“Ready?” Fiona asks excitedly when I pick her up in my mother’s SUV. There are still traces of sunscreen on her face.
“Sure,” I say. “I thought we might try someplace new.”
“Someplace new?” She reaches into her beach bag and pulls out cherry-flavored lip gloss.
“We’ve been going to the same beaches since kindergarten,” I say, backing out of Fiona’s driveway. I hate driving; I could hear the surprise in Fiona’s voice when I volunteered to drive this morning. I’m the only girl in our graduating class who didn’t beg for a car for her sixteenth birthday.
Fiona tucks the lip gloss away in her bag and retrieves her phone. “I need to tell Dax where to meet us.”
“Dax?”
“Yeah, I told him we were going to the beach today.”
I try to stifle my sigh, but it comes out anyway, heavy and warm. “Can’t we do something just us today?”
“But I already told him.”
“Well, Fee, you didn’t tell me.” I tighten my grip on the steering wheel. I’m headed in the direction of a beach that we know, determined to drive right past it.
Fiona fingers her phone in her lap.
“I can tell him not to meet us until the afternoon. That way we can have the whole morning together. Okay?”
I nod, loosening my knuckles, wondering how much ground we can cover by noon.
A half hour goes by before Fiona speaks up.
“What exactly are we doing?”
I don’t answer right away because I’m not entirely sure; we’ve been driving in a straight line up the Pacific Coast Highway, past the beaches I know and past a few more that I don’t. I haven’t pulled into a single parking lot. I’m honestly not sure where to begin. I should have brought a notebook or something with me, should keep one list for the beaches I need to search and another for the ones I should drive right past. I need to treat this like any other assignment: do enough research, and I’ll find the answers I’m looking for.
“We’re looking for a beach,” I say, which isn’t a lie.
“We’ve passed, like, twelve beaches, Wendy. What are we looking for?”
I hesitate before answering. I take a deep breath and exhale. “My brothers.”
“What?”
“We’re looking for my brothers. I am.” I wave a hand at the beaches outside the window, and when I do, the car swerves from its lane.
“Wendy,” Fiona says slowly, “you should pull over.”
“Why?” I don’t take my eyes off the road.
“I think we need to talk.”
“We can talk while I’m driving.” Without meaning to, I press harder on the gas pedal.
Fiona’s eyes widen and she sits back in her seat, like she believes I’m going to drive right onto the beach, over the sand, and into the ocean.
“Don’t look at me like I’m nuts,” I say, finally pulling into the nearest parking lot. “How many times do I have to tell you, Fi?”
Fiona releases her seat belt and turns to face me. I keep my hands on the steering wheel. “Wendy, you’re not going to find your brothers. They’re gone.”
I shake my head and look out at the beach in front of us, past the sunbathers and swimmers, to the spot where the water meets the sky. I never really understood how big the ocean was until the police said that the bodies of the two surfers went unrecovered; I’d always thought that things could be found, even in the ocean. Everything I’d ever lost had turned up if I just looked hard enough: keys, scarves, books. Maybe that’s why I believe I can find my brothers. Nothing is ever really lost.
I push my sunglasses up like a headband. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“I think I know John and Michael a little better than you do.”
Even as I say it, I know it’s not entirely true. I’ve always loved my brothers, but, like everyone else, I loved them from the outside, like they were actors in some endlessly fascinating play for which I had front row seats.
“Wendy, you have to accept that they’re not coming back.”
I shrug. “Maybe you have to accept that they are coming back.”
“Surfers take risks on those waves every day.”
I can practically hear the words that Fiona is avoiding. That surfers wipe out, they fall, they break bones and can’t swim to reach the surface. A towline gets caught on a rock at the bottom of the ocean and they can’t come up for air. A shark can scent the blood from their scrapes and bruises and come looking for them. A wave can crash over them until they are so discombobulated that they can’t remember which way is up.
I know the words Fiona wants to say: There are any number of ways for surfers to die.
I shake my head, releasing the steering wheel and resting my hands in my lap. Fiona isn’t going to help me. Fiona can’t help me. This is something I have to do alone.
We sit in silence until I ask, “Where did you tell Dax we’d meet him?”
“Huh?”
“I’ll drop you off. Just tell me where. You don’t have to do this with me.”
“I’m not going to leave you. It’s been a rough few days. Graduation must have been tough without your brothers there. Last night…” Fiona’s voice trails off.
“Where should I drop you?” I say, insistent now.
Fiona mumbles the name of the beach closest to home, the beach we’ve been going to since we were babies. The place where John and Michael learned to surf, soon complaining the waves were too small. The last beach where they’d be now. I mentally add it to my list of beaches to ignore.
I pull the car out of the lot and head back the way we came.
When we get to the beach and I pull over, Fiona hesitates before getting out of the car. “Wendy,” she says gently, “I understand why you’re looking for them. But even your parents have accepted that they’re gone.”
Gone, I think bitterly. The word tastes like vinegar. No one ever says the words they mean: drowned, dead. Instead they say things like gone, missing, lost.
“We don’t know anything for sure,” I say.
