. And maybe wishes weren’t something you hoped for, but instead something that found you. Tommy, Mom, and I were three specks in a big world, I thought, with sharks in the seas around us.

T
he smell of the ocean is always new. You could be away from it for a hundred years, or live by it every day, and when the wind finally brings the ocean’s scent to you, you recognize it deep down somewhere. My first smell of the Pacific came on the wharf when we watched the seals, but at 5:23 the next morning from the backseat of Mr. Cotter’s Cadillac I smelled it again and it was new. Mr. Cotter had showed up at five precisely, his legs covered by a pair of wind pants, his nose marked by a dot of zinc oxide, a blue fleece buttoned up around his chin. He brought a coffee thermos and a half gallon of orange juice and a box of
Dunkin’ Donuts muffins and bagels. He didn’t mention that Tommy forgot to wear the shark hat or even that Mom made us all wait fifteen minutes while she showered. He fixed us a little place to eat on the top of a cooler he had in his car trunk while we waited for Mom, and Tommy and I ate there while we watched the sun come up and felt the morning wind die away.

I had to hand it to Mr. Cotter: he figured out how Tommy wanted to take the shark trip. He didn’t keep making jokes, or plying Tommy with questions about sharks devouring things, and while we ate he talked quietly about his own experience with the sea, and how he sailed sometimes in a small boat, and how he grew up in Northern California but had gone to school back East, to Dartmouth, actually, which was why he took a special interest in Tommy’s application. That brought New Hampshire into the conversation, and he asked us where we lived, how far into the White Mountains, if we hiked up in Mount Moosilauke—he had fished the Baker River there while he attended Dartmouth—and if we ate maple syrup on snow in the spring. Turns out he had retired as a radiologist, his wife had died, and his children, all grown, lived near him. He enjoyed competitive croquet, and played most afternoons with a bunch of old fogeys (his word) on a court on an acre of land they bought together for that purpose.