those sandals?” she asked.
“Stylin’, huh?”
“Are they made from old tires?”
“Yeah. But they’re premium gear.”
“Did you also buy a hat made from a hubcap?”
“You don’t like these?”
“If you have a blowout, does the auto club bring you a new shoe?”
Kicking off the sandals, he said, “Well, I like them.”
“How often do they need to be aligned and balanced?”
Soft and hot, the sand shifted underfoot, but then was compacted and cool where the purling surf worked it like a screed.
As they waded into the sea, he said, “I’ll ditch the sandals if next time you’ll wear the red bikini.”
“You actually wanted this yellow one.”
He repressed his surprise at her perspicacity. “Then why would I ask for the red?”
“Because you only think you can read me.”
“But I’m an open book, huh?”
“Winky, compared to you, Dr. Seuss’s simplest tale is as complex as Dostoyevsky.”
They launched their boards and, prone upon them, paddled out toward the break.
Raising his voice above the swash of the surf, he called to her: “Was that Seuss thing an insult?”
Her silvery laughter stirred in Ryan memories of mermaid tales awash with the mysteries of the deep.
She said, “Not an insult, sweetie. That was a thirteen-word kiss.”
Ryan did not bother to recall and count her words from Winky to Dostoyevsky. Samantha noticed everything, forgot nothing, and was able to recall entire conversations that had occurred months previously.
Sometimes he found her as daunting as she was appealing, which seemed to be a good thing. Samantha would never be predictable or boring.
The consistently spaced waves came like boxcars, four or five at a time. Between these sets were periods of relative calm.
While the sea was slacking, Ryan and Samantha paddled out to the lineup. There, they straddled their boards and watched the first swell of a new set roll toward the break.
From this more intimate perspective, the sea was not as placid and blue as it had appeared from his house in the hills, but as dark as jade and challenging. The approaching swell might have been the arching back of some scaly leviathan, larger than a thousand sharks, born in the deep but rising now to feed upon the sunlit world.
Sam looked at Ryan and grinned. The sun searched her eyes and revealed in them the blue of sky, the green of sea, the delight of being in harmony with millions of tons of water pushed shoreward by storms three thousand miles away and by the moon now looming on the dark side of the earth.
Sam caught the second swell: on two knees, one knee, now standing, swift and clean, away. She rode the crest, then did a floater off the curling lip.
As she slid out of view, down the face of the wave, Ryan thought that the breaker—much bigger than anything in previous sets—had the size and the energy to hollow out and put her in a tube. Good as it gets, Sam would ride it out as smoothly as oil surging through a pipeline.
Ryan looked seaward, timing the next swell, eager to rise and walk the board.
Something happened to his heart. Already quick with anticipation of the ride, the beat suddenly accelerated and began to pound with a force more suited to a moment of high terror than to one of pleasant excitement.
He could feel his pulse throbbing in his ankles, wrists, throat, temples. The tide of blood within his arteries seemed to crescendo in sympathy with the sea that swelled toward him, under him.
The sibilant voice of the water became insistent, sinister.
Clutching the board, abandoning the attempt to rise and ride, Ryan saw the day dim, losing brightness at the periphery. Along the horizon, the sky remained clear yet faded to gray.
Inky clouds spread through the jade sea, as though the Pacific would soon be as black in the morning light as it was on any moonless night.
He was breathing fast and shallow. The very atmosphere seemed to be changing, as if half the oxygen content had been bled out of it, perhaps explaining the graying of the sky.
Never previously had he been afraid of the sea. He was afraid of it now.
The water rose as though with conscious intention, with malice. Clinging to his board, Ryan slid down the hunchbacked swell into the wide trough between waves.
Irrationally, he worried that the trough would become a trench, the trench a vortex. He feared that he would be whirled down into drowning depths.
The board wallowed, bobbed, and Ryan almost rolled off. His strength had left him. His grip had grown weak, as tremulous as that of an old man.
Something bristled in the water, alarming him.
When he realized that those spiky forms were neither shark fins nor grasping tentacles, but were the conceptacles of a knotted mass of seaweed, he was not relieved. If a shark were to appear now, Ryan would be at the mercy of it, unable to evade it or resist.
As suddenly as the attack came, it passed. Ryan’s storming heart quieted. Blue reclaimed the graying sky. The encroaching darkness in the water receded. His strength returned to him.
He did not realize how long the episode had lasted until he saw that Samantha had ridden her wave to shore and, in the relative calm between sets, had paddled out to him once more.
As she came closer, the concern that creased her brow was also evident in her voice: “Ryan?”
“Just enjoying the moment,” he lied, remaining prone on his board. “I’ll catch one in the next set.”
“Since when are you a mallard?” she asked, by which she meant that he was floating around in the lineup like a duck, like one of those gutless wannabes who soaked all day in the swells just beyond the break point and called it surfing.
“The last two in that set were bigger,” he said. “I have a hunch the next batch might be double overhead, worth waiting for.”
Sam straddled her board and looked out to sea, scanning for the first swell of the new set.
If Ryan read her correctly, she sensed that he was shining her on, and she wondered why.
With his heart steady and his strength recovered, he stopped hugging the board, straddled it, getting ready.
Waiting for the next wave train, he told himself that he had not experienced a physical seizure, but instead merely an anxiety attack. At self-deception, he was as skilled as anyone.
He had no reason to be anxious. His life was sweet, buttered, and sliced for easy consumption.
Focused on far water, Samantha said, “Winky.”
“I see it.”
The sea rose to the morning sun, dark jade and silver, a great shoulder of water shrugging up and rolling smoothly toward the break.
Ryan smelled brine, smelled the iodine of bleeding seaweed, and tasted salt.
“Epic,” Sam called out, sizing the swell.
“Monster,” he agreed.
Instead of rising into a control position, she left the wave to him, her butt on the board, her feet in the water, bait for sharks.
A squadron of gulls streaked