“It’s crazy to think you can find them when the police couldn’t.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “What’s crazy is that the police stopped looking.” I undo my seat belt and lean across the car, reaching for the latch to open Fiona’s door for her. “You don’t understand,” I say sadly.
I’m not sure I could explain it to her. It’s not like I was so close to my brothers. This sounds awful, but it’s not even about how much I miss them, not exactly. The truth is that the house is more peaceful without them, and no one is making fun of my pale skin and my status as perpetual teacher’s pet. But it just doesn’t feel right without them around. The house isn’t supposed to be that peaceful and I’m supposed to be made fun of. Fiona looks at me like she’s waiting for some kind of explanation, so finally I say, “You don’t have brothers.”
I pull away quickly after Fiona steps out of the car, barely giving her the time to shut the door.
4
I pull into the gas station and open my window. It’s been hours since I dropped Fiona at the beach and it already feels like I’ve been up and down the coast a dozen times. I’ve seen so many surfboards sticking out of trunks and balanced across the tops of cars that I can’t even tell them apart anymore. I rest my head on the steering wheel, my face close to the air-conditioning vents, trying to cool off. The floor of my mother’s car is already covered in sand. I never realized just how much beach there was.
Someone is knocking on the roof. I blink.
“Miss?” The gas station attendant is waiting for me.
“Here.” I turn to hand him my credit card and ask for unleaded. Out of the corner of my eye, I spot a surfboard.
“Miss?” he says again. I take the card back, sign the receipt. I put my hand to the keys, willing myself to put the car in gear and drive away without looking at the board. I don’t need to stare at another surfboard.
; But then my eyes fall on someone’s bare back. Messy dark hair and long, colt-like legs under board shorts. A patch of sand has dried onto the small of his back. He’s bending down over a bike, filling up its tires with air, just a few feet from where the board leans against a tree. His feet are bare and the ground must be a million degrees, but he hardly seems to notice.
When his tires are full, he grabs his board and hops onto the bike. He turns around for a second, adjusting in his seat, and I gasp.
It’s the boy from the bonfire. The boy who pulled me to shore.
I pull out after him. He expertly balances his board on his right hip while he rides, then turns into one of the lookouts and dismounts. He walks his bike and his board toward the edge of the lookout, where brush grows out of the sandy dirt.
I park and follow him.
At the edge of the lot, the reeds grow as high as my head. Then taller, so that they cover the surfer’s head, too. It doesn’t look like a path at first, just grass and rocks, sharp under my bare feet. I keep my eyes down, following the stripe that the boy’s bicycle tires made in the sand as it slopes downward. The air is thick with the smell of salt water. Seagulls shout in the distance.
The reeds begin to thin out, and the sand beneath my feet becomes sugar-white and flour-soft, and slightly wet, as though it was covered in water not very long ago. I can hear the ocean, but the waves sound different here. Even though I can’t yet see the water, somehow I can tell: these waves are perfect.
The path opens up onto a small but pristine triangle of beach, bordered by the reeds on one side, rocky, sloping cliffs on another, and then the sparkling water. The sun reflects on the ocean like a million fingerprints.
I look around, searching for the boy with the freckles on his face and the sand on his back.
Shielding my eyes from the glare of the setting sun, I can make out the shadow of the boy paddling out, already beyond the break of the waves.
Suddenly, he sits up and lifts one arm into the air: he’s waving. I look behind myself to make sure that it’s me he’s waving at.
He shouts, “You made it!” as though he’d been waiting for me to arrive. His voice carries over the surf.
He turns back to the ocean and begins to paddle into a wave.
“I made it,” I echo, but too quietly to be heard.
Behind the boy, moving so fast that I can barely make her out, is a small girl with wild blond hair. In between their rides, the pair sit up on their surfboards, rising and falling gently, until they finally let the waves bring them back to shore. I wait. Just under the cliffs, a handful of boys crouch around a fire burning down to its embers, filling the air with a warm, smoky scent.
“Nice to see you again,” the boy says when he pulls his board out of the water.
I smile. “I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me.”
He grins. “You’re kind of hard to forget.”
I can feel myself blushing. Of course, I remind myself, it’s hard to forget a girl you nearly decapitated with your surfboard.
“Who’s this?” the blonde asks, stepping out from behind him. She doesn’t look at me but at the boy, who’s at least a foot taller than she is. Her skin is tan and freckled, her teeth bright white. Without meaning to, I fold my arms across my chest, trying to cover up my skin, so pale by comparison.
“Don’t know,” the boy says, grinning and leaning down to muss the girl’s hair. They could be brother and sister, even though they look nothing alike.
“I’m Wendy.”
“Wendy,” he repeats, wiping his hand on his board shorts then holding it out in front of him. “Pete,” he says, his smile inviting me to take his hand.
“Pete.” I nod, reaching out and closing my fingers around his. His hand is cool from the ocean, and when we touch, I shiver.
“I’m Belle,” the blonde says, interrupting the moment. Abruptly, Pete drops my hand.
I smile at her. “That was some amazing surfing.”
Belle shrugs, then turns her back on me, dragging her board toward the water.
“You’re amazing, too,” I add, turning to Pete. “I’ve spent a lot of time watching people surf. I watched my brothers for years.”
“Watching people surf?” Pete echoes, his lips widening into a grin. His freckles make his teeth look even whiter. “Your brothers never made you get on a board?”
I shake my head. Michael and John had been surfing for a year when I asked John if he’d teach me. I’d wanted to share in it, too. But Michael started laughing before John could answer.
“Sorry,” Michael said, in a tone that made it clear he wasn’t at all sorry. “You do know that the ocean is full of water, right? Might mess up your pretty hair.”
Now, standing on the beach next to Pete, I wonder whether things would have been different if I’d learned to surf. Maybe they wouldn’t have run away. Or maybe they would have taken me with them.
“Surfing wasn’t something they shared with me,” I say finally.
“Don’t worry.” Pete props his board so that it stands up on the sand and he leans toward me. “I’m an excellent teacher.”
I shake my head. I can conduct my research just fine on dry land. “No, thanks,” I say. “I’ll just hang out here.”
“Life isn’t about watching from the beach, Wendy.” He points to the water, where Belle is paddling toward a wave that is about to open, dropping into its mouth until it looks like the wave will snap shut with her inside it. But she comes out the other side and immediately turns around, paddling back out into the water, not even winded.
“I taught Belle,” he says. “Look at her go.”
A feeling like jealousy weaves its way tightly around my ribs, tugging me in the direction of the water. Something shifts inside of me: I want to be out there on the waves.
“Okay,” I say, “I’ll try.”
5
The sun is hanging only halfway in the sky; the heat of the day is burning off. Before today, I’d always waded into the water one toe at a time, giggling and squealing at the cold, watching my brothers run out ahead of me. But today, I rushed into the water after Pete. And now, an hour later, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve fallen off his board. Every time, water shoots up my nose and fills my mouth. Salt clings to my eyelashes until my eyes sting.
I haven’t even come close to standing up on his board.
“The surest way to get worked is to try to turn back after you’ve started paddling in,” Pete tells me.
“I’m not turning back,” I say stubbornly.
“You’re not moving forward.”
I shake my head and chew on my bottom lip, studying the waves. This really shouldn’t be so hard, right? Hundreds of people stand up on waves every day. Thousands. Tens of thousands, maybe. Pete treads water beside me as I pull myself back up onto the board and try again. And wipe out again.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Pete says. “Or you’re not thinking of the right thing.”
“I’m thinking about getting onto this board,” I spit irritably as I come up for air. “What else should I be thinking about?”
Pete steadies the board between us. “Surfing says a lot about a person, you know?”
I shake my head. I certainly don’t know.
Pete floats on his back and doesn’t look at me when he says, “I’m guessing you’re a straight-A student who doesn’t like to cry and could turn worrying into an art form.” Pete straightens himself out, face-to-face with me again. “Am I right?” He grins.
I look down into the water, surprised that it’s clear enough to see my feet kicking out beneath me. “I have a lot to worry about.”
Pete shakes his head. “You can’t bring all of that with you here.” He taps the board. “Worries weigh you down. You need to be light enough to fly.”
Fly, I tell myself, looking at the sky above us, seagulls screaming overhead. Behind us, the ocean stretches out endlessly, so beautiful that it’s hard to believe it might have swallowed m
y brothers whole.
I lift my chin off the surfboard to look at the beach. The sun is reflected on the cliffs in a rainbow of colors, like someone painted them there. The light is dancing like fireflies on the water, which is surprisingly warm, like a current of warm water flows right into this cove, just for them. The water is even clearer here than it is down the coast. My brothers would have called these waves glassy and hollow, perfect for a ride.
And then I look at Pete, his face lit up by the setting sun. He looks perfectly at ease, like he was made for this very spot.
“Where are we?” I breathe softly.
“What?” Pete murmurs.
“Doesn’t this place have a name?”
He smiles. “Kensington,” he says, and he makes the word sound like music.
“Kensington,” I repeat, the word heavy in my mouth. I look around us, at the beach with sand so white it seems to exist outside of time. The last of the sunset is reflected on white rocks on the cliffs, the smoke from the fire rising up beneath them. And the ocean, which has always existed outside of time: it was here long before we were, and it will be here long after we’re gone. I know one thing for sure: I’m not leaving this place until I’ve taken a wave.
Pete whispers, “Think of something that makes you happy.”
Once more, I pull myself up onto the board so that I’m lying flat on my belly. Think of something that makes you happy. I close my eyes and think of Nana. Nana’s great big paws on my lap; the soft place between her ears. Nana’s giant tongue giving gentle kisses, and her great brown eyes, always waiting for me to come home, the tail that wags every time I walk in the door. Our parents got Nana for all three of us to share, but the dog singled me out almost immediately. Even John and Michael took to calling her “Wendy’s dog.” When she was a puppy, Nana slid over the tile floor of our house like a mop; she had to learn to walk on the slick surface without slipping. Nana has always belonged to me, the way John and Michael always belonged to each other.
I’m so focused on Nana that, at first, I don’t notice that Pete is pulling himself up onto the board behind me. He lies on top of me, his chin settling in the small of my back, sending a pleasant shiver up my spine.
